Aileen: [00:00:00] Thank you, everyone for joining today’s episode of the, How Did They Do It? Real Estate podcast. We are your hosts, Seyla and Aileen. And today our guest is Russ Scheider. Russ has been flipping houses part-time for 20 years and full-time for the past seven years.  He uses fix-and-flip and wholesale strategies. 

Russ has flipped over 75 houses in Charleston and Columbia, and also runs a thriving wholesale business. Russ is also the co-founder of Clear Vision Coaching, where he and his team provide real estate investment education, coaching, inspiration, and mindset. So today Russ will talk to us about how to develop a successful mindset for successful real estate investing.

We’re grateful to have you on today, Russ, how are you doing?

Russ: [00:00:36] I’m doing great. Thanks for having me.

Aileen: [00:00:38] Great. Thank you so much. So before we get started, can you please provide a little bit more about your background and just how you got started with real estate investing?

Russ: [00:00:45] Sure. Yeah. I grew up in a family, had a cabinet shop and a remodeling business and houses have always been what I know and what I do.

And then my career developed to the point that I was working for a larger company, I left my family business. So I was working for, I worked for a pretty big kitchen and bathroom remodeling company in St. Louis and then a large whole house remodeling business in Charleston, South Carolina here as a project consultant, was my title, but I was essentially a salesperson and then a residential designer. So I would put the projects together and the projects in Charleston were 250 to half a million dollars, very high end very specialized remodeling work. So a pretty challenging form of sales, but something that I love doing

Seyla: [00:01:34] Awesome.

So we want to dive in, into the mindsets in real estate. Could you tell our listeners and what is the importance of mindset development in order to be successful in real estate investing?

Russ: [00:01:45] Yeah. And this is a personal topic for me, because if you ever saw Winnie the Pooh as a kid, Eeyore, the depressed character.

And so for me to get fired up to be a salesperson in my former career or buying investment properties. And we’ll talk about this later, I hope in the podcast, is a sales process and reverse. So the mindset is so critical for somebody like me to be able to create opportunities for people solve problems for people.

And if you’ll give me the time, I’d love to go through how a coach helped me or a number of coaches over the year, but one in particular helped me build that success mindset.

Aileen: [00:02:30] Absolutely. If you can please share with us, that would be, that’d be wonderful.

Russ: [00:02:33] Yeah. I was working the career that I just mentioned, which was rewarding, but very stressful because it was so dependent on the opinions and lives of other people. And I was a servant to those people. And then my ex wife, Natalie, started this house flipping business by enlisting a coach. And there’s a story behind that, but I won’t take the time. But Tim Taylor success coach was our coach and he was fantastic.

And Tim’s tagline was, you’ll never own any real estate until you own the real estate between your ears. And that’s where the whole coaching program for Tim started and with their vision coaching, we start there too. And so what I’ve learned to fight my Eeyore personality is, or to work with it is that, the very foundation of a good mindset is gratitude and a sense of abundance. So if I’m not grateful for the things I already have, I have fresh water to drink. I have a car that starts every time I turn the key, I have food to eat. I have friends and family. I have air conditioning and seat. I have a comfortable mattress to sleep on, et cetera, without the feeling of gratitude for what I already have, none of the other mindsets, exercises or progress will ever work. So that’s the basic foundation in my experience for mindset is constant, at least daily, if not multiple times per day, sense of gratitude.

Aileen: [00:04:03] Are there any strategies that you do to get yourself in the mindset on a daily day to day basis?

Russ: [00:04:08] Yes.

One of the things that I think you had Kelly Garrett, who’s one of my partners on the call. And something she learned from Grant Cardone. We all learned from somebody else. I didn’t invent any of this. We all learned from other people, but in our coaching program. And we as coaches write down our goals every year and I write a gratitude list either on a piece of paper or when I have one field time, I did it this morning. I was driving to one of my projects and I’m thinking it’s a beautiful day. My truck is running. Just thinking about the gratitude I have for my dogs and my home. And that attitude of gratitude is a daily exercise. And then the writing down your goals every morning takes us into the next step.

So gratitude and abundance thinking our first and the second step in our success mindset, and my experience is a vision and the vision is comprised of goals and a plan to achieve those goals. So the tool that we use every morning is writing down our goals for the next year, a quarter, month day. What are the goals?

What’s the plan. So that’s the vision for success

Aileen: [00:05:21] Great. Thank you.

Seyla: [00:05:22] Can you talk a little bit about how important it is to have a coach to guide you in order for you to scale up and possibly starting the real estate business if someone wanted to start up.

Russ: [00:05:33] Yes. And speaking only for myself and from my experience, the first thing that Natalie did, and I was right on board after a little convincing, was to write a check for, I think our initial payment was $10,000 to Tim Taylor.

And I thought that was crazy at first, but it was the best investment we’ve ever made. Grant Cardone says, and I love this quote. He said the most expensive way to learn how to do anything is to figure it out yourself and. I find that to be absolutely true, but having a coach and in our coaching program, we don’t believe in education.

We believe in instruction. So instruction is how to actually do something and then coaching and Tim Taylor, our coach did that for us. And that brings me to my third point and mindset and building a mindset, which is the confidence and optimism to do things. Came to me from my coach, because he gave me the formula that we use to acquire properties to this day.

And he got it from Ron LeGrand, look up Ron LeGrand, if you don’t know him, he’s the granddaddy of real estate investing and I’m in Jacksonville, Florida, but it’s the same formula that  Ron LeGrand has been using for 40 years. But that formula gave me the confidence to buy investment real estate.

Aileen: [00:06:53] Can you share with us what that formula is?

Russ: [00:06:55] Yeah. Anybody who’s familiar with flipping houses or wholesaling, the tried and true formula is the after repair value or the fair market value of a house in 2020, 2021 condition times 0.7 minus the repairs that are necessary to get that condition. So a hundred thousand dollar house, we multiplied times 0.7 is 70,000.

If we estimate the repairs at 30,000, the most we’ll pay is 40,000. If you don’t follow me, if you don’t follow that, we’ll give you contact information at the end of the call, where you can call me, text me, email me, and I’ll send you the spreadsheet and then Tim, my coach, and Ron LeGrand put another layer on where we use a 0.65. So A R V after repair value, times 0.6, five minus repairs. And then I can wholesale the property or flip it, or keep it as a rental because we have enough equity, a margin for wholesale and a margin where we could borrow money and flip up. Okay.

Aileen: [00:08:03] Today you have flipped over about 75 houses in both Charles and Columbia.

Can you walk us through the steps of how you actually were able to do that and scale to that level?

Russ: [00:08:14] Yeah. So this is a fun story. It was 2012. We’re sitting here, we’re talking now in the fall of 2020, but in 2012, we went through Tim’s coaching program. Kind of kicked our business off in January of 2013.

And we got our first three deals from a newspaper ad in a paper newspaper in the classified sections that I continued to run that newspaper out until 2015, when it had been two years since we had bought a deal from it. So the, and then we did radio advertising, television billboards, all the marketing today.

I think that things like Google and SEO and direct mail still works. But the point is to generate leads from motivated sellers, meaning people who need our help, they need to sell it to an investor and we can solve a problem for them. So, first step is to find that seller and then we know our acquisition formula, right?

Cause we just talked about that. We know how to calculate repairs because our coaches have taught us out. And we make the offer. We have lenders lined up, you interviewed Kelly Garrett on the podcast and she runs rehab wallet, which is a great lending site. And I can help you find other lenders, but Kelly and rehab wallet, they’re funding my next deal.

That’s a great program. So we find the deal, find the money, calculate it. Correct. And then contractors. We don’t have enough time to talk about managing contractors. Part of our, the coaching I received and the coaching I give and what I did this morning before this call is managed contractors, and then selling the property in this market is relatively easy, but there are some do’s and don’ts for that

Seyla: [00:09:58] Awesome.

Throughout your real estate career. So far, what is one of the biggest challenge that you had to overcome?

Russ: [00:10:05] The biggest challenge for me was change. In 2013 and 14, we could just make a bid on the HUD. We made a lot of bids on the HUD housing, urban development website, and bought a lot of houses. And we ran a radio ad.

We got a lot of response and about 2014 or 15, that started to change. And today the market’s so hot, that finding deals has become a major challenge. And what we talk about in our mastermind and our coaching sessions is when it gets harder, we have to get better. And so we’ve developed techniques and strategies where we’re still buying properties.

I have four closings next week buying and selling, and it’s not easy, but I had to get a lot better. And I had some Eeyore, moments during the process of getting better, but I felt sorry for myself. So that’s a challenge.

Aileen: [00:11:00] So you talk about the Eeyore in yourself, how do you get to that mindset to overcome your self doubt, to learn the new skills and to just to continue to improve every day?

Russ: [00:11:09] I rely on other people who are naturally passionate and I spend as much time with those people in person, on the phone as I can. And they light my fire. I do my mindset exercises and look at things with optimism and gratitude. And that’s because somebody taught me to do that. But the people you surround yourself with it’s just such a critically important part of success.

Aileen: [00:11:35] That’s great. And so you also talked about some of the different ways that you had to change your strategy a little bit during this environment, it’s been a little bit more difficult to find properties. Can you share what some of those strategies

Russ: [00:11:47] are?

Yes. We abandoned a lot of the mass media marketing that we were doing like television and radio, because I don’t watch television or listen to broadcast radio. And you probably don’t either because we have Netflix and Spotify or, you know. And instead of that, we started pulling lists and cold calling. I do it on a networking.

Try to make sure everybody knows who I am and how I can help. So it was a big mindset shift from put it an add in the newspaper and buy three or four houses in six months. And that newspaper ad by the way, was about three 50, a month, $350. So that’s a major mindset shift too. We were spending three or $400 to get a deal.

Now I budget $5,000 per deal.

Seyla: [00:12:40] So if someone wanted to start buying real estate, is there any training that you can recommend them to do?

Russ: [00:12:47] Yes. Absolutely. I will be happy to send anybody who’s interested what I call a starter pack. And it is a video and the seller interview on how to talk to sellers. So you can use it to call, dispose expired.

Anybody who responds to your marketing, I will send that for free and also our, our deal analysis worksheet that includes repairs and ARV calculations for rental or a flood. And the last thing in the package is a how to calculate the ARV. So once you know how to calculate the ARV and the repairs, those are the only two variables.

And then the seller interviews really helps with how to talk to sellers. So those are free resources from our coaching program. Okay. I’m old-school so I give my phone number, which is 843-302-1936. Old fashioned email, which is my name RUSS_SC H E I D E R@yahoo.com.

And if you send me an email or a text message, I’ll respond with a newish investor starter pack that has some really great tools to help you.

Aileen: [00:14:01] Thank you so much for willing to share that Russ. We really appreciate that, but you also talked about a little bit about having a sales background. How do you think that has helped you be successful in real esate?

Russ: [00:14:11] So with the seller interview in hand, and if you watch the video of how I go through the seller interview, whenever I have a new coaching student, their first exercise is to call and contact, make contact with 20 for sale by owner listings. And practice going through the seller interview. And it’s a fantastic way to sharpen those tools because the question you asked was how does a sales, a trained salesperson, the sales background?

How does that benefit and a real estate investor? So one of the, one of the key components of real estate investing, whether you want to be a rental property owner, Or a flipper or a wholesaler is acquisition actually buying the properties with the equity that we need to make it work. So it’s really sales and reverse instead of trying to sell or having the job of selling somebody, something we’re creating a situation where they would want to sell us something two bucks that I’m going to recommend that we all read and study to make this process much better.

One is never split the difference. Negotiating like your life depends on it by Chris Voss. And the second one is the closer’s survival guide by grant Burnham and the sales training in those books. And then negotiation training helps us to ask the right questions. And that’s what I learned as a salesperson when the whole world changed for me as a salesperson is when I learned to quit talking and start listening and.

Asking the right questions in the right water and listening to the response and really understanding the seller’s needs is a complete game changer for acquisitions. People who are essentially just salespeople in reverse.

Aileen: [00:16:04] No, that’s great because you need to figure out what the other person is looking for and basically what’s in it for them.

So you can tailor it and apply the best.

Russ: [00:16:15] Yeah, we’re all our job is to solve problems for people. And one of the realities I am, we just brought on two new coaching students yesterday. And the reality that I impressed on real estate investors, when you’re new, we serve two to 3% in my market. We serve two to 3% of the homeowners.

So I’m not afraid of the work and you better not be afraid of the work to find a way to reach out to the two or 3% of homeowners. So we can truly help.

Seyla: [00:16:45] How has real estate investing impacted your life?

Russ: [00:16:49] Wow. Freedom is the word. In 2017, Natalie and I loaded the kids up in an RV and took a nine week RV trip across the USA.

And it was unbelievably light, just, I mean, a life experience. We sold four houses from the road during that trip. The fact that I make my own schedule, I spend my time the way I think it’s best for me, that we closed 40 miles on the road, on our RV trip, 13 national parks, incredible experience for us on the toads, but on a day to day basis, I decide how I’m going to spend my time. And that’s an incredible level of freedom that real estate investing has given me.

Seyla: [00:17:35] Awesome. What is one thing that sets those successful people apart in the real estate investing business?

Russ: [00:17:42] It’s hard to narrow it down to one thing, but I would have to say that persistent action, Tom Cole loves the words massive action. And I agree. It’s persistence and massive action. Really successful real estate investors that I know, their business takes massive action. That’s different from hustling till you’re burned out, but the business has to be creating a massive amount of action

Seyla: [00:18:08] What tools or techniques have you used to improve the efficiency of your business or personal life?

Russ: [00:18:14] I have a virtual assistant in the Philippines. She’s been with me for almost six years now. And she’s awesome. And a system of handling leads. We use Podio, not selling Podio. There’s tons of platforms out there, but have some way to organize the lead flow and the followup and the acquisition side of the business that I can meet with a client and meet with the seller, pull it up on my phone, have all the data at my fingertips and my acquisitions team.

Can do the same thing. So just making it a business, I think would be my simple answer to that is make it a business, have the right people in place have the right tools and systems.

Aileen: [00:18:54] No, that totally makes sense. You also gave out your phone number and your emails. Is there any other place that people can learn more about you if they wanted to learn more about you?

Russ: [00:19:03] Yeah, Clear Vision Coaching is our coaching company and yeah, the website is actually clearvisionmastermind.com in Charleston, South Carolina. We run an organization called REI Central, which is REI-central.com. I’m not hiding from anybody. So I’m all over Facebook and Instagram, just put my name and then that links to my professional pages.

So just R U S C H E I D E R on Facebook or Instagram.

Aileen: [00:19:33] Awesome. Thank you so much for sharing Russ. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation today.

Russ: [00:19:37] Good. Thank you for having me on. I really appreciate the opportunity.

Aileen: [00:19:40] Thank you so much.