Guest Interview with Strategic Business Coach Joey Ragona..Part 1 of 2

10X Real Estate Marketing & Coaching

Hey, there are 10 X real estate warriors. I got a really exciting guest for you today. Joey we're going is actually from strategic business Academy. Advi Canada, actually, he's a serial entrepreneur number one bestseller speaker coach. Joey is actually known as the entrepreneur secret weapon. He's the CEO and founder of strategic business Academy and helps entrepreneurs and online marketers who have already have a business, but feeling overwhelmed, distracted, disorganized stock, especially when it comes to building their business sound familiar, man, that could be just about anybody. With more than 30 years of experience as an entrepreneur, he's now known and trusted as the authority to the millennials in online marketing strategies and implementation. He spares no expense to personal and business development, spending time training and exclusively at some of the world's highest achievers, including Brendon Burchard, John Ashraf, and Frank Kern.

Just to name a few Joey is also in high demand, high performance coach and online digital marketing consultant with proven track record, he's actually consultant and coach companies like Remax century 21, Keller Williams, domino lending and hope a whole bunch of others that you've already know and love. He's been featured on numerous magazines, podcasts, live streams, business shows, sharing his tools and his beliefs and his systems and his strategies with entrepreneurs who more than business. You know, they're actually out there and he actually gives a to be honest with you, he's one of the few guys that have actually caught up with, on Facebook and watched him from the outside, looking in a little bit. And obviously most of you guys know me. I don't recommend people unless they're actually in my own space and if I can trust them or if I don't trust them, I'll let you know either way. It's all good. So, Joey, how are you

Are doing really well today, man? It's, it's awesome. I don't know how the weather is over there, but you know, here in Toronto, Canada, you know, usually we were a little bit cooler in the Novembers, but we're having a blast the summer again, man. So I'm just enjoying it even more. So thanks for having me, bro.

No worries, man. You know, as a matter of fact, I think one of the last times I remember actually going to I'll tell you a funny story. We were in Toronto and whatever the big major hotel is right by the stadium where the Bluejays play. It was right after they built it. And this is probably 2009 or so. Yeah. It was right after the secret came out and Bob Proctor was a friend of a friend of mine. One of my other mentors got named and actually John Alison Asaf. Funny enough. Yeah. And I actually paid, I actually paid Bob like $10,000 to go meet with him for four hours with my wife. We fly up there. My wife is like three or four months pregnant. We get to Toronto, it's a ghost town because they were waiting for a blizzard to show up.

And it's like me, Bob, his assistant in a room that was like one of these conference rooms that they gave us the entire concert for like 150 people. And the four of us were sitting at a table with like a cup of coffee talking. So good time, you know, but it's just funny how I remember that, you know, for cause John asked her off was also in the movie the secret. Yeah. So give us a little bit about your background. How does, like, how does a guy like you come from kind of like in the real estate space? I remember you mentioned that in the business space to where you are now.

Yeah. It's a funny story because I've, I've grew up in an entrepreneurial family and I'll try to fast forward through, you know, this stuff really quickly. But I grew up in an entrepreneurial family and real estate came into my life in 2008, believe it or not. And it was after I sold my family company. My dad passed him when he was 60. And it was a few years after this and I, you know, decided that there was that wasn't something I wanted to continue on because it was in a corporate world environment and the governments and all that. And that's just not who I am and more of the entrepreneurial type. And so I sold that company had some money. We were in a really good position in 2005, six, somewhere around there, you know, paid off everything we had, you know, no debt whatsoever, great assets.

We were in a, and we were in a position where everybody wants to be right, owning everything, no debt and a huge chunk of money in our bank account. And I looked at my wife and said, listen, what do we do? We could either go to Hawaii for the next 10 years and party and then decide what we want to do later. Or we could use this money and invest in real estate and do something with that. I had no idea what real estate was all about. And so I decided to invest in real estate to keep my dad's legacy around, right. Because this is from the family business. Right. And and then I went into real estate and I'm one of these guys that jumped right in. Like I jumped with it without a parachute. I build things on the way down. And when I decide to do something, I focus completely on that.

Like it's 110% in that and just, there's no stopping me. And I involve myself all the way through. So I really spent I spent the regular working day of a normal person studying real estate, like actually studying it, going through the courses, you know, absorbing the information, writing everything down. And, and I invested in 2008 as, you know, what the world was, what it was in, in 2008. And luckily because I have no idea or I'm not even associated with the world with what's going on in the world. I invested in the best times possible 2008, 2009, 2011, which the world was crashing around us. Right. And everybody was out and I had no clue what they were talking about, which is great because I'm, I don't associate with that. And so that really, and so I was known for stepping into fear.

Like every time I would go to these, these events, which was monthly events, you know, the seminars, I'm sure people were like, you're crazy. The interest rates are going to do this. And then all these analysts and all these people, I'm thinking, what do you guys do? And like, I don't understand. And I'm buying real estate. And so I got known for the stepping into fear and that's how I've been all my life. So I started getting asked to speak on stages and go like that. And so started talking about that. And that got me into coaching of real estate investors, because I saw, I saw people sitting around these events for years, like I would be sitting at a table and the, and the first thing they ask you is, I don't know about where you, but for me, it's always, how many doors do you have on like while we talking. So, you know, that's how they enter the conversation. And I'm like, well,

Let me interrupt you for a second. So for those people listening, and a lot of you guys are in the space, but if you're not in the space, you know, how many doors is the true sign of an investor? Because the investor true investors don't count. Like I have this many buildings with this many people in, or that many doors, how many apartments such that it's how many physical doors or how many units you own and each door is unit. So the, you know, unless you're like some of my investors that own SROs, which are single occupancy residences, which are the old old-school boarding houses, which by the way are like ridiculously profitable. If you can get a license for one probably a Haven for COVID-19 though right now on that note. So let me ask you a question. It sounds like you, so you went, you kind of went in head first, you got involved in the real estate business and that's done fairly well for you. And then you kind of figured out that we're probably not the smartest group of people on the planet. And when you dive in your diet, you know, half the time in our business, you end up swimming next to the lifeguard in the deep end with, with no paddle. So, right. So once you got your business up and running, what were you speaking about on stage? Were you speaking about real estate? Were you speaking about like the strategy of running your business?

It was both like, it started with fear. It started with like, you know you gotta make a move and start getting into something because you never really can predict a future. And you know, you and I both know that people live in one of three places usually, which is regretting the past or fearing the future. And I was like, you know, okay, I look at the future, but I don't fear it. I step into it. And they started talking about that. And then I started bringing them in my marketing ability to the stage because I started my first business when I was 18 and grew that business without the internet from zero to 5,000 customers in three years, all by little, you know, newsletter thingy that you'd send out in the actual physical mail. Right. And so I brought that marketing strategy to, to getting people, to give me money, like joint venture partners, like, you know, using other people's money to invest in real estate and everything that people talk about still to this day is, you know, I still remember it and I, and I stood against it.

It was turning every conversation into a real estate conversation. And I totally disagreed with that. It was like, you know, you don't bug people about real estate because I tried all this. It wasn't that I was standing against it without actually trying it. And I did that. I, I did everything they told me to do on stage. And I destroyed relationships like to the degree where I would be walking down the street on my street. And cause I did it to all my neighbors. They would cross to the other side of the street because they would know I would stop them and want to talk about real estate. And have you call her

Then what I did in the business, you polarized yourself from everybody else trying to be passionate about your business.

Well, it wasn't even that it was, I wasn't really passionate about real estate about the business. It was, it was, it was, it was following the advice, the gurus on stage. And I'm not saying they're all wrong, but I'm just saying that from that capacity of, of trying to get people to give me money, it was totally wrong. And so when I did finally get somebody to give me one ear,

Let me interrupt you for a second. I'm curious, because that's something that I'm passionate about. And bear in mind, I was trained by the best in the business and spent the better part of my life on the phone, five to 7,000 calls a year, I should say, contacts a, your men, which meant that I was probably making 700 to a hundred, you know, seven onto a billion dials a year to get to 7,000 people on the phone to have a conversation with them to say, Hey, do you want to buy solar invest in real estate? Right. And what's interesting is, you know, I've said it in the past is, you know, I was trained to spend my entire day on the phone to have somebody at least tell me, go screw myself at least twice a week to know what I was doing something. Right.

And I only knew that I was doing the right thing if I got yelled at. And I was like, well, wait a second. Why the wonder, why realtors end up with a therapist half the time? Or they end up out of the business in the first six months? I mean like what kind of business, let me, let me, let me clarify that for you here. I want you to go to war and I want you to go naked and I want them to throw rocks at you. And I want them to hit, you would have sticks and it's going to be okay. Cause every once in a while somebody is going to come over and say, it's okay. I mean, that doesn't make sense. So I empathize with what you're saying and I, you know, I've been down the road, I've been down the path and yeah, it's now there's, I think it's just our position is it doesn't have to be that way. Right. That real estate doesn't have to be difficult or any business.

No, it doesn't. And this leads up to where we were going with the, in now in the business. But you know, to, to close that loop, it was totally against the grain of what everybody else was doing still and still is. Yeah, it still is. And you know, I always felt that, I mean, you know, thinking of where it came from, I mean, I grew up with an entrepreneurial family. I saw my dad bring clients to the table. We had dinner guests all the time and I'd never really understood why. And there was always like, they were friends and they were business associates. Right. So my dad, and some people disagree with this that you have, you can be friends with your customers. Right. And some people totally disagree with that. I don't, I believe that my customers are my family and that there is a point of time where they can come over into my backyard and we can have a beer or two.

And then we get back into the business week. It's like, you're my customer now. Right. And some people can't have, they can't bridge that gap right. Where I can. And that's the way I've always approached business. So it was the same with real estate. It was the same as like, why would I go after anybody with money, convinced them, even if I could convince them to give me money. And they're not somebody that I want to hang out with, or they're going to be a pain in the by calling me every day and saying, Hey, I just saw this thing on CNN. Do you know what's going on? I'm like, Holy . Like, I don't want to deal with that right now. Like just leave, leave it alone. Let me do my job. Right. So it was very important for me back then, even with real estate, as it is today to have a dream customer back then it was a dream investor.

So we call that. And I'm sure Joel, you'll touch on this. We call it an ideal client profile, right? Where your perfect customer. Right. And, and, and interesting that we're having this conversation because you know, I, I said to Joey, before we got started, I said, you know, if you had asked, if I had asked you, what's your superpower. And he said, turning, and I'm going to simplify what he even told me, which was turning complexity into simplicity and figuring out how to take a complex idea or concept and create it, make it really simple. So what we just touched on a second ago was turning your ideal customer. And we, we talked about it a minute ago, which is instead of, instead of going fishing for salt, water, fishing, and fresh water ocean, go fishing, go, go find out what time, what temperature the water should be figuring out what bait they like, and then go fishing for the fish that you want to bite know, or you want, you don't want to buy your stuff. And so based on that, you know, how'd, you make the transition to helping people with their online business that are already established. I mean,

Yeah. So that's where it was going with the, with the real estate, because I started coaching real estate investors. Right. They wanted to know. So you were asking me what I was talking about on stage. It was fear. And then it got into how do I get joint venture partners? I became the joint venture dude, like talk to Joey because he knows how to get joint venture partners. And so I was very popular around, around that, that, you know, single family home one-off. And so I wasn't into anything. I just can't handle complexity. So the more, the simpler, the better. And if anybody wanted to get into apartment buildings or they wanted to go into getting, you know, big, big money, hundreds of thousands of dollars, I wasn't the guy, I was the normal dude. You talked to your neighbor, God, I like real estate.

You get together. Right. So that was me. And so people started to hire me for the wrong reason. I didn't know that, but I was trying to help them build their business because as you know, a lot of real estate investors and even realtors, because I trained both of them and coach, both of them, their life is, is around their business, right. Their businesses first and their life is all around it. It gets really, really, it's just so much fun. Yeah. And so I was all about, you guys are doing this wrong. You can't build your business and your life around it. You need to build your life first and your business around your life. So that was my big, you know, introduction to coaching. And they, a lot of them were not interested in that. They said they were in all this, but they were still interested in just how do I make more money?

How do we get more customers? Right. And that led onto, okay, well, there's this thing online. And it's called Facebook. It's called us. You can do a couple of these things, but they were not online people. They were just like, how do we get leads? And how do we turn them into customers? Right. And I'm not that guy, I'm not a sales dude. I'm not a guy. Like you just said, take 30 calls a day or, you know, 50 calls a day or you're not a sales guy and the customers. Right? Yup. And so the realtors that did win me, the, we use the strategy of how do we narrow down, pick a niche, pick a niche, whichever, however you guys want to say it. Right. Everybody says it differently. But pick the customer and focus in on that. And you can infiltrate into other markets outside of that.

And that's what we did with the realtors. A couple of realtors that really, really excelled at that because they understood that if they're known for the condo guy in Toronto, that's it, then people are gonna gravitate to them. And then they could also say, listen, I don't have a condo to sell have this family, single family home. Could you help me to, you're not going to say no. Right? What other realtors, when they went the other way, they're trying to get the whole market and say, you know, I said, well, who do you serve? And they would say, I serve anybody anywhere, anytime buy anything and sell anything. Exactly. That's a really good spoken. Right.

So the reason why they serve no one is because they don't know, nobody knows who they serve. Yeah. And I always ask that question is how many, how many products does Amazon sell? I'll ask you how many products does, Amazon's got billions of, I believe it or not. They're only known for selling one though.

They're real. They're really real. They're real, they're real

Business to real businesses, actually renting space on their servers in the back end to customers like you and me and huge companies and huge corporate fortune 500 companies. And really what they provide is the infrastructure in the server farms. And what they did was they built huge, just huge, huge, huge server farms to store information. And then they went to these small guys and they said, Hey, you know, we're not really using, it's kind of like in, in, in New Jersey, at least, or in, in the United States, a lot of these gas stations, they use the gas to make, to get the people in the door. They didn't make a lot of money on the gas. They actually made the money on the repairs, on the car. And there was usually a gas station with five pumps and two, two bays. And then what happened was is that the you know, the foreigners came into the market and so on opportunity and they sorted the arbitrage between what we pay for gas and what we sell it for.

And they said, you know, we can get, you know, for the, the American guys or the people that were here, you couldn't afford to have a farm mom or dad stand there and pump gas because they didn't pay him enough, but you could get your brother from Pakistan to come because he's used to making 50 cents an hour. You're going to pay him a dollar