It is time to unlock the power of masterminds. Learn the secrets of high-performing investors when you tune into this episode. Today, Benson Juarez, the co-founder of Privy, shares how these exclusive groups can propel your real estate journey to new heights and find the perfect and find the perfect mastermind. He also reveals his strategy for maximizing ROI and forging valuable connections with your mastermind. Benson’s insights will equip you with the knowledge and strategies to unlock the transformative power of Masterminds. Don’t miss this opportunity to discover the secrets of successful investors. Join Benson Juarez to learn to fast-track your real estate success.
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Unlock The Power Of Masterminds: Mastering Real Estate Investment With Benson Juarez
This show is brought to you by the REI Circle of Trust Mastermind, which is REICOT.com. In this episode, we’re actually going to get into that topic, but I’ve got a buddy of mine named Benson Juarez. We have not seen each other in person since pre-COVID, but we’ve had a lot of fun together, picked on a mutual friend of ours. Benson, I appreciate you coming on the show. Why don’t you tell the audience a little bit about who you are? Let’s dive right in.
Derek, it’s great to be back with you again. I know we spent some time together in Tampa at the Family Mastermind, had a chance to hang out, have a couple of beers together, and get to know each other. I’m part of that mastermind with you. My background is in real estate and technology. I’ve been in the business for over twenty years. I started back in 2001. I went to college for Computer Information Systems. I got my degree in that, which is from a business school. I have a good mixture of technology, education, and business training. I’ve always been entrepreneurial. Ever since 2001, I’ve done everything from doing loan origination. I got licensed as a real estate agent. I’ve done fix and flips, buy and hold, private money lending wholesale. I haven’t done any subject-to deals yet, like creative. I’m still learning that business.
That’s something that interests me. I got back from the C, which is Pace Morby and Jamil Damji’s new mastermind and subject-to was a big conversation there. That’s something I’m interested in. I’m always adding new tools and new strategies to my toolbox. In my own business, I use our software called Privy. It’s a real estate investing software platform. It’s data-driven. You’re getting local market intelligence, automation and data-driven analytics so that you can make better decisions. I use that in my own business as well.
That’s my basic background, Derek. I’m always looking to do new things and networking is always a big part of my strategy. We started a mastermind here in Denver, which is also called the Colorado Cashflow Club. That is a mixture of networking, your typical REIA approach, but also, we were engaging in more of mastermind and education in that particular meetup.
I definitely want to spend a bunch of time comparing masterminds so that our audience can understand what to look for. Before we get into that, you’ve done a whole bunch of different stuff, not as much on the creative side, but thus far, what was your favorite out of all those different avenues? I have a very similar background. I ran a hard money lending company for ten years. I’ve fixed and flipped hundreds of properties. Creative deal structuring is actually my passion, so I love that. We can jam a little bit about that, too. For you, did fixing and flipping get boring? What was your favorite stuff?
I think it’s getting over those obstacles when a deal gets tough and it isn’t a straight line from A to Z from contract to close. When those deals get challenging, when you’re having trouble at title or maybe you’re having trouble negotiating to get a win-win and you figure out a solution, that’s exciting to me, which probably makes me think that I would enjoy doing creative because that’s what it’s all about. It’s coming up with creative solutions to get deals done. I’ve enjoyed everything from the fix and flip where I did this live and fix in goal in Colorado once, and it was a foreclosure. I bought it sight unseen. Once I got in the house and realized what I had ahead of me, I noticed how unique the house was.
When I was little, I wanted to be an architect. I had a drafting table, all the squares and rulers, and I used to love drawing houses. I would always draw these houses with interior courtyards built around an open courtyard. When I bought that house in Golden, it had an open courtyard in it. I didn’t even know. I got in there, and then right when you walk into the front door, there is this glass. The glass goes all the way around in the center and I was like, “This is the coolest house ever.” I was going to flip it, but I decided to keep it. I moved in into a virtual construction zone and I lived in that house for about a year while I fixed it up.
I enjoyed the work. I rebuilt all the cabinets, built all new drawers, and I laid all 1,500 square foot of tile and it was like a fun project. That was cool. Across the board, I enjoy real estate. There’s always new challenges. One of the things I like about it the most is it’s a people business. You get to work with people. You get to work with different personalities and at different levels of motivation, experience, and exit strategies. It’s cool.
Real Estate is a people business. You get to work with people with different personalities, motivation levels, experience, and exit strategies. Share on XEspecially if you get into the creative side. I have this conversation with people literally weekly. You are going to be very challenged to find a creative deal structure listed property when you can’t talk to the seller because you can’t solve their problems if you don’t know what their problem is. In most cases, real estate agents are only facing things on price.
Many of the deals that I’ve done, it’s figuring out what that person needs and solving their problem. We don’t even talk about what I need because internally, we already know that. You and I wouldn’t move forward with the deal if it doesn’t hit our parameters. There’s no point in spending a lot of time talking about what we need. I did one with three properties. The seller was stuck on his retail price. Benson, have you ever paid full retail for property?
I have. I’ve paid over retail. I still got it at 50% of the ARV.
You and I are very similar that if there are terms that make sense, we can pay retail. In this case, this guy had bought all three properties over a period of a couple of years ago and handed it over to property management and had never cashflowed ever. He was stuck on his price. I told him, “I’ll give you full asking price, but I have to have terms that allow me to cashflow and make sense.” One had a small mortgage, which we took subject-to and the other were free and clear. He carried back financing on all three properties, which were in 3 different cities and 2 different states, 0% financing, zero money down and ten-year note.
The thing was, Benson, I didn’t want the properties. I made 4 phone calls to sell 3 properties and the phone call went like this, “You’re going to buy a property from me and give me a very small down payment. I’m going to carry financing for you at 7% with five-year balloons, which allows you to cashflow. Would you like the deal?” The answer was yes, but I didn’t want to sell the property again because I wanted to stay in the middle.
This is one thing that, especially when we’re talking about subject-to, I’m not a fan of putting a property under contract subject-to and then flipping that contract. Personally, I don’t like that model. I want to stay in the middle. I closed on all 3 properties in 3 separate trusts and then I sold the beneficial interest of the trusts on terms instead of selling the property on terms. We did that in January. It was fun. It was great. Everybody’s getting what they want. Ultimately, that seller, when we paid him off, he’s already been preempted to become an investor of ours. At that point, he’ll go from 0% to whatever we’re paying at the time.
You sold it to an investor who wanted to rent it out in cashflow, like to a normal renter?
I sold three properties to three different investors but we sold them the beneficial interest and if they ever default, that’s personal property. It’s easy to get the beneficial interest of the trust back without having to foreclose because of the way we draft our documents. The whole point of that story was we could never solve that guy’s problem if that would’ve been a listed property because we have to know what his goals are.
I will interject a little bit, Derek. You definitely can do creative with on-market. I’ve been under contract with on-market once before. The listing agents is the linchpin in that if they’re open to it and they understand they’ll present it to their sellers. They’re more difficult to do.
Privy
At what point in your career did you figure out your software that you have now called Privy? I’m assuming you didn’t have that from the jump. What was the timeframe you were using the old school way, and then you said, “I got to build something, a better mousetrap?”
I was doing quite a bit of investing before the last downturn in the market in like 2008. 2005, ’06, ‘07, which is cranking, building a portfolio, doing as many deals as I could, the strategy that we were using, which at that time made a lot of sense, but in hindsight, it was mistake, was getting properties and doing the BRRRR approach and refinancing them and pulling all the cash out, maximizing the amount of cash we could pull out and put into another deal. We were recycling the cash from the equity increase on the brrrrs and putting them into new properties. We were maxing them out. The downturn happened and renters were scattering and everything was becoming more difficult to cashflow and we started to take a hit.
My business partner at that time decided that she wanted to take all of our cash reserves and disappear. It left me holding the bag with all of the mortgages, which were on my personal credit. I took quite a hit. I learned some valuable lessons there. I decided to reinvent myself, pull back from investing personally and started to support investors because there were a lot of investors that were way more prepared to take advantage of the downturn at that time than I was. I wasn’t very liquid, but a lot of investors were. What I did was hang my real estate license at an REO brokerage called the Mercury Alliance. We had anywhere from 70 to 100 bank listings at any given time.
These were all foreclosures, but they ranged from standard Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac-type loans to huds to stuff that we’re getting from other banks. Although we couldn’t do buy pocket listings directly from the banks, I knew about them before the public did because we would get them in and we’d have to prep them and the team would go out and set up the property. Some of they did renovations on some of them, some of them were listed as is. I could go and do my due diligence and walk them and basically have an offer ready to go as soon as that thing hit the market. I used that advantage to level up and do more deals with my clients. There was another agent in the office. His name was Scott Fall. He’s my business partner in Privy.
What we realized is there was a limit to the amount of deals that we could do effectively with our clients before we started dropping balls. Most of that had to do with that. There’s a lot of manual work that has to be done, even if you’re a licensed agent. At that point in time, I was at like 7 or 8 years of experience, even with all that at my disposal, there was still limitations. We asked RE Colorado, which is the name of the MLS here in Colorado in the front range, if we could have access to the data because we had some ideas about automating the comping process, tracking deals and being able to automatically find opportunities because it didn’t exist at that point.
The MLS wasn’t set up to do that at that point. There wasn’t a thing called RETS that existed yet, which is the Real Estate Transaction Standard. It wasn’t pushed as an initiative through MLS until after we had asked for that first set of data, and they told us no. We were basically the Guinea pig to launch that here on the front range once they got word from NAR that they were going to push that initiative nationwide.
We got a chance to help them test it and launch that product. That was our first direct to MLS data set. This is one of the things that makes us very unique is we’re one of the only platforms in the world that has that direct to MLS data on scale. Right now, we’ve got over 100 markets directly connected to MLS. We get the best data that appraisers and agents use, which updates several times an hour.
It’s timely, it’s got photos, it’s got agent information. If a property gets fix and flipped an hour ago, we’ll know about it. We’ll know what they bought it for, what they sold it for, how much money they made. We can leverage all that local market information to understand what a deal is in a specific neighborhood, not what something is statewide or nationwide or what was a deal five months ago compared to. That helps myself and my business, but mostly our users, to make educated and get data that will help them take action.
Do you have any idea how many mlss there are nationwide? I’m curious.
There’s like 600-plus. The majority of them are small rural areas. We all know about rural versus center of the city. With the ones that we have now and with the plan for the rest of the year, we’ll have about 90% of all of the major populated areas.
Privy is expanding at this point, is that what you’re saying?
We are. We started to hold an internal department for compliance to work with all these MLS more closely because there are different levels in Privy. There’s our agent accounts where an agent from a particular MLS can come in and we verify that they’re licensed, but they can get access to things like private remarks. They can set up their clients on drips to show deals to them automatically. They can see agent and contact information for listed properties right there, which is different than what an investor sees when they log into Privy. If an investor gets an account like a wholesaler, creative deal structure, fix and flipper, or landlord, they’ve got limited access to certain information, but still more than they would see on Zillow, Redfin, or something like that.
The MLS access is geared more towards licensed people, which makes sense.
No, everybody gets that. They just don’t get the private information that you need to be a licensed person. You can’t see the private remarks. That’s only for licensed people. One of the main things that our system does to help investors is comping. We have a comping algorithm that automatically pulls comps and builds a comparative market analysis like a property report for every single property in the US 24/7. It updates live. At any given point in time, you can type the address in of any property and our system will go and pull comparables on it, analyze it to make sure that the numbers make sense, and then where the investor feels confident taking action.
At what point did you build this out and start using it specifically for yourself? You said that they helped you launch it in the Colorado area. Was it designed for you or was it designed to give to the masses?
No, we never intended on selling it as a product. It was only built to use in our own business to help us scale and work with more clients. However, in 2012 or ‘13, we realized that this was a product that people would use and pay for and subscribe to it. That’s the approach now. It’s saas, Software As A Service. You can subscribe to Privy and pay a little bit per month or you can buy it on an annual basis depending upon their budget and how motivated they’re to get success.
I’ve used a lot of different softwares over the years and, full disclosure, I am not techie at all. I’m usually looking for the very user-friendly software. For me, when we started looking at Podio, for example, years ago, there’s too much stuff that it could do. It overwhelmed me. Is it pretty cut and paste for rookies, so to speak?
It is. I’d say a good third of all of our clients are brand-new people that have never done a deal. One of our main partners, Jamil Damji, teaches thousands of people to do wholesale deals. He says that 70% of all of his students find their first deal on Privy.
Jamil’s got a pretty big following. If he’s saying 70%, that’s not a small number either.
It’s not. It’s so hard to get that first deal because a lot of it is mostly in their head. It’s limiting beliefs and things are holding them back from taking action. Once they hit that tipping point and prove to themselves that the business is doable, the floodgates can open up. They can do everything from finding on-market deals or off-market leads, or they can pull lists of buyers. They can pull lists, can analyze properties from a cashflow basis, fix and flip wholesale, all the different extra strategies. They can find agents who are investor-friendly because we track all of that.
When I first started doing virtual wholesale deals in St. Louis, one of the very first things I did was to find boots on the ground. I found a couple of agents that were working with a lot of investors, reached out, introduced myself, told them what I wanted to do, and I was able to find an agent who wanted to help me grow and had no problem with me being in Colorado. She wanted to know that I wasn’t going to waste her time. I made sure to explain my model, and we did several deals together.
What does it cost to the consumer for Privy?
Standard pricing if you went to the webpage, is $149 a month. We offer special offers, discounts, bundles, and all kinds of different things for different situations.
For my readers, if you are interested in checking it out, you can go to TheGenerationsOfWealth.com/softwareguru. Check it out and see what Benson has to offer. I’ve been in this business almost as long as you, since 2003, and I’ve seen a lot of changes. I remember buying our first properties in advertisements and newspapers, so it’s been that long. We got to stay on top of technology. If you don’t, you’re going to fall by the wayside. It is what it is.
It’s true. It could be distracting too. There are so many things coming out. I was at the last Family Mastermind and they had a whole segment about artificial intelligence. The guy sat up there on stage, and he rattled off about 20 or 30 different AI tools that people can use in their real estate business. I was taking furious notes and it was overwhelming. That wasn’t even with jumping in and trying to use the tool. It’s trying to figure out like what did what, and it’s a lot. There’s so much and it changes so quickly, too. Use some of the chatgpt stuff for writing content, which is pretty cool. It’s not real estate per se, but writing emails and sales copy. I have used it for doing my podcast. I’ll put in there like my podcast guest and what we’re talking about and they’ll make it sound real cool. There’s a lot of cool stuff you can do with it, but it’s more of like a shiny object to me, at least right now, than what is a practical application that will make you real money.
One of my speakers on Generations of Wealth Voyage, our conference on the cruise ship, had a segment about all the AI that’s happening and how quickly it’s changing. For me specifically, I like using it for powerpoint presentations and even in podcasting, there’s a lot of things that we can do plugging these videos into AI and doing editing now that used to take hours for a human.
By the way, I don’t do that because again, I’m not a techie, but my team is using tools like that, which is great. I do want to go back. You touched on something earlier. You had a partner that basically screwed you over. I want to touch on partnerships a little bit because I exited ten-year partnership, which was a great relationship. We exited amicably. We just had different visions for where we were going. I’ve had partners in the past that didn’t end well. How did you rebound? Were you scorned that first time when you got shafted?
I don’t know. I don’t think I was scorned, but I did learn some valuable lessons. Now, whenever I enter any sort of partnership, and it doesn’t have to be like a full-on, “We’re going to be partners and members in the same LLC.” It could be something as simple as I’m going to do a private money lending deal and lend you money on a fix and flip or somebody who is going to have a significant influence on my business like an affiliate partner. There are some people out there, gurus out there who have got bad reputations. You dig a little bit sometimes underneath the surface you can find that they’ve screwed people over or they were arrested for something. Background checks, doing research, doing due diligence on people.
We can get lazy. I got lazy in certain respects about who to work with. That particular person taught me the mortgage business, so she was like my mentor. I had a lot of trust in her already. What I brought to the table was good credit and the hustle factor. She brought the experience, had done different kinds of deals, and was well connected. It was a good complimentary partnership until she decided that she didn’t want to do it anymore. I wouldn’t say I was scorned, but I’m definitely more prepared now when it comes to partnerships and JV opportunities than I was in the past.
I know for me, when I got into my next partnership, which was the ten-year partnership, we had a lot of talks before we ever entered into any business together. We put together our operating agreement, death, divorce, we don’t like each other anymore, who makes decisions, buy-sell agreements, all of that stuff. That’s why it was an amicable split because we had everything talked about way in advance. We said we’re going to be partners until we don’t feel like being partners anymore. It was a great ten-year run.
I see so many people jump into bed with a partner on a deal and they don’t even know, for example, that person’s spouse. That can be a big challenge. My first partnership, that’s what ended it. We became good friends. We weren’t friends to begin with. He got married, and all of a sudden, I had a new partner who wasn’t involved before, but she certainly was at that point. It went South.
I think that most people get into partnerships with the best of intentions. I think that everyone usually goes above and beyond. There were probably some nefarious people out there who are looking to take advantage of people. I think that’s probably the rarity. I don’t think that people set the expectations properly. What are the roles? Who’s going to do what? What are you expected to do? How much time are you expected to put into the business? Is it equal? If it’s not equal, is that represented in the ownership of the company? If I’m putting in 70% of all of my time and you only put it in 30%, should that be how the business is separated? Those are some good discussions to have. What are the expectations of the partnership? Who’s responsible for what? Who gets paid what?
Are we taking money out early or are we reinvesting the cash in the business to grow? Sometimes people get into these things because they want a lifestyle business. They want to make the money so they can go do the things they want to do, but they’re not worried about an exit. Are we thinking about taking this thing to the moon? Are we going to have a big exit, or do we want to buy boats? That’s something that people should talk about. When it gets hairy, when things go South, if you’re not hitting your revenue mark, you’re not getting those sales that you need, you can’t pay for the bills, that’s when people’s true selves come out. It’s when times get tough.
I think a lot of the mistakes I made in the first half of my career was that I didn’t have a network. I couldn’t necessarily vet people the way I would because now, you and I go to a mastermind and we’re talking to people. These are intimate conversations that get very deep. I was invited to be a guest on somebody’s weekend webinar or training. I sent it out to my email list and within minutes, I had people emailing me. They’re like, “Did you do any research on this guy?” Admittedly I didn’t. He was a scam artist. I’d already committed to speaking to his group, and I followed through because I wanted to educate his group. That’s the importance of having a network.
I certainly didn’t market it anymore to my list other than that first email. There are a lot of different types of masterminds and I think it’s key that we talk about that because for me, like the REI Circle of Trust, that is structured to where it’s a board of advisors for each other. It’s small groups. We stay in a house together for 4 to 5 days. We’re immersed. Nobody’s escaping. Versus going to some of the larger events where there may be 100 to 200 people. I know you mentioned Family Mastermind. You were telling me before we started the show, what’s the other one that you’re a part of right now?
Investor Fuel Mastermind. That’s put on by Mike Hambright.
What are the advantages and disadvantages in the masterminds that you’ve been a part of over the years?
Advantages And Disadvantages Of Masterminds
I will say that I think the word mastermind has been way overplayed. The meaning of it is misinterpreted, and people will throw that on any sort of meetup or meeting or training that they do to bring people in because it sounds high-level, like, “A mastermind. That sounds important.” The reality is that most of them aren’t masterminds. I don’t have the dictionary in front of me, but a mastermind in general is a collective. You bring in like-minded individuals who are pursuing a common goal and you’re using each other as a sounding board to scale up the collective mindset together like a synergy effect, 1 plus 1 equals 3. That’s the goal. You want to have people in that room who have different experience levels, different perspectives, and different backgrounds. You can get all of those perspectives in the discussion.
The whole point is to come out of there with new ideas, new initiatives and new inspiration. Looking at someone else and be like, “Look what they accomplished. If they can do it, I can do it.” Not everybody has to be a high-level person. That’s the other thing about masterminds, too. There are different levels of masterminds based off of experience. Somebody who’s starting off should probably participate in a lower-level, entry-level mastermind where there’s still benefit for everyone because that’s the other thing, too. Let’s say real estate investing mastermind, someone that’s never been in a done a deal is in the same mastermind as someone that’s done 1,000 deals.
There are different levels of masterminds based on experience. So, somebody who's just starting should probably participate in a lower-level entry-level mastermind. Share on XThey’re not going to have equal benefit there. When you’re brand new, you want to be around people who are a little bit better than you and maybe even someone who a little bit below you. You can reach out and help, but you can also reach out when you need help. The people who are successful have lots of money, done lots of deals, potentially. They want to be around people too. They need someone who’s like good. Maybe if you’ve done 100 deals, maybe you’re in a room with someone that’s done 500 deals and then maybe someone who’s only done 90. Maybe you can help them up. It’s a weird dynamic, but I think it’s definitely a conversation worth having.
I know, like for me, with Circle of Trust, everybody’s got experience, but when we first started with our first group, we were deliberately trying to segment people based on how many deals they’ve done or how many years they’ve had in the business. Over a period of about two years, we saw a shift. I like having different age demographics. Everybody is from different parts of the country. We don’t allow people to be from the same market because they won’t be 100% open and honest. I was getting a lot from the 30-year-old because the 30-year-old has a tech background or has been brought up in a different atmosphere and vice versa. The 65-year-old has a lot more wisdom from real-life experience. When we started mixing up the groups in that way, it got that much better.
For us at Circle of Trust, it’s not just business. This is a lot of vision work and stuff that is talking about your relationships, partnerships, and health. The Generations of Wealth show is about living your vision and loving your life. Compared to some other masterminds that I’m in, one is a run by a guy named Kyle Wilson, who was Jim Rohn’s business partner, and it’s Kyle Wilson’s Inner Circle. That’s business people of all genres. Actually, only 25% of the members are in real estate. I go to that for a completely different set of feedback. That’s expanding my reach and marketing, as well as sitting down and talking with people like Tom Ziglar, Zig Ziglar’s son. That has a lot of reach for me.
Now, with Family Mastermind, let’s touch on that. By the way, I loved your definition of masterminds. The way I always describe it is if one person is speaking at the front of the room and everybody else is listening for a couple days and you get to give no feedback, that’s a seminar. It’s not a mastermind. Yes, I liked your definition that it should be a collaboration and everybody should have a voice. What do you like about Family Mastermind and Investor Fuel?
Family Mastermind
Family Mastermind’s a unique one because there are investors in the room and it is about real estate in general, but all the people there are not actively investing. A lot of them provide services and products to investors. Many of them are mentors, coaches and influencers. Everybody has a different perspective. I think that, collectively, the thing that they all have in common is that they want to provide value to the investment community in one way or another. One thing I do love about that community that I haven’t experienced in other masterminds, and this isn’t about Investor Fuel but others, is that people leave their egos at the door. There are some people in that room who have a good reason to have a big head. They’ve done important things. They’ve made millions of dollars.
Matt Andrews, the organizer, has taken time to put the right people in the room. I don’t know who he’s saying no to, but he must be saying no to some people because I haven’t had a negative experience with anybody in that place. Are there some people that I like more than others? For sure, but that’s for different reasons. You don’t get along with everyone and you see better collaboration and better JVs with some more than others. What I like about that one is I have experienced that it is pretty open and honest and that people will share their proprietary secrets with this room because it might help somebody else.
With this group, it isn’t about markets. You’re in Wisconsin, I’m in Colorado. Two different markets. There is competition because it’s not about geographical markets, it’s similar verticals. Twenty people in there teach wholesaling, but then a wholesale coach will get up and show all his kpis and metrics on how they do lead generation and how they teach their people. I found that the group was more open and honest than the other groups.
Another good group that I like is the Real Estate Investor Roundtable. Jack bevier and Fred Lewis from the Dominion Group out of Maryland put that on. I wasn’t in this investor group as an investor because I wouldn’t meet the grade. I was showing them Privy. The guy in the room had done the least deals at that point in the year. He had only done 50 deals that year. That was like the very lowest, but it was impressive.
This was a similar thing, too. They actually had all their desks set up in a circle, and then all the presenters except for me and one other group and one other company were from the mastermind. Everybody went in and they would find something in their business that they thought would be helpful to everybody else in the room. They got up, did a PowerPoint presentation, and taught it. There’s this free exchange of ideas and leaving the egos at the door, but ultimately wanting to scale up the overall group, not just certain individuals.
In fact, I was a part of a hard money mastermind that was very similar, all hard money lenders. Same thing. Especially when COVID hit, it was great to have that network to see what’s happening in your region and what’s happening in your state. We were all comparing notes feverishly. It helped. Lending space in the COVID year was the best year we’d ever had up to that date. The one caution I would say is that when you get into a mastermind, you should also keep your eyes open because you can get caught up in shiny object syndrome so easily. You come back from something and you’ve heard all of these remarkable things that the other members have done and you can take your eye off of the ball with what you were already working on and it can have a spiral effect downward.
To even take that a step further, masterminds are work. You’re not going there to hang out like you might at the biggerpockets conference where you’re just hanging out and there’s all the lights and the glamor and the speakers talking at you. Those are more relaxing. It’s a mixture of pleasure and work. When you go to mastermind, you need to be intentional about your goal for being there.
When you go to Mastermind, you should be intentional about your goal. Share on XMasterminds typically aren’t inexpensive. There’s a good in investment of money into these things. If you’re not going there thinking, “I paid $25,000 for this mastermind. How am I going to make this money back? Who am I going to connect with?” Even beforehand, researching all the people that are in it and looking at like, “Here’s the top five people that I want to meet and have a conversation with.”
When you get at these things, people are good about exchanging information, but most people don’t follow up. They have all these texts and they’re exchanging their Blink cards and the little scanner QR code thing, but the follow-up doesn’t happen. You have to make sure you’re following up and being intentional about where the JV opportunities are. How do you move those relationships forward? How do you take action together? That’s the big difference in my mind from going to a seminar and being in a mastermind. It’s making sure you get your return on investment.
I know the last event I saw you at, which was quite a while ago, you were on my top five of who I was going to have a beer with, and we had maybe two.
I think it’d be split one.
Two straws, one beer, something like that. Super awkward, but that is the other side that I love about the business and when you’re in the right group because, yes, you are going there to work and you’re exhausted by the end of it, but you’re also so energized. A 2, 3 or 4-day mastermind feels like you put in a 100-hour work week if you’re putting in the effort, would you agree?
The Investor Fuel one starts on Monday and I got the itinerary and the itinerary starts off with pickleball in the morning. Pickleball starts between 6:00 and 7:00. Get in here, go play pickleball, run around, sweat with people, have that engagement, and then go to the actual room where the mastermind’s happening. They expect you to go to the dinners and the networking event. You start at 6:00, you end at midnight the next day. That’s an eighteen-hour day of talking constantly, listening and engaging. It is work.
Most of what I’ve gotten out of most masterminds wasn’t necessarily during the mastermind session. It was the extracurricular activities, the dinners and the conversations. Even if you’re not talking about business, that’s when you’re growing your relationships and getting to know, like, and trust people. For us, sometimes, things get a little bit comical and we end up doing some silly stuff, but that’s memorable. We started the show off saying you and I haven’t seen each other since pre-COVID, but yet the memories flash right back to what happened then. That wasn’t because we were sitting in a stuffy classroom when the memories were made.
I probably talked to 30 other people that night and I don’t remember. I remember hanging out with you. I remember calling Bill and giving him crap in the hotel lobby. I remember those things. You’re right. It’s what you make of it. It’s easy to go to these things and hang out, not get a good ROI. If you treat it like it’s part of work and then you get the benefit of building relationships, hanging out, entertainment, and having fun, then the ROI is exponential.
If you treat a mastermind as a part of work, you benefit from building relationships. Share on XBenson, I’m going to ask you a question that I ask most of my guests. What should I have asked you that I haven’t yet on any topic?
You didn’t ask me directly, but I think good questions for podcasts or sometimes is not what have you done well, but where did you mess up? What are your failures, and what did you learn from them? I brought one up through conversation and it had to do with making mistakes and evaluating my business partners and getting taken for six figures. I think that’s a good question to ask people directly like, “Where have you messed up the most? What did you learn from those things?” That would be my response. I worked on it because I think it’s an important part of my story.
How I got to where I am now is you are not doing this alone. We talked about the mastermind, we talked about building relationships and you know how you and I met. I think it’s a very important to realize that in a business where it’s all about making money, the relationships are probably the most important thing.
I guess as a reminder to everybody, you can check out what Benson has to offer at TheGenerationsOfWealth.com/softwareguru. We didn’t get around to talking about subject-to, but we’re running out of time. I appreciate you being here, Benson.
Thanks, Derek. It’s good catching up with you. I’m excited for what you got going on. I want to learn more about the Circle of Trust and what’s going on there and I know we’ll have more conversations in the future.
For all of you reading, if you want to check out the REI Circle of Trust, go to REICOT.com. TheGenerationsOfWealth.com/softwareguru to check out Privy. Also, please, go out there, give us a good rating, share this content anywhere you see it. Jump on Facebook, go join The Generations of Wealth Facebook group and be part of The Generations of Wealth community. That’s what this is all about. Benson’s here giving his time and knowledge and that’s what we do, too. I appreciate you joining us. Come back for the next show and we’ll see you next time.