Follow me:
Search

Chad Corbett | It’s Not About How You Get There

Play episode
Hosted by
Mike Ayala

On today’s episode of Investing For Freedom Mike brings on the show a great guest, Chad Corbett. Chad talks about his journey to get to where he is today, and you do not want to miss this! Enjoy!

“Stay focused on the outcome. Nothing else matters. How you get there is all part of the fun and part of these stories.”

HIGHLIGHTS:

[03:35] Who is Chad Corbett?
[06:06] Chad Corbett: The FBI agent
[11:09] Walking away
[13:00] Greatest Setback
[15:24] Advice from Chad
[16:00] Focus on the outcome, not the in-between
[19:00] Change of Course
[22:00] The start of Chad’s career
[32:00] It’s all about cash
[38:39] Baby boomers
[42:46] Go Abundance
[45:32] It’s not about how you get there
[47:50] About Chad

RESOURCES:

All The Leads | https://alltheleads.com/about-us-copy1/chad-corbetts-bio/
Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/AllTheLeads

FULL TRANSCRIPTION:

Mike Ayala Thank you for joining me on the Investing for Freedom Podcast. As always, I’ve got a very special guest today. I’ve had the privilege of getting to know Chad recently, and I think you’re just going to be blown away by Chad Corbitt and his background and just all the things that he’s accomplished in life. What an amazing story and experience. And then when we pull together what his business is all about, I think it’s really going to help those of you that are looking for ways to get into multiple streams of income, owning your own business and get into some passive income and maybe eventually quit your job. So, Chad, thanks for being on the Investing for Freedom Podcast. 

Chad Corbett Oh yeah, thanks for having me, man. 

Mike Ayala Excited to have you here. So let’s jump into the four questions. So who’s had the greatest impact on your life? 

Chad Corbett Man, that’s a really hard one for me to answer.  It’s like, what’s your favorite food? I’ve been blessed with so many amazing people in my life.  But, when you first ask that I’m like, alright, in a good way or a bad way?  You have your bad experiences that really kind of shape who you are, but I would have to say, to pick a single one, I think, and I didn’t realize it at the time, I didn’t know who Tony Robbins was in 2014. A friend asked me to go with them, we challenged each other to go to four major events each year. Usually,  we picked shows, real estate conventions, masterminds. And I found myself in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in a room with 8,000 people just screaming their heads off, jumping up and down, and I’m like, what kind of cult crap is this? Later that night, I was walking on fire with Tony Robbins, and at the end of that four days, I was lit up like a Christmas tree, right?

And then it just kind of died off. What I didn’t realize is, how big of an impact it made on me, until I took a friend back to UPW the second time. Like, when I did it the second time and I was like, this seems so basic, who doesn’t know this? It had made such a large impression on me, and I came back from that second time, looked at my notebook; that you can have a spiral-bound notebook from that; I had accomplished my wildest dreams, that I could record in that notebook, I had accomplished in about a year, year, and a half. And I was three or four years from that. And, I kind of had to go back and retrospectively give Tony Robbins the credit, because of just understanding, and even within that, like understanding the six basic human needs, the way he teaches it.  I graduated with honors, and psychology and law enforcement, but that’s formal theoretical stuff. And that’s the practical psychology that I’ve learned from him, and how to very quickly identify and change your own behavior, and the behavior of others. That’s probably been the most beneficial thing that I’ve ever done in my life. There’s been a lot, but, I would say if I had to choose one, that change in mindset and a shift in thinking that they used psychology in real-time has been hugely impactful. 

Mike Ayala Man, that is amazing. There is so much to unpackage there, but we’re going to stay focused. 

Chad Corbett We could be here for days. 

Mike Ayala Yeah, and I actually have a few things that I want to circle back on, and that’s what I love about this whole process; The Four Questions. Sometimes I feel like we have to turn it into a four-part series. So, there are a few things that I’d like to circle back on with that. So, if you could narrow it down to one thing that has had the greatest impact on your success, what would it be? 

Chad Corbett Walking away from the FBI. 

Mike Ayala Wow. Tell me about that. 

Chad Corbett So, I started training at 15 years old to be an FBI agent. I set my sights on it, wrote letters, I started with the basketball coach, up to the high school principal, through the superintendent, to the board of education, to the governor, and got into the West Virginia State Police Academy, a junior trooper academy.

I went through the police academy at 15. It was small, it wasn’t the full twenty-eight weeks. That’s what made it clear for me. I’m like, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to serve, buddy. Like I’m going to be part of a team, I’m going to serve, I’m going to make a difference. And from 15 to 22, I lifted weights, I ran, I shot thousands and thousands of rounds, and at 22 years old, I was about to graduate college, I hadn’t graduated, and I was recruited and hired before I even got my degree. And, you can imagine how big your head is as a 22-year-old, who, I wasn’t even old enough to be a special agent, but they hired me as a police officer. So, I was pretty proud. I felt like, how did I, as this little farm kid, that came from a very modest beginning, how the hell did I get here so quickly? 

Then; I can’t hear six thousand megahertz. So, I had failed their hearing tests, and I let them know that I would because I’d been through the military processing like nine times, and failed their hearing test. But, that was a huge deal for me, probably the thing I was most proud of, still, one of the things I’m most proud of, getting through, the FBI has pretty tough filters, right? They’re pretty good underwriters. And, I got through all that, and I got through it all by 22 years old. 

And then, on principle, I left and burned it all to the ground because, my guaranteed hearing waiver turned into, oh, you know, you’re such an asset, we’re gonna bump you up like eight pegs on the pay scale and give you a desk job. And that was my last day in the bureau. I walked away. 

I didn’t even give myself time to think about it, like I just said, act, act on your principles. And when I did, I was like, holy shit, did you just do that? And I did it. You know, unfortunately, the captain that they sent to deliver the news to me had to hear a few choice words, but. It took me quite a while too, I guess, to process and reconcile that. But once I did, it was one of the most valuable lessons in life. Because I thought that everything was over, everything I’d worked for, everything I poured my soul into, through the most formative years of my life, at the time, I thought, had just crumbled. 

In retrospect, what I’ve learned later, as you see on my wall here, like, I’m an empath; I’m a teacher. I didn’t know that. So I was going into a career like that was a hard-charging, and, I’m an anagram seven, in my natural state. I just want to have fun and be perpetually 23. When I get challenged or threatened, I go back to an anagram one where I’m like, you know, that military mindset, like pick a target, go through it. And I think that that was probably the best thing that ever happened to me because I don’t think I would have been happy, I think that I would have never really found my creative genius. But there’s a hell of a lot of lessons that come from it, and, you know, as far as discipline goes, grit and tenacity and doing the right thing. So, I think that’s probably been the most valuable life lesson. At the time, it sure as hell didn’t feel that way. In the moment, it felt like it was the end of everything I had worked for, and I was going to be working in the gas station for the rest of my life. But, it gave me fuel, man, it was rocket fuel, if there ever was any. I immediately, again, I didn’t think. I owned a fencing company, I was making really good money building fences for farmers, and I immediately went and got my real estate license and took action immediately while that was a fresh fuel. And it’s really fueled me to, I guess, become the business person that I am, the teacher and coach that I am. 

Mike Ayala That’s pretty powerful, man. So, I don’t really know a lot about your family and all that, but how did the people around you take that; when everything you’d worked for, you just left? 

Chad Corbett You know, it’s interesting with something like that, because for 12 weeks you have FBI agents; I mean, I grew up in a town of you know, there are like 15 people, in what we call our town, it’s just a few farms. 38,000 people in the entire county I grew up in. So, for 12 weeks, from your kindergarten teacher, all the way through your current college professors; they’re being interviewed by FBI agents. Your coaches, the people who work in grocery stores, so, everybody knows about it, right? Everybodys like, what’s going on? I would go to a bar my senior year in college, and people would be like, what the hell?! The FBI was at my house at 6:00 a.m. yesterday! What did you do?! I’m like, nothing yet. 

But, walking away from it, everybody was super supportive and proud, and that, honestly, like, how they perceived it, kind of made it harder. But, the thing that everybody said was, you know, Chad, it’s OK, everything will be OK, everything happens for a reason. And there’s a whole story behind that, too. It’s so hard as a 22-year-old, both with the EQ that I had at the time, it was really hard to hear that. You know, I know you’re being supportive, but it doesn’t help. I just wanted to help, I wanted to be solved, though. The people in my community were very supportive. And it was interesting when I did the Freedom of Information Act and got my packet released. It’s pretty interesting to see what people say about you when they don’t know that you’re ever going to see it, right? And when they’re looking in the eyes of an FBI investigator. But, people were supportive. And when I jumped in the business, and into real estate, people were very supportive of me. I come from a really, really good family, a really good community.

I can’t think of anyone who said, “Hey man, you’re crazy, you shouldn’t do that”. Now, later in life, when I started really stepping outside of my box and doing more creative things and became a serial entrepreneur, I’ve had family members say, why don’t you just quit this and get a real job? And I’m like, what?!  But at that time, I think most people were supportive of me trying out something different. Most of those farmers and adults, they’re simple folks. But I think they’re more knowledgeable than most people give them credit for, I think they might have known that it was the best thing for me.

Mike Ayala Yeah, no, that’s such a great point, too. I love this whole process because, just like, my wife has an aunt and uncle that are ranchers in Wyoming, and, you know, they play like their just everyday folk, but, man, he’s a genius, and she’s a genius. And so, to your point, I mean, pretty level headed people. And a lot of times, what we think is a success or what we think is E.Q. or I.Q., is just something completely different.  An amazing story there, I might want to unpackage a few more things there, too, but.  What was your greatest setback, and what did you learn from it? 

 Chad Corbett I think it was, you know, probably the FBI story. I mean, I think that pretty much covers that. Other than that, it would be, trying on brutal honesty and candid communication in a corporate setting, when you’re making more money than the senior VPs that are supposed to be leading you; resulting in the rug being pulled out from under you, and a calculated decision that litigation would cost more than the commissions they owed you. And, that was a very valuable lesson, that was a setback. At the time, I thought it was a setback, but the same as the FBI, it was fuel, man. Because it made me unemployable for life. I started my first business at seven, and I’ve always been in charge of my own income, even when I was a W2 with them, I was earning 100% commission. It taught me to own the source, right? It taught me to never be dependent on somebody else feeding me. Because, at that time, when I reached a certain level of success, the people who were supposed to be leading and mentoring me, turned against me, and in a very aggressive way; I mean, they owed me quite a bit of money, but they knew how much it would cost to get it back in a courtroom. So I had to make a decision to walk away from that, knowing, like I had to decide to fight; You know, it’s like, do you want to be right, or you want to be happy? So, I took my motorcycle and I disappeared in the Canadian wilderness for a couple of months; I processed that into who I am today, and it was one of the best gifts I’ve ever been given. So, if you’re listening, you know who you are, thanks. 

Mike Ayala I love it. That’s awesome. Alright, last one. What is the piece of advice you find yourself sharing the most in life? 

Chad Corbett  Get clear on the outcome and forget the rest. 

You know, as somebody who came from the background I did, I trusted the advice that I was given on the way up. And, with the military and law enforcement mindset, there’s a strategy and there are tactics for everything, right? And I put too much weight in that. Several different prominent self-help and psychologist people will have different names for this, but I’m trying to think of; Anyways, the curse of hows, is what one of those guys that I’m having… Timothy Dooley is the author. He calls it the cursed hows, and the cursed hows, you know, if you say, alright, I want to make a million dollars and I’m going to do A, B, C, D, you know, if you try to layout every step, and you try to overset goals, or you get too granular with goals, and I know this will probably go against the grain of a lot of your listeners, but hear me out:

Getting really clear on the outcome, and for me, making that outcome a feeling, and forgetting about how you get there; the metaphor that I use when I try to explain this to people, in a short amount of time is, you know, you’ve got a GPS, right? We all have one in our pocket, and we pull this thing out of our pocket and say, okay, I’m on a drive from New York to San Francisco; Avoid tolls, avoid highways; There’s a million turns in between, right? And you trust this advice, this thing that was designed and manufactured as cheaply as possible to get in your pocket, but you explicitly trust it, and at what point do you know it was right? Not until you pull in that driveway and it says you’re there.

You could have made a thousand turns and been completely lost and wouldn’t have known it, but you trusted that outcome that you chose. You focused on the outcome, not everything in between. And that’s kind of how I look at that. Especially the big picture things in life. As my best advice to anyone is don’t get lost. And in the granularity of goal setting. And if you get clear on your big picture, get clear on the outcome, let those other things happen. Let the FBI do what they’re going to do, let your bosses and vice presidents do what they’re going to do. That’s all just the right turn or left turn to help get you to that destination if you stay clear and you stay focused on the outcome. Nothing else matters. How you get there is all part of the fun and part of these stories. 

Mike Ayala  Man, that was, I mean, we could just stop right there because that alone was gold. As you’re talking about the GPS thing; when we first started buying manufactured homes across the country, I partnered up with a guy that had already, I think that we owned like 15 properties when I partnered up, and I was tasked with the operations team, and being out in the field. And so, I was heading to Kentucky to see two of our communities. The regional manager had told me, well fly into, I think it was Louisville, and one of them is going to be, 45 minutes from you, you’ll stay the night there, and then the next day you’re going to drive about another 45 minutes.

So, I land in Louisville, I get my rental car, I plug the location into the GPS, and like two hours later, I’m still driving. And I called; I’m like, I don’t know if I took a wrong turn or what, I’m like two hours into this thing and I’m still not there. Well, somehow my GPS got set to avoid freeways?  So, I’m driving the entire time like, just not paying attention. I’ve never really thought through that, other than man, I’m an idiot, but when you brought that story up, that happened to me the opposite way.

Like, I’m just driving along, not paying attention, and all of a sudden I’m an hour and a half, two hours into this trip. And it was because my GPS was set wrong. I love, love, love what you just said about not getting too granular on the goals. Because it’s funny, as we progress, and we achieve more success, we tend to try to package that, bottle that up, and here’s the 15 steps to success, right? But, if we think back to the beginning, we didn’t understand that back then.  

And so that’s why, I don’t know if you’ve listened much or paid much attention to the process, but I keep it super simple: What do you really want? Why do you want it? What are you gonna do to get it? Measure results, and then adjust, because things are going to come out of nowhere and kick our ass. Our desires are going to change, what we think we want is going to adjust. So, I love everything that you just said. That was amazing. 

Chad Corbett  The biggest plus for me, in that, Mike, was like, just because you wrote something down and had to change course, to me, that was a failure. I started booking those as failures, I would get to the end of the year, and I’m like, well, failed at that, failed at that, failed at that, and by the time I got to the end of my goal sheet, I was pissed off, and I was mad at myself. And I did the opposite of what we should all be trying to master, which is self-love, right? We should be trying to figure out how to get our cup full, and actually give ourselves the credit we’re due. I still find that challenging. But, when I started focusing on goals and how they make me feel; not how much money they make, or how many houses, or doors who are included in it; but how do you want to feel, Chad? Like at the end of the day, how should life feel? And then, just get clear on that, and what it is. And the goal can be a house, but I would encourage you if you say, I want a million-dollar house anywhere; Why? And eventually, you’ll get to the root of that. It’s a feeling. I want to feel significant. I want to feel secure. I want to feel accomplished.

Whatever that might mean. It’s something different for all of us. But I encourage you not to set goals based on a number of doors, or the number of houses, or the number of dollars in the bank, but who the hell do you want to be? And how the hell does that guy feel, or that girl feel? And then just let everything out, like just trust the process, just like the GPS metaphor. If you’ve got something written down, a more granular goal, and it goes off the rails; Let’s say you make a bad investment decision and you lose a hundred thousand dollars. Well, who the hells to say that that isn’t the fuel to light some more tenacity in you to make better underwriting decisions on the next deal or to select a whole new asset class? And if you can focus out on the horizon, like on the big picture, it’ll keep your mindset right. It’ll keep you from turning against yourself, and becoming your own biggest threat to success. 

Mike Ayala Wow, that’s amazing. So, there’s so much to unpackage there, but, you know, even when we’re setting the goals, that’s kind of what you started that off with; even when you’re setting these goals, get into the reason, the why, just keep asking why until you dig into that. So, you’ve got a board behind you, is that the touch part of that? Tell me a little bit about that. 

Chad Corbett So this board was, I added the letters to it, it was a gift, just because people know I like to travel, and I’ve got the rest of my office that you can’t see, are antique maps, like I lived in Maui, and I like old maps. But, this is significant to me because it represents like I cannot see myself coming from a really small town; the first time I was ever on an airplane, I was 26 years old. But since then, I haven’t stopped traveling. I’ve been a cowboy and a dude ranch, I’ve been a lumberjack, I’ve managed fine dining restaurants, I’ve traveled the world and done many different things. And that’s kind of what this represents. And what I’ve learned is, you know, I love to travel to get myself out of my comfort zone and gain those new experiences. I learned, not soon enough, but I’m still young; I learned that I’m, in my heart, I’m a teacher; And my gauge of success there is, is again feelings.

If my students all pass where I’m at, or are more successful than me then that’s one of the greatest feelings I can get.  When a guy comes to me and says, man, listen, I made a million dollars last year with what you taught me for 250 bucks, that’s currency, baby. That’s that feeling. So, that’s kind of touching people, and, you know, I do charity work. I ride adventure motorcycles, and train people to ride the big, like the twelve hundred GS off-Road, on-road, like world travel bikes. And I spent last year, the whole month of May in the Pole delivering MSR water treatment systems, that you know, and in a month we were able to save at least 7,000 lives a year, with the systems we put in place. So that’s kind of what that represents, is travel for you, but always make sure that you’re always, always being true to what the talents you’re given of teaching people and touching their lives. That’s kind of what it means to me. 

Mike Ayala Wow. That’s powerful. And so, let’s get a little bit into your business because I want to make sure that we touch on that. You just said when somebody comes to you and says, I made a million dollars on what you teach me; you’ve built a pretty amazing system. Let’s just, let’s just touch on that a little bit so we make sure that we’ve got that. 

Chad Corbett Yeah, so in 2011, is when I kind of hit the reset button and it said I spent a couple of months in the Canadian wilderness on an adventure motorcycle, with just a fly rod and some freeze-dried food in a backpack, and a leather-bound journal. And every night, I would ride and take photos all day. And then I would fly fish and journal until the sun went down at eleven o’clock at night. And I had one particular night in Ferney, British Columbia. There was I was on a lake. And that’s this photo behind me represents a good, funny story behind that. But I made three rules for myself, it was: always help others more than yourself; always turn a six-figure net so you can live and give the way you want, and always be able to do it from anywhere in the world with an iPhone or a laptop. And, those became the targets, like those were those big outcomes on the horizon, that I was telling you, you know, I don’t have to say I’m going to start X kind of business that does X amount of revenue, and that I thought that my targets kind of became those three things. So I moved and I ended up moving to a town where I knew nobody; Roanoke, Virginia. And I built my career and resort development. So we developed ski-front, beachfront ownership. And I did a water park in the Smoky Mountains. But I had come from multi-million dollar real estate development and sales. And there’s none of that in Roanoke, Virginia, in case you ever been there, and you don’t know. 

But I kind of took myself out of the top of an industry and I’m like, oh, now what? And I chose Roanoke deliberately looking at MSA is all over the country. And I chose it because of the proximity to it. I wanted to come back to Appalachia because there’s just something special about this place. I just love the people, I love Appalachia. So, I wanted to be back into these mountains. I wanted to be in a town where I could start a real estate business that would help me achieve those three things. And when I moved here, the median price was one hundred and forty-one thousand bucks. I’m like, what’s not a brokerage, we know that. Like how the hell do you make money in this market? And I started looking at investing and I looked at the price to rent ratios here, and they were more like Memphis or, you know, Detroit. Like, I bought my first house in Roanoke for ten thousand dollars. Replacement windows, new siding, new HVAC, new roof. I paid ten-grand for it, and I had a 950 a month HUD tenant. I’m like, you’ve got to be kidding me. And I mean, so I mean, you the whole like you’re doubling your money every couple of years and, you know, and then the lower-income rentals here. So I chose to set up an investment business here. So I started wholesaling just before I risked my own capital completely, I thought let me wholesale a few deals and cut my teeth. So I did a few wholesale deals and really hated that, man. Like I realized I’d been spending my I built my career negotiating the price up on millionaires and billionaires. Now I’m in the living rooms of people who made poor decisions and I’m trying to beat them down. And that just wasn’t for me.

So, I did a few deals and moved on. There’s still a place for that like a wholesale falls in my lap every once in a while where it’s people just are checked out, and they’re like, just take it. But for me, the core business, that wasn’t it. So I thought, how do I take all these people who need to get a higher price but can’t and still serve them? How do I help others before myself and still make six figures and still run it from an iPhone? So those three things, those three big outcomes, really shaped my investment business, too. So that led me to creative financing. So when somebody didn’t have enough equity to sell, I could do a lease with the option to purchase or structure some sort of a creative financing deal. If somebody couldn’t buy it for a wholesale price, I had seven other tools in the toolkit. I got really good with let’s lease purchase, like I had a 95% close rate, on my lease option program. It’s very, very detailed. It’s outside of the scope of this conversation. I’m happy to teach anyone and everyone how to do it. It’s different, but it works. So from there, I noticed that most of the people that we’re responding to we bought houses stuff; they had either inherited from the home or they’re in the probate process. So I’m like, alright, I’ve got to figure this out. Well, before I actually said I’m going to go to the courthouse and learn this stuff before that happened, one of the other mailers that I had sent out, a lady had called me and said, “take me off your list. I’ll die in this house.” And it was just the high equity list, don’t ever mail that list, by the way, high equity owner occupant. Not a good list.

That lady had called me 60 days later, I got a call from a frantic lady who was just in tears. She had driven eight hours from Wrightsville Beach to come up here. Her mother had had a stroke, was in the hospital. They were getting ready to discharge her because she couldn’t stay, and they couldn’t afford the rehab facility. So she needed a solution very quickly. So this all kind of happened on accident, man. I’d known about creative financing, I built at the time I’d gotten my Virginia real estate license, so I had four real estate licenses at that time. I had done the wholesale, I was flipping houses, listings, short sales, I was starting to do a lot of different things in residential.

When I first moved here, I sold 100 million dollars in real estate, but I didn’t know how to sell a house. I had never sold a house. And so, I had to learn all this stuff. So in a matter of six months, I went from never having sold a house, to creative finance deals, wholesales, conventional listening, short sales, I was just trying everything on for size because I was looking for those three big outcomes, right? And this one appointment really became a pivot point in my life. And I didn’t even see it coming, because I’d been doing all these things and beating myself up, and the advice I gave you guys about, you know, set it like get clear on the outcome and don’t worry about the left and right turns, just trust the process; It’s because every night I would in the end my day and beat myself up because I didn’t get that deal, or I didn’t make this many phone calls, and I was failing, and I had to learn to process those things. But, what happened then in this appointment was this lady, she needed money and she needed every penny possible. So I thought, all right, forget your own damn outcomes, forget your own goals, forget your own business model. Serve this lady. Listen. So we walked through the house. I heard her out. 

She needed money so she needed cash immediately to get her mother into the rehab facility. We needed to liquidate the asset for every penny that we possibly could so she could sustain her because she wasn’t ever coming home, she had a massive stroke, it was clear; we needed the transition to long term care and there was no plan, you know, 78.8% of senior citizens surveyed by the Nursing Home industry had no plan, their only plan as to die in their home.  60% of Americans die in hospitals, 20% in nursing homes, 20% at home. So 20% of people, their plan works out, 80% of people get blindsided and they have no contingency plan. There’s no long term care plan. There’s no estate plan. 

And that creates the feeling Pam was failing. So she was frantic. They were trying to discharge her mother out into a rehab facility that she couldn’t afford. They couldn’t afford in-home care. She was 65 years old herself; she certainly couldn’t take care of her, and she was just lost. She was frozen, and her father had passed away. The house was part of probate, but that’s not the reason; I just happened on this one through a high equity list. Thank goodness I did. 

So, we walked through the house and I said, you know, Pam, I’m still surprised how this happened, because it happened on the spot. I came back to the living room, I sat down, and I was just kind of like, OK, so I’ve got four things for you: One is, I’ll about this house cash, I’ll close probably within 48 hours. As soon as I can pull a string and get a title binder, I will close, I promise you. She flinched really hard, you know because she thought it was worth twice that. And it was, but for me to know that early in my investing career, I was like, ehhh, and it was kind of a busy road, it was set back a bit. So anyway, that was my safe price. 

Option two; As is, where is, it had been on the market with a realtor who did a terrible job. I said, I’ll list it as is, where it is, and we should find a buyer within seven days, and close within 30, at this price. Option three is, we’re gonna do what the other realtor should have. We’re going to get this home ready for market. Since your mom’s not coming back, I’m going to get an estate sale company to come in here, make an offer on this antique furniture, and we’re gonna take the money from that furniture, we’re going to do a light punch work rehab, like a cosmetic rehab. We’re going to have it done in three to five days, we’re going to get great photography, put this thing out, at probably retail value; where you had it listed and when you got no showings, we can get that number if we do the right job. Option four is everything an option three, but instead of going to the conventional market to MLS, we’re gonna go lease purchase, rent to own, owner financing. And then I explained my program to her. 

To my surprise, that’s what she chose. So, I was able to get an eight-thousand dollar option fee, eleven-hundred first month, and eleven-hundred last month in her pocket right there, like within three days I was able to get the house sold for full price, no contingencies. We sold it to a pair of Navy veterans who had retired and had left Pennsylvania and forgot to pay their utility bills. So, they had that on their credit. That’s all we had to resolve. And not like at the end of the day, we ended up netting her twenty-five thousand dollars more than the last realtor had expired de-listing at. And we did it in a matter of days. I mean, we’ve got a solution in place in a matter of days. 

So, as with all those other nights, I came home and beat myself up. This night, I came home and poured a glass of cabernet and I’m like, what did you just do? Like, wow, what if you could do that again, and again, and again? And what if it scales? What if you could teach other people? And that was a pivot point for me. And I started thinking that way. So the next day I’m at the court. Meeting with the probate clerk, learning the process, learning how to gather the data. The next day, I’m sending out letters offering this is like a vertically integrated solution. We will bring in our contractors, our cleanout crews, our estate sale companies, our senior moving companies, our attorneys, you know, yada, yada, yada. I quote, is a vertically integrated solution.

Why not have 35 marketing hooks and all, and if you’re going to send one letter with one hook, that’s OK. You’ll find some success. Why not send one letter with 35 hooks? And so, I later read the book Blue Ocean Strategy, which I love because it kind of validated this for me. I found an uncontested market space, chasing those feelings, those three things that came to me on that mountain top. I found it by accident, because I was trusting the process, and being true to those three things that I said I wanted in my life. So I did; probate became my niche, probate became my specialty. It built the entire investment side of my business, the entire brokerage side of my business. And at a certain point, it got so big that it was threatening, that it was threatening those three things. Right. Like, I wasn’t able to just pick up and leave and take off because people were becoming to rely on my presence, like here and Roanoke.

It was title companies, real estate agents. You know, everyone needed more and more and more and more time and more phone calls, and more text messages. So for me, I’m like, all right. And it’s time to reevaluate. Like, how do you meet these three rules, but grow that? How do you make a bigger impact? And I’m like, I wonder, what if I could teach thousands and thousands of other real estate professionals how to make the impact that I learned how to make here in Roanoke? And what if that scaled at the end of your career, rather than making a huge difference in one town, what if it was nationwide? And that company became all the lead. I had a business partner. I have four partners, three partners. But one of my partners, Jim and I were doing short sales together, and he and I kind of hammered this out in our own businesses, proved it out as a proven system. And then we rolled it out.

Our other partners obviously helped with the things we’re not good at. And we rolled it out to, you know, to the nation as All The Leads. It’s a brand that we can grow into. But right now, you know, we just have for the past six years focused on a proven probate system that’s built off what we learned empathetically serving those people in this situation. 

So, you’ve got, you know, in the next 45 years, you have about 76 million baby boomers left in that generation, and they hold 70%  of disposable income in the United States, which and their total assets and receivables like life insurance and everything considered, it’s about a hundred and thirty-six trillion dollars in wealth that will transfer from one generation to the next. And you’ve got about two million properties a year coming through probate. One point four million of them are free and clear; most of them sell in the first six months. So, it was it’s you know, it’s something that’s appealing to just about anybody, whether you’re a realtor, whether you’re an investor.

There’s equity in the deals. And there’s certainly a high-level of motivation because of the lack of planning in the family and the urgency that’s created by this situation and the lack of liquidity in the estate. They have to liquidate. Usually, they have to liquidate the real estate to settle the liabilities. So, it’s easy from a business standpoint. It’s easy to get excited about. Like, holy crap, those are big numbers, right? But also from you know, from an empathetic standpoint, these people really need guidance. You know, if they didn’t need help, they would have an estate plan. They would have established a trust. They would have had, you know, things would be different and they wouldn’t have such urgency. So they need leadership because we don’t teach it in schools, we don’t teach it in colleges, we don’t teach it in our communities. We’re not allowed to talk about money in normal circles.

We sure as hell don’t want to talk about death. We’re American. We don’t talk about death. We don’t die, right? And I, like our culture, have created a situation where baby boomers, I mean, the Federal Reserve did a study in 2018; The average baby boomer, the median savings of baby boomers is 24,700 dollars.  That’s insane. Yeah, these are senior citizens. That’s all the liquidity they have. So how many months of living expenses is that really? Especially in a health event, like when you get into a hospital or into a rehab facility. It’s like that you’re done, right? You’re dusted. 

So there’s a big chance. The other side of this, there’s a big chance to step up and really scale your business in a space where you can make big equity gains and get a lot of deal flow. But the bigger opportunity for me, what really drives me is, like my primary objectives. And doing this is how I want to lower the stress level for the families and maximize the equity and help them grow generational wealth versus spending inheritance. Because if we don’t lead them, they’re going to spend it. And I would rather help them invest it. So we go in and we’ll get the house under contract where we buy. Or someone else by that we listed. And someone else by that, we’re going to try to turn that.

We’re going to make sure at the closing table we go from the closing table to a registered investor as an investment adviser. And we’re going to talk to them about private money lending, and showing them how to become lenders to capitalize our other buyers who are buying the other houses that we got. And I teach people to create a continuous cycle of transactions. And it’s just value, value, value, value. And you get paid. So, there is never a time your phone can ring that you can’t help somebody and monetize it. And, there’s never a time when you help somebody and monetize that, that you can’t repeat it by continuing to provide a higher level of service to them. 

And so that’s kind of become my thing is teaching that and doing that, and that’s All The Leads. So we provide a probate system in every county in the United States that comes with, you know, we obviously take the public data. We bring that back. We augment that. So we give you almost two thousand real estate data points in addition to it where we’ve built the proprietary system we call Probate Plus. So we’re the only people in the country that can get the probate data and then go find every piece of real estate associated with the deceased, whether it’s held in trust or entity or even another family member’s name. If we have ways to tie it back to that deceased person, we can show you. And that’s the interesting part. You find mobile home parks, multi-family, single-family portfolios, hotels. I mean, people own a lot of stuff. And we find that in trust, we find that in LLCs. So we get you bound phone numbers, email addresses, real estate information, including the debt level, the equity level, you know, all the property, a full property report.  That goes into a CRM that we provide, as this is all part of one price, that we deliver leads into a CRM; that CRM is tied to our direct mail house. We fully automate the mail.

All those chokepoints, like, I started out going to the courthouse, putting it on a pen and pen and paper, that went to the spreadsheet, the spreadsheet went to Spokeo, and Intellia, then you skip traced that, then you finally get to start marketing, and then you do your mail merge and all that. Then, about a week in, you finally get to start marketing to your list because you got all that work done, and what All The Leads does.  We just take all those chokepoints out. So we just automate everything, everything but the productive activity, which is doing what you do best, talking to people, take calls, make calls, go on appointments. That’s all you have to do. So, we took something that, hearing me explain and I’m sure sounds complex and convoluted, but it’s just really streamlined down.

You don’t have to fight the fight that I fought. And you learn all the lessons I learned. He just got the plug into a proven system. And in addition to that, we kind of provide a ridiculous level of support. We have over seven hundred hours of our job training that’s free to access. We do right after this, 12 minutes, I’m jumping on an hour-long probate mastermind call. We’ve done almost 300 of them. Every week we do a mastermind call where you can come ask anything. I would do role-play calls. So, we’re pretty proud of what we have and the reputation we have and how we treat people. And it’s different from what you’ll see from other companies. But if you’re interested in and making a really big difference in real estate and you want to work with very little competition and really impressive RO eyes, probate was my blue ocean. 

Mike Ayala Yeah. Well, and make a huge impact. For those of you that are listening, I met Chad through Gobundance, and you know, we, we were in the group for a while before we connected, and I think we scheduled a 30 minute call awhile back, and I think two hours later we’re still talking, right? And because I mean, just such an interesting, giving person and the thing that I want to kind of pull together here, I’ve got another friend slash mentor named Jean Guerrino, and he always says, you know, we can do well, while doing good. And that’s the one thing that I just keep taking away from you here. I mean, your principle number one is to help others more than yourself. You can design an amazing life around what you really want out of life. And I think, I would argue, and Chad would agree, you should get what you want out of life because if you’re hating what you’re doing, go ahead. 

Chad Corbett I said, absolutely. 

Mike Ayala Yeah, if you’re hating what you’re doing and it’s, you know, I mean, if you were still in the FBI, you wouldn’t be as passionate about what you’re doing. And so a couple of things I just want to throw out there and make sure we pull together. You know, Chad said it. It sounds complicated, but he was just sharing his story with you and how he got here. And when I see the pathway I was telling him before the interview, I just spent a lot of time looking at the site and the program, and even just the infographic. I mean, you guys have taken a lot of the work out of this and automated it for people when they come into your program. And so basically, the other thing that, you know, is on your board is teaching. You’re going to teach people to do what you love here. But I haven’t gone through the system, but I can see, just by looking at it and talking to you, what an amazing program. And then, the other thing I’ll say, just back to doing well and doing good so many times, I think people when I hear the stories that you talked about, every single time somebody is in probate, there is a problem that exists there, that they didn’t plan for. If they had planned properly, and I’m not trying to slap somebody in the face that’s in probate or something, but if they had planned properly, they wouldn’t be in that situation. In my mind, probate is like one of the worst possible places to be, because not only do you have some kind of loss or death in the family, it’s the worst possible time to be dealing with most of this stuff. But there was a lack of planning. And so, for those of you that are interested in this and want to connect with Chad, this is not; I want to make sure we’re dealing with a mindset that most of my listeners probably don’t have. But you’re not doing anything other than helping people. This comes back to helping others more than yourself. And you said that multiple times. But if you get in this program and you can help people do this, you’re helping people out of a bad situation. 

 

Chad Corbett  

Absolutely. And that moment with Pam, the reason I told that story, I mean, that was, it made it clear to me like they thought they were good. The point that our mother had called me and said, I’ll never sell this house, I don’t need you, take me off your list. But she pinned my letter to the fridge. And I don’t know if I mentioned that, I sent greeting card envelopes, with a handwritten font. And my letter was penned to the fridge when Pam showed up that morning to her mother’s empty house to try to get her, you know, do whatever she could do before she went to the hospital to see her mother in a coma, basically. And, you know, it’s the lack of planning creates an extreme level of urgency and a lot of families then dumping a lot of equity. The people who wouldn’t agree with what I’ve been saying here. Now, I have about as low as 18 cents on the dollar. But I do it very transparently. I show them those options. I’m like, here are your options: you can dump it for this, you can sell it as-is for this, we can go conventional for this, or I’ll partner with you and risk my own money and flip the house for you, and we’ll do a 50/50 JV and they’ll self select all the way back down into that 20 cents on the dollar because the house is so rough, they’re just checked out. Emotionally, they don’t want to deal with it. So, you can buy houses at deep, deep, deep discounts and still serve these people. You’re not taking advantage of them, but you can also really take advantage of these people. And I think a lot of folks get into the probate niche, and that’s their intent. And there’s no surprise why they don’t last long and why those guys always struggle. When you’re that kind of investor, your ass is going to be swimming upstream your whole career, and you don’t have to do that. There’s literally millions and millions of dollars if you just provide service to these folks, and that is the thing I’ve learned like you helping up, helping enough other people get what they want, you’ll always have what you want. 

Mike Ayala I love that. So, for those of you that are interested in this, just, you know, reach out to Chad. Chad, what’s the best way for people to get in touch with you? 

Chad Corbett So you can always find me, we have a mastermind group called All The Leads Mastermind. We’ve got about 10,000 carefully screened real estate investors and real estate agents in the group. I’m active there most of the time, you can always call all, go to alltheleads.com or call the number on that page. I would give you my socials, but man, I can’t keep up with all that. You saw my responder. But you guys can usually find me through all the leads, alltheleads.com, or All The Leads Mastermind on Facebook. And obviously, I’m on Facebook, Chad Corbitt. 

Mike Ayala I love it. And we’ll go ahead and put a link in the show notes to where you can find Chad. But, Chad, I appreciate the perspective that you bring to the audience. I mean, there are so many things that you said here that are just amazing. But, one of my big takeaways that I’m going to dig into is, how do you make a larger impact without losing your freedom? Because a lot of our conversation is investing for freedom and we’re having conversations with a lot of people that are in that W2. We could talk about this for days, but they’re in the W2 job, and they’re looking for passive income and ways to earn their freedom. But at the same time, every time we start progressing up that mountain peak, you know, it’s like climbing an extreme Everest, right? You’ve got to go back up and then you’ve got to come back down because you hit ceilings, and so, I took so much away from this. But, how do you make a larger impact without losing your freedom? And you figured that out. And one of the things that I so appreciate about you is even when you started hitting those ceilings, that’s when you went on and created All The Leads and said, how do I impact more people and help others more than myself while not losing my freedom? And so, I really appreciate that about you. It’s pretty amazing. 

Chad Corbett It’s tough, man. I’m guilty of falling back into; I break my rules, sometimes; I fall back into and I work too much. But, you know, my best advice on that, as you know, a short piece of advice is, find something that means so much to you that you don’t even have to work at the obsession, like be obsessed with it, like be obsessed with the outcome. Those things we talked about before. So set whatever your three things are, you know, mine were mine, I’ve shared, like, they’re gonna be different for you, but be obsessed with those. Think about them every day. Think about them every night. And just trust the process. Everything in between like what’s if you’re living the right way, what’s right for you will find you. 

Mike Ayala Yeah. Well, and if that resonates with you, just go ahead and steal his, because that’s one of the best I’ve ever heard, those three. That’s amazing. So, Chad, I appreciate you being on the show. We’re gonna let you go because you’ve got a mastermind coming up here in four minutes. But, man, can’t thank you enough for sharing your wisdom. Yeah. Thanks for having me, Mike.

 

 

More from this show

Episode 56