Podcast 176. How Using Virtual Assistants Made His REI Business Explode with Mike DeHaan

Average Joe Finances:
0:00

Hey, welcome back to the Average Joe Finances podcast. I'm your host, Mike Cavaggioni, and today's guest is another Mike. It's Mike DeHaan. So Mike, I am super excited to not only have another Mike on the show, but I'm excited to have you specifically come have a chat with me today about what you're doing. So welcome to the show.

Mike DeHaan:
0:18

Yeah, appreciate you having me. I've I've really been enjoying the episodes I've listened to with ya and excited to bring some value to the listeners here.

Average Joe Finances:
0:25

Absolutely, and I appreciate the fact that you listened to a couple episodes before coming on as well. Greatly appreciate that, man. So the first question I want to ask you and you should know this if you've listened right, is, the same question that I ask everybody that comes on this show and we wanna know more about you, so we wanna know, who is Mike DeHaan? So can you share your story with us? Tell us a little bit about how you got started, just overall and everything.

Mike DeHaan:
0:48

Yeah, absolutely. So I guess starting at the end, first, my, my main business that I run right now is I am, I have a real estate wholesale investment business that we do at scale around the country, right? So we do in a bunch of different markets, fully virtual and, that allows me to live like a virtual lifestyle where I could work from everywhere. We travel a lot. It makes it, not tied down to the corporate sort of structure, even like an office building, things like that. And I got that way because, I guess growing up. I was almost entirely exposed to the opposite side of that. I grew up pretty traditionally, went to high school grew up out in Montana, which is like a blue collar town where I lived in Bozen, Montana, which is like a poppin place, Navajo, when I was growing up, it was very blue collar. And there it was super traditionally minded. You went to high school, most people, they didn't never even left the town. They went to the local university there. And even still, a lot of people I went to high school with still live there and, you worked up the ranks. You worked like either a trade, you went and you got an office job. That's what you did. So I was one of the few that actually left there and I went to school at Gonzaga University here in Spokane, Washington where I'm based out of. And I got an engineering degree, not necessarily cause I wanted to be an engineer, but because when I got to school it was right after the crash. It was 2009 when I started at college. And so it was all about what was gonna make me employable, what was I gonna be able to do to make money? And that was the focus that was rooted in me after, the place that I grew up. So went to Gonzaga, got the engineering degree. I struggled through school the entire time. It was just never for me. Even though I was a really good student in high school, I did not like the whole college process and the engineering sort of thing. I was always convinced that once I got into the workforce, I would enjoy that more, which as is not usually the case. Left there, got my first job right away cause everywhere was desperate for hiring electric engineers, which is what I specialized in. So I had medley of job offers, ended up moving out to Seattle. First job I worked out there was at a consulting company that was like, you're selling time. You need to have x amount of billable work per week. You're expected to be in the office for 50 to 60 hours a week, and that's what you did. And so I started on the corporate treadmill there almost right away. Didn't like that job too much, especially because of the culture. So I got what many would consider a bucket list job. After that, I transferred over to Boeing which is like a big ticket job that a lot of people were trying to get into. And when I got in there, I was very fortunate because it was like a highly competitive job and it instantly bumped up my pay a huge amount, which I thought was great. But actually what that did was that gave me the dreaded golden handcuffs, which I didn't even realize for a couple of years later. So worked at Boeing for a number of years, disliked it. Honestly, from the first day that I walked into the office, like I'll always remember, my first day. I was so excited and I walked in, walked into the factory floor, they're making airplanes, all sorts of cool stuff's going on. And then I walked up to the cubicle farm where I was going to work, and it was the most like, just soulless, crippling place that you could possibly imagine. And at that moment I was like, I think I've made a horrible mistake. I wanted that, that extra pay and that security. So I was there for years until finally my wife and I, we decided we wanted to move out of the Seattle area, so we moved back over to Spokane, which is on the east side of Washington. So about 500 miles from Seattle. I had one more engineering job there.. And then finally after that job, that was my third job since leaving college. I was like, this career just isn't for me. I'd been being an engineer for five years, so I just said, all I want to know is that I want to not do this anymore. And then as I was still trying to figure out my next career path, I read the four hour work week. And that sort of got me thinking. I was like, how can I have this lifestyle of, having. Horizontal income, enough passive income that I can live this true, like virtual lifestyle. Cause in that book he talks about, how to actually utilize VAs, how to be more resourceful with your time and all the different strategies around that. And so I said I need to figure out how to do this. The last couple months of work as an engineer, I was like, I wanna try and figure this out while I'm working my W-2 and then finally I just said, eh, I can't do this. So I just quit with no real plan and decided that I was gonna figure it out for the next little while. And that was I guess the very beginning of 2018. So at this moment, almost exactly five years ago, which is pretty crazy actually, but yeah.

Average Joe Finances:
5:16

Wow. All right, Mike, that is some backstory, man. And bouncing around. I'm sitting here writing down some notes as you're going, you went to school for engineering specifically to make sure you had, a degree that would be employable, not, you didn't wanna do the underwater basket weaving things. So I get that. There's not too many underwater basket weavers, , but yeah. So you end up getting that dream job over at Boeing. And then you had mentioned that you realized you didn't realize till a couple years later that you felt like you had these golden handcuffs on. So could you explain that a little bit? What does that mean to you when you say that you had golden handcuffs?

Mike DeHaan:
5:47

Yeah. And . Like I said I really disliked that job from the first day that I walked into it. But the fact that I was making so much money at the time, cause at that time I was, I guess when I started that job, I must have been about 25. And on my first job I was making, I think it was $55,000 a year. When I switched over to Boeing in the course of a couple of weeks I was all of a sudden making $90,000 a year plus bonuses. So I was making a very strong salary for being, in my mid twenties with a job that honestly wasn't very hard. Like it had a lot of time commitment because it's union based and they forced you to do your hours, but like the actual expectation on output was super low, tons of paid time off, tons of, holiday leave and those sort of things. And leaving that there aren't a lot of better options like honestly going from there in the corporate world. And that was a reason that there's so many miserable people at that company. And like even if you like talk to anyone else who's ever worked at Boeing, they'll all attest to this. They're like, yeah, everyone there is so unhappy because they have the realization that going somewhere else, you're going to be giving up some of the major perks that you have for working there. And so like even making the leap of going from there to the third company I worked at in Spokane was super, super hard because everything seemed like a step backwards because in the corporate world, honestly, it was. And then to leave and go do your own thing was even like a bigger step down from that.

Average Joe Finances:
7:11

Yeah. just wanted to point that out to from, for my listeners, because that whole thing about having golden handcuffs is where you're sitting here in a situation where you're stuck in a job that you do not enjoy. But the pay and the benefits, when you weigh them against each other. You say, oh, you know what? I could sacrifice a little bit more of my sanity and happiness because I'm getting paid a little bit more, or I get, better benefits or more time off and this and that. I feel like that's a trap that a lot of people get sucked into when they get into a higher paying W-2 job and they decide, ah, you know what? I'm just gonna do the typical thing, invest in my 401k and retire at 65 and live like another 10 or 11 years, and then, that'll be my life. But there's, man, there's so much more to that and I feel like, when you have that enlightenment and you decide to step away and move on into something else like you did that's definitely something I want to dive a little bit into. Now you had mentioned after reading the four hour work week, how you, you realized using. Solutions that the book offered to utilize VAs to work a virtual business and everything. And that is something you decided to just jump right into. So what was that like to just decide, say I'm quitting the corporate world and jumping right into my own business? Did you have a plan? What did that look like when you just up and jumped off that boat?

Mike DeHaan:
8:28

It was about as chaotic as it sounds when you phrase it like that. Because honestly I didn't have.

Average Joe Finances:
8:33

Yes that's what I was going for now.

Mike DeHaan:
8:35

Yeah, yeah. I didn't honestly have any real plans, so like my original goal so let me back up a little bit. As I was, in into my twenties I got really into strength and fitness, sports, and I competed at a high level, both in CrossFit and Olympic weightlifting. And as part of that, I would also coach on the side mostly because I would get a free gym membership, but then I also discovered that kind of a passion for coaching. And so when I quit my W-2. I guess my engineering job, my original intention was to go and become a physical therapist and get a physical therapy license because I had seen how people had used that skill to create, like virtual businesses and online businesses through, online training and all these sort of things. But I needed accreditation to do that legitimately, right? So I spent six weeks after I quit my engineering job going to a community college to get pre-reqs so I could go and get a get a PT degree afterwards at a secondary school and working at a PT clinic. After six weeks of that, I was like, this is even worse than the engineering job. There's no way I can do this. So I quit that and at that point I was honestly at a complete loss of what I was gonna do. And we, my wife and I, we had saved up some money because I did have that high paying job. While I was at Boeing and I guess like my initial iteration of trying to find an escape and have the the financial independence was through what most people do that have high paying jobs. They're like, I'm gonna save everything. So we had a relatively high household income for a couple of years and lived off of very little. So I had a nest egg. And we said, and I guess I said to her, I was like, I need to find myself. Can we do something? So we decided to go on a trip and we went down and we spent the month traveling around New Zealand. And that actually also reignited my love for travel that we do a lot now. So traveled around there. And, just connected with a bunch of people. And down there I connected with several people that also lived virtual lifestyles that were expats from different places and lived there and just had lifestyle businesses. And I met people. That did everything from like e-commerce to affiliate marketing to I had one guy that had like a marketing agency that, like he did like design and like custom web design and stuff like that for people. So that sort of opened up my eyes to the fact that. I guess especially talking to a lot of them too, most of them didn't have backgrounds in that. They just figured it out. So that made me think I guess I don't actually have to have the established skillset to learn how to live this for our work week lifestyle. Because originally when I left I was like, I'm good at coaching. I'm good at being a trainer. I'm good at helping people on the physical fitness side. So that's what I need to turn into my muse, I guess as he calls it, in the four at work week. And then after meeting all these people, I decided that wasn't the case. So what happened after we got back from New Zealand, I found myself there. I tried everything you could possibly think of over the next eight to 10 months. I tried to start a drop shaping company. I tried to do affiliate marketing, tried to write a blog. I actually taught myself how to do basic code, and I worked for a startup for a short period of time. Before that whole thing popped. I was doing everything. And then ultimately as I continued to read, born more Wealth in business books that's when real estate came into the picture because that was the reoccurring theme that I found. And everything that talks about passive income and talks about generating wealth on both an amateur and a professional level was real estate. So I said, cool. I guess that's probably something that I could try and focus on.

Average Joe Finances:
12:00

Yeah, Mike, that's quite amazing, especially, you took that time to to find yourself, like you said. And I think one of the important things to point out here is the fact that you and your wife were, living on, on much less than, living way below your means and saving up a lot of money, which gave you that opportunity to say, you know what, I'm gonna wash my hands of this walk away and find myself and figure this out. And, on that one month journey, that, that's just amazing when you're telling me about, the different people that you met, other people that are living like that digital nomad, virtual business lifestyle. Everything from affiliate marketing to you said some people have a clothing brand and stuff and and real estate was the recurring theme, right? cause you know most people. or in any type of business, they have to put their money somewhere. Where do they put it? Usually it's real estate. And then the other thing you realize too is like nobody, not nobody, but most of them didn't have a specific background in that area. They just figured it out. And with you having a degree in engineering, I'm pretty sure you're like, you know what, I could figure some stuff out. And then you just went with it, man, and I think I really appreciate that because, I feel since I retired from the Navy and I'm figuring out things now on the other side of that, I don't have that, JOB that I go to anymore trying to figure out, okay, what's next for me? It's here, it's now and I'm just doing it. So I, I appreciate hearing your side of that and how you just kind. up and did it right. Now, you had mentioned, and kind of touched on this a little bit before about utilizing virtual assistance, right? So now I understand you use VAs for your business. Can you tell me how you set that up? Like specifically for your business?

Mike DeHaan:
13:39

Yeah. I guess to get to the point where VAs were really what was on the radar, I learned the basic real estate fundamentals first, and I originally started like when I started with real estate. If you had told me you could use virtual assistance to run the business I would say that doesn't make any sense because it's a tangible asset in a location. How can somebody from the Philippines possibly assist in that process? I was ignorant just like most people are. So when I started out, I was like flipping houses and I was partnering with people and I was doing a lot of the work. And then ultimately as I was going I went back to the four hour work week roots. And I was like, how can we make money with this asset class that I like, with this sort of general business process that I'm learning without having to be, there swinging a hammer without having to be, doing like the driving around and doing all this sort of stuff that we're doing. And that's what led me to the wholesaling business model was because I realized first off, I learned what wholesaling was, and if you don't know what that is, it basically means that you get a contract to buy a property for say, a hundred thousand dollars. You sell that contract to another investor or say $115,000 and you make the $15,000 spread on the middle, so I started going down that path and researching what it would take to do that. Learning from different sort of investors and business owners that were operating wholesale businesses that were all virtual. And as we learned the general process, we realized it's actually quite simple to do that without ever having to go to any of the properties. So first off, I guess when we started using virtual assistance it was me and my business partner and we started. So when we started our business, our goal was that we would not have an office. We would not be someone that like was tied to this individual location. We did not want to create the situation that we had like attempted to leave.

Average Joe Finances:
15:20

You didn't wanna become the problem.

Mike DeHaan:
15:22

Exactly. Yeah, exactly.. As we got into it, we were building the business virtually in mind. So we started right away building systems that were completely reliant on the internet and the ability to, tie apps together and all that sort of stuff. And same with like our relationships. We were helped actually by Covid, I think because people got much more comfortable with virtual relationships than they were prior. Health by Covid. I don't think people say that super often, but we definitely were.

Average Joe Finances:
15:45

And you got to look at the bright side of this thing somewhere, right there. There has to be some type of silver lining.

Mike DeHaan:
15:50

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So as we were going about it, we were still kinda doing the boots on the ground stuff, but we had a lot of tasks that come along with the wholesaling process, such as, managing data. Putting together marketing campaigns, doing basic like lead follow up over the phone, those sort of things. And we were like, let's try to hire someone overseas to do this cause we were also super cost conscious because we were still trying to figure things out. We started with our first foray of just trying to bring on virtual employees from around the world. We had a few swings and misses to start, as most people do, as we would have people come in and then they would just proceed to do nothing for an entire week. We had a couple people that would go and they would agree to come on, they would never show up for work. But, just is kind of part of the nature of finding those sort of employees. But as we continued with it, we lucked out actually with our first, like I would say, successful employee that we had, who's actually still with us now, almost three years later. And he was great because he had a lot of experience with working with overseas people, being a virtual employee for Americans. And he helped us learn how to teach virtual other virtual employees from the Philippines how to do their jobs better. And we still rely on them a lot to that day. And now at this point we use virtuals for everything in our business excluding like the hard sales of like closing deals, which even then we would do that. But the problem is that sellers and motivated sellers that we tend to work with, they tend to be slightly sensitive to people that have accents or that don't understand the process super, super well. So we keep that stateside, but we have everything from virtuals that are doing like admin work to, we have people on staff that are full-time, that are high skilled virtual employees. It's like we have a graphic designer. And a web developer who is very high scale, that we pay him on salary. He lives in Romania. He costs us a fraction of what it would cost us to find that person in the United States. We have like our social media strategist. He is he's from India and he does like a lot of our sort of overhead social media and marketing work. We have our copywriter who's based out of the Netherlands. And she's part-time with us and works hourly, but is still at a relatively cheaper rate than it would cost when we were doing research to find something like that in the United States. And once you learn how to build general systems and organization, it's shockingly easy to build a business. Can be completely virtual and you avoid all of the overhead that also that you have to have with having a like brick and mortar business like that.

Average Joe Finances:
18:09

Yeah, Mike, I absolutely love that. cause I use VAs myself. As a matter of fact, this podcast will be getting edited by my team of VAs. Yeah. That take care of everything and my e everything that's gonna go on the social media. My personal virtual assistant my executive assistant is what I call her now. She'll be taking care of all of that. I think it's just a wonderful thing because, , even though you're getting something done at a more cost effective price versus, hiring somebody here in the states to do it, that money that you're giving them is worth way more, where they're at. I recently took my executive assistant off of Upwork, cause that's where I I was using her from. And now I pay her a salary instead, a monthly salary. And it's just awesome, man. So I can definitely attest to the power of utilizing virtual assistance. For sure. So it looks like you use them in almost every single aspect of your business, and except for closing deals, which totally understand that side. But wow, man, like that is, that's pretty awesome. Yeah, so it's also very, like you said, cost effective too. It's saving you guys a lot of money on the back end and that, that money goes towards profits.

Mike DeHaan:
19:15

Yeah, exactly. And. Yeah. And like we wouldn't have been able to grow as we have if we had in-house people just because we wouldn't have had as much money to reinvest. And on the note of pay too, It's funny people, I think American people, they always tend to have a problem with paying someone like 800 or a thousand dollars a month to do all this admin work. But if you talk to them and you just do the if you treat them like people, they're always extremely grateful. That's something I find that's really common with people when they're first new to virtual employees, is they treat them like a robot that's like off they're doing a thing, include them in your team, have like conversations with them, like a human. That goes a long way and they will serve you very well. But also too, if you're paying that$800 a month, that thousand dollars a month, that is a, like you said, a legitimately good pay for them. And they can get very far with that. And even with like our high skill people, so like our guy in Romania we pay him $26,000 a year. Okay, and if I were to find like a full-time, like senior level graphic designer web developer here, that would cost me 80 to a hundred grand on the low end. Okay? I pay this guy $26,000 a year. The average pay, I asked him about this. The average pay in his town is about 600 to $700 a month.. So he's making two grand a month. He's balling right now. He is so stoked on how his life looks and as a result, he treats us very well. And even better yet because we have it systematized, I'm not making him stay up through the graveyard shift to work for me. He knows his task he has to do. He can work a normal work day on his time and it almost comes out better because then your business is being worked on 24. Like literally while I am sleeping, there are people that are working on my business. They go to bed, I come in, I check everything, reorganize everything, say, cool, this is what we do next. And it is just constantly going. And it frees me up to be productive in my own time without feeling like I need to micromanage the people that are like in my office or So it makes it much like the growth is so much more of a snowball effect when it's happening all the time.

Average Joe Finances:
21:10

Yeah, I love that man. Okay I want to ask you this then, this is a personal question for me too, then. What is it or what, like CRM system or type of organizational system do you use to keep all of this stuff together? I know Slack is definitely one great way for communications but what kind of other things like, do you use HubSpot or anything like that? Monday, Asana. What do you use?

Mike DeHaan:
21:30

Yeah, so we have a couple different systems for the different teams. Our, like our wholesale sales team is with a CRM called Ari Simply, which is a wholesale specific CRM and we love that over there. And that manages all of our phone calls and Texas sellers and KPIs and all that sort of stuff. For the admin side. And like for our podcast, we use Asana. Super basic on there. And we just pair that with different documents that we all have in a Google drive as things need to come around. And it's not rocket science, we just set up like the reoccurring automated tasks that refresh every week, every month, whatever it is, they know what needs to be done. And then as we go through and we have new projects that we need to do. We just create all the tasks in there and then it's very easy to see as things get done.

Average Joe Finances:
22:11

Yeah. So is that a really good one for because I was using Trello boards for a long time. Yeah. And we were using Trello and like Google Drives cause you know, you can connect them all and everything. I really liked that, but I was looking at switching to something else, so that's why I wanted to ask you that.

Mike DeHaan:
22:22

Yeah. Yeah. I like Asana because I mean it's a little bit it's definitely like prettier than Trello and it's a little. More robust with the free version of what you can do. And then if you do use a paid version, a lot of the integrations you can do make stuff super simple. So different like payment structures and those sort of things that we do it's like some of the different avenues that I guess that we've built out within our business. It's very easy to connect to Asana with things, whereas like some of the other ones I found like Trello is quite limited. And then with things like Monday, I found that Monday, regardless of how many times I've played with it, I know that's a really popular one. It always just turns into a spreadsheet. Right? And Asana has a little bit more flexibility of what they want it to be. Like a CONBON system or the listed stuff or calendars or all those sort of things.

Average Joe Finances:
23:04

Oh yeah, man. You're selling me. I like it. I'm gonna have, I'm gonna have to look in, look a little more into it. Cause I have I just started actually bringing on more coaches for the financial coaching side of average Joe Finances. And it's nice, I'm trying to figure out a good CRM system to use for that. Specifically. But I think I can tie that in with the podcast and make that all work together. I like, I've looked at it, but I never really went too deep into it for me, if I can't figure something out, if I'm fiddling with it for five minutes, I get a little frustrated and say, okay, I'm wasting my time. I got to go get something else . Yep. May, maybe I'll look a little more into it and and see how that goes.

Mike DeHaan:
23:36

Yeah. It's worth load gets decent for sure. And we've used it for a couple of years and like the thing that I like about it too is because it is such a big software, is they're constantly doing updates and things like that, and their customer service is really good.

Average Joe Finances:
23:46

Yeah.

Mike DeHaan:
23:46

And I've also found with the Asana. A lot of people that we bring on different virtuals, they're already familiar with it, so there's no learning curve, which is, makes a huge deal as well.

Average Joe Finances:
23:55

Okay. Yeah. All right, man. So I wanna ask you something about, from the time you started when you jumped ship and got started in this business to where you are today what kind of growth have you seen? What does that look like? Like where did you start and where are you now?

Mike DeHaan:
24:08

Yeah. So when I quit my job, it's funny I'll even get into some granular finances for. So the last year that I was at my engineering job our household income between my pay and my wife's pay was about $160,000 for the year. Right? That was at the end of 2018. No, sorry, the end of 2017. 2018 was the year that I quit in 2018. Because I left my engineering job. I think I was making 96 there. Plus bonus, my personal income in 2018 was $15,000, which I got entirely from Uber and from working at the gym. Which is doing classes. So it was, my income was what?$80,000 less than it was. At the end of that period of time, I started getting into real estate and started flipping houses and I guess getting interested in flipping houses. 2019 I flipped a couple of houses with partnerships. So 2019 I made my personal income was $87,000. 2020 we started the wholesale business. And we started doing doing that more full-time and doing deals. It took us. From when we started our wholesale business in February of 2020, it took us $30,000 of spend before we got our first deal, of which we made 7,500 bucks. And that was six months time, about five months, six months. So that was super uncomfortable period of time. We were spending a ton of money and weren't making anything. And then the deal that we wholesale, we made $7,500 hundred dollars. I'm pretty sure the people that we bought it from, they just vacuumed the carpet and they listed it and they made 85 grand. So missed opportunity force there. So we did that and then that was end of May that year and then in October we had our first six figure month. So it basically turned parabolic very quickly as we started to build momentum. So that year I made one point, no, sorry, I made a hundred and I guess $60,000 at the end of. And then at the end of 2021, that was our biggest year that we've had to date. End of that, I made just over seven figures. It escalated very quickly.

Average Joe Finances:
26:07

Wow.

Mike DeHaan:
26:07

And in that period of time I've bought I own 50 doors now up from zero, and now at the end of 2022, we've done 167 transactions since we started the beginning of 2020.

Average Joe Finances:
26:20

Wow, man. Well done. Yeah it's funny too cause as you're talking about this I feel like a lot of people that get started in that first six months period, like where you spent $30,000 just to turn around and get $7,500 bucks. I feel like a lot of people would just be like, you know what I'm not doing this no more. This is a waste. But you kept going. But I, think what happened is and I think you realized this as well as you were going, is all that time and effort that you put in during that six month period where you weren't getting anything back, it didn't matter. You were making an impression. People were starting to know who you are, right? And you started connecting with the right people, right? And as you're going and going maybe some of those, People that you reached out to early on that didn't want nothing to do with you back then started reach you back out to you now cause you're still around and that's when you started to really pick up the momentum. I'm just assuming, but

Mike DeHaan:
27:07

Yep.

Average Joe Finances:
27:07

I feel like that's a safe assumption.

Mike DeHaan:
27:09

It is a very safe assumption.

Average Joe Finances:
27:10

Yeah.

Mike DeHaan:
27:10

And that was one of the reasons we were able to go from, taking like $30,000. and six months to get our first deal, two, four months after that, having our first six figure month.

Average Joe Finances:
27:21

Yeah.

Mike DeHaan:
27:21

Was because once the momentum was there, you can't stop it, honestly. Unless you just get completely I guess negligent to everything. And the reason we were able to keep. Pushing through that though, it's I can always tell that story we were $30,000 in the whole program on our first deal. That sounds super tragic. Right? Super traumatic. But we were focused from the get go. And so my business partner, he is my best friend from college. He's an ex army ranger, super Determined okay, with discomfort, that sort of stuff. And then me having competed in fitness sports for so long, the same, and we were very intentional to focus on the lead indicators as opposed to the lag indicators. So as we were spending that money Leads were coming in, we were having conversations, right? So even though we were $30,000 in the hole and we had like literally made no revenue yet, we knew that it was a matter of when, not if. When we got that little bit of money that came back, we just pumped it right back into the business and kept that momentum going. And the thing with wholesaling, and especially like any sort of marketing business, but we do direct mail marketing as our core., it really compounds on itself. And you get the snowball effect. That's super huge because as you send out these, little tangible pieces of marketing to people, they get into more people's hands than you send it to, right? People share it with each other. It sticks with people because they have something they can hold. They have your logo, they can do research, they can take their time. And after doing that now for. What still happens is we will get calls from people that we mailed six months ago, seven months ago. And not only that, but like, when we continue to send things to the same people, they start to get things from us, five times, six times, 15 times. All of a sudden you get their attention and so you do it for a longer period of time, and your metrics and your lead indicators become, like more favorable towards you. And all of a sudden the money, like it becomes inevitable. Like the opportunity becomes inevitable, right? If you just trust the process and you are measuring that, it is in fact working.

Average Joe Finances:
29:18

Yeah. You just, you keep tapping and tapping until you break a hole in that wall, right? it's the way you describe it too you talked about like when the momentum built up, it's. only so much snow can fall on the mountain before the slightest sound will start that avalanche.

Mike DeHaan:
29:31

Exactly.

Average Joe Finances:
29:32

So that's exactly what you did, man. And that's awesome., Mike, this has been an awesome conversation. I think I got a lot of great nuggets out of this. At least for me personally I'm definitely gonna look more into Asana that's for sure. But I wanna transition this into something that we call the final round. That's where I'm gonna ask you the same four questions I ask everybody that comes on this show. And it puts you more like a, in a hot seat, and we see how you react under pressure, which I'm pretty sure I know how that's gonna be because you're crushing it, man. So if you're ready to go, we'll get this party.

Mike DeHaan:
29:59

Yeah, let's do it.

Average Joe Finances:
30:00

All right. Let's do it. Okay, so the first question, man, this is a doozy. What's the biggest mistake you've ever made in real estate investing?

Mike DeHaan:
30:08

Yeah. So the biggest mistake I ever made was when it was actually with the second house that I flipped. And I would say it's the second house. I bought the flip, the third house that I sold. And I went into it having just learned a bunch of lessons with the first house. And I've been having a bunch of conversations. I've been doing a bunch of research and I thought that I was now the smartest guy, right? That I knew how to do everything. So I jumped into this deal. And I basically trusted everyone that was involved in the process that was strongly incentivized to have the deal closed. So it was brought to me by a wholesaler. They gave me their loan officer who's gonna hook me up with a hard money loan. They hooked me up with their inspector. And across those three people, everyone said oh yeah, this is great, but you have a wholesaler who's only gonna get paid if the deal closes. You have a lender who's only gonna get paid if I use them for the loan, and you have an inspector who wants me. It probably gets a kickback from the wholesaler that is going to, make sure. I buy the deal so that he keeps getting referred business. And then when I went into it, I found out that it was actually a terrible deal once I got into it. And I did not know what, I did not know. I did not know how to do my own due diligence, but because I had walked through it, I had seen like a lot of problems on my first flip that I was able to overcome. I was like, it can't possibly be worse than that in any way. What ultimately ended up happening with that?

Average Joe Finances:
31:30

Never say never.

Mike DeHaan:
31:31

Yeah, exactly right. That's true. Got way over my skis, it went way over budget. I ended up losing about $25,000.

Average Joe Finances:
31:38

Wow. Yeah. That's, so that's how it goes, man. That's sometimes how the cookie crumbles. And you know what we call that in real estate investing education. That's what

Mike DeHaan:
31:46

Totally, and that's.

Average Joe Finances:
31:47

Master degree.

Mike DeHaan:
31:49

Exactly. And it was the best education I've ever had, honestly because, especially cause that it put me in such a tough spot. Again, it goes back to the connections I made super awesome connections with contractors going through it cause this house had so many issues that I didn't foresee. I made lots of good connections with different lenders as I was looking to get out of the predatory hard money loan that I was tied into. I made lots of really good connections with realtors as I was looking to try and sell it over various times and just like having those conversations cause it was a unique house. And tons of those connections that I made have gone on to make me significantly more money than the $25,000 I lost on that deal. And everything aside I don't think I would do anything different with that because, even though the $25,000 sucks Having that, I guess initial monkey off your back too. Feels pretty good when you can go into it knowing that you've already taken your licks a little bit, cause I think what bites a lot of people is they only have wins for the first while and then they don't know how to handle it when the hard time finally comes around. But I got that out of the way early.

Average Joe Finances:
32:46

Yeah, it's if you're training for a boxing match and you're, all you're doing is punching bags, and then you get into the ring and you actually get punched in the face, that's when you. activate that fight or flight and realize what's about to happen to you?

Mike DeHaan:
32:57

Exactly.

Average Joe Finances:
32:58

Exactly. That's awesome, Mike. I appreciate that story and that lesson that you learned. But speaking of things that you've learned, that actually ties into the next question, and that is what is something that you've learned that you wish you knew when you first started?

Mike DeHaan:
33:10

Yeah. So something that I've learned now is the value of having a personal brand and reputation. Honestly, that's a big reason that I started the podcast that I now have. The Clicking Keys podcast was, As we started to grow and we started to try and do larger things in different markets and like scale outside of the Spokane area, it was very difficult to establish relationships in different markets, cause like when I did that here in Spokane, I did it over the course of years, right? So then when we transferred over the wholesaling, I already had different relationships I built. That was fine. But when we go and drop in to say, Knoxville, Tennessee, which is the first virtual market we dropped into. I'm now a guy from Washington State that no one knows of. No one has any reason to know who I am or any reason to care, and I'm trying to now do deals down there. It makes it very challenging. But since then we have, started our podcast. I'm working on my personal brand. I'm very involved in national groups and all of a sudden we go and drop to a different market and they can see my profile, they can see I have a real estate podcast, they can see that I have an education platform. They can see that we have a successful business. Making connections with good people is so much easier and I really wish that I had started that when I first started my business as opposed to waiting until, I was two and a half years then.

Average Joe Finances:
34:27

Yeah, man, I definitely appreciate that, that answer because it was one of the things, like when I first started as well I had started this blog to talk about my own journey into financial independence, financial freedom and just, financial literacy and learning everything. And then a friend of mine twisted my arm and said, Hey man, start a podcast. Like podcasts are gonna be big. Just do it. And I'm like, ah, yeah, fine, whatever. I'll do the podcast. And I got to tell you, man, the connections I've made from this podcast have just helped me just overall in, in my real estate, investing in my businesses, just overall with everything. The connections I've made have just been superior to anything I could get from going out to a bar and trying to meet people and Hey, what's up? You wanna talk about investing? No, shut up.

Mike DeHaan:
35:08

Yeah, exactly.

Average Joe Finances:
35:08

You get to. Like-minded people and pick their brain. Like I, dude, I love this conversation I had with you, man. This is awesome. And I'm hoping that we'll stay in touch after this. I stay in touch with all my guests, man, because.

Mike DeHaan:
35:19

Yeah.

Average Joe Finances:
35:19

It's just been a great piece of everything that I've been doing with this podcast and I know you're probably feeling the same way about yours and the connections that you make, man, and the networking opportunities, it's absolutely phenomenal. As a matter of fact it's one of the topics I'm speaking about at the Real Estate Wealth Builders Conference. This May, I'm talking about exactly that, why I think you should have a podcast if you're a real estate investor and how it can help you network. So I think that's awesome, man. Anyway, I'm gonna get off my soapbox here cause we still have two more questions to get through. And we're gonna go right into the next one. Okay. So the next one is, do you have any tips or tricks that you would recommend to someone that is just getting started out today?

Mike DeHaan:
35:57

Yeah. So the number one thing I always tell new people is be prepared to commit and be uncomfortable for three to four months if you actually wanna be successful.

Average Joe Finances:
36:06

I like that.

Mike DeHaan:
36:07

And a lot of people, they'll say oh, you got to be consistent. You got to keep at it. Which I think is like the good base level, but what does that mean? And I say, try something 100% fully committed to it for three. And then assess if it's working. And when I say try it for three months, find ways to measure, kinda like I said earlier in the show, the lead indicators. So determine how you are going to define what success looks like for whatever you're trying to do. Commit to the process for three months, see if you got those results you were expecting. and then if you didn't, then at that point you can look to pivot. But I think the big mistake so many people make is they get shiny object syndrome and they jump around. Or what they do is they keep trying the same thing over and over again, but they don't have a definition of what success actually looks like to them. So they never know if they're actually getting better and they never actually can figure out what they need to do to grow, be success.

Average Joe Finances:
36:57

I really like that man. Start getting comfortable with being uncomfortable because , it is very cliche that you hear people say, oh yeah, just stick to it. Just keep going. You're gonna get there. But, the other piece of that is, while you're sticking to it, while you're doing it, there's a lot of stuff happening around you and you're just like, man, I don't know if I'm doing the right thing. And you start questioning what you're doing and you get very uncomfortable. So I really appreciate that perspective that you gave Mike about Be prepared to be uncomfortable, right? And get comfortable with being uncomfortable. I think that's super important. So definitely love that, man. Final question, and this is an opinion-based question and I'm gonna preface this with, besides your own, because you have a podcast. So besides your own, do you have a favorite business investing or real estate related book or podcast, or, both?

Mike DeHaan:
37:40

Yeah. So obviously the Four Hour Work Week is the one that I have gifted the to the most people. That's what Tim Ferris's question is always is too, is what's the book that you've gifted to most people? And it's that one. I really like that book. And then another one that I really enjoy is The Millionaire Fastlane by MJ DeMarco. It's a similar vein to the four hour work week, but I will say it has a little bit more like philosophical views around wealth and like making money and like how. You don't need to be this big, like all-consuming sort of powerful thing to be successful. And you can be, you can honestly be a nobody if you want to and make legitimate money. And like it's all about sort of systems and leverage and the way that he approaches it is different I guess from the four hour work week and the way that it is more about like, How anyone can do that. Whereas like the four hour work is here is exactly how you should do it. So that's always a good one that I like to refer to people like to ignite that fire a little bit.

Average Joe Finances:
38:38

Love that man. Definitely. Great. Recommendations. I appreciate that. Okay. Now that is it for the final round. You survived. Great job. You're still with us now. I do have one more question, and this actually is the most important question of all because if people that are listening to this episode are enjoying it as much as I am having this conversation with you they're gonna wanna know more about you, Mike. So where can people find that? Do you have a website, social media, that you could share with us? Tell us about your podcast. We wanna see it all.

Mike DeHaan:
39:07

Yeah. So yeah, my own podcast is the Collecting Keys Real Estate Investing podcast. You can find that wherever you listen to podcasts. It is a real estate focus show. We do three episodes a week, so we have interviews with people on Mondays, on Wednesdays. We do what we call the Mike and Dan show my my. Business partner's name is Dan, and we spend a lot of time talking about specific business stuff, this real estate in general, what we're working on in our business. We're very transparent about the things that are working for us and those aren't, so lots of good actionable stuff if you wanna create a direct to solar business. And then on Fridays we do, we call a Friday focus, where ideally we'll get like a question from a listener that we will answer in a long form content long form content in that. That's Clickin Keys Real Estate Investing podcast. You can go to clickin keys podcast.com and get some more information about our podcast there. And then if you want to contact me directly, best places on Instagram, so it's @mike_invests and you can just shoot me a DM on there and I'm always happy to chat with people.

Average Joe Finances:
40:02

Awesome. Thank you so much for sharing that. I'm gonna make sure I have all those links in the show notes to make it easy for our listeners to find them and either click away, copy and paste away, whatever it is they need to do to get in touch with you. Just don't do it while you're driving. Okay? That's my little disclaimer there. Now I wanna say again, thank you so much for this conversation, man. This has been absolutely fantastic. I truly enjoyed myself. I truly enjoyed talking with you today. And I also wanna say to my listeners, thank you so much. For joining me in our special guest, Mike DeHaan, on the Average Joe Finances Podcast, go leave us a five star review and tell us what you liked about today's episode with Mike. Aloha from Hawaii and have a great rest of your day.

Mike DeHaan:
40:42

Awesome. Thanks Mike.