Seth: Hey everyone, how's it going? Seth Williams here. You're listening to the REtipster Podcast. This is episode 204. Today, I'm talking with Nicholas Nick.

Nicholas runs a company called Lead Mining Pros. They focus on cold calling for real estate investors. Today, we're going to dive into cold calling, specifically as it relates to land investors, because this is a marketing channel that has gotten much more popular in the land investing space over the past couple of years.

Years ago, nobody did this in land investing, but nowadays a lot of people are using it. In fact, of all the big land investors I know, I might even go so far as to say that most of them are using cold calling on some level, and some of them do only cold calling. So this isn't some fad or passing trend. Cold calling has proven its value and I think it's here to stay.

The question is, is this something you should be pursuing as a way to find land deals? Maybe you're somebody who hasn't gotten into this yet, or maybe you're somebody who is using it but wondering, "Could it be better? Am I doing it right?" So we're going to talk about all that stuff here. Nicholas is here to help.

Nicholas, welcome. How are you doing?

Nicholas: I'm doing awesome, man. Doing awesome.

I love what you mentioned there: "Am I doing it right?" There are so many nuances to cold calling. I remember I had a client call me years ago, and he goes, "Nick, alright, I'm not getting good luck. I'm doing it on my own." So first I pulled the list from Fiverr and I was like, "Wrong answer." He's like, "Then my script mentions everyone by name." So he was doing this thing where he was saying, "Hey, is this Bill?" And I was like, "Wrong answer."

And I said, "Dude, I kind of feel bad. I'm picking apart your whole strategy." But what that showed me is that there's a lot more nuance. You know, when you're good at something, it's hard to tell. It's hard to go up to a pro football player and say, "You're really good." He's been good his whole life. He's looking at the guy better than him. So we discount our skillset sometimes. But I'll never forget that day. It was a good reminder of how important the systems and processes are to actually get great results.

Seth: Absolutely. Well, maybe to start this off, tell us about your background in the real estate business in general. What does your story look like?

Nicholas: Absolutely. Yeah, I'll give you the short version because this could be 40 minutes by accident. I'm super fortunate. One of the things that's unique about me is I used to run restaurants for a living. For 13 years, I was in a very intense customer service situation. That really taught me a lot about emotions and people, and I was face-to-face, not behind a phone. So I had to learn all this stuff. That was my first real life, from about 18 to 31.

Then from there, I accidentally stumbled upon a real estate investing company that taught people how to invest in real estate. I was hired as their event coordinator. I didn't know a lot about real estate, but I knew a lot about organizing events and throwing parties. I figured restaurants are just parties that happen 12 hours a day, so I could be an event coordinator.

I started throwing events all over the nation for this company. I threw about 40 events for them over a three-year period. One of the events was $6,000 per person, with 30 people attending. Another one was $15,000 per person with five people attending. I wrote the schedule, called the attendees, and made sure the hotel was good—nothing was anyone else's responsibility. It was all on me, which was really cool.

One of those events focused on direct mail. We were paying for direct mail, and it was going out, and then we were having the students call the direct mail leads. Well, direct mail is expensive, no matter who you are, whether you're a million-dollar corporation or a young real estate investor. What was happening was the company was forking out $4,000 in direct mail every time, and it wasn't always yielding the best result. I was also thinking about how much experience our students were missing out on.

So we shifted. I came up with the idea to shift to cold calling. Hey, it's completely free. What we started teaching was just dial by hand. We would have all the attendees show up with a list of phone numbers instead of giving them direct mail leads, which are either "F you" or "Yes, I want to sell." That's what I always joke about. I wanted to put the power in their hands.

Seth: Well, I mean, maybe to start this off, tell us about your background in the real estate business in general. What does your story look like?

Nicholas: We turned that whole event from a direct mail event into a pure cold calling event. Then I was introduced to Dean Graziosi. You might know that name. Dean fell in love with me. I started throwing these events for Dean, and I was literally out of the restaurant career for just 11 months when I started working for Dean Graziosi. I was so glad I left the restaurants.

When that job came to an end, I thought, "Well, I've seen cold calling work." Like every event, someone was closing a deal. So I knew this worked. When that job came to an end, I went home and began cold calling every day for my first real estate deal. One of the things I did differently is I went live on Facebook every day and did my cold calling live so people could see it. The secret is, I did that to hold myself accountable because I didn't want to do it either.

So I started cold calling every day. This was eight years ago. After three months of cold calling, I did about 15,000 dials a month. It was 300 to 600 dials a day—300 was my minimum, 600 was my maximum. If I hit 600, I was always like, "Yeah, great job today, Nick. You did it, buddy."

Then people started calling me: "Hey Nick, I see you cold calling. Could you cold call for me?" And I was the only cold caller. It wasn't a team of VAs—it was just me. Another guy calls, "Could I pay you to cold call for me?" Little did I know that was the beginning of this company. I ended up founding Lead Mining two months after that officially. I made a Facebook post inside of a group that went viral, and I got over 25 clients the next day. We've been off to the races ever since. Since then, we've never had a week with less than $9,000 in sales, and right now my business probably averages about $30,000 to $35,000 in sales a week.

It's been a blessing. Now I have a whole team—30 employees. We have only Americans. That's one of the big niches about us—everyone's an American cold caller. There are no foreign callers on the line. So that's a little bit of my background and maybe why I'm qualified to be here.

Seth: That's great to know. Well, a bunch of questions can come out of that. Your note there about American cold callers—I can think of reasons why that would be beneficial, but maybe you can confirm or deny. Why is that helpful? Is it just like not having a foreign accent, or is it that they culturally understand things better? Why is that a big advantage?

Nicholas: The accent is only an issue on the first impression. It's really not a big deal if someone has an accent. It is a big deal if they live halfway across the world and have an accent. The reason is, if someone says "HVAC" to a Filipino, they don't know what HVAC is. When I had foreign cold callers—and I used to offer both, so I have a thorough answer for you—sometimes they'd be on a Zoom call; they're outside in a hut. I'm not kidding, they don't even have air conditioning in some cases, let alone know what HVAC is.

When there's that gap in communication, it hurts. But the main benefit is rapport. You automatically start with greater rapport. If someone calls you with a thick accent, we tune out a little bit. Same thing if I call Dell, AT&T, or T-Mobile and get a foreign person—it's like, "No way." The problem isn't racism; it's trust. It's "Can I trust that they actually understand the words coming out of my mouth?"

One of the big things I've learned about foreign callers or VAs, is that they say "yes" in perfect English. So we think they fully understand, but most of the time, they don't. "Yes" in perfect English, we think they understand. That's one of the big gaps.

With an American, they think it's local. One of our goals is to sound official: "Hi, good morning. Thank you for answering. Are you the owner of 123...?" We want them to think we're from the government, like they need to talk to us. When you pick up the phone and it's an American, you're automatically relieved. I don't even care why they're calling anymore. I'm like, "What is this about again?" because you're not foreign.

The last thing I'll share is that six months ago, I got rid of my entire foreign team after looking at the stats. I'm very meticulous with my numbers. The American callers were averaging a lead every 225 dials. The foreign callers were averaging a lead every 500 dials. That's a big difference. Now, I was charging half as much for the foreign caller, so they were half the price, but they were costing my clients more than double. My thought was, why would I sell this product that just distracts my clients from better results?

Seth: Is it hard to find Americans that will do this kind of work?

Nicholas: Honestly, bro, I hate to spill my secret sauce here, but I'd love to. The way I find employees—first of all, training is everything. Finding them is the easy part. Training them, processes, accountability... but I'll gladly go through my entire employment process. I'm in a local group in the city that I'm in, and every couple of months I make a post saying, "Hey, I'm hiring a work-from-home position. It's cold calling. You don't have to sell anything"—because" that's the first thing people think—that cold calling means they have to pester someone to sell. No, if they don't want to sell, we have like two lines that you say, and then we get off the phone.

I pay $13 to $17 an hour. That's it. You'd be surprised at the quality of employee that comes out of the woodwork for a true work-from-home position. I have single mothers, engineers, business owners—all those people work for me because they're also refining a skill. It's actually been very easy. But here's my rule of thumb: you got to hire five to get one good one. A lot of people are going to come up and disappear, and that's OK. I don't mind if you disappear.

Actually, anyone who's American watching this, if you're looking for work, you can message me and I'll gladly get you started if you want to refine some skills. The other thing I do with my team is I let them create their own schedule. I often call myself the Uber of cold calling. Let's be honest, Uber would be a really crappy job if there was such a thing as an Uber boss: "Hey Billy, what are you doing? You got to be at the airport from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m." Nobody wants to get yelled at by their boss and have to pick up strangers in their vehicle.

With cold calling, I let my entire team create their own schedule, and that helps them feel empowered. It helps them feel like entrepreneurs. They're not like, "Oh, Nick's making me clock in" or "Oh, I can't take my daughter to the doctor's appointment." You can do whatever you need to do. That provides a large quality of life for the employees.

My theory is that Americans, if they're forced to work on a nine-to-five basis, you will not keep a cold caller very long because it really is a very crappy job, and you have to give them some type of freedom to come and go. The last thing I'll say is that when someone's in a bad mood, you don't want them calling anyway. If you're grumpy today, don't call—that's my rule. Don't call if you're grumpy because you're going to only get grumpy leads.

Seth: It's just like a weird little anecdote from my own life. Three years ago, our family bought a dog. We found this dog down in Indiana. Apparently there was an Amish dog breeder that bred these dogs. The person that I called and talked to on the phone, though, sounded super professional, super relatable, just a likable person. She totally sold me on the dog; she made it really easy. We drove down to Indiana to pick up the dog. It was really interesting—we drove to her house; it was a completely trashed-out mobile home. I mean, it just looked like a dump. She did not look well put together at all, but she was really good on the phone.

I could imagine if she had gone and tried to get a job anywhere, she might have a hard time since she didn't present herself that well, but on the phone, she was awesome. I can see what you mean in terms of, like, there's a lot of people who don't want to play that game of making themselves look a certain way, but they know their way around the phone. For a person like that who has that type of skillset, I can totally see why that would be appealing. I'm sure there's a lot of people out there that kind of fit in that mold.

Nicholas: There is. And a lot of them work for me. I'll tell you, my average employee has been with me for five years right now. When you take care of them and they are the right person—I'll tell you, you do need a talkative person. My best cold callers are all a little crazy. You get on a Zoom call with them and they'll talk to you for an hour and a half before you get a word in. But that's what makes them the best cold caller.

So it's fun now that when I meet people that are a little eccentric, I'm like, "Are you looking for work?" And I'm a little eccentric, so that's not a judgment. But I'm like, "You know, are you looking for work? Because I have a great opportunity for you. I think you'd be great at it."

Seth: So kind of a fundamental question—land investors, real estate investors—we have lots of different ways to find and reach potential sellers. We got direct mail, texting, ringless voicemail, email, paid ads, and we've got cold calling. What makes cold calling effective or special versus any of these other marketing channels?

Nicholas: There's a couple of things. One is I call direct mail like a scratch-off ticket. I don't know how you check your mail, but here's how I check my mail: I open up my mailbox; everything that's colorful I grab and throw right in the trash. Whatever's in a white envelope, I then go through. The first part about direct mail is we really don't even know if they saw it, in my opinion. And then, if they saw it, did they put it on the counter? Did they throw it right in the trash? Every person checks their mail every day—they've got a system, and they're not going through garbage mail because they've been getting garbage mail for 30 freaking years.

Mail does work; there's definitely no doubt about it, but we really don't know if they saw it. I'll jump into Facebook ads next. I think Facebook ads for land are a waste of time. Here's why: I run my own Facebook ads. When you sell something on Facebook, let's say in a city of 10 million people, there's only 2,000 available lots of land. For Facebook to find one of those only 2,000 people is going to cost you a fortune. There's not enough landowners, in my opinion.

Now, houses are great for Facebook ads. A lot of people have houses out there, but land is very sparse. It's not like everyone owns a piece of land. Actually, very rarely do people own pieces of land. So Facebook ads can get expensive to do the outreach because what Facebook is looking for is actually such a small target on the map.

Then we do calling and texting. And the perk of calling and texting is we know we spoke to that person. That is actually the difference. It's not like maybe, kind of, I don't know—we definitely sent them a text and called them twice. For me, it's that sheer direct-to-seller contact and communication that really makes it much more special. And with land specifically, so few people are doing it that it gets insane results.

Nicholas: I tell people all the time when they ask where they should go to get land leads—I'm going to be honest with you, I've never not seen leads come out of land. Now, I would stay away from like three cities, I'll just share with everybody real quick, and probably more but definitely these three: Houston, Dallas, Miami, and then Orlando—let's make it four.

Seth: And why is that?

Nicholas: Well, yeah, anything that's like super metro is really what it is because there's not a lot of land there and the people that do have it know what it's worth because it's such a metro area. Maybe you throw Phoenix into that mix—oh, now we're at five. If you stay away from those, we're going to get you a bunch of leads, no doubt about it.

What I tell my clients to research is how long does land take to sell in their market? If I can get land leads anywhere, your highest priority should be length of time to close. That's one of the big indicators I give people. Like, hey, we're going to find the leads. You need to find the place where leads don't sit on the market for too long.

We do houses too. Houses, I have this saying: if you're a land investor, there's a 90% chance you're going to love us. If you're a house investor, there's like a 50% chance you're going to love us. That's just because houses are so saturated. It's such a crapshoot, but land is so unsaturated, especially with American callers. That's the thing—someone who owns two acres in Texas doesn't want to talk to a Filipino about buying their land. They actually know for a fact that that guy is not the one buying their land. So their guard already comes up.

Seth: So I know, I think if I know your story right, you started doing this with houses and land became a thing; I don't know how many years ago, but it wasn't the original way that you started out with cold calling. What are some of the big differences there between doing this for house investors versus land investors, other than what you just mentioned about the saturation or the lack of saturation for the land space? Is there anything else just fundamentally different about what it takes to succeed at this for land versus houses?

Continuing with the transcript cleanup:

Nicholas: Honestly, it's really very simple. I'm so good at systems, so I'm trying to think... One is the intro. When you call someone on a house, you say, "Hey, I'm looking for the owner of 123 Sycamore Street." When you're calling someone for land, even if it has an address, don't say the address. Say, "Hey, I'm reaching out about the two-acre parcel of land you have in Galveston, Texas." I think that's a big differentiator—don't go in leading with the address. You're going to confuse them. Mention the land, mention the acres. That's one of our big differentiators because it also reminds them I'm only calling about land.

Most land investors don't want to deal with properties with houses on them either. That's one of the main things. Other than that, it's really fundamentally the same. It's easier. They're easier to talk to. You can build confidence better because, you know, with house investors—man, I used to have an employee who would send me her horrible call recordings. This sweet lady picks up, "Hi, how's it going?" "Hey, have you ever considered selling before?" She says the most vulgar thing to her, and I won't even repeat it.

You would not believe what a lady who was just so pleasant five seconds before said to her. So the other thing that is a big differentiator is that you get way more beat up emotionally when you're calling on houses. I'll tell you, when you're new in this game—I've been around for eight years—I still don't have a lot of emotional stamina. When someone beats me up emotionally, I'm like, "Oh my God."

The calls do go a little bit better with land. I think it's a little bit better of a confidence boost, but I'd say that intro is really the best part. Land questions are easier. With houses, it's any general repairs, how much is the mortgage, how much do you want for it, stuff like that. Land is all due diligence.

Nicholas: We ask questions like, "Are there utilities on the property? Is it wooded or is it cleared? Do you have a survey for the property?” We have this great question: "Do you know what can be built on it?" We have another one: "Why did you buy the property in the first place?" The questions are almost easier to answer.

With house questions, people are very personal. If someone ran a house into the ground, they have shame about that. No one is like, "I destroyed that house." So you almost have to chisel away at this tough exterior with houses to figure it out. Land is just, "How much do you want to give me?"

Seth: Take me through the sequence of calls. Does it take, like, somebody to find and close a land deal through cold calling? I guess my assumption is your team handles this first call and then once they identify whether somebody's motivated to sell or not, they then pass it on to me and I have call number two. Is my objective to close the deal or make the offer on that call or am I doing a third call? Like what happens in call one, call two, call three if there's a call three?

Nicholas: I love that you asked. I don't even know if you know this, but I just created an entire system where I literally tell you exactly what to say to every single one of my leads. Since we have been open for eight years and I am so hands-on—you know, I do my welcome calls with my clients, I do campaign recap calls with my clients—I'm so involved. So I created this. I really call it the perfect acquisition system for land. And I would love your feedback on it after we talk about it.

So the first rule of thumb in land, in my opinion, is never ask the seller how much they want for the property. Never, ever, ever. That is such a bad question. You're setting yourself up. If they say any number that's too high, you'll never get them far down. So my theory is you'd rather work up from your low offer than down from their high offer.

Nicholas: That's the first part. So a lot of people go, "Ask them how much." No, we do not ask that question on our call. On our first call, we do very good due diligence and are very friendly fact-finding, similar to your Amish dog breeder. We want to have that warm and fuzzy vibe. We don't want to send you pissed-off leads. We want to send you happy leads.

When you get the lead, what I tell my clients to say is call them up. You almost don't even let them talk. This is the first touch—you just got the lead that same day. "Hey, how's it going? You just spoke to Sherry about the three-acre piece of land in Galveston, Texas. Is that right?" "Oh yeah, that's right." "Wonderful. Well, Sherry told me you were interested in selling. So let me tell you what happens next."

Now, I'm going to do some online research. One thing I recommend is don't say "comps." One big lesson in sales is don't use your jargon for the customer. "Hey, I'm going to do some online research and I'm going to see if this property is right for me. If it is right for me, I'm going to send an offer out to you in the next 24 to 48 hours. Now, when I send that to you, do you want that via email or regular mail?"

"Oh, email." "Oh wonderful, can I just get your email address real quick to make sure? By the way, I will only be sending the official offer. That's all I'm going to send to the official offer." I say this because I'm not going to start spamming you on email; I'm not going to start asking you questions on email. I'm only going to send you the official document when the time comes.

Then I have this really ninja line where I say, "And by the way, have you ever sold a piece of land like this before?" "No, no you haven't. Okay, look, that's great. So what I like to do with new land sellers is, when I send the contract, I would love to be on the phone with you. I want to walk you through the entire contract. Why don't we make an appointment for two days from now at 2 PM? I've already got your email; I'll send you over the appointment and I'll send over the offer and we'll cover the offer live on the call."

Now keep in mind that this is your first call, but their second call. So now when they say, "Well, how much are you going to offer me?" "Oh, well, sir, you know, I don't know. I haven't done the online research yet. I have to make sure it's right. I want to make sure I'm seeing the right thing. And then I might even call with some additional questions."

So then we get off the phone. We have our appointment in two days from now. Then in those two days, we do the online research. We get it all ready. Here's what I recommend: Do not let them look at that offer without you being on the phone. Here's why: if it's a low offer and you're not on the phone, they're going to look at it and say, "I knew it. I knew he was going to lowball me." And their emotions are going to be all sporadic, all over the place.

no,

If you're on the phone with them and you're like, "Hey, it should be in your inbox right now. If you want to open that up," they're going to go, "Oh, you know, it's a little lower than what I was hoping for." That difference in their emotional reaction could be the difference between you getting the deal or not.

I recommend being on the phone with them, sending them the offer and literally saying, "So yeah, I'm offering $60,000 for this piece of land. I did see that it is wooded, so that's going to include me clearing it. I did see it doesn't have utilities, so that's going to include me putting in utilities." So we're having something like this—it's not an arbitrary lowball offer. It's, "Hey, it's wooded; it needs to be cleared; it doesn't have utilities; it doesn't have water. So the reason why we're at 60 is I'm going to work on these things."

Seth: That's interesting.

Nicholas: You're making it make sense. I always say, think of a restaurant. The chef doesn't just come out and go, "Yeah, it feels like you ate like two hundred dollars worth of food." They give you an itemized bill. So I like to think about how we can give them this type of itemized explanation, even if it's verbal. That's kind of my whole strategy. Then you've got them on the phone and you're almost there at the closing table.

A lot of house investors are so successful because they're in front of them at the closing table. This strategy I just brought up, I believe, is the most intimate way you can get closings. It's a three-call system: our call, your first call, your second call. What's important about this strategy is that maybe five days have gone by now since we first started. So they've been thinking about you for five days. By the time the offer comes, even if they don't like it, you know what they're going to think? "Do I want to start all over?"

This was a nice man. He did everything he said he was going to do. He called me when he said he was going to; he gave me an... you know, there's a lot of things you're doing right here too. And it's also very low pressure for you. The system I created isn't heavy on negotiations. It's not heavy on—there's no deceit. It's all just upfront communication.

That's the strategy I recommend. And that's not just for cold calls. Honestly, that's in my opinion for every lead you get until the end of time. But making that low offer on the third call is extremely important because they are going to like you enough now not to hate you when that offer comes in. If I'm talking to you for five minutes and I get on the first call and I go, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, 20,000. Yeah." *Click* And then what we're really doing is we're telling that person never to answer our phone call again. When you give the offer too early, you're telling them to ignore you if you think about it.

Seth: Well, it's really interesting. I know a handful of people who are doing it very similar to what you just described there—just very phone call-intensive. Like if you're afraid of the phone, this isn't the strategy for you. But it also makes me think this is very different from somebody who's sending out blind offers without looking at anything really, just kind of throwing a bunch of junk at the wall and seeing what sticks.

It makes me wonder—if you're going to be going through this process of making phone calls just to sign the contract and walk them through it, you probably don't want to be offering like 10% of market value in those cases, right? Unless you can somehow justify like, "It's really going to take me this much to make all these improvements." Are there any limitations or parameters? Like should you probably make no less than a 50% offer if you're going to go through this, or could somebody justify literally any offer and there's no reason to be afraid of them getting mad at you?

Nicholas: Well, one strategy that I have, if I go a little bit more in depth, is I call it a proactive price reduction. One of my clients—we created, so I go deep with my clients—and we created a due diligence checklist for them. So on their second call, they actually confirm: "Hey, so I see here the property is wooded. Is that right?" "Yeah, it is." "Oh man, did you know that it costs $10,000 per acre to clear a property?" "Oh, I know that." And you're not saying who's going to do it. You're just soft; move on. Educate and move on.

For me, I think it's really all depending on if the numbers make sense or not—if you can make them make sense. Let's say now we get to the closing table and they go, "This is $30,000 less than I thought." "Oh, you know, hey, I completely understand that. When we spoke about clearing the property, did you plan on doing that or did you want me to do that?"

Nicholas: For me, I think the financial objections come in with our ability to make it make sense. It's like, "Hey, if you're gonna, honestly, sir, if you're gonna clear the property, I could give you $10,000 more right now. But just so you know, I offer this as a service. This is what we do every day."

In my opinion, it's not so much the offer value. It's how much can you make it make sense to them? Because what we're doing here is wanting to show them that we have integrity. A low offer is fine, but "because I said so" is not fine. If we can find a way to make it make sense... And I have a great line when they say it's worth more: "Hey, maybe I missed something. Is there a lake on the property?"

Like, play innocent. "Hey, you know what? When I was comping this thing—hey, I want this property to be worth more too. Tell me about it. What makes it worth more? I would love to pay you more for this property if it's worth more." So that's kind of the strategy I use.

I do agree that maybe it's not a 10% offer strategy. One of the things I coach against—and I understand working quote-unquote "super qualified leads"—but" money, in my opinion, is not what qualifies a lead. What qualifies a lead is their energy. If they are grumpy but they're willing to sell it at 10% or 10 cents on the dollar, that's not going to be fun for you. If they're happy, they're easy to talk to, they're a good person, and all this other stuff...

I used to have a client who told me the way he would train acquisition managers is he would let them listen to a call recording of someone saying, "I'm never going to take less than $100,000." Then he would show that they bought it for $55,000. So his rule was, if price is the only thing we do not line up on, do not hang up the phone.

Nicholas: And so that's my rebuttal to the super low offer because how many leads are we exploding on our way? Now, I get it—anyone that says yes is now super hot. I get it. But how much money are we really leaving on the table? You know, like what if AT&T called and said, "Yeah, we only have the $5,000 plan. We did away with the $50 a month plan." Are they going to have massive, large sales that go on? Yeah, they are. But are they going to have flow through? Are they going to have longevity?

And the thing about land—in my honest opinion, there's not enough land parcels out there for us to be blowing these up. This is not houses. Like there's probably a 20 to 1 houses to land ratio. So in my opinion, having a foreign cold caller and blowing up your leads with insanely low initial offers is not smart because there's not enough landowners in your market to sustain your business. If that is your strategy, that is at least my fundamental truth.

Seth: That's actually really interesting what you just said there, because I've always heard the opposite and sort of seen the opposite in terms of like there's a lot more undeveloped land in the country than there are houses. But that doesn't necessarily mean that there are more landowners who are interested in selling. I don't know. How have you determined that in terms of, like, there are way more house sellers than there are land sellers?

Nicholas: Well, don't forget, I pull lists for people. So if you tell me you want a list of houses in Atlanta, I'm going to pull up 75,000 houses. If you tell me you want lots in Atlanta, I'm going to be lucky to get 1,000.

Seth: Most land investors are looking at rural areas, though, right? Outside of Atlanta, they wouldn't be looking in the first place.

Nicholas: They might be, but I never plug in a market and I'm like, "Oh my God, 10,000 landowners!" Never. We pull lists for everyone using Land Vision and Data Tree. And the number one issue we have with land is getting enough records every time. Our lists are small, 1,000 to 2,000 records. But if we do the same thing with houses, we might have 10,000 absentee owners.

So you are potentially on acreage, like acreage available. But when one person owns 50 acres, that's half a county. So if I blow up that one person, or I do that wrong... That's how I came to that conclusion. Because absentee owners—and that's not even owner-occupied—that's absentees—people that own a home they don't live in—that's often in the thousands, maybe even tens of thousands. And every time we pull land, I would say it would be an anomaly to pull land in a county and get more than 4,000 records in that whole county.

Seth: Oh, really?

Nicholas: But if I were to pull houses in that county, I'd probably end up with 50,000.

Seth: I think a lot of this is a function of how you are filtering your list. When we say land, are we specifying what the acreage is or just literally anything that's land? In Data Tree, I know there's over a dozen different types of land.

Nicholas: With us, most of my clients do zero to 20. So that right there, I mean, that would whittle it down quite a bit.

Nicholas: Yeah, exactly. But, you know, the other part is like even these data providers. The thing I've learned is that when you get into super large parcels of land, I don't know if their data gets worse or if there's just fewer people. But you do start going into county lines and all this other stuff. We have a client right now that does zero to five and five to 100.

The other thing about land, too, is I don't filter. A lot of people try to get... The other thing is that some people are just doing tax-delinquent land. In our experience, that's a waste of time.

Seth: Why do you say that?

Nicholas: Well, in the short, I see the numbers. If I pursue landowners and they're tax delinquent, that tax delinquent list is going to have 200 people on it. The full land list is going to have 2,500 people. So then the ones that aren't paying their taxes are going to be way smaller.

The first part is that your pool is extremely small. The second part is that I've noticed that we get a ton of leads no matter what. Land is very simple—they're either building on it or they're selling it. That's it. There's no, like with houses; grandma could be living in there, my sister could be living in there, and all this other stuff could be happening. With land, they're either building on it or they're selling it.

So focusing on solely tax-delinquent land might be a great strategy to start, especially with direct mail as expensive as it is, but I have not seen any correlation with tax-delinquent land producing more leads than just regular land.

Seth: I mean, there's some nuance in there. Certainly you're not going to have as many leads to work with if you get a delinquent tax list.

Seth: I think it's more a function of—of the leads you do talk to—do you want them to be a lot more desperate and motivated to sell? Because they usually will be, but again, the pool is going to be a lot smaller. So it's almost like, are you intentionally casting a wider net or not? And I think with cold calling, one of the benefits of it is you can extract a lot more deals out of people that might not necessarily come off as desperate at first glance. Whereas if you're sending blind offers, you're going to lose tons of them because you're not really trying that hard. The whole nature of it is like you don't even want people to contact you unless they're willing to put the letter down and pick up the phone.

Nicholas: Yeah, we're like prying a little bit more, which is also why the follow-up system I created is gentle and nice. You are 100% right, and that is one of the different... You know, mail is more expensive than maybe a dollar a piece or something. At my company, we basically give you three touches for less than a dollar each. You get the two American calls plus the text message.

Now, what we do do and what we can do to match the blind offer is we cold call vaguely, like we talked about using that script. But when we do the text message, we can text message blind offers. So you can get all those leads. Now, I have clients doing that—their leads drop drastically. So again, we have to ask ourselves, What are we trying to do here? Are we trying to make millions of dollars investing in land? Are we trying to work the hottest leads and hope that they become deals?

Nicholas: So my strategy being a lead generator, I put it on my clients to have a superior process that turns what I call "maybe plus" leads—anyone who's a maybe or more—into a closed deal. Because I don't know about you, your first year, you might kill it with your lowball strategy. Year two comes, now what?

I remember I had a client years ago say to me, "Nick, I want to close twice as many deals this year than last year. How much more do I need to spend with you?" That's what he said to me. And I said, "Great news, zero more." And he said, "What are you talking about?" I said, "You need to look back at every lead that didn't close last year and look at what you did wrong. Because if you want to close more deals, it's not spending more money. It's converting more of the leads you already have." At least that's my opinion on it.

I get it. We all want the 10 cents on the dollar guy. Yeah, I know we do, but that's the bottom of the barrel. And that works maybe for the first two years of our strategy, but then those start to run out. And then we're going to be forced to adapt anyway.

I had one of the coaching companies I worked at; he had a land investor there and he hired my—we got him 25 leads for $550. And he called me up—he's been doing direct mail for 20 years. And to your point, he goes, "I'm not going to call these leads. You know, I'm lazy after all these years. He goes, ”I just want them to call me and close."

You know what? That's totally fine. But at the same time, that guy's going to find himself a dinosaur at some point. At some point, the money's going to stop flowing because he's not willing to do what it takes potentially to adapt to close more deals.

And I think the process I created isn't that daunting. My rule is every lead's worth two to five minutes of your time. If they're an asshole, hang up on them. I'm not telling anyone to work with them. That is not my MO. But if they're easy to talk to, I would not hang up the phone on them.

Seth: Yeah, sure. It is interesting. I think a lot of us can relate to that. It's way easier to just throw money at a problem than to actually do the work. I get that all the time. Like I'm in the process of trying to migrate to a different CRM right now. And as part of the process, I can pay a thousand bucks for a consultant to walk me through the whole process and hold my hand. And I'm happy to pay the thousand bucks. But as part of that process, I have to get on five hour-long calls with them to spend the time to do it. I just don't want to do that. I just want to flick the switch and have it work and pay a thousand bucks for it. And it's just a good lesson in life. A lot of times, what's really needed is your effort and attention. And it's not just more money.

Nicholas: We've been in business for eight years. And I'll be honest with you, I'm kind of on easy street right now. I have 30 employees. I've got thousands of systems. I'm working very little—maybe two, three hours a day right now. And I've gotten comfortable working two, three hours a day to the point of my land of—I don't want to call these people. And I get it because I had a meeting with my employees yesterday and something broke and the employees aren't the owners, right?

One thing I said to them is, "I think I got to take control back." And to your point—and it's not a permanent thing—I think this is what's important for us. Here's one thing I tell myself to address what you just said: I'm okay with diving back in as long as I've got an exit date. So, like for your CRM, hey, you know what? If I focus on this for one month, I'll iron out all the kinks. I'll do all the stuff. Then I'm back out. That helps me commit to this work.

A lot of my employees or clients will say, "Nick, I want to hire a VA." I say, "Do not hire a VA yet. You need to hire me. You need to do the work yourself. And then you need to figure out what parts you want a VA to do." If you start and you just hire a VA right away, you don't know what you're supposed to do. They don't know what they're supposed to do. You're just going to find yourself feeling like you're walking around in the dark.

To your exact point, there has to be a level at some point where we actually do the work, at least at first. So I tell all my clients, you work the first 20 leads yourself. After those 20 leads, pay close attention, create a system, then pass that system off, if anything.

I will just say this because it could be confusing—I would never have a foreign person handle a hot lead ever. I'm okay with foreign people handling cold leads and lukewarm leads, but I would not have them handle a hot lead. I would never have them do acquisitions for you ever. It's like, I have a video I just posted that says, "Your $3 an hour VA is costing you $50,000 a month." It's like that guy blows up one deal and you're too busy going, "But he's only $3 an hour." Yeah, but he's not—he's costing you hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Nicholas: They're still great though—have them do comps, have them send contracts, have them do text messages and work out of your CRM. I'm not saying don't use VAs. I am saying do not use VAs on deals that you think are going to close to talk to them on the phone. Keep them in the digital world where they can't maybe tell that they're a VA.

Seth: On that whole note of hot lead versus cold lead versus lukewarm lead—so when your callers do their work and they identify a lead, whatever that means, and you pass off to the land investor, me, what level of motivation do they need to indicate for you to say that it's worth my time to call them and talk more? Like, do they just have to say that they want to sell period, or do they have to say that they want to sell at a discount? How do you measure that and quantify it?

Nicholas: So with us, again, I'm a lead generator. So my strategy is to send—and I'll explain a couple of ways—but my strategy is to send you leads and you need to have a system that sifts the leads. The downside of this strategy is that you do have to sift through the leads. Now the upside is I have a $1,500 package where the average person closes two deals on a $1,500 purchase. The upside is that the ROI is through the roof. The downside is you do have to create a process. But again, I have courses that teach people that process.

But to answer your question, our script is, "You know, I was calling about the three-acre property in Texas. I was wondering if you've ever considered selling." If they say yes to that, you're going to get the lead no matter what. Now, we ask them qualifying questions, but I always say that does not mean that if they say one thing wrong, you're not going to get the lead. One big part of cold calling is it's much different—their guard is up. They're not going to be 100% honest on the first call. But if they say yes, they want to sell, and you're going to get it.

But you're still going to get all of our due diligence questions answered so that when you get the lead, you can read it and evaluate it and give your approach. Now, I still never recommend judging a lead by its notes. You call the lead. That's where the two to five minutes come in. "Hey, how's it going? I saw you spoke to Sherry." "Yeah, that was great." And you kind of have that time. And if they're like, "What do you want? Make me an offer and never call me again" or "Screw you, buddy"—if" any negativity, feel free to bail out of that. But I recommend touching every lead, giving them a call and having the conversation from there.

Nicholas: And the beauty of it is that people that follow my system do close deals. Like all I really have to get my clients to do is call these fricking leads. That's all I have to do. But that's harder than it sounds. You'd be surprised how many people pay me 1500 bucks and then they say, "Uh, you know, I went on vacation and then I came back and it was too late. I'll call them next time I make a purchase from you." And so one of my biggest goals is to get them over that hurdle. Cause it's hard. It seems simple to call a lead.

Seth: When you pass off one of these leads to me, I guess I get these notes, which I'm not sure how detailed those are or what they say. But do I get to hear a recording of the call? Is there any other information that I'm equipped with? Or is the rule of thumb just like calling everybody back no matter what?

Nicholas: Yeah, if I send you a lead, the rule of thumb is definitely to call everybody back no matter what. Now, when texting leads, I do tell clients texting leads can often not be worth your time to call back. A lot of the texting leads might be sarcastic responses. My team, we don't pick up on sarcasm for texting. If someone says "$500,000," we're going to send you the lead.

So I do tell people with texting, look, I understand some of those leads are not going to be worth a follow-up call. But I have another saying, and that is to be a false yes is the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life. Between AI and follow-ups and everything else, for someone to say yes when the answer is no is the dumbest thing. So even if they said yes at any point and we have an optimistic attitude, we can get to the core of whether they really want to sell.

But I do tell my clients, look, I agree that you're going to get some leads that aren't going to serve you. It's easier for you—and this is a good note for all of us—it's easier for you to hit the delete key than for me to go back to my team and say, "Hey, when they say this one little thing on the phone, don't send the lead." Because now I'm going to get in their head and they're going to be like, "Oh, am I going to get yelled at for sending this over?"

The other part too is like, I try not to get too in my team's head with the nuanced answers because I always have this joke. I said, "You never want a $10 an hour employee qualifying your leads." So one thing I always say is we don't send qualified leads. We ask the qualifying questions. Because, you know, all investors are different. I have one investor that says, "Nick, if you can get me a raised hand and I can have a good conversation, I'm going to buy that piece of land." Then I have other people that are like, "If they want more than 40 cents on the dollar, don't send them to me."

So there's a lot of different ideologies sometimes that we have to play in. That's the strategy I recommend. We'll send you all the yeses. I'm not under the argument that every person is a great lead to call, but I am also under the impression that the one person I don't call is the one that would have closed. I have that FOMO when it comes to money.

Seth: You've already kind of answered this question, but I'll try to ask it again just to get the full answer. What do I need to give you so that you can do your job and start cold-calling people? Like, do you just need my raw list or—it sounds like you pull that list for people and you skip trace it or... Where does my work start and then you take over and then where does your work stop and I take back over?

Nicholas: You can provide a list or we can pull it. So either one can happen. You can either come to us with counties and acreages, or you can come to us with your own list. Either way, we can skip trace, call it, and text it. I do have these done-for-you packages where we pull the list, skip trace it, call it, and text it. They're also discounted compared to just the individual services, as you're buying everything together.

So you come to us with that. We can start within 24 to 48 hours. I do have two teammates call you and make sure that you watch. I have an onboarding course that's 35 minutes long. That's the course where I tell you exactly what to say and exactly what to do to every lead. I highly recommend everyone watch that, even if they're a veteran. Because I come from restaurants, I don't say what you think I'm going to say. It's like we're loving on them. My whole strategy loves them. It doesn't take from them.

Then you pay us. We start in 48 hours. You watch the course and then we're off to the races. Then, when the leads come in—and they'll come in the second they're generated—you'll get leads sent to you. Bam. Just like right away. So then, when the leads come in, I recommend you do a couple of things. But when the lead comes in to answer your question, it's now in your court. We are done with that lead.

What I recommend you do is get the lead, read the whole notes, and be optimistic. Optimism is a very big deal. If you're pessimistic, you're going to—I call it “negative lead self-talk.” If you're trash talking the leads in your head or out loud to your friends, you've already killed that lead. And so have a good attitude, read the notes, proofread your script that you're going to say before you call, then call the lead and then execute that strategy that I offer.

I do offer follow-up scripts. I also offer a flow chart where I actually show you the whole process that it could go from our lead to disposition even. So with our clients, I give them the scripts on what to say. I tell them how long each call should last. And I also give them the flow chart so they could then track where that lead is at in the process.

Seth: Awesome. And what does it cost to use your service?

Nicholas: So my smallest package is $565 if you want all of it. Everything we do is no contracts, no commitments, and no setup fees. So you can show up for $565. Then you can go away if you want. You're not stuck with us. You're like, "I wish I wouldn't have signed that contract." I know one of my competitors has a $10,000 three-month commitment. With us, you show up with $560.

If you're happy, we keep going. If you're not happy, one thing we didn't talk about is I meet with all of my clients one-on-one in the middle and at the end of their campaigns, and I troubleshoot their campaign with them. So if they get a bunch of leads, I talk to them about their acquisition process. Are we calling the leads? How is that going? And if they don't get a bunch of leads, I help them troubleshoot their campaign.

And I also have a satisfaction guarantee where, if they're frustrated by any means, I give them 20% of whatever they bought completely for free. So it's like this cool—again, like the way I love my customers is the way I recommend they love their sellers. It's like, you're comfortable, you're safe. I have guarantees. I meet with you. And so a lot of my closing system is almost exactly what I do with my clients. It's very hands-on.

Seth: This might be a dumb question, but do people ever use cold calling services for selling properties or is it just purely acquisition?

Nicholas: Yeah. So I have clients use us to call builders. I have clients use us to call neighbors. With landlocked properties, we often sell those to neighbors. And I also have clients use us to call cash buyers as well. So yeah, it's not as common. Builders work very well. We've been doing builders for a while now. I can't get a list of builders, but if someone can get a list of builders, we can absolutely call them very easily. We already have a builder script.

Now, what I recommend for selling deals: I'm a big fan of profit so I always say you want to list your deals first on places you make the most profit. MLS, Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist—those you can use like retail listings almost. Maybe it's 80% of the property value; it's still slightly discounted. So I recommend everyone first put it where you profit the most, then find the builders and cash buyers, because a builder needs a discount, a cash buyer needs a discount, but the MLS and Facebook Marketplace buyers are often buying close to retail. That's the advice I give to make sure my clients profit as much as possible.

Seth: Kind of alluded to this a little bit, but I'm curious, what kind of person do you think should or should not be utilizing cold calling? Like, it sounds like if somebody isn't willing to follow up with everybody quickly or they're just terrified of the phone, maybe cold calling is not for them. I don't know. Do you have any thoughts on that? What do you think?

Nicholas: I think if somebody is not willing to call the leads back, they should not use us. Similar to that guy who's like, "I'm not going to call these leads." Now if they know they need to and they just don't want to, I encourage my clients to call me. I say all the time, like, "I'll screw your head on straight." If you have a lead and you really want to call it and you're scared, you can call me.

But there is a person out there and the other person is a pessimistic person. You know, a lot of people, you can tell when someone doesn't want to call the leads because they'll have a bunch of excuses. I had one guy; I got a lead and he goes, "All these leads suck." And I go, "How'd the calls go?" He goes, "I just told you they sucked." "Oh, so you didn't call anybody?"

Nicholas: And so some people, when they look at things and they're very pessimistic, also should not hire us. If you think everything is crap and everything sucks and life isn't good and you're down on your luck, I would also not use a service like mine because that's not going to change that. Every lead you get—they say even a scarce person who's rich is still scared they're going to lose all their money. It's like, you know, they still have that innate thing.

Now, a lot of my training that I offer that's free, I do work on people's optimism a lot. Like some of the things I said today, "Every lead's worth two to five minutes of your time." Simple sayings like that make it easy for people to take action. My goal is to turn my clients into optimistic warriors, for lack of a better term, because I understand a lot of people are pessimistic, but if you can't get over that pessimism then I would not hire us.

I'll just share one little story. This customer calls me up—this is a house guy in Dallas, which is like one of the hardest markets. And he's like, "You know, this sucks. These leads suck. This sucks." And I said, "Did you know, if you were my acquisition manager, I'd fire you right now." And he goes, "I'd fire myself too."

I was just trying to remind people that when we go on and on and on and we're being super negative about things—like we don't want to see that in our staff. And it's okay. But I ended up getting through to him with that line and he totally got it. And then he changes attitude. That's what I'm pretty good at. I'm pretty good at checking people in like a soft way.

If someone said that to you in your business—and I said, "If your acquisition manager just overheard you saying the leads suck, he's never going to close another deal. He's going to come in and say, 'Even you said the leads suck, man.'" And so leads and the way we talk about them in our business is the most important thing. Those are our customers. If you own a business and a customer walks in and you go, "This customer's making me work," you're going to be fired. That customer is the only reason why the business is there.

Nicholas: And I think I have that attitude from my restaurant career. Because I've had that talk. I remember when I was 18 years old, I'm a cook and I'm complaining about how busy I am. And the manager calls me in the back and she goes, "Hey, that's the only reason you're here. Like if you're complaining about cooking food when you're a cook at a restaurant, that's not good." And I'll never forget that day. She's like, "I need you to stop complaining about that." And it's kind of that—that's actually an epiphany for me. I've never told those two stories combined before, but it's very similar. We can't talk about our customers like that. And if you do, and if you can't get over it, then, and that's the perk of us having no contracts and no commitments. If you hire us and it's not right for you, don't hire us again.

I mean, I still can provide lists. I still can provide skip tracing. I can even do text messaging and some other stuff, but maybe just the cold calling or that strategy isn't right.

Seth: It's a really interesting thing you bring up about pessimism or even like skepticism or cynicism. It's just like kind of a negative underlying attitude about life in general. I've heard it said that that kind of thing is kind of like salt in the recipe. Like, it's actually very important to have a little bit of that, but it's very easy to overdo it. And it just spoils everything.

And I wonder what would be like a test one could run against themselves to see, like, am I being too pessimistic right now? And I say this as somebody who, I think I'm somewhat guilty of this. I get pessimistic about stuff and I probably need somebody like you in my corner to, you know, say, "Hey, buck up. Like things aren't all bad." And yeah, it's; I just think that's one of those things where your thoughts control your life. And it's very easy for that kind of thing to creep in and almost get you to a point of like, I'm not going to take responsibility for my own inaction. I want to blame somebody else. That feels a lot better for me. I don't know. I feel bad for somebody in your position when that happens. 'Like, it's not necessarily your fault. She said, somebody's being lazy and they're putting it on you.

Nicholas: So I'll actually share the solution to that. This is a true story. When I was 14 years old, I found that I was always thinking the worst thing ever was going to happen to me. If I go ask a girl out, she's going to say no. If the bell dings in my classroom, I'm getting written up. If the teacher calls me in, I'm getting suspended. I always ended up thinking the worst thing was going to happen to me.

Then it hit me—this is true—that it's not fair for me to only think of a negative outcome. So I started, I had a rule and I encourage you and everyone else to do this: Every time I had a negative thought, I forced myself to have an equally positive thought. "Well, what if I get fired?" "Well, what if I get a promotion?" "Well, what if she slaps me?" "Well, what if she kisses me?" And so I ended up telling myself this. And what happened over time is the positive thing; it is actually what happened time and time again.

And after that happened 20, 30, 40 times, it became easier to push down the negative thoughts. And it's that level of training. And I literally did that to myself because I knew how unfair it was. Like, "Nick, it's not right for you to only focus on the negative side of what you think is going to happen." So I ran that experience with myself and then it really worked out for me.

You know, now I have this multimillion-dollar company. I used to be a restaurant manager. And what was funny is when my company blew up, all my friends, then they wanted to start listening to me. And I was like, "Guys, I've been positive this whole time. I just wasn't making enough money for anyone to listen to yet." But you know, I never hated my restaurant career. I never hated my clients. I never hated my boss. I mean, I may have been put in bad situations, but what I loved was the experience I was getting as opposed to the situation I was in.

Nicholas: And it is not easy to have an optimistic outlook. So I think that's a good point that you're making. It's not easy to keep it because then you're being optimistic. And just so you know, people who are optimistic make mistakes. There's actually a scientific study that says angry people make fewer mistakes than happy people do. Because happy people think everything's going to be okay. Now, that being said, those angry people don't have happier lives. They just make fewer mistakes.

But that's why I think it is smart for us to have a healthy amount of skepticism, exactly like you said. We can't ignore the skeptical side, but we should give it 10%, 15% max of our energy. We have to tell ourselves things.

And I'll just share one last little thing. I had one of my first business partners—and I was a lead generator; he was the closer—and he used to say, "Nick, read me the notes and lie to me." And what he meant was, "Tell me how bad this person wants to sell. I don't give a damn what the notes say." He said, "Because I know it's how I feel about the call that's going to govern where the call goes."

And to this day, that's one of my favorite things I've ever experienced. "Tell me about this lead and lie to me." And it's because "Tell me how good this call is going to go. Tell me how bad they want to sell their house." That's going to give me the energy and the motivation to make this call. If I read that and it says all this negative stuff or whatever, I am not going to feel very positive about that interaction.

So, you know, I think there's a level of delusion that we need to a certain degree to really accomplish our goals. I mean, look at Elon Musk, right? And he's like, "I'm going to blast rockets into space and I'm going to get them to land themselves on the ground." He couldn't accomplish that with pessimism. He couldn't have. You know, you can't have these grand ideas if you think that's not going to work.

Seth: Yeah, that is interesting how being realistic doesn't always serve you well. Like that can really just limit you and hold you back. So, yeah, it's fascinating. So two more questions for you. We're almost done. So one question is, how do you see cold calling changing in the next five years, if at all? Do you have any future predictions on where this side of the industry is going to go, if it's going to get easier or harder or different in some way?

Nicholas: So I guess the only thing I can relate it to is houses, because houses, you know, cold calling has been around forever with that. And with houses, it's just that your market selection has become the most important thing. With land, like I said, stay away from the super metros. That's pretty easy. Like you mentioned, a lot of people shouldn't be there anyway. And an infill lot in a super metro might as well be the same as a house.

Now, with houses, if anyone is in a city or any touristy location, I tell them to get out of there. And I say, the more suburban, the better off it is. So the soft prediction is for land; if things do get more saturated, we just go further out. The good news about land is we're often further out from the city already, which is one of the reasons why it works really well.

But even when such—because houses—we've been doing that for eight years. We still get amazing results. Maybe we don't get amazing results in Dallas or Houston or Miami or Phoenix or Southern California, right? But nobody does on any strategy. But so I see, as time goes on, being more selective with markets.

You know, AI, I think, is going to phase itself out. I think AI is a threat for all the wrong reasons. AI is technically illegal. AI is a robo-dial. Now, robo-dials were made illegal when Trump's first presidency was in office. And what that means is there's a phone call and there's not a human behind the phone call. That's what a robo-dial is.

Nicholas: What I'm scared about with AI is that before it gets super regulated, they're going to start calling hundreds of thousands of people against the law, and then that's going to cause additional regulation to come out. And then AI calls suck. I don't know if you've... I get them on my phone. You can; there's a pause, there's a gap, and you can tell the person doesn't have a lot of inflection.

So I do have a slight concern about what AI is going to do to the industry. It's already been regulated against. They've already—at first, AI was okay. And then six months ago, they deemed it a robocall officially. So it does fall under that illegal act like an RVM. So RVMs are also illegal. You can get sued for doing RVMs and get sued for doing the robocalls.

On the base level market selection, on the deep level with AI blowing up and people—and then also AI being used for scams, right? I think AI being used to buy and sell houses isn't that big of a deal, but if it's being used to buy and sell houses and it's going to be used to scam Americans out of their money—which I've already gotten calls from fake Chase Bank and all kinds of stuff. So I'm interested to see what happens as a result of that. But they're doing a good job of regulating proactively with that. But that I think is the question mark. But at its core, I think market selection is going to be the big difference.

Seth: That was actually my second question: What role do you see AI playing in all this? You basically just got into it without my prompting you. But it is interesting. So a couple of weeks ago, there's a website called Eleven Labs, which I've known about forever. You can clone your own voice, or you can make your voice sound like other voices, or do text-to-speech, all this stuff.

But they've got this AI voice agent now, where you can, in a matter of seconds, create basically a phone agent. And you can even talk to it right there. And it's using something called Gemini Flash 1.5, I think it is. It's a model that responds immediately. There's no gap at all. And it sounds stunningly real. It's just like, I don't see how this could not play some role in the future.

I do think there's something going to happen with that regulation and all that. I don't know where that's going to go or what's going to stick. The way that's legal is if it's only on follow-up calls. Does that make sense? So I think AI is going to play a huge role—a bigger role maybe in acquisitions than lead generation. Because it's not legal to robocall a cold person. It is going to be legal to—oh, you already said yes to a human; now let's put you...

So one thing I'm even looking into is that I just started working with this AI partner for my clients. Because I think AI is great after the leads generate it. Let that follow up for you and sift through the lead and all that other stuff. And then you're still not breaking the law with the robo-dials and all that other stuff. So but I do see a huge function after the lead is generated for AI coming soon.

Seth: I mean, you could even train the thing to be Nicholas Nick, like respond like he would, like answer the objections this way and do it in the same tone of all this stuff you could do. So for somebody who is terrified of phone calls or just doesn't want to do them or whatever that excuse is, I feel like there could be a future where that fixes up.

Nicholas: I should look into that just as a solution for follow-up calls for my clients, right? It's like, hey, you can upload it in my 10 YouTube videos and just tell it to go nuts. You know, like hundreds of call transcripts that went well or something like that.

Seth: Yeah. No, yeah. I think I like that idea, especially when you utilize it properly, right? It's about where you put the stuff in the process that makes it acceptable or not. I don't think anything's ever going to be an American human on the phone, but I mean, it might in five or 10 years. But I think that's a great first impression. And I could totally see automating or AI-tomating the follow-up sequence there.

Nicholas: Yeah, totally.

Seth: So if people want to check out Lead Mining Pros, we do have an affiliate link to Nick's website, retipster.com/leadminingpros. You can also find links to that and a lot of the other stuff we talked about in the show notes today; retipster.com/204 is where you can find that.

Anything else you want to leave us with?

Nicholas: No, you know, the most important thing I say when people say this is—I chatted about it today—the negative lead self-talk. I would just say, you know, if you're in business, think processes. If we get wrong numbers, what do we do when we get a wrong number? Like there's a process that can overcome anything.

And so I know we want the hottest and I know we want the sharpest. But let's think about what process we are putting the lead through that can change their mind. If they're mad that they've spoken to 10 other investors before you, your process should tell them how you're different and how you're more reputable.

Instead of just taking a lead as dead or over-disqualifying a lead, I want everyone watching to think about a process they could put that lead through that will keep them as a qualified lead. I think too many people out there right now are overdisqualifying leads.

They're using price to do that, when in reality, they should be using the relationship to get that property at a lower price. At first glance, if I just talk to anyone right off the street, you're paying top dollar, period. When I fall in love with you and see that you have respect and integrity, only then would I consider changing my top dollar amount.

I think that we want to shortcut that with people. But my challenge to my clients and anyone watching is to come up with a system that gets them to fall in love with you so they can receive that lower offer with a bigger heart. And that's one of the processes that I offer in one of my free courses.

When I was—I told you I was a cold caller—I was doing 300 to 600 dials a day for three months. What I realized was that there is a phrase that we could use on every person that opens them wide up. I don't know what that phrase is. That's not the point of me saying this.

Seth: Come on...

Nicholas: I really don't. But you'd be surprised. And I'll give you a couple examples. I cold called to New York and this guy says, he's yelling at me, "What do you think? You're being cute?" And I said, "Well, I do think I am pretty cute, but sir, I'm not trying to be cute with you right now."

I had one guy say, "You know, if you can find my ex-wife for me, I'll talk to you about selling this house." And so it's like you'll find when you have an open heart and a good attitude that it's not always this black and white nut to crack. Sometimes talking to them for a minute, sometimes having that time with them, you'll find the right words. As soon as they realize that you are a real human being, you've got them right where you want them. So find those opportunities to crack that seller wide open and get them to trust you. And now that I even said this, you'll see, you'll say a phrase and the whole call will shift. They're easier to talk to; they're calmer; they're friendlier.

Seth: So when you figure out that that exists, it's going to work wonders for you as well. There really is an art to that, to being a human and finding those opportunities to show your humanity. And, you know, if you can find ways to insert humor in there and all this stuff—not everybody has that naturally, but I think it can be developed. I don't really know what it takes to do that, actually. I can't say I'm awesome at it. Sometimes I find ways to do it, but...

Nicholas: It takes 13 years of restaurant management. I have some of these ideologies because of the things I've had to overcome. And I love what you're saying because a lot of my advice is perfect coming from me because everything I described today is who I am. I'm overly optimistic. I am humorous. I do love walking into situations and coming out with people loving me. So it's like, I do get off on that stuff to a degree, you know?

Seth: It's also interesting your story about how you spent 13 years in the restaurant business, but I assume you weren't a millionaire doing that. It wasn't until you shifted to this new thing. Just makes me wonder how many people out there have a millionaire mind, but they're not in a millionaire seat. Like they literally can't get there based on where they are and how it's not going to happen unless they figure out what to shift to. I got to think there's lots of people like that out there. They could be great if they could just get into a different situation.

Nicholas: Well, and I'll share real quick. I know we're wrapping up here, but I was a restaurant manager and I was pretty exceptional. And I remember looking around and realizing, and I capped at $65,000 a year. The most I ever made was working 70 hours a week, making $65,000 a year and I was borrowing money from my parents at least once a month. And I was paying them back. That's why I had to borrow more. But I was rough. And I knew I was better.

And then one day I go into work and I'm scheduled 90 hours a week for six weeks straight.

Seth: That's crazy.

Nicholas: And I have a salary. So I don't make more. And I ended up realizing that it's time. I'm better than this. And I quit that job. I walked out of that career and I decided to never apply for another restaurant job again because I knew I would get it. Then I got on with that education company and my life exploded.

So I think the big lesson there is if you're in a spot and you can tell you're superior and you're ready for more, you have to burn the boat. You have to, because as long as that boat's there, you've got an out and you can do it. And so it's like I burned the boats, but it took 13 years. And then I finally made it. And now I'm where I am now. And I couldn't be more thankful.

But walking out and making that massive change and committing to a new life—it honestly couldn't get worse than a restaurant. I'm working midnight till three or noon till 3 a.m. So like, oh, it can't get any worse than this, you know? And I was right—it literally only got better and now I make what I used to make in a year in a month and I'm working 10 hours a week instead of 70. But you know, it really takes us having that epiphany and believing in ourselves to make that move.

Seth: Yeah, I spent a small stint as a chef at a restaurant and it's super stressful, man. I burned out real quick on that—my brain just couldn't handle it.

Nicholas: Yeah, it's crazy. I think, you know, we get off on the adrenaline. I used to joke and say I work 12 hours because it feels like eight. That was a joke I used to... you see, my whole life I have these dumb quotes I told myself so I didn't get depressed. But no, you're exactly right—it's a war zone back there.

Seth: Well, Nick, thanks for coming on. It's great to talk to you. Again, retipster.com/leadminingpros. You can check out the show notes at retipster.com/204. And I'll talk to you next time.

Nicholas: I'll see you, brother.