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life coach, Trevor McGregor. He said, “Hey, you should check out this podcast thing. A guy named John Lee Dumas does a podcast called ‘Entre- preneur On Fire.’ Think you could do something like that?” I said, ”I don’t know what you’re talking about, but sure.’ I was familiar with podcasts but was not a listener. So I said, ”It is September [2012] right now. I’m going to make a com- mitment to do a podcast a day for the rest of the year. So I’ll do it for three months—October, November and December—and then take a step back and see if it’s a good use of my time.” And I’ve been doing it now for more than two years. It’s the world’s lon- gest-running daily real estate podcast, and I’ve interviewed Barbara Corcoran from “Shark Tank” and Robert Kiyosaki. It’s an interview format primarily, and it’s the second-best business decision I’ve made. THINK REALTY MAGAZINE Was it a challenge to get people to come on and talk and return your calls when you were starting out doing your podcasts? JOE FAIRLESS Fortunately, one of my strengths is that I build relationships as I go through life, so I was able to get fairly good responses from people, friends and those in my network to be interviewed. But there were times when I was in the in-between stage of I’ve reached out to all my people and their friends and I haven’t quite hit a tipping point with the podcasts with popularity, so who else do I reach out to? I mean, I was having to come up with some pretty creative solutions. One of them was my roommate who had THINK REALTY MAGAZINE Was your best decision to go from advertising to real estate? JOE FAIRLESS You’re a mind reader.
FAIRLESS INVESTING www.fairlessinvesting.com info@joefairless.com BEST REAL ESTATE INVESTING ADVICE EVER PODCAST www.joefairless.com/show
invested in a sixplex. He didn’t know it, but when he got home from his job at Macy’s at 5:30 p.m., he was about to be interviewed for a podcast that was supposed to air that day. I also ended up doing some special series that now are still on the show and that stuck. One of them is “Follow Along Friday,” where I talk about what I’ve got going on in my entrepreneurial career and lessons I’ve learned. Well, that was created out of necessity at the beginning because I was struggling to keep up with the daily routine of getting guests, inter- viewing them, editing episodes, etc. You must learn a ton from the people who are on your show. Could you pick out a couple nuggets that stick in your mind, some good pieces of advice that you’ve heard from people that you’ve interviewed? JOE FAIRLESS Yeah, absolutely. One is from Barbara Corcoran, a “shark investor” on “Shark Tank,” and she talked about putting people in a position to succeed based on their strengths. And she tells a story on the podcast where she was on an airplane and there was a flight attendant dealing with a disgruntled passenger whose potatoes weren’t warm enough. It was pretty ridiculous that he was upset about that. So the flight attendant says in a silly voice, “Hey, potatoes. Why are you so THINK REALTY MAGAZINE
cold when you should be warmer than that?” That got him smiling, got the whole cabin smiling and all the passen- gers were laughing. Barbara thought to herself, “That flight attendant has sales experience that she doesn’t even know she has.” So she ended up putting the flight attendant as one of her lead sales- people, and she’s still with the company and with Barbara today. So for my businesses, it’s important that we identify what we need and then find the person whose natural abilities and interests align with that need, because it’s one thing to know what someone’s good at, but if it doesn’t exactly align with what we need, then it’s not relevant to us. That’s one lesson I learned. Another lesson is that raising money is the top of the real estate heap. If you have access to money, then you become a deal magnet. One of my guests said that, and that quote always stuck with me. It’s a big mistake for investors to go try and find a deal if they don’t have the buyers. Real estate, as I mentioned earlier, is a very small group of people, especially commercial real estate. If you lock some- thing up and you don’t close, you get a bad reputation. Do that enough times, you’re not going to get any deals done, or at least not any good ones done.. •
Robert Springer is a regular freelance contributor to Think Realty Magazine. Contact himat rtspringer@gmail.com.
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