How do you progress from your first deal to scaling your wholesaling real estate business? Imitate what works and add your own flair to it! Chris Larsen’s guest today is Chris Craddock, a nationally certified Life Coach in Leadership and one of the top Real Estate Professionals in the world, closing 30-65 deals a month. In this episode, Chris underscores the importance of learning from other peoples’ mistakes. But it doesn’t stop there because you have to act on what you learned. As Chris always says, imperfect action trumps perfect inaction. If you’re looking to scale, listen to Chris! Tune in!

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Wholesaling Your First Deal To Scaling Your Real Estate Business To $1M In Profit With Chris Craddock

On this show, you’re not going to want to miss Chris Craddock. This high energy guest is going to tell you how he grew eleven businesses, how he grossed over nine figures in 2020 as a real estate agent and his special leadership tips. It’s not only from his PhD leadership but also what he did in building his eleven businesses.

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We have Chris Craddock. Chris is a nationally certified life coach in leadership and one of the top real estate professionals in the world, closing 30 to 65 deals a month. He’s also the host of the Uncommon Real Estate podcast. He’s a realtor and entrepreneur who runs multiple successful businesses in the Washington DC metro area. His company consistently brings in $10 million in revenue or more year after year. His team, The Redux Group, sold over $165 million in volume in 2020. In addition, Chris has been married for over 21 years and is the proud father to six beautiful children. Chris Craddock, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me here. I’m excited to be here with you.

I had a great little conversation with you. We’re going to have to tell that story about your daughter in the car at some point in the show. It cracks me up as a parent. Chris, you have an amazing story and background. I’d love for you to share a little bit of that with the audience before we dive in here.

I graduated from college in 2000. I went on staff with an organization called Young Life. I loved Young Life.

I was a member when I was younger myself.

The problem was I made $20,000 a year from Young Life. It was a little rough. In 2003 when my wife got pregnant, I needed to make more money to support the family. I went to the library and took every book on real estate investing. Honestly, I went out and started knocking on doors of distressed properties. I always say imperfect action trumps perfect inaction. Somehow, I ended up making twelve times that I made in a year in the next four months.

Down the road, I always lead large groups of people. I went back to school and I ended up getting a doctorate in leadership. My kids always joke that I’m a doctor that can’t do anything. I’m like, “Great. Okay.” The money started running out again in early 2010. I started flipping houses again. I ended up getting my real estate license. Most of the houses were short sales at that point.

I read Gary Keller’s book, The Millionaire Real Estate Agent, where it laid out a color by numbers path of how to net $1 million in real estate through having a retail team. I always lead and love people. I was like, “That makes sense.” I started a retail team. It took us five years to get there but we did get to the $1 million mark. Through that time, we started building other synergistic businesses like title, insurance, construction, and all these that float off that flywheel of the real estate team. In 2020, we did 500 transactions, $167 million, and have ten other businesses that we’re running as well.

I want to dive into all that because you got so much stuff here that we can talk about. One of your business is wholesaling. This is a topic that we haven’t dove into this show in a while. I remember going to real estate meetings not too far from you in the DC area. I would drive off from college and visiting my parents. We’re in a park near Annapolis. I go to these meetings and I’m trying to get some capital to invest. I already had a couple of properties at the time. I was 21, 22. I was like, “Wholesaling.” Do you mind talking about the wholesaling concept and what you guys teach there?

I’m one of the coaches with Wholesaling Inc. and they teach wholesaling and then a number of other things through that. The basic concept behind wholesaling is the idea that you buy a property and you find distressed sellers that are looking to sell a property. Let’s say a property would sell for $300,000 and the seller is willing to sell it to you for $225,000. You get it under contract for $225,000 and then you sell the contract to somebody else.

Let’s say you sell the contract for $275,000 and it’s worth $300,000. That buyer buys it for $275,000. They’re getting a discount. The seller gets what they want, the $225,000. You make $50,000 to sell the contract. That’s the gist of what wholesaling is. You’re going out and finding people that want to sell, and you’re making that deal happen. You’re pretty much the middleman connecting those people and you get paid to connect those people.

I know some people who are reading are thinking, “That’s too good to be true.” People are going to go, “List it with the real estate agent. That’s not going to work.” I’ve seen this. I have a friend and he lives right here on the other side of the mountain from our house. He’s made a whole business of this. How does that work? Walk us through the process, Chris. I get these calls every week, “Chris Larsen, I’m getting started. I would love to invest $100,000 in a real estate deal but I don’t have $10,000 yet.” This sounds like a great concept from them. What’s the business look like?

If you want to start on something like that, there’s something called Driving For Dollars. You download the DealMachine app. Use the promo code and you’ll get a free month. They’ll give you $200 with free marketing material as well. You find people that want to sell and you can send $200 worth of door hangers and mailers out for free.

Driving For Dollars is the easiest way to start with nothing. You go out and what you do is it’ll give you a map. You drive around the map, and you can lay a filter out saying, “I only want absentee landlords.” Absentee landlords tend to sell at a higher rate than other people. “I only want people that are in distress for whatever reason.” They tend to sell at a higher rate than other people. They call it data stack. You can even put all those together.

You drive down a street and it’ll show you the houses that fit those data criteria. Any house that’s rundown is more likely to sell than a house that’s not rundown. There’s your pro tip right there. You click on the DealMachine app where it is and it’ll give you their information. You can click something right there and it’ll send them a letter saying that you’re wanting to buy their house and all of the other stuff. People are willing to sell it for convenience.

If you say, “That’s not true.” I’ll tell you this story. I could have probably made an extra $2,500 when I traded my last car if I sold it on Craigslist. I didn’t want people coming to my house, test driving my car, and going through the hassle of it. It wasn’t worth it to me. I was willing to pay that money for convenience to trade it and get the truck. I thought about the truck that I wanted. I’ve always wanted a Ford Raptor. I ended up trading it in and get my Ford Raptor. I wanted to move on from my old car to the Raptor. That was it. I’ll pay for the convenience to turn it in. That’s the whole deal.

When you think about why do these distressed sellers do that, they want to avoid real estate agent commissions. Maybe they think their house is too messed up to go on the MLS. Maybe they don’t want their neighbors to know that it’s a hoarder condition and so they don’t want it to be publicly out there. Maybe they don’t want people coming through their house all hours of the day or night. People are willing to sell. Maybe they’re in distress, they need to move fast, their job changed and they’re not getting paid relocation, they’re getting foreclosed on, or whatever the reason is. There are all these reasons why people are willing to sell fast and are willing to sell it at a discount because they want to get it done.

It’s true. I did the same thing with my last car. My wife and I, we’re building spec homes. She was sending out cards to people all over our city that had lots adjacent to their house. This was years ago. In 2020, she got a response back from one of those people that was looking to sell that said, “We’re looking to sell our house.” It’s the middle of the pandemic and we weren’t looking to buy it at that time. We moved on to different stuff.

The cool thing is, Chris, everything you mentioned, you can say, “I’m looking for a house for myself. I can’t afford in this neighborhood in the city. I want to save $50,000 when I’m buying.” You can use this strategy. You could say, “I want to buy a house with a lot that’s attached to it.” You can use this strategy. You can use it to buy a rental. You can use it for wholesaling. It’s a great strategy that can be used and expanded over multiple different things. That was the DealMachine app. What was the code again that people could use?

Uncommon.

Did you get that from one of the three podcasts that you do, Chris?

Yes. The whole idea behind it is common people do common things and they get common results. I know this isn’t politically correct but the 1% are the 1%, oftentimes, because they’re willing to do what the 99% aren’t willing to do. I want to live my life uncommon. I want to do uncommon things. I want uncommon results. Frankly, if you do that, you’ll get that. That’s what people should do.

If they want to find their first off-market real estate deal, download the app, drive around, and you’ll find properties a bunch of properties that are dilapidated. Here’s the other thing. Don’t think that if you find three properties, you’re going to get 1 out of the 3. Get 50 or 100. The average in lower dollar areas is something like 80 properties to get a good deal. In the high dollar area like mine in the DC market, it’s 150 properties to get a good deal. That’s the average. Maybe you’re uncommon, you can do it half that.

It’s a numbers game. Apartments are a numbers game. You make a lot of offers and look at a lot of deals. We don’t get a lot of signed offers in return. That one good deal that you get every month, every quarter, every year can make it all worth it. You’ve built a $167 million real estate practice in 2020. Let’s talk about some of your other businesses, Chris.

In the coaching business, REI Revive, I teach investors that are bringing in leads and monetize their dead leads. For a wholesaler, if you’re not buying at $0.65 or $.70 on the dollar, you can’t wholesale. When people say, “I want to sell at $0.90 on the dollar.” What happens there? They usually go to the CRM and die a slow and painful death. Some real estate agent monetizes it and it gets done. What do you do? You partner with a real estate agent and let the real estate agent do that. This is a new thing. People have been trying it for years but they have not had much success because most real estate agents don’t know the scripting to talk to them like they’re a regular seller looking to sell.

The reality is they don’t want to talk to a real estate agent. Their brothers and uncles are real estate agents. There are more real estate agents than there are active listings right now. They don’t want to talk to an agent. You need to have somebody that can come in and hear their problem and know that their problem is one of those things that I mentioned earlier why people sell to an investor. If that agent can solve that problem for them, they are going to get paid to solve the problem. The people who make the most money are the people that solve the most problems. If they solve that problem, then they can make money on it. You, as an investor, can work with the agent to get referral fees on those deals.

“People that make the most money solve the most problems,” I used to tell my sales reps that. They would be complaining about something I said, “It sounds like that’s a problem you need to solve.” I said, “Yeah. If we didn’t have problems, you wouldn’t have a job.” That’s the great thing. If you go out there and look for problems to solve, you can do it.

You have REI Revive. You got eleven businesses. You got six kids. You got three podcasts. You have a doctorate in leadership. Chris, what are some tips for people? We have a lot of people that are reading. They’re successful in their careers and they’re looking to make that next step. I transitioned from sales to leadership. It’s hard.

It’s one thing if you’re dealing with yourself every day and clients but when you have to deal with people and you’re leading them, it’s a whole different ballgame. What are some tips that you can give to the audience that you’ve learned in your time, not just with your doctorate but growing and leading people in these businesses?

If you are a great salesperson, the reason you’re a great salesperson is because you know how to listen to what they want. If you listen, everybody will tell you how to sell them. Most of the time, if you don’t know, you haven’t asked a good question and you haven’t listened well. The reason why we don’t remember people’s names is because we’re too busy thinking about the next thing we’re going to say rather than listening to their names and caring about them. Get over yourself and start thinking about them. That is how you do it. That’s one.

Number two is you make a lot of money in sales because Zig Ziglar says, “You can have everything you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want in life.” You need to now go from being the actual person that you’re selling to, to your client needs to be the people you’re leading. The way you do that is you think with them. It’s the same thing you do when you’re working with a client, “What’s in it for me?”

I’m a Christian guy. I pray for the people. That’s one of the things I do. I also think, “How can I make the world bigger? How can I allow them to grow into something that they want to grow into?” I also think, “What is it that they want? What don’t they see for themselves? How can I lead them to see a life that’s bigger than they made and see for themselves?” When you add that value to people that are following you, they’ll follow you forever.

You don’t want people that are going to be there because they get a paycheck. You want people that are going to be loyal to you, people that if you were to go into battle, they would say, “I would follow that man or woman in the battle. I want to be with them.” The only way to do that is to know that you’re willing to speak into their lives and help them see a bigger life than they may even see for themselves.

There was this story when Jesus rose from the dead and people didn’t recognize him when he was walking. It’s called the Road to Emmaus. He was walking with them and after he left, the people said, “Did our hearts not come alive? Did it not burn?” The whole idea is you may not be massively charismatic and you don’t have to be. What you got to be is somebody that helps people dream bigger than they need. You don’t have to say that loud or emphatically. You have to be able to help them see and then they’re willing to go beyond what they were willing to do before because you helped them see that vision for their own life that they may not even see for themselves.

I hope we can get that quote because that was awesome. It’s true. To summarize what you said, if you’re leading people, you need to find out what matters to them. You need to step onto their stage and find out what they’re going through in their life. Help them dream bigger, think bigger, have a bigger future and then help them get there. That’s how you lead people and ultimately provide them value. I hope I did a good job summarizing that.

Simon Sinek’s book Start with Why has that idea. Get them feeling the why and understanding the why. Interact with those goals. Otherwise, they’re going to stay malaise. They’re going to feel like their goals are far away. Honestly, what that swimmer taught us is it’s not in your head. Your head dictates how your body feels. You’re going to have less energy. You’re going to have less excitement. You’re going to have less enthusiasm. Brendon Burchard, in his book High Performance Habits, says that a great leader creates energy. I know that I’m a little bit more energetic than most people. That’s one of my gifts.

You’re getting me fired up. Keep it coming.

The whole idea is, what can you do to create energy and impart energy? You can’t say, “He’s got more energy. I’m a little bit more subdued by nature.” That’s not it. You need to lead the people in your life and figure out how you can impart energy, vision, and focus into their life.

Two awesome books, Start with Why and High Performance Habits, two great authors. You can check out Simon Sinek. He has a great YouTube video, Start with Why. Brendon Burchard has a ton out there as well. I believe it, Chris. It’s something I experienced in my own life. When I was leaving my career, I was anxious. I was almost a little depressed because I didn’t know what my future was. I had this big goal that I was always working towards. We finished the house and got to a couple of things financially. I was almost depressed.

When we don’t have a bigger future that we’re helping people and have bigger importance, it sucks the energy out of us. That’s important. If you’re at that point in your life, you got to dream big, think big, and you got to surround yourself with the right people that can help you get there as well. Chris, you have eleven businesses. You got a lot of stuff going on. Gary Keller has the book, The ONE Thing. I would like to know what’s the one thing? What’s the big thing you’re working on in your life?

The big thing that I’m looking at is, how do we expand the footprint? We built all these businesses that are great. Now I want to work to help other people build great, massively, big, and exciting lives. It doesn’t have to be big but exciting lives. A lot of people have these goals and dreams and they’re hitting these glass ceilings because they don’t know how to go to the next level. For me, I want to help people go to that next level. As I become a better leader and a better communicator and help more people, every single other business that I’m a part of will get better.

I love that.

The definition of The ONE Thing is if you do this thing, everything else will become easier or unnecessary. If I become a better leader and a better communicator, then all of my business partners, all of the people that work for me, will make it easier or unnecessary for some of the stuff that we’re doing.

That’s fantastic. I have that at the top of my quarterly goals. I always write what my one thing is every quarter. Even if everything else doesn’t work out or anything else doesn’t work out on that list, I find that if I get that one thing done, my whole life changes over that 60 or 90 days, which is big. I want to wrap back around to Gary Keller because you mentioned you walked through his step-by-step process to build a million-dollar business, net profit is what you said, over five years. What did you learn over that process? What does he say for those who maybe aren’t familiar with Gary Keller or what he teaches?

The goal is to get to a net profit in a twelve-month period of over $1 million. In part one, the whole goal was first thinking about them. Think about it. Your reticular activating system will bring the right things into your life to do it and then you grow some million. You bring in net revenue, top-line revenue of $1 million in your business, and then net $1 million, which is you keep. You take home $1 million. The next one is The Millionaire Real Estate Agent 2.

They give $1 million. Learn how to take home $1 million every year. Now, learn how to give $1 million. I do have a goal that in a twelve-month period, I’ll give over $1 million away. The whole idea behind it is how do you do that? A lot of people look at education. Education is more of a hobby for people. They listen to podcasts and don’t do anything about it. They read books and don’t do anything about it. The reality is it needs to not be a hobby. It needs to become an instruction.

If you tell people about stuff and they listen and they say, “That was cool. I’m glad I heard it.” Who cares? It needs to be life-changing. The thing I love about The Millionaire Real Estate Agent is it’s like, “Here’s your first step, second step, and third step. It’s colored by numbers.” One of the things that I’ve learned in life is too many people that are entrepreneurs get creative that they try to innovate way too early. What I’ve learned is to imitate and then innovate. He gives you the path. Imitate that and then put your flair into it.

I follow a lot of different things. “Why recreate the wheel?” Chris, if somebody is looking and they’re saying, “I want to learn how to wholesale. I’m a realtor and I want to learn to grow my business.” Maybe they’re their business owners and they want to learn leadership. What is the best way to work with you? How do you work with clients? How can they find you?

When I first started as an entrepreneur, I would reach out to people if I liked their vibe on podcasts. I couldn’t believe they’d talked to me. I was like, “What? This is crazy. You make how much money and you’re chatting with me? This is nice.” That was cool. I want to give back the same way people give me. I will answer any direct message that I’m sent on Instagram. It’s @Craddrock. It may not be right away because I do get a bunch of them now. It may take a couple of days but I’ll answer anything on that front.

If you are a wholesaler, a fix and flipper, or you have leads come in and you want to learn how to monetize them, you can go to my website, ChrisCraddock.com. Get in there and click Apply. Either me or somebody from our team will take a look and see if your business is right for the coaching business. I do some coaching, personal development, scaling your business.

I say no to more people than I say yes to on that. I only have a couple of clients on that. One is because I charge a lot of money for it. Two, I only want to work with somebody that has massively big goals because that’s where I am in my life and I get to choose where I am. I’m sorry if that sounds douchey. I don’t mean to be that way. I’m at a point right now where I only want to spend one on one coaching time with people that think massively big.

That’s fantastic. Before we get to the story about your daughter’s green car, if you go back to your 25-year-old self, I imagine that was right around the time that your first child was born, what piece of advice would you give yourself back then, Chris?

Let me flip the script on you and ask you a quick question here. If you could go back to 25 and you take a pill and you can know everything you know today, how much money would you pay to take that pill?

I would pay for everything I had. If I had to beg, borrow, or steal, it would be worth at least eight figures at a minimum.

I was always doing education. I was always learning but I wasn’t paying for individual one on one coaches. I would say, “Pay for that.” If you can compress decades into days, honestly, think about the millions and millions of dollars all of us would make, if we could go back and know everything we know now, the whole way to do that faster is to get people that know the path and can say, “Don’t make that stupid mistake,” that’s wisdom. Wisdom is to learn from others. Wisdom is to walk the path those other people can say, “This is where it’s at.” I always joke. I call it the stupid tax. Who wants to pay the stupid tax? The stupid tax keeps you from learning fast.

Find somebody who’s emulated the success that you want and reach out to them. If you can, hire them to help you get there as fast as possible. That’s phenomenal advice, Chris. You got six kids. Who’s getting the car?

The eldest one is getting the car.

I want to see a picture of this green thing.

The story is we went over to get a car for my daughter. It’s this nice little red whatever. I don’t even remember what it was. It’s not going to be ready because it was traded in. They’re cleaning it out and changing the tires and everything else on it. We found the ugliest, nastiest green car. Somebody’s going to hate me for saying this.

They’ll say, “I have that car.”

I’m sorry if you have this car. It’s a puke green Kia Soul. We sent a picture to my daughter and said, “The car is not available. What do you think about this one?” She was upset. I looked at my text messages and I had this massive string between my son, daughter, and wife. My son jumps in and he’s like, “Don’t get that car. That’s going to be passed down to me. I don’t want that.” My daughter is like, “I hate that car.” They’re upset about it. I love practical jokes.

They’re fortunate kids to have that problem now. I love it. I can’t wait to play a joke.

First-world problems.

Chris, I love your energy. I took more notes on this podcast than I perhaps ever have. Thank you so much for everything that you’re doing out there and for helping other people. Thanks for sharing your story with our audience as well.

This was awesome. Thanks for having me.

Thanks so much.

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I hope you found this episode valuable. I have one more thing to give to you. We have a page for my coaching clients where you can get a free copy of my book, as well as much more from previous guests on the show. Check out NextLevelIncome.com/coaching to get a free copy of my book, audiobook, and much more. I’ll send you a copy of my book and cover all the shipping costs as a thank you for following the podcast. Also, please like, share, and take 90 seconds to give us a rating on Apple Podcasts.

Important Links:

• Chris Craddock

• Uncommon Real Estate – Apple Podcasts

• The Redux Group

• The Millionaire Real Estate Agent

• Wholesaling Inc.

• DealMachine

• REI Revive

• Start with Why

• High Performance Habits

• Simon Sinek

• Start with Why – YouTube

• Brendon Burchard

• The ONE Thing

• The Millionaire Real Estate Agent 2

• @Craddrock – Instagram

• NextLevelIncome.com/coaching

• Apple Podcasts – The Next-Level Income Show

• https://app.MonsterCampaigns.com/c/trz74uitfoa0juuppebj/

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Tagged: leadership, coach, wholesaling, deals, education, real estate business, Group 3