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Mom Guilt, Real Estate, and Building a Legacy of Love with Cheyenne McGriff

Key Takeaways You can be a successful businesswoman and a devoted mother, but it requires setting boundaries and embracing support. Delegation is not a weakness—it's a strategic move that unlocks growth and presence at home. Legacy isn't just what you leave behind; it's what you build every day with intention, balance, and love. United States Real Estate Investor The REI Agent with Cheyenne McGriff https://youtu.be/W9MQvDhYLWY Follow and subscribe to The REI Agent on social Facebook Instagram Youtube .cls-1fill:#fff; Linkedin X-twitter United States Real Estate Investor It's time to have an investor-friendly agent on your team! It's time to have an investor-friendly agent on your team! United States Real Estate Investor Navigating the Intersection of Business and Motherhood On this episode of The REI Agent, Mattias and Erica Clymer welcome South Dakota real estate powerhouse and podcaster Cheyenne McGriff for a deeply honest conversation about balancing motherhood, business ambition, and building generational wealth. Cheyenne’s journey is not only inspiring, it’s a powerful reminder that you can create a fulfilling life on your own terms, even when the odds feel stacked. Cheyenne, who co-runs her real estate team with her grandparents and raises a four-year-old daughter, brought raw vulnerability and wisdom to the mic. Through stories of her journey from rural beginnings to a growing real estate career, she shares what it really takes to make it all work, without losing yourself in the process. Breaking Free from the Rat Race with the Cashflow Quadrant Mattias and Erica set the tone with a quick dive into Robert Kiyosaki’s Cashflow Quadrant, highlighting how real estate agents often mistake self-employment for true freedom. Cheyenne echoed this lesson throughout her episode by describing how delegation and building support systems has shifted her from overwhelm into ownership. “You become more than your hours put in. It’s not like you work eight hours and get paid for eight hours—you start building something bigger than you.” The discussion reminded listeners that escaping the rat race isn’t just about grinding harder; it’s about thinking differently. Cheyenne’s path illustrates this shift with her strategic moves into investing, flipping, and planning for long-term passive income. From Prairie Roots to Powerful Presence Hailing from a town of just 800 in South Dakota, Cheyenne was mentored by her grandmother, a real estate agent since the 1970s. That foundation, combined with her own modern-day marketing skills, has created a deeply rooted, service-oriented business model. She’s not just selling homes, she’s creating experiences that leave clients feeling like family. “The people part is really what I like about this job… I want them to feel like they’re part of something bigger than just one transaction.” From personalized welcome gifts to seasonal community events and even a private online client community, Cheyenne has elevated relationship-based marketing into an art form. Letting Go to Grow: Delegation and the Power of Support One of the most transformative parts of Cheyenne’s story is her shift toward delegation. After resisting the idea of hiring a transaction coordinator, a stressful moment on the job pushed her to take the leap—and it changed everything. “I wasn’t good at asking for help, but once I hired my first TC, I knew I could finally start working on the business, not just in it.” That shift allowed her to stay present at home, plan ahead for another child, and avoid burning out. She reminded listeners that you don’t need to do everything alone to be a great agent—or a great parent. The Shadow Side: Mom Guilt, Identity, and Real-Life Balance This episode didn’t shy away from the hard truths. Cheyenne and Erica tackled “mom guilt” head-on, especially the emotional whiplash of switching between demanding clients and emotionally needy toddlers. “Sometimes client conversations

aren’t that different from talking to a toddler—both are needy and expect you to drop everything.” Cheyenne shared how she’s had to draw boundaries, set Sundays aside for family, and challenge the inner dialogue that whispers she’s not doing enough at home or at work. Her story resonated deeply with Mattias, who acknowledged his own growth in fatherhood and the importance of intentional presence over perfection. Legacy, Leadership, and Living Life on Your Terms Cheyenne’s episode is a masterclass in long-term thinking. From modeling leadership to her daughter, to inheriting and evolving a decades-old family business, she embodies a vision that’s bigger than today’s to-do list. “I want my daughter to see that you can love working and love being a mom at the same time.” Whether talking about avoiding real estate "jail" or describing the safety and values of her South Dakota community, Cheyenne inspires agents to redefine success, not as a sprint, but as a legacy. You Can Have It All, But Not All at Once Cheyenne left listeners with a profound reminder: seasons matter. Some seasons are for the grind, and others for the people we grind for. “You can have it all, but you can’t have it all the time.” In a culture obsessed with hustle, this episode was a breath of fresh air, showing that slowing down, delegating, and showing up for what really matters might just be the greatest investments we’ll ever make. Ready to build your legacy while living a life that feels full and aligned? This episode is your blueprint. Stay tuned for more inspiring stories on The REI Agent podcast, your go-to source for insights, inspiration, and strategies from top agents and investors who are living their best lives through real estate. For more content and episodes, visit reiagent.com. Related Articles Therapy You Didn’t Know You Needed (Holistic Wisdom for Real Estate Professionals) From For Sale Signs to Life Design (How The REI Agent Transforms Real Estate Into Holistic Wealth) Achieving Holistic Wealth and Success Through Real Estate (Insights from The REI Agent) Partnering with Investors (How Real Estate Agents Can Exponentially Maximize Profits) United States Real Estate Investor Create healing and connection within yourself, your family, and your community. Create healing and connection within yourself, your family, and your community. United States Real Estate Investor Contact Cheyenne McGriff Cheyenne Summer 605 Real Estate Mama Collective @cheyennesummer605 United States Real Estate Investor Mentioned References Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki The Let Them Theory: A Life-Changing Tool That Millions of People Can’t Stop Talking About United States Real Estate Investor Transcript Welcome to the REI Agent, a holistic approach to life through real estate. I'm Mattias, an agent and investor. And I'm Erica, a licensed therapist. Join us as we interview guests that also strive to live bold and fulfilled lives through business and real estate investing. Tune in every week for interviews with real estate agents and investors. Ready to level up? Let's do it. Welcome back to the REI Agent. Erica, let's talk about the cashflow quadrant. Great. Let's do it. I'm so excited. This is the stuff that keeps you up at night with excitement, exhilaration, mental stimulation. Yeah, so the cashflow quadrant is just simply like, you know, there's being an employee, then being self-employed, then moving over to being a business owner, and then going down into being an investor. And the goal is to kind of work your way through it and try to be more on the business owner and investing side. I think that a lot of people, when they first get into being a real estate agent, feel like they've kind of like broken out of the system and have made it. And I think that is a huge step and a very intimidating one, a very scary one. I mean, you did the same thing. Coming out of like being in a company that you did your therapy services for.

It's being having a private practice. You became a self-employed person as well. And that is a big step. However, it is very much dependent on you as a person, right? So moving into, you know, trying to get our businesses or trying to, I don't know if you have any interest in this at all, but you know, trying to move things over into that business quadrant more and investing quadrant. So obviously we're doing the real estate investing. An idea for, you know, private practice is that you could, of course, you know, buy a building and then have people kind of lease it, but maybe also somehow work under an umbrella of yours. Is that something you could do as a private practice counselor? Yeah, yeah, I could. I could be where I would just be in a consulting role and have therapists under me seeing the clients. And how would that work? Would they get like you had a cut for every client they see? Yeah, I would take a percentage. Um, and I think it's, it is attractive in some ways. I think it's also being a therapist is not the best paid job for the amount of work that you do and the amount of emotional investment you put into the job. And so, but, and so I guess in saying that, it's really nice to be able to be just in private practice on your own. And so I would almost want to maybe create something where I'm encouraging and helping other people being able to do that. And like more of a coaching or creating some sort of a class supportive role there, as opposed to being, having therapists underneath me. Because when I do that, everything rides on my license also. And that the liability there skyrockets. Sure. Yeah, I mean, the same would be for real estate teams or brokerages, certainly brokerages more as far as the liability rides on them. So that's definitely a big factor, big consideration. I mean, and there's always the fact that you don't necessarily even have to own a business that would be related to what you do. I mean, you can buy businesses. You can buy, I mean, each, you know, they say that, you know, every multifamily unit or apartment building you buy is a business. And I mean, really each investment in general, each single family even could be seen that way. Airbnb, blah, blah, blah. They can all be seen as businesses. Of course, there are investments as well. But basically, that you become more than your hours put in. You are becoming greater than the hours you put in. So it's not like you work eight hours, you get, you know, X amount of money. You instead have your money work for you and have others work for you as well to kind of free yourself up. And I guess the reason for the conversation is we just had a great conversation with Cheyenne McGriff and she has a podcast and she talks a lot about mom guilt and how to kind of balance the life of a real estate professional and a mother, in my case, a father. And it's a tough balance. And I think, you know, trying to aim or trying to steer the ship in a way that is intentional, that you can not, you know, always sacrifice to, you know, you still have the moments with your kids, with your family as you go, but maybe also try to set yourself up to be less dependent upon the hours you put in so that you can have more time with the family. It's kind of where that was all going. Did you like the Cashflow Quadrant? Are you going to think about that tonight? As always, when we talk about financials like this, I try really, really hard to stay present. And so thank you for bringing that conversation back into the forefront where I can't walk away or do something while you talk. I just, it's probably the best place maybe for me to sit here and be present and listen to you. Can I lay out our next five years for you real quick? You guys have the time? No, but it's definitely, I think, demanding. I mean, it's the gift and the curse of branching out on your own and not being an employee is that it's harder to shut it off when you're not on. So it's definitely something that I think everybody has to work through.

They have to find their own way through this crazy world of real estate sales. And yeah, having that goal, having that North Star of trying to become 100% passive income is one of the goals. Owning a business could be another one for sure that maybe you can have enough delegation, management, et cetera, in place that you don't have to be 100% active. But yeah, trying to work towards that bigger picture is something that motivates me, especially when things are insane and I have very little time with the family. Anyway, without further ado, let's get right into Cheyenne McGriff. Welcome back to the REI Agent. We are here with Cheyenne McGriff. Cheyenne, thanks so much for joining us. Hey, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Yeah, we were talking a little bit before that you have your own podcast as well. I do. Yeah, it's fun. I love connecting with others through podcasting and just hearing about everyone's journey in real estate and life and this kind of crazy world we're living. When did you start your podcast? I just started it late last fall. So it's a baby podcast but it was born out of a desire to connect with other, primarily moms in real estate that were dealing with the same things we are. Comparison with dealing with imposter syndrome, dealing with mom guilt, all the things. It's just been a fun way to connect across really the world with other agents. Have you found that those themes have been pretty common? Absolutely, yeah. It seems like something we all deal with but we don't share online because it's not the fun, pretty houses. It's the deep background, everyday hard work and sacrifice that comes with this career. Oh, yeah. I almost want to connect you with somebody we had on the show a couple weeks ago. I might send her your information because, oh my gosh, I feel like she would love your podcast. Well, tell us what you're coming out of and tell us kind of how you got into real estate and then we can get more into that theme as well. Absolutely. My office is in Rapid City, South Dakota. So if you're familiar with South Dakota at all or Western South Dakota, so think Mount Rushmore is where I am. But I live in a small town of about 800 people. So if you've heard of the Waldrug store in the Badlands National Park, that's where I am. So I work a lot of rural areas and also a ton in Rapid City, which we only have two cities in South Dakota and Rapid City is the second largest. And I think surrounding areas is maybe around 80 to 100,000 people. So that's a big city for me. I have, of course, my husband and I have a four-year-old daughter and a little puppy and been in real estate since 2018. I got into the business encouraged by my grandma. So I work on a team with my grandparents. My grandma's been in the business since the mid 70s. So I had a built in mentor basically my whole life. She had always encouraged me to join her. But after college, I mean, I just wanted to try to do my own thing. And then, of course, eventually ended up jumping into real estate. Wow. And since the 70s, she's really seen a good bit of change, huh? In the way advertising works and marketing. And just even how the relationships work between agents, buyers and sellers. So many things have changed. So much more paperwork now. Wow, that's amazing. Yeah, our company just had a 50-year celebration. And they're talking about how the contract was, I don't think I even filled up a whole page at the beginning. So I'm sure she saw that as well. You gotta love lawsuits to make things more paperwork heavy. Yeah, absolutely. It's just fun. When I was, I remember I was taking my classes, I would call her and ask her questions. She's like, yeah, that was because of this that happened. And now we have this paper. Like, oh my gosh. And now we've been seeing it with the change in the last year in our industry. So it's just, yeah, it's a wild world. It's always shifting. It kind of keeps things exciting though. And if you want to look at it as a positive.

And that's why I feel real estate's been a good fit for me. Because I had good jobs before I started in real estate. But I just like physically cannot handle being in one place for eight hours a day. So I just love the dynamics of real estate. I love how you can get into not just sales and investing and connecting with others. It's just an ever-changing industry that keeps me on my toes. So true. So what kind of a rhythm are you in right now in your day and your week at this current season? I know we over here, it definitely changes for us, depending on whether it's spring, summer, winter, fall. What's it like for you right now? Right now has been very busy. And I've been in a season of change and growth in my business for 2025. I had just one transaction coordinator for about two years. And now I'm up to, I have an in-person part-time admin, a marketing admin, a TC and an event planner for my client events. So I've just kind of grown my support team around me. And then of course, my team members with my grandparents. So I've been in a season of growth and working to delegate more. I started to feel like I was starting to kind of get, I don't know, drown in the work that I had and trying to do the things to make client experience better for everyone. And I just felt I needed some more support. So that's been a big shift for me this year. As far as day-to-day, I try to keep the same morning routine every day. But as you know, in this world, you can try to plan your day as much as possible. And something's going to change or shift, someone's going to need to see a house in five minutes, that kind of thing. So I would say I don't have a great rhythm, but I'm working on setting good boundaries with at least having one day that's off work for family focus a week. Mm-hmm. Okay. And your daughter, you said she's four. So she's in pre-K right now? She just finished her first year of preschool. So she'll have one more than kindergarten. Okay. Wow. Our middle daughter is heading into kindergarten in the fall and is very ready to get on that school bus that she sees her older sister get on every morning. That's exciting and hard. Yeah, I know. I'm curious what kind of client experience stuff you do or wanting to incorporate with your admin staff that you have. Yeah. So this year, I had always done at least one client event starting maybe two years ago. I do one client appreciation event. And this year, we're on track to do five for the year, all very different, all trying to hit each dynamic of my clients. One was kind of female focus that I did. Another was Valentine focus. And then we've got a family focus one coming up in August, and then a fall festival, and then a Christmas. But I could not do that on my own. So I contracted an event planner and a friend to help me out. And it's been amazing. I just like to do that little extra. I do client baskets for every client. I try to be very present in the transactions. Because one thing I don't want to do is get so busy that I just write up a contract and then hand somebody off to my team, which there's nothing wrong with that. There are all so many very different ways to run your business. But the people part is really what I like about this job. I do feel like my clients become my family. So I just very much try to stay as involved as I can while delegating the things that I do not have to physically do. Yeah, I love that. I've heard of, there's different, what's the word? Archetypes, business archetypes. And people have, companies have different brands. People have different brands. And one of them is kind of like the Disney. I don't think it's called the Disney. But it's like trying to keep that magical experience throughout the whole process. I toyed with the idea of, one idea I had heard that you have champagne or something delivered to them when they get pre-approved, like a buyer at their work. I haven't done that. That's a little extra, a little maybe too far.

Because you also get into the thing, what if they don't drink? So anyway, but just trying to make that experience be memorable and fun for them and feel like everything's well thought through. And you're right, when you have so many things that you're doing and you're just in your car nonstop going from appointment to appointment, it's hard to try to figure out those details. Let alone have quality time with your family. Right. And I never want anyone to feel like I'm too busy for them. So I try to just have my support staff help me with the things, like I said, that I don't physically have to do. But I never want to be too busy to actually take care of my clients throughout the process. And after closing, of course, there's a gift and all that. But I have a community, an online community where I put my clients into. So every time after closing, I just say, hey welcome so and so to our family. Give them a shout out. If you're their neighbor, tag them. So that everyone feels like they're part of something bigger than just one transaction. That's cool. That's an excellent idea. Is that on Facebook? It's a private client community, yeah. That's awesome. That's a good idea. Yeah, so how long ago did you... When you first got a transaction coordinator, at what point was that that you decided to bring that on? Well, very much. It was after I went on a podcast and said I would never get a transaction coordinator. And about two months later, I had a transaction. Well, actually, the story is I was very busy and I was doing a deal with another agent in my market. And I just could not get back to her on time for our response time. And I said, I'm so sorry. I'm out showing houses. I can't get this back to you. Can you please give me more time? And she's like, you need help. And she actually referred her transaction coordinator to me. And she said, you got to call this girl. She's going to help you out. And I had been toying with the idea for about a month or two before this. But I couldn't find anything that really fit. Like I didn't want somebody that wasn't... I wanted somebody not... They didn't have to be local. But I don't know. I just wanted to make sure that there was a little bit more in-house feel to it. And she doesn't have a huge list of agents she does TC work for. So she can really pay attention to my clients and what we need. And I had one interview with her and signed her on the next day. My biggest fear was before my shifting I've done this year, I wasn't... I have kind of a scattery brain. So my things made sense to me. And I was embarrassed to say, oh, here, can you fix my scattery brain documents? And she just knew exactly what to do and got it started. And I didn't even have to do... She just knew what to do. So that really helped me kind of level up as a business owner, I feel. And gave me more confidence down the line to continue hiring. One of the hesitations I had with that was... Or one of the things that I kind of did for a long time was I had a transaction coordinator kind of keep track of things in the back end. And then CC me that I would then... Or like make a list for me basically that I would then follow up with my clients with. And they would come from me. And I kind of wanted them to feel like it was coming from me. But ultimately, that became a bottleneck that I would... It still required me. And so it was something that would slow me down. And ultimately, sometimes it just wouldn't get done then because more of the communication piece wasn't getting done. I'm curious, did that ever... Was that a concern for you at all? Is that one of the reasons you were against it? And did you have them communicate with the clients directly? That was one of the reasons I was against it. So I had done deals in the past where I felt like myself as the agent on the other side. And the clients were just handed off. And I never wanted that feeling to come through. Like you never spoke to the listing agent again after you went under contract. And I didn't want that vibe.

So that was my biggest hesitation. But I exactly like you. I was like, well, I don't want my clients to think that I'm not working for them or that they can't call me or that they need to call her. But once I did that first deal and I just said, hi, myself and my TC will be reaching out to you. She can help you out. But you don't call her. You call me. If you have questions, you respond to both of us. We'll both help you out. And they seem to not care at all. As long as things were getting done and balls weren't being dropped, they didn't care. They always knew they could call me and get ahold of me for anything. And she's just made me much more efficient. As well as if I'm out showing houses all day, I don't have to be stuck in my office until 10 o'clock at night responding to everything I need to for other transactions. Yeah, totally. So it sounds like that too has made a difference just in you feeling like you can let go and be present then when you're home. Yeah, that's huge. Yeah. Let's get into the bomb stuff. Yes, I've been waiting. I've been letting Mattias ask his questions. Yes, I want to hear about that and more of the shadow side of what comes along with the real estate career. Yeah, absolutely. So mom guilt's very, very big. And it's gotten better now that my kid is a little older. She goes to preschool. She has daycare. She loves socializing. So during the day, I never feel like she's getting left out of anything. But what's still a challenge is getting home at night and still having work to do. Because sometimes work doesn't really start until like four or five o'clock when people are off work. And then they can call you and ask you questions and set up showings. So it's challenging really for me to stay present at home a lot of times. I have to set pretty clear boundaries that I'm still not very good at because I'll get on the phone and I'll be like, oh, this is just going to take a minute or I just need to respond to this real quick. And that real quick turns into an hour of following up and catching up on work, especially when my kiddo will sometimes say, mom, I really want to spend more time with you. Mom, can you stay home from work today so we can be together? That just breaks my heart. And so I've been working on this year implementing Sundays off or at least one day a weekend when she's home. Like this week, it was Saturday. And so I try to at least have a day where we can have a family day. And she understands I have to take a call here and there. But the goal is to not have showings, to not have things I have to physically be gone for. And it's not a perfect system. But it's been improving for a long time. My husband was mostly stay at home dad. But he recently started working again. So we're just kind of rebalancing, which has been a challenge. But I feel like we're doing the best that we can. It's so true. I mean, can you really go through raising kids without feeling like you're just doing the best you can? Yep. Exactly. It's chaotic. Amen to that. Yes. And we're hoping we're going to have another kid within the next year or so. So that's really been my biggest push for getting more support and more organized. So that because when I had my daughter, my husband was home. So now that he's working, it's just going to be a whole nother set of systems and time management and relying on others. So that was my big push for getting more organized and having more help. Yeah. So with some of the other women that you're talking to on your podcast, what are they saying that's similar to what you're mentioning? It's the balance between having the, I don't know if this is the best term, but like the boss babe energy, like the energy at work where you're trying to be in charge, trying to be in control, and then letting that go to have that softer energy at home. When you get home to really be present and let the work go and having that mom guilt is just so real. And I know what

happens for dads to just hearing my husband talk about it since he went back to work because in our, in our household, because he was home most of the time, he's really the primary go-to parent because my daughter's more used to me being gone because it has been that way basically since she was a month old. So the moms I talked to all have different experiences. Most of them don't have a husband that would stay at home like I did. I know it's more of a rare case. So just dealing with them, be having to be the primary parent when daycare's closed, they have to be home. When school lets out early, they have to be home. When summer care is over, they have to be home and take their kids to things. And most of the time we find that our clients are pretty okay with it as long as you let them know upfront if like, Hey, something, you know, I've got to bring my kid. But then it's finally like, okay, in this moment, am I mom or am I your agent? How do I balance these things? So it's just kind of a growing, I don't know about growing, but continually changing way to live your life. Yeah. Well, and I was also thinking, you know, in the evening, and I don't necessarily have this experience. So you guys would have to tell me if this is true, but I would imagine that it would be just a lot of extra work to transition from an adult conversation where you're maybe managing something that's super stressful and then having to be calm enough on the inside to then transition into maybe like a child who's really needing something and frustrated that you're not there as quickly as they want you to be and having just be calm on both sides. Yeah. It just takes a lot of work. Client conversations aren't all that different. People are very needy and they need you to do something right now and you're not paying enough attention to them. Sometimes they're similar conversations. I honestly, with my kid, one thing that I have tried to really work on when I get home is to get out of like problem solving. How do we handle this? How do we damage control and get through this? Instead of being like, okay, let me hear you. Let me listen to you. Let me hear how you're feeling and help you through this. Instead of in my job, I'm very like, okay, this is what we're going to do. This is the way through the problem. I'm not super woo-woo, but I feel like it's very masculine, feminine energies that you have to shift back and forth. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. I am reading the Let Them Theory right now. Have you read that book? I haven't read it, but everyone says I need to. It is. It's so good and I told Mattias he should read it too. In one of the chapters, she talks about how adults really, most adults, unless you had amazing parents that taught you actually what to do with your emotions, are mostly at the emotional maturity of an eight-year-old child. Adults tend to respond very similarly to children if they're not getting something they want or it's not happening fast enough, like throwing a tantrum or shutting down, those kinds of things. It's true. We're not that far off from our kids. Right. One thing I feel good about, though, with working is one reason I really wanted to get into real estate is because my grandma, she was at all of my sporting events, all of my plays when I was in high school, all my graduations, everything. She may have been on the phone, but she was there. Always showed up. She would take two days off to travel across the state to watch me in some athletic event. She was always there. I knew that that was a life that I wanted to be able to build, was that I didn't have to ask for time off to go watch my little kid's program. I didn't have to ask for time off to go to a volleyball game in the future, that kind of thing. I also want to show her that if you want to do something like real estate or entrepreneurship, you can do it. You just have to put your mind to it. I want her to see that mom loves working and mom loves being a mom. You can love both things at the same time.

I got to say, Cheyenne, I've been sitting here, because one of the stories I've told myself is that her being the preferred parent has a lot to do with her being a mom. There's the connection that mothers have. She's also a therapist, so soft, easy, all the time. Not all the time. That's not true. But I really appreciate you saying what you did. I think it really strikes me as that's been some BS that I've been telling myself, and that I can do better. I can try to help figure out more how to be more for my kids or to shift. That's definitely something that I've wanted to let the gender kind of thing and the parental role kind of explain a way where there is just something that I can maybe work on a little bit more. Not that I knew that to some degree, but whoever puts the most time in with the kids is going to have that extra connection with them. That's definitely something that you have, for the most part. Here recently, maybe case in point here, but here recently, Erica had a meniscus tear, and she couldn't really put our son down. He's almost three because he would fall asleep, and then she couldn't hold him and move him from the rocker. I was doing it every night, and I was forced to do it every night, but now we're tight. It's just a good reminder that you really get out of life what you invest in. I appreciate that perspective coming from you. That really means something to me. I was curious, did you feel that yesterday? I was watching this when we were all in the kitchen, and I was thinking our entire family was in the kitchen. Everybody's cooking something different. I was making sourdough bread, and you were with Ayla making dinner, and Azra was making cookies on her own. You guys were there and present with each other, and you were really involved with it. It seemed like everybody was really enjoying it, too. Yeah, yeah. I think it's just one of those, in our season, I was also just coming off of a really, really, really busy spring, a busier spring than normal. I think there's just seasonality with our business as well, and trying to be, I guess, more intentional when you can is another. Having the boundaries, but also understanding that sometimes it's just going to be, you got to make hay when the sun shines, right? Right, yeah. One of my friends that I spoke with, she had a good point. She said, as a mom or a parent in real estate, you can have it all, but you can't have it all all the time. So you have to find, like you said, in your seasons, am I in a season right now where it's a work push? And then you talk to your family, like, okay, this is a short term. This is a busy season. It's a work push season. I'm going to be less available at home. But then taking advantage of those seasons where it's not. For us, it's winter. So I try to take way more time off in the winter, take my family on vacation, things like that, so we're more intentional with our time, and just go in with the understanding that, okay, this moment. Right now, mom's in a push season. So it's just really, like you said, finding the balance in those seasons and making the most of the time where you can be more available. That's so true. It's interesting, too, because the push season for me as a therapist happens between Thanksgiving and New Year's. Oh, sure. Everyone's with their families. Everybody's having a hard time. But it is when you guys are much more free and available. That being intentional is another huge thing. So I'm in this kind of accountability, mastermind group. One of the ideas that another guy did was, A, that he tries to track having 10 minutes of undistracted time with his kids a day with the hope that it would be more. You sit your phone down for 10 minutes, and you're going to engage with them, and that's going to help. So that's been a cool practice. But another one that he did that I've been trying to implement as well is having a special mom-free outing overnight, ideally once a quarter.

So we've kind of had our life kind of get thrown off balance here. But I need to do one with the girls yet, at least. I don't know if that's going to be camping or what. But even in the hecticness of the busyness of the spring, summer season, I think you could still probably get a weekend away or a night away with your kids. So the thing that I want to keep going as well to kind of keep that special relationship time with them. I love that. I love putting it as a mark on your daily tracker. That's a really good idea. And you don't want to think of your family as that. But sometimes if you don't put it on the list, it gets pushed as, well, I need to get this other thing done. But does it really need to get done right now? Probably not. So it's good to have that. I love that idea. But it's hard, I think, in this world to step back and take that time away because it is competitive. There are so many other realtors out there trying to do the same thing that you are. And if you go on social media for five minutes, everybody's selling a house every minute. And then you think, oh man, well, I need to be doing what this person's doing or advertising like this person's doing or sending mailers like this person's doing. And then it's like, yeah, try to do everything. And then you forget about, why do you even do the work? Right. If it's not for making a way to spend more time and be more present with your family, why was everything worth it? Yeah, I did want to ask you, working with your grandparents, has that opened up any new opportunities for just a different kind of relationship with them? What has that been like? Yeah, it's been really cool. So like I said, I started with them, it's been seven years. And at first, it was very much I was just learning as I went, followed them around, went to appointments and got to see what I had always seen from the outside, my grandma doing, got to see it from the inside. And I learned a ton. And it's just fun to have that. It's just a special relationship to have. I feel very honored to take on and continue the business she has built for decades, because it's quite an opportunity that I don't think very many people get. And it's fun that we can go to lunch and we can talk about some things like silly that my brother did at dinner the other night. And then we can talk about how I'm handling a home inspection request. So it's just a fun relationship. That's really cool. Yeah. Do you have something? Go ahead. No, I was so I'm trying to get a picture for how big your family is. Are there a lot of other grandchildren in this picture? And you mentioned your brother. How many are close by in the area? So for my parents, I have four full siblings, and then my mom has three and my dad has two. So there's a lot of us. Yeah, out in the world. But for my grandma, it would be the four or six of us. And we all have very different. And it's just fun to I think at first I was nervous about working with family that it would affect our dynamics, but it hasn't at all. Yeah, I love it. It's a really unique way to get to know your grandma in a different way. I think sometimes, particularly with grandparents, we only know them in their older phase of life and maybe not even in their working phase of life. We just hear about it through stories. It's cool that you get to live some of that with her. It is. And one story I tell pretty often is when I first started in real estate, I was going to show some houses and I told her where I was going and she said, you're not going to show a house there. I was like, why am I not going to show a house there? It's everything my buyers want. She said, Cheyenne, that subdivision was built over a mine and it's probably going to fall in someday. And I said, okay, I guess I won't show any houses there. And literally, I think it was like two, maybe three years ago now, the subdivision started sinking. No way. Yep. So just that knowledge and history of the area is huge.

So especially if I'm going into a new subdivision that I'm not very familiar with, I'll ask, hey, what do you know about this? What do I need to know about this? And it's just, it's such a big benefit for our clients. Wow, that's incredible. Yeah, that's crazy. I thought you were going to say like an Indian burial ground at first. An actual mine. Wow. It's very bad. So I guess this is kind of for my own curiosity, but so my parents lived in South Dakota, I believe, for a little bit. I have never been up to that area. My parents live in Kansas now. And of course, we live in Virginia, but I'm just curious how you would describe the culture where you live, any major themes that run through just the people that you work with and what's kind of expected there? Absolutely. So I love living here. I've been here my whole life, except for a short stint in Nebraska for college. And what I love about South Dakota, especially Western South Dakota, we like to pick on Eastern South Dakota, of course, but we are kind of like a big, small town. Really all put together, we have fewer people than a city. Our whole entire region. So it's kind of everybody knows everybody. Everybody really treats people, people treat people well here and really care about one another. It's just a friendly environment. I feel like I can go downtown in our city and I know like all the business owners and everyone's pretty supportive of one another. It's just a big, small town and we're all just proud to be members of the Black Hills community. Oh, cool. That does sound a little bit like what my experience and my parents, probably their experience in Kansas. They also live in a very small town and it's just it's very friendly. It's very open and generally pretty safe too. Yeah, it is here. And that's one thing I so I live, like I said, in a real small town. And one thing I said I sometimes take for granted is that I can go out on a walk at like five in the morning or nine o'clock at night and I'm never nervous. I'm never afraid. I'm, I mean, more afraid of like a mountain lion or something. But it's just a nice feeling. And that's why we chose to raise our kid in a small town like that. Just because everything I hated about it as a teenager are the things I like about it as a parent. Oh, how interesting. I have a, I have a attorney in town that for settlements that he's from, I think, Michigan and or I think Michigan or around there. He's a big Michigan fan at least. But anyway, so we had, I have another really good friend from Illinois that, that came in and he just talked a little bit, like they just had a little bit of a conversation and he just looks at me. He's like, you're from the Midwest, aren't you? And he's like, yep. He's like, I can tell you're a good person. Oh, that's perfect. It's so funny. But yeah, people are really nice. And we have, we're in a tertiary market ourselves. And there's a lot of benefits to that, like to having, you know, we're not seeing the first movers and we're not seeing the huge spikes or, you know, huge falls either in the markets. So it's definitely, there's some advantages to that for sure. Absolutely. We had a big spike during COVID. Of course, everyone was moving here from especially like Colorado, California. We had just had a big influx during that time and it did affect our population and our housing prices pretty significantly. So our housing market has been tough for first time buyers, but I know that's basically across the board from what I hear market-wise. One cool thing about working and investing here is a lot of times like for my rentals, like, oh, I know your mom. I'll just call your mom if you don't pay your rent, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah. So have you all gotten into a lot of investing as well? I would say I'm a very mini investor. So our first house that we bought, we were living in a, we were living in my family's place and I joke, we lived in a single-wide down by the river because we quite literally did live in a single-wide down by the river.

And it was great. We were 21. We didn't have anywhere to go and it was perfect. But a couple of years later when I was pregnant, we needed something different. So we bought a fixer upper house and we fixed that up, refinanced, used that to pay off debts. And then a year later we needed a bigger house. So then we bought that house and we just rent out that first fixer upper house. And then we did a flip and we used our flip money to buy a fourplex. And from there, we've just kind of been waiting. We're not super risky investors, I would say, like we haven't ever taken on like hard money or investor money. We've just done it all ourselves, which I know we could really grow if we wanted to go in that direction. But just for this season, it was like, well, we're just going to wait to take that on. No, it's such a great way of having a retirement plan and trying to build up that escaping the rat race. Because even if we are self-employed, it is still a bit of a rat race. And being work optional is always a great place. I'm too busy. I don't think I could just drop everything. I need something to do to climb, if you will. But yeah, kind of building up that portfolio as you go just really is amazing. Yeah. My husband always jokes when I get overwhelmed, I'm like, I'm just going to quit. I'm going to sell everything. We're going to run away to a beach. He's like, yeah. But then, Cheyenne, you try to be the mayor of the beach town, start a job. And then you do all these things. You just would never relax. I'm like, oh, that's probably true. I do have to ask if you have any golden nuggets you want to share with our listeners. It could be for first time agents or new agents, I mean, or seasoned ones or anything that comes to mind. Absolutely. So the first thing I would say to a new agent is make sure you have a mentor. Don't just hop in to the business without being around people that have been in it for a long time that are willing to offer you support. I tell everyone that I feel like I was put at least five years ahead being with my grandma and being I'm in a very established office. So being here with so many seasoned agents, I feel I was really able to learn quickly and learn what not to do even faster. And for seasoned agents, so I'm in year seven now. I wish I would have started delegating two years ago, at least. So I would say don't be afraid to start delegating and make that first hire and even hire a coach to help you if you need to, because it's really going to be a game changer. Yeah, there's been a lot of people that have done this before us, and it's huge to take advantage of that. Why slam your head into the ground to try to learn it yourself if you can learn from others and what worked well for them? I love it. Absolutely. And have a lot of fun, get yourself in real estate jail. Yes, that too. Speaking of learning from others, are there books that you recommend that you think our agents should read as a fundamental thing or ones that you're enjoying now? Yeah, the best book I would say I read as for real estate and investing was Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I'm sure that's been echoed on here often, but it really was the biggest one for me to change my mindset. Yeah, 100%. If you're not from an entrepreneurial family, which I was not, and my dad was a professor, so it's kind of perfect for that story, right? But yeah, it's just a whole different mindset. I hear it's a completely fake story that he made up to sell board games, but it's really effective. But it makes sense. Oh, yeah, no, but it's a really good... Yeah, because it's a story, the message lands more, and it's really good. Cheyenne, if people wanted to follow you on social media or find you, want to invest or buy in your area, where can they find you? Yeah, so my brand is all based around South Dakota, so our 605 area code. So if you find me on Instagram, it's my name, @CheyenneSummer605, so at @CheyenneSummer605. Very simple. And you can find me that way on my website, too, at CheyenneSummer605.

com. For Facebook, it's Cheyenne McGrath, but it's with our team. So the Soderquist team is where I am on Facebook. I'm most active on Instagram. And my podcast, you can find it on Instagram as well, but it's called The Real Estate Mama Collective. Okay, cool. Love it. Awesome. Thanks, Cheyenne. I really appreciate you joining us today. It's been so good to talk to you. Well, thank you, guys. This is so fun. You guys are so awesome and easy to talk to, so thank you. Maybe I can be a mom on your podcast sometime. You know, we need all perspectives. Yeah, thanks so much. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the REI Agent. If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe to catch new shows every week. Visit REIAgent.com for more content. Until next time, keep building the life you want. All content in this show is not investment advice or mental health therapy. It is intended for entertainment purposes only.

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The Million-Dollar Marketing Mindset to Create Authentic Relationships and Success with Luke Acree

Key Takeaways Building strong client relationships through consistent, emotionally engaging content is more powerful than high-tech automation. Print marketing, when done right, can outperform digital efforts in memorability and ROI. Persistence, authenticity, and storytelling are the keys to long-term referral-based business growth. United States Real Estate Investor The REI Agent with Luke Acree https://youtu.be/-MJ8nBx3Jbg Follow and subscribe to The REI Agent on social Facebook Instagram Youtube .cls-1fill:#fff; Linkedin X-twitter United States Real Estate Investor It's time to have an investor-friendly agent on your team! It's time to have an investor-friendly agent on your team! United States Real Estate Investor A Personal, Purposeful Introduction to Real Estate Marketing Greatness On this compelling episode of The REI Agent Podcast, host Mattias dives into the brilliant mind of Luke Acree, President of ReminderMedia and serial entrepreneur. Known for building a $70 million empire helping agents and small businesses build unforgettable brands, Luke brings a no-fluff, high-impact strategy to marketing that flips the industry norm on its head. His core belief? “Marketing is not about getting your name out there, it’s about getting your name remembered.” In a world flooded with digital ads and short attention spans, Luke shows us how real human connection—and good old-fashioned print—still dominate when used with intention and consistency. This episode isn’t just a masterclass in branding; it’s a soul-level wake-up call for agents and investors who want to build businesses that last. The Foundation: Faith, Family, and a Vision Luke didn't start with venture capital or a ready-made empire. He built ReminderMedia alongside his brother, learning through relentless trial and error. “We started cold-calling. We believed in it enough to keep showing up when no one answered.” That gritty beginning taught Luke the essence of real marketing—it’s not flashy, it’s foundational. It's the same reason he still makes 30 cold calls every day despite being a multimillion-dollar CEO. Why? Because “If you want to lead people, you’ve got to do what you’re asking them to do.” The Fatal Mistake Agents Make Every Day Most agents focus on transactions. Luke urges them to focus on transformations. “The reason most agents fail? They treat relationships like transactions. They don’t follow up because they’re chasing closings, not clients.” He introduces a mindset shift that could change your entire business: Stop trying to look professional. Start being personal. Stop showing stats. Start telling stories. “People don't remember the top producer with the most graphs. They remember the one who told a story that touched them.” Storytelling Is the New Selling Luke drops golden insights around content: “Sticky content is emotional content.” He explains why your marketing must be personality-infused, emotionally charged, and delivered with consistency. His standout method? Personalized lifestyle magazines that outperform email marketing by an astonishing margin. In a culture dominated by digital scrolls, print becomes powerful again, not because it’s old-school, but because it’s rare. “When someone keeps something you send, you’ve earned a place in their home and in their life.” 100 Referrals a Year Is Not a Fantasy—It’s a Formula Luke shares a roadmap that’s as strategic as it is heartfelt. With a 12-month follow-up plan built around providing value and emotional touchpoints, any agent can generate consistent referrals without ever sounding salesy. “The top agents don’t wait for referrals, they systematize them.” His advice? Commit to one marketing system for a full year before you judge its ROI. Persistence beats pivoting. Closing the Gap Between Who You Are and How You Sell As the episode wraps, Mattias reflects on Luke’s wisdom, emphasizing that successful agents today are the ones who live their values in business.

Luke’s strategies don’t just grow businesses—they build legacies. “You don’t need a new lead. You need to serve the ones you already have better.” This episode reminds us that the best real estate marketing isn’t about automation, it’s about authenticity. It’s not about looking the part—it’s about being the part. Final Thoughts from The REI Agent Luke Acree doesn’t just drop marketing hacks. He redefines what it means to serve in real estate. With his relentless commitment to authenticity, persistence, and real human connection, he proves that success isn’t reserved for the flashy or the fortunate—it’s available to anyone willing to show up and care deeply. “If you love people, you’ll win. And if you love them enough to stick around, they’ll love you back—with their referrals, their loyalty, and their trust.” Let this episode be your call to return to the heart of why you started in this business—and to move forward with fresh fire and strategy. Stay tuned for more inspiring stories on The REI Agent podcast, your go-to source for insights, inspiration, and strategies from top agents and investors who are living their best lives through real estate. For more content and episodes, visit reiagent.com. United States Real Estate Investor Create healing and connection within yourself, your family, and your community. Create healing and connection within yourself, your family, and your community. United States Real Estate Investor Contact Luke Acree ReminderMedia United States Real Estate Investor Mentioned References Start with Why by Simon Sinek The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill Atomic Habits by James Clear The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber Good to Great by Jim Collins The Psychology of Selling by Brian Tracy Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki Stay Paid Podcast (hosted by Luke Acree) United States Real Estate Investor Transcript Welcome to the REI Agent, a holistic approach to life through real estate. I'm Mattias, an agent and investor. And I'm Erica, a licensed therapist. Join us as we interview guests that also strive to live bold and fulfilled lives through business and real estate investing. Tune in every week for interviews with real estate agents and investors. Ready to level up? Let's do it. Welcome back to the REI Agent. I had the honor of interviewing Luke Acree today. I've been saying that wrong, even though I had a fun little way of saying that that helped me remember. Anyway, Luke is a really interesting person. He owns a marketing company that started off primarily using or servicing agents. He's not the only owner. He joined with his uncle, but he is very, very smart and driven and has many brothers as he gets into that now he owns is in a partnership with a real estate sales company, a property management company. They invest together, have over 200 doors. We started off the conversation really focusing in on marketing. And then we get into some of the investing and things like that as well. But marketing is such a great thing that if you can find the right vein, if you can find the right way of doing it, the way that you like, that fits with your brand, I think that's such a great thing to get off your plate. I think many people don't do marketing well. And it's one of those things that you can outsource that should be giving you an ROI and you should be tracking it. So I think it's one of those things that if you analyze what brings you the most money in your business, where you should be spending the most time, marketing is a powerful one. And maybe you're really good at it. I've interviewed a lot of people that are awesome at social media. And that's great, but there's a lot of people that aren't. And I think that that's a great thing to outsource. You know, that might be, I'm not sure if that would come before something like transaction coordinating or admin support, but it's definitely up there.

And it's just a great thing that you can find a good company to take it off your plate, to focus in on what you do best and know that this is gonna help you bring business in going forward so that you don't have to worry about the ups and downs as much. And hopefully, you'll have to worry about having enough time to support all the business it brings in. And maybe you gotta look at building a team to support all the business it brings in. But yeah, it was a great conversation. We could have had three probably episodes with him. We could have talked about three different topics, marketing, maybe just real estate sales tips in general. He's not a realtor, but he's worked with a lot and helps, he kind of owns, co-owns that firm with his brothers, property management, investing. I mean, there's so many different things we could have talked about. But yeah, it was a great conversation. So I'm gonna leave it at that because it's a longer episode, but it's well worth it. So stay tuned for the whole thing. Without further ado, it's Luke Acree. Welcome back to the REI Agent. I have the honor of having Luke Acree. Did I say it right? Yeah, you got it right, my man. Yes, my little trick worked. Luke, tell me a little bit about how you got into the real estate space and I guess more specifically, what kind of space you're in in the real estate game. Yeah, for sure. And first, thanks for having me. Love being here, love podcasting, have one myself. So excited to talk to you in the audience. And I got into real estate through marketing. So about 14 years ago, I joined up with a company called Reminder Media. It was a company that my uncle owned at the time. Was doing mainly print marketing. You might've heard of the concept of like customizing a personally branded magazine. We kind of are the creators of that space. So the small business arena doesn't have the ability usually to have their own magazine because it's too expensive. So I think a real estate agent wants to send a better home than gardens to their sphere. They don't have the funds to be able to create their own. So we create them a version and they're able to white label it. So make it look like it's their magazine. We send it to their database. It's been a home run for us. So we've worked with about 150,000 real estate agents over the years. It's been awesome. And then that led us into digital marketing because people want a digital version of their magazine. And how do you distribute that? Well, email, text, social media, magazines filled with content. What do you need for your Instagram, for your Facebook? You need content. So we got into social media content. And so now we kind of have this marketing platform that if you're looking to generate, acquire, nurture and retain your leads, which business is not, that is what we help people do. And we do it from paid advertising like Facebook and Google all the way to the magazine for referral generation. And then there's a bunch of things in between. I've been doing it for about 14 years. Love it. Very passionate about it. And so we even work with some investors because investors have relationships. I always tell people, who are your relationships and how are you keeping in touch with them? Because you wanna create your clients into raving fans. And the only way you do that is by doing the unexpected. So people nine times out of 10 usually do the expected, but there's that 1% of people that tend to do the unexpected and they get raving fans. And people rave about them and that's what we're in the business of doing is helping people create raving fans. Yeah, that's perfect. Yeah, and I mean, just kind of staying in touch is can be a challenge if you don't have a system in place. And in this space, I mean, things are changing constantly. I mean, Instagram's algorithms. Yeah, frustrating is what it is. It's different all the time. So I guess, tell me a little bit. I need my marketing. I need to step that up.

I'm looking to, I have a goal this year. I'm gonna sell over 50 homes and I've been slacking on my newsletter, been slacking on posting anything on social media. I've been just burnt out for a couple of years. I wanna come to you and I want you to take over. Is it an a la carte kind of service? Can I pick and choose which of these items I wanna use or what's that look like? Yeah, it's a great question. So it is a la carte in the sense of like, depending on your need, we're going to consult and help you based upon that. So maybe you're looking for geographic farming and you wanna be the dominant agent in a neighborhood or I know a lot of investors listen to this show, that's where it's geared towards. So maybe, like my brother and I do investing, we target absentee owners. So it's like my first phase is, okay, what's your end goal and who's your ideal target audience? Because you market to people based upon where they're at, not where you're at. It's a huge mistake businesses make is they tend to sell and preach and market based upon where they're at, not where the client is. So we gotta determine who your ideal target audience is. Nine times out of 10 for real estate agents, it usually is their sphere because their sphere is gonna bring them referrals and repeat business. And that's where I think it was NAR that said 65% of all listings came from referral and repeat business. So 2 3rds of listings are coming from referral and repeat. So that tends to be the ideal target audience. How do I get in front of my sphere? And then we will basically help you from a product standpoint, depending on what you wanna do. I believe in Omnichannel. So Omnichannel is just a fancy way to say, Facebook, email, mailbox. I want you to be everywhere. So I'm gonna set up a drip to where they're getting a piece of mail from you like the magazine every two months. They're getting an email from you either bi-weekly or monthly. I hope bi-weekly because the more the better. And then I'm gonna take all this content and post it out on your social media. Social's tricky, like you said, because the algorithms are always changing. And then the content that usually crushes it on social media is personal content. And so it's very hard to automate and curate personal content. In fact, it's impossible to usually do that. You have to be in the moment. And so we'll help you subsidize your social media. I usually recommend, hey, I could post three times a day, every day for 365 days a year for you. We have that much content that we're creating, but that won't give you a great social media strategy. What I would rather do is post for you two to three times a week. So you're consistent. Everybody feels you're active. And in the mind of a consumer, activity a lot of times makes people think productivity. So I want you to be seen as a productive agent by being active, but I still need you to do the personal stuff. You with your family, you out and about, doing what you love, your passions, your hobbies, because that's what will draw people in and attract kind of that tribe, as they say. And so that's kind of how it would look. You would come to us. You would say, hey, Luke, I'm doing a terrible job at keeping in touch with my database because I don't have time. So I want to provide you an automated system that does it for you. I want to provide you exclusive content that only you can send because only you can send the magazine and stuff like that. And then I want to obviously generate you an ROI because none of it matters without an ROI. So all of our content, we link out to landing pages. So the goal of that is, and you probably know this, but it's just to get a hand raiser. I want to provide an item of value. So a very popular one right now is home equity reports. What's your home worth? A free CMA, things like that. Like our last mailing we did for Acri Brothers, which is my brother and I, the real estate team that we have down in Lynchburg, Virginia.

We sent a, Lynchburg homes have gone up like 30K. I want to know what your home's gone up. We sent it to, I think it was 429 people in our sphere, got 33 scans on that QR code on the magazine. That then turns into phone call conversations and such to funnel them down. Does this service then go with or integrate with other CRMs? Is it kind of like its own CRM that you would have to check separately or how's that work? Yeah, great question. So it is its own, it's not its own CRM, but own content manager or contact manager, I should say. We are integrated now with followup boss and we are working to integrate with some of the bigger ones like a bold trail and Moxie and all them were in the works of trying to get in with all of them. But right now it's standalone where you can kind of do it and we integrate through, you can download and export things or text in email to you. Okay, and if somebody were to have their own funnel, for example, could that be integrated and you could link that to the QR code? Yeah, you can link out to your funnels. A lot of people will do that because they have maybe their landing pages or funnels through like ClickFunnels or Regal Geeks or something like that. So we have people do that. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I think that the key piece there that you're talking about, and I think it's one of the maybe one of ones that real estate agents miss often or just in general. I mean, like I think when people get a real estate license, they're not expecting to have to become an expert marketer on top of knowing how to sell real estate. And I think one of the things that I see a lot is people don't really put out content that in my opinion, others would care about. That are like you talked about, you got to think about what the consumer themselves want. And so getting something out there that is enticing, a value that either gives them good information that they might appreciate consuming, or like you're talking about, it's actually something that would give them, that would get them to take action to actually scan a QR code, to look into something deeper, to give out contact information if you probably have it, if they're marketing to them. But yeah, some sort of hand raising. And so I think that's the intentionality that I think a lot of people miss. And that's where your company can obviously help a lot. It's a big pain point of normally we tend to market for instant gratification, but anybody who's built a successful business realizes that it's a long-term game. It's about consistency. It's about relationship building. You usually can't build a relationship unless you're on one of those weird dating shows like Married at First Sight. You can't usually build one overnight. It takes time because the foundation of somebody working with you is that old slogan of no like and trust. So we've all heard it till we're blue in the face. And so what I'm trying to do is go, okay, how do you take these principles of getting known, getting liked and getting trusted? And how do you facilitate that from a marketing standpoint to help foster and move that along from a speed standpoint? And I have just found that you get trusted usually from a couple different things. One is through consistency. So you build trust by just being with people all the time. You tend to trust people you're familiar with because you just know them. You've watched them. You've seen them show up. You've seen them follow through on what they say or not follow through, which would be a breaking of trust. And so consistency has a big part of building trust. But another way of building trust is who do we trust? We tend to trust people we learn from. So we tend to trust people like teachers and pastors and coaches and mentors. And so your job in your whatever specialty is to be an educator because education drives trust. So people might not pay attention to what you say all the time, but if you're an investor, like how

do you educate the clients on what you want them to know based upon what you're going after? And how do you put out that content? Now, here's a problem. You can't just educate 100% of the time because it's boring, right? So the insurance salesman cannot educate you all day long on insurance. You'll just tune it out because you don't care about insurance until when? Until you have a need, until you have a pain point. So the trick is there's no magic formula to it. But I've always said like 50, 60% of your content that you're putting out to the world through email, through social, through print should be educational content, elevating your credibility as the subject matter expert. But then you have like 30% of your content should really be what I call is entertaining, like value driven. That is just about connecting. And if you think of the know, like and trust, known comes from just getting out there in front of people and through consistency. Liked is if you are a student of Tony Robbins, it's about rapport building, right? Likeability is usually off of, we have things in common, both shared values and shared interest. And so how do you showcase to people shared values and shared interest? And this is why like, you know, I've tried to think of an example for you guys. It's like I was homeschooled all the way to college. I grew up in a family of eight kids, homeschooled all the way to college. I was the third of eight. My dad's a pastor. I'm married right now to my high school sweetheart, Megan. We have two children, Evelyn and William. I go to church, I play on our praise team. So I'm mentioning all these things about me. So anybody listening to this right now that is a believer, was homeschooled, is married, has kids. Like if I said the sports team, like I'm actually a Washington Commanders fan. I know it's kind of, well, last season was a great season for us. So let's go hail Jaden Daniels. But the point is anybody who's a Washington Commanders fan is connected to me more, right? And the people who hate the Washington Commanders is now they don't like me as much, right? So it's those things that build subtle trust, like subtle likability. And you cannot have trust without this familiarity and you can't have familiarity without frequency. And so it's this idea in marketing, and sorry, talking long, but it's this idea of how do I help you, Mattias, be consistent and educate everybody that, hey, if they need help buying, selling, or investing in real estate, Mattias is the subject matter expert. He is so passionate about it. He obsesses over it. He knows it because he's lived it. He is the Sherpa. If you want to climb Mount Everest, he's done it 20 times, right? So how do I do that? That's 50, 60% of the content. Easy hack for everybody. Write down your FAQs, your frequently asked questions that you get all the time and what you do every day. That is your educational content. You're an expert in it and you just need to produce it and put it out there. But then I want to 30% of the time get you to post about you and your family, you at church, you at maybe at local events that are going on. And then you take it a step further. Gifting is a way to, you know, encourage likeability and getting to know people. The Ford acronym is the perfect acronym. Family, occupation, recreation, dreams. Like put out content on your family, your hobbies, your work, your dreams of what you're trying to do. You'll connect with people. And then build trust by, I call it education, but there's also three other ways you can build trust, which is testimonials. So what your clients say about you. So you can claim you're a great educator, but it's better if a client tells the world you're a great educator. Accolades, you can claim you're an educator, but it's better if a third party endorser says, Luke Acree has been on the Inc 5000 list with Reminder Media four years in a row. Fastest growing companies. So I can tell you I love marketing,

but it's a lot different when Entrepreneur Magazine or Founders Magazine or these places that you get featured. This is why PR is a thing. It's like, I've been on NBC. I've been on Fox. I've been up, right? It's an endorsement of the educator. And then the third way that a lot of people don't think about, which I guess you could say is the fourth way. So content, right? Education, then you have accolades, then you have testimonials. The fourth way is what I call partnerships. So like you have a trusted audience right now with the REI agent podcast. They don't know Luke Acree from anywhere. So I'm earning trust through you by association because they trust you because you've been educating them. They know you personally, all this stuff. They now will give me a window. They'll lower their guard and trust me a little bit because of the trust that you have. So I'm earning trust through association. So I always encourage, and this is huge in investing, like Tim Bushnell, an agent on our team, has two clients that feed him. I mean, they might feed him 30 real estate deals this year. They're investor clients. And he's earned a lot of trust, but he joined up with an investor group in Lynchburg, Virginia to build that. And so he earned trust by association in that group. And it's turned into a great lead source for his business. So it's like, that's a long ramble to say that is what you have to do in marketing in order to be successful. And we're gonna try to help automate that for you so you can spend time closing deals. No, that's really, really great. I mean, and you just also succeeded at educating and getting us to know a little bit more about you, building trust, et cetera. I have to say, I had this pet peeve and I don't think it's fully founded, but amongst all of what you just said, you did not say you were posting just sold pictures of your clients. Yeah. I'm not opposed to it. I just don't think you should do it all the time. That should be your only thing. Yeah, so, because I think about this all the time is just how different real estate marketing is or what most people do for real estate marketing compared to what other industries do. And I think that, like for example, you mentioned insurance. Nobody's out there wanting to watch a Geico commercial where they talk about how many successful policies they wrote. Who cares? I mean, sure, there is the element of they're big and all these other people trusted them and surely they're a good option for you. Yeah, it needs to be framed differently. Clients helped. We were able to help X number of families this year. Like here's how we do it at Acre Brothers. It's like last year we sold 269 homes. I shouldn't say that. I should say we did 269 transactions buy side, sell side. Right? But so 269. And so we're able to say thank you to our sphere for helping us serve 269 families this year. So it's a humble brag to a strategic way, right? And that's how I would encourage people because you're exactly right. You don't want the doctor posting number 10 of a successful surgery of removing this person's organ, right? That would be the weirdest post from the doctor. From the surgeon, but real estate agents do that. But it is a glaring example of if you feel awkward posting that it means you haven't done the other work necessary to be able to post the just sold, to be able to post the I just helped Susan and John because you haven't built relationship and it's all just about marketing. Everybody sees through that and goes, that's just, you don't really care about Susan and John. You're just bragging because you haven't been consistent in actually doing it all day long. And you can know things head knowledge-wise and not do them yourself heart knowledge-wise. I've been guilty of it myself. It's where it's like, I constantly am posting stuff about all the successes, wins, things like that. But I haven't been posting the failures. I haven't been posting the content that's relatable and that's about relationship. And that's where we fall down.

Yeah, no, and to your point, there is a place. Like it's not like, I just, I think that's where it's the low hanging fruit that I think a lot of people will take on and the only thing they share. And yeah, it does just feel like it's bragging. And again, it doesn't really focus on what your client actually or what your target audience actually cares about or is interested in. So yeah, it's super fascinating. Doing it over the years too, I would tell people because I talk a lot about obviously what you should send and do, but I've actually found over 14 years of doing this now with a bunch of people is the biggest problem in the industry is they don't curate and cultivate their list. Like they have no idea who's on their list right now. They have a list that is not well-maintained, that they are not weeding. Like they're not pruning and taking care of the garden. Like they are not doing the work and it's like your marketing is only as good as your list. And everybody who's done email marketing knows that for a fact. And there is so little time. I actually had to build a team out of 17 people that you know what they do all day long. This is their only job. You guys could save me so much money if you get this. They just call real estate agents and business owners to help them put their list together and stay on top of them to get their photo into us. It's literally a team of 17 people, 17 paid people that get commissioned when they get Mattias to actually get his list to us. And you would think that would be the thing a business owner has at the tip of their finger because it's their most valuable asset. But this is why like one of my mentors, Alan Dalton, he was the past CEO of Realtor.com. He says, Luke, the biggest problem is you have an industry calling people past clients. And he goes, what are you, a past agent? He goes, you're not a past agent, you're a past client. The reason why real estate agents can't retire and can't sell their practice, but financial advisors can, doctors can, lawyers can, they can all sell to PE firms, to other competitors, strategic partners. Real estate agents can't, why? Because real estate agents do not maintain and cultivate their client list and they treat people as transactions. And even though they don't say it, they have the head knowledge, they know, oh, no, no, it's relationships. Oh, no, no, no, they're not past clients, but they don't act fundamentally that way. And so they have no value in their book of business that people can buy. And if you go talk to all top producers, they do do that. And that's why they're top producers. Yeah, yeah. I mean, so you mentioned Ford earlier. That's definitely mentioned in the Ninja Selling book. And I think it's a really great- Yeah, I love that book. That's a great resource. And I think what you're talking about is exactly the mentality that I like to say I do. I'm not perfect, I don't always. But just, yeah, building up long-term relationships. We want those clients to refer us. We want to new people, to their friends, their family. We want them to come right back to you as soon as they have any questions about even thinking about selling or anything, just getting their house painted, what's the best colors these days, et cetera. You want to be that person that is on top of their mind. And they felt like they had a great experience, they could trust you, all those stuff. And yeah, what you're saying is basically you should have established that in the process of selling the house, but you need to maintain that as well. You need to kind of stay top of mind and do so by producing content that is hopefully valuable, not just, hey, look at me. Well, I'll give you a perfect example. One of my clients, and also I would call him a mentor now, I've learned so much from him. I've had him on our podcast, Sean Carpenter. He is a real estate agent, he was a coach and trainer, still is a speaker, he speaks all over. But he sent me a video

chat the other day on April 9th on my son William's birthday, saying, Luke, calling in, I think he was at Nebraska. I think he was speaking to Nebraska's National Association or something like that, I can't remember, they're realtors. But he goes, hey, Luke, just wanted to wish William a happy birthday. I mean, it's one thing to send me a video message on my birthday, he's doing it on my son's birthday. Like that's how good, this guy's like a freaking ninja as you referenced the book, right, using that language. He is a ninja because he lives it. Like every day he writes, I think it's four or five handwritten notes to clients. He engages with like 20 people or so on social. Like the guy's a freaking assassin, doesn't even have to work for his referrals. He's doing mostly speaking and training these days, but he's still selling real estate because it just comes to him. And that's an example of doesn't cost him anything but his time. And who do I talk of on an REI podcast? I talk of Sean Carpenter, right? I think of Misty, Medicare Misty in the Medicare space, right, absolute beast. When William was born, sent me a little onesie, my dad owns a magazine and like she sent me that and I still remember that. And you just go, it's those little things that like that's all you have to do. I call it like a five for five, take five minutes every single day, pick five people in your database and just text them. Text them or DM them on social, it will help you with the algorithm because they'll engage, you'll engage and it will boost you. But like just personally reach out to them, say, hey, Mattias, thinking about you today, brother. Thanks for having me on REI. I can't believe it's been six months since I was on the show. Hope it's been going well. And then Easter just happened, hope you had a great Easter and boom, that's it. And now who's on Mattias's mind? Luke Acree. And now when that email comes through for my drip, I elevated the email. Now I stand out in the inbox because you remember the text message. The personal human interaction elevates all passive marketing. So the billboard stands out when you have gotten a phone call from the person on the billboard. Never forget that in marketing. You can market the crap out of people, which I do, but you've got to elevate your marketing by building a real relationship. This is why influencer marketing is all the rage because an influencer puts a face, a personal relationship to a brand. And that's why it's all the rage because people connect with people. Yeah. I mean, mic drop. That's brilliant. It's perfect. It's exactly right. And yeah, people haven't ever done this. If they haven't actually ever sat down and written postcards or sorry, letters every day, or systematically went through, I mean, you can go through your contact list and divide them out by, you could do met, not met. You could do A, B, C, D. You can do all sorts of different things to kind of organize your contacts. And what I like to do is A, B, C, D. A's would be people that would be kind of my promoters, the people that would either be repeat buyers or be like singing my praises at the top of the mountaintop and be sending me referrals all the time, et cetera. And those people probably deserve like a lunch or something every year. And to keep track of that kind of thing, you'll be amazed how just nurturing those relationships. And usually these are people you like too, right? So it's not, it's actually kind of fun to do this. And it's kind of an intentional practice that it becomes like a thing you enjoy when you get into it. But yeah, that is so much better as time spent than in my opinion, paying for leads, which I just, I would rather have, hey, my buddy- The data backs you up too. And we do lead for people, but I can speak to that. The data backs you up. You're spot on. That is a way better use of your time. And if you know, like would you rather be answering 16 calls a day and hoping that one

out of a hundred might answer or meet with you? Or would you rather be spending time talking to people you have a relationship with already? And then, you know, you get a call that says, hey, you know, my sister is moving into town and she needs a house. Can you help her? Yeah, spot on. And you're not like begging to get their attention and to please don't hang up on me, please. It's exhausting. My philosophy on that, cause we do for context for everybody listening. So we do Facebook advertising, Instagram, doing some Google. So lead gen is that side. Postcards is also what I would consider a form of lead gen. It's about a 2% conversion over 12 months, two to 4%. And then you have referrals. I am such an advocate of your first and most important pillar for leads is your sphere. And you only should move to the next pillar when you have an excess of money coming in or time on your hands. So where most people, this is where I think people fall down. It's not that you should not do lead generation. You 100% should go after and do leads only if you have an excess of money coming in from your referral business that you want to invest back into your business and you can't invest it back into that referral same pot that's going to generate more referrals or you have an excess of time and where most people find themselves as an excess of time. What do I mean by that? Well, when you come in today at 8 a.m., hopefully you guys started at least by 8 a.m., right? You came in at eight, you make your follow-up texts, your follow-up calls, you're going to run out of friends to call, sphere to call. There's not that many if you're doing it every single day unless you are just like extremely popular. So guess what you find yourself with? Time. And what are you going to do with that time? Most people are unproductive and the phone is too heavy to pick up at that point and call cold people to go out and door knock and actually door knock people. So they tell themselves that's a waste of time and it's not good conversion. It's like, absolutely. I would much rather do a referral, but I don't got no more sphere to call coming in. I need to go do this. And that's our philosophy at Acre Brothers is 51% of our 269 last year came from referrals. But then we have pillars of, we have geo-farming going on, we have Facebook advertising going on, we have some investing clients things going on. And so we use the excess of time to pick up the phone and make an hour of phone calls every day to that circle prospecting list. And that's what I would encourage the audience listening is 100% focus all your effort onto relationships. When you find you have some time, don't make an excuse for yourself and work on something that doesn't matter. Actually get prospecting and pick up the phone and call some absentee owners, call a circle prospecting list, right? And do that. Cause you can do a lot with sweat equity without even spending check equity on leads. So anyways, that's my philosophy on it. No, I agree with you completely. And actually this is one of the things that I have thought about AI being really helpful with. So having a AI chat bot that isn't trying to pretend to be me, and you can do it as a caller to AI, like voice caller, where they are responding to a lead on the internet, for example, and basically just trying to vet and set up an appointment with that person. So they click on something. I think every time I've had like a lead thing kind of coming to me, half the time I feel like people or more than half the time, I feel like people kind of clicked on something curious about what their house was worth or whatever. And then all of a sudden they like are getting bombarded by a bunch of agents calling them. Like I didn't really sign up for this. And it's just a painful process. And I- It is, yep. So, but let's say like instead, you have a chat bot, you have an AI voice caller, you have AI saying, hey, I'm Mattias's AI assistant that

is wanting to see if you have any questions to start and then have like, is there a good time for you to meet, depending on how you set it up exactly. And basically getting them on the calendar, going through all that process to begin with is likely gonna mean they're gonna show up and actually have some serious interest. And so if you can get a hundred people screened down to one through not having to call. I agree. I am much more into that, just from my personal philosophy. Yeah, we're testing that right now with our Facebook lead program. We've launched a bot where the bot basically does exactly what you're talking about. Hey, got your request for the list of homes. Just wanted to narrow down. Are you looking for new construction or, you know, and that type of texting, we've had some decent success with it. It is confirming. What it does for you right away is anybody who responds, you know, is a real person that's actually interested. And so that's working. I think you're spot on that. These AI bots are a great, these chat bots are a great way to funnel. Facebook leads, which are usually majority top of funnel, which means they're not actually ready to buy. Zillow leads tend to be way more bottom of funnel, which is why they're so expensive and everybody wants them. Because, you know, it's someone actively looking to go see a property a lot of times, not all the time, but a lot of times. But, you know, Facebook leads, they're probably top of funnel. Google leads are top of funnel to middle of funnel because it's at least intent-based versus an interrupt, right, they're actually searching for something. But these chat bots are a great way to take it from top of funnel to interest, middle of funnel. Well, and my thought with it all is that, you know, why not take, why not add to your marketing plan of a house that you're listing, saying that you're going to be giving, putting out Facebook ads for it. And then with that, you know, try to funnel in some extra business that way. That could be targeting new buyers, et cetera. And just, you know, you're doing, you're kind of getting a win-win there. You're marketing your client's property better and you have another metric to go off of. You can say how many clicks it got, all that kind of stuff. But then on top of that, you're then also potentially getting new business from it and you're not having to deal with as much of the headache. Yeah, that's well said. Yeah, it's well said. Yeah, no, this is fun. I have been, so I'm forming a team. And so, you know, looking at increasing my, what I do as, you know, kind of the director of marketing as part of it, for sure. And so thoughts about, you know, really just taking advantage of each listing as an opportunity to gain other listings and other buyers. I think, you know, one interesting thing I've heard is I'm actually taking a under contract postcard and sending it to the neighborhood. So, you know, you can see like, you know, just listed, just sold, but you could also be a buyer where you're in a neighborhood and you say under contract and you kind of allude that, you know, they might be able to find out what the price was under contract for, but it would be more targeted towards like, what would your house sell for? That kind of thing. And you can potentially get some more activity. And like you said, I think this is all, you know, if you're doing this at different levels, let's say you're, you know, Facebook marketing, you're doing a postcard. If you're getting out there in different ways, you can really be becoming more familiar, becoming not quite the met phase, but you're becoming more trusted. You're like, okay, this person is like marketing this place. Like I would see how, you know, I would wanna use them to list my house. And yeah, it's, there's a lot of opportunity. I think a lot of times we are too bogged down with the actual getting the house sold process to really take advantage of what an opportunity is.

You know, each time you get a house under contract, each time you list a house to try to gain more business. Yeah, cause your next deal should always come from your current deal a lot of times. It's like your next listing is there. It's within the listing you have, even the buyer you have. I know with like our team, you know, when we have a listing, especially for the good ones, right, you're gonna throw the open house. And one of the things we do is door knock, right? The closest in the neighborhood. And we go there strategically to ask the neighbors what they love about the neighborhood. Cause we can use that in our material to basically go, you know, here's what the neighbors love about this neighborhood. And you get a lot of insight, but at the same time, so it's a non-salesy door knock that has a sales value added, which is, hey, would you like to know what your home's worth based upon this home selling? Would you like an update on the price? I'd love to keep in touch with you there, collecting email addresses. And then, so it gives you a bunch of different avenues. One, to meet the neighbors, to hear what they say, to help you market the current listing. And it's a strategic way to get to know them. So that's one thing that's been working for us. And then this idea of, which is kind of crazy, circle prospecting is working right now. And my theory on this, cause it's not just Acre Brothers, but across the nation, I'm hearing this from people. I'm actually gonna interview a guy out of Michigan soon that is doing a very similar thing to what we're doing and having the same success, calling on these neighborhoods, right? And you're picking the neighborhood based upon some activity that has happened. You know the neighborhood, a listing has come up or something like that. But I think it's working because inventory in most markets is still sparse and prices are high. And 70% or so of the US is sitting on a 4% or less interest rate. And so they want to move. I have employees that want to move, but there's just no way they're gonna move without prodding, without someone literally making them feel like, I guess it's meant to be, I'm supposed to move. So there's a lot of this pent up demand. I just interviewed the co-CEOs of Next Home. So they have one of the largest, fastest growing real estate brands right now. I think it's like 600 offices plus. And they were saying, Keith, who's like their numbers guy, was saying he believes when rates hit like 6%, that there's going to be a ton of buyers that come onto the market. And I think we are almost discovering those people sooner by circle prospecting. But the problem with circle prospecting is the sweat equity. 12,000 calls to 3,000 unique people for 12 deals so far this year. Ton in the pipeline, but 12 deals so far. Closed already this year from that. And it's like, but it's a lot. Who's going to want to make 12,000 calls to 3,000 unique people? Spread out, guys, though, over four months is really not that much, but it's still that. It's that level of intensity. And the added benefit though, and Steven, you know, my brother, can speak to extremely well, is you get a lot of people who will sell their listing off-market. And they don't want to go to market, but they'll sign a listing agreement with you for off-market deal. And so we have a, I forget what Cody said, he's the director of Ops. I think he said it was like 18, maybe a little bit more of off-market listings right now that we can share with our buyers that come into the open houses that, hey, look, you know where you find deals is before they come to market. We have a list of 18 plus homes already, let alone through our whole network that we can connect you to. And it helps you solidify that person that comes into your open house. So that's just a couple like strategies that are working right now for us, I hope helps. Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah, that's great. We had talked a little bit about how a lot of

agents don't invest in real estate themselves and how it can be a really good retirement plan, but there's just a really, we talked about this a bit off air, but just how it's a good retirement plan. I mean, honestly, we're just put in front of opportunities as well. So there's that, but how, it just makes a lot of sense as an agent for many reasons to invest in real estate. You also mentioned to me off air that you invest with your brother as well. You want to talk a little bit about that? So I've been investing now for, I guess it's been like five years. So we've learned a lot. We're up to about 200 properties, mainly, say what? So you've been aggressive. That's a fast growth, that's awesome. Yeah, so we obviously got into it because we love real estate. Steven knows the Lynchburg market really well. And so I always wanted to be in it. So him and I, and then our other brother, Mark, joined up and we just actually got my uncle to get in too. So we're starting to syndicate a little bit, but so smaller portfolio, I guess it just depends who you're talking to, but so we mainly what I would call single family, some duplexes, triplexes. We just started in recent year and a half, two years, started to buy some 12 unit, seven unit deals. I think our biggest deal has been 24 units, I want to say that we got. We've bid, like I told you off here, we've bid on some big ones. We just can't get them because capital's too rich. And people will take a cap rate that we won't take or they'll take a return that we don't want to take. We want to beat the stock market where they're willing to take just 6% because they're looking for a place to hold their money. So there's a lot of these funds and stuff like that out there. I'll tell you, we got up, we did a lot of flipping too. So this year we'll probably flip 15 to 20 homes, but at one point we had 13 flips going on at one time and that was a lesson of disaster is what that was. It's like, man, to manage the subs, the contractors, to keep that, ugh. I mean, Luke, you must be a master of systems because that's a lot. It was crazy. I mean, right now, even right now we have, I think like five jobs going on, but some of those are holds versus flips. But yeah, it's a pain. And I give all credit to my brother, Mark. He's the one who's managing the day-to-day of that. So he's kind of our, luckily I came from a family of eight kids, like I mentioned. So there's a lot of brothers, six boys, two girls. My brother, we just started our own property management company, 127 Rentals. So it's just early, like last four months. We got my brother, Josh came out of the military and he's going to run that. And so, you know. With 200 units of your own, I mean, it makes sense. Yeah, we need to get, we were saying we need to get like a hundred more units for it to really make sense. And that might be just our math of where we want to be. But we said, so we're, we just started managing a couple other people's properties. Here's a pain point that I think will be, you know, relevant to the audience is my brothers, Josh and Mark are operators. Stephen and I are visionaries. So not that they don't, that sounds bad when you say it out loud. Mark and Josh have a lot of vision, right? But they're more operators. They care way more about the, dotting the I's, crossing the T's, being prepared. Where Stephen and I are like, ah, we'll figure it out. You know, just, you know, buy it, do it. And so it's like, it's a real struggle of, you know, hey, what do you do first? Do you get the operations together or do you buy the, or like in this scenario, do you take on other clients before you have it fully operated out? And my experience has taught me, you learn the most through application. And so you can prepare and you should use wisdom, but most people wait too long. And I would encourage people that you will have pain no matter what. Just step into it because there's this thing in software development that I think translates really well, which is kind of MVP.

So it's called minimal viable product. And if you wait for the perfect product to bring to market for software, you're too late. You need to bring the minimally viable product to get feedback from the market. And the market then tells you where to invest your time and energy. And that's, I think, true for your real estate investing, for property management. It's like, go to market with a minimally viable product. I can find candidates or people to tax, applicants to go in and I can lease the property and I can collect the paychecks and I can evict them out. And then from there, let the market tell you, wow, I'm not getting enough applicants. I need to focus my time, energy, and money on marketing. Oh, we're getting too many maintenance calls. I need to focus my time, energy, and money into the maintenance aspect of the business. Like let the market dictate how you iterate versus trying to think of it all. And this has been a healthy debate within our own organization that I think can help and translate to people. So Josh, Mark, if you're listening to this, man, we just need to go, baby. I mean, that's also such a beautiful combination though. It's like, I think that's, in the team building that I've been doing, we actually had Rosie Noel on the podcast a while back. My wife and I did the CliftonStrengths Finders examination or whatever it's called. And we did it separately and we didn't know each other's results. We waited until she was able to do how we work well together on air live, which was a lot of fun. But it was also really powerful and really true. And it went through our different strengths and vision was the futuristic was the way they worded it, was one of my top strengths as well. And anyway, so in building the team, we've had everybody that's joined on also do this Strengths Finder. And a really cool thing too is you can take the results of that and you can make a custom GPT where you're going to be a perfect, whatever it's called, like a business consultant based on strengths and all that kind of stuff. And then you can just kind of ask it questions while they have the data uploaded of these people and how they best fit. And so we're kind of trying to form the whole company based on that. And so it's $50 to do this exam. What is it called? Clifton Strengths Finder. Okay, I'm going to take note of this. That sounds phenomenal. I use something called the predictive index, which is like the PI. It's kind of like the disc, but you can take it pretty fast. But yeah, okay, I'm going to write this down because that's pretty awesome. It's a really cool, I'm blanking on the word, it's not an exam, but like, so basically it will, it gives you 20 seconds to answer each question and how fast you answered will actually impact your overall score as well. So there might be some things that you answer immediately because you know right away. And she knows, Rosie knows this because she actually took people, or she had somebody take it in English and Spanish was her native language. And they were like kind of like slow to answer a lot of stuff and they were listed as very undecisive basically. I mean, they focused on strengths, not like weaknesses. So like decisiveness was low. But then when she retook it in Spanish, she had a completely different result. But anyway, so it's a really cool thing. And I think it's a really fundamental way of trying to understand where people are coming from. And you can then also communicate to them knowing where, how they're probably seeing things, versus how you're probably seeing things. And you can kind of make jokes about, oh, that's Mattias living in the clouds again, or whatever. That's so true. Cause I was telling Steve and my brother that, hey man, you're trying to motivate, Josh and Steve and, or sorry, Josh and Mark by motivating them towards the vision. And all that is saying to them as operators is more work, more problems, more you don't understand the reality. You

need to speak towards the day to day and go, hey, where are we at today on this one task? Cause that is more where they live, not because it's right or wrong. We need them to do that because we're not doing that part, you know? And so it's, that's such good advice. I wrote that down. I think I'm going to get everybody to take it. The four brothers to take the CliftonStrengths. It's been super interesting and well worth it to me. Cause there's 32 different strengths and then there's four different categories of each strength. So you can see like strategic is like a bigger category, relationship oriented. And there's just, it's also like you use, if you're high strategic, but not good at a different area, you might have a strategy to compensate for that weakness. And again, we're not really focusing on weakness, but it's just a really interesting way of kind of being intentional about setting things up. And I've enjoyed it immensely so far and hope to kind of continue to build it and see where, you know, what's needed on the team. Like, what do we need to fill in the gaps that aren't there? And, you know, I think we are a very relationship oriented team so far, which is great. And I think that's going to be good, but we probably need some doers, some executors as well. Don't, don't undervalue the doers. Exactly, which is not, you know, like you need both. Cause like sometimes if you only have executors, if you only have executors, they're probably not going to give a crap about how the people are feeling. And then there's just going to be this ongoing tension that just like, that builds up. And so you kind of need that. It's like everything in life is a push and a pull. It's such a give and take. And also you have the effect of seasons as well. So there's different seasons that come in and one skillset is better than the other. Yeah. And it's not because it's more valuable. It's just in this moment and in this season it is. I know as we've grown the company, Reminder Media, you know, growth is not a straight line. It's more like the staircase, right? You grow and then you flatline cause new problems arise. And the craziest thing to me has been that the thing that helped us overcome that one hump back at like 10 million is the actual strength that is killing us at, you know, 60 something million right now. And it's just like, you're like, wow, what I valued back then, even though it's still just as valuable, it's an amazing thing, is actually killing us at this stage cause it's a different season. And so this is where comparison really kills entrepreneurs because we're comparing ourselves to the Alex Ramoses or the, you know, you name it, like whoever your choice of person is. And you're not realizing that, hey man, advice is so nuanced. And that is why it is so critical to get mentors who are doing what you are doing or have done what you are doing little bit further ahead of you than, you know, and so they can speak to it. Cause sometimes like it's hard to speak back to the earlier stages because, you know, that hasn't been my most recent memory. So, you know, memory a lot of times is false. I don't know if you've read that same stuff. It's like a lot of times what you remember is actually not true. A lot of it's a lie. You just made it up in your brain. So it's like, you want that mentor that has the life you want, but it's not too far ahead of you. It's like just a little ways ahead of you cause they can remember the nuance of what it takes at that stage of the game. No, that's really well said. I agree completely. But the point of it all is keep growing, keep learning about yourself and don't forget that you probably want to retire one day. So you might want a business you can sell and probably- If there's a deal, the money will show up. Realtors tell themselves the lie all the time. I don't have money for it. Oh man, if you find the deal, the money will show up. You know how many people want to invest

in real estate? You just got to do your part, which is build relationships, get out to the investor forums. You'll find other investors that will help get in on that deal with you. And maybe you have to keep a smaller part of the pie to begin with. But Hey man, you know, at least you're in the right room, right? I think it was Grant Cardone who said, if you can't afford a ticket, serve, right? Be the janitor, carry the water, right? At least you're in the right room at that point. I love it. And to your point, you know, like we talked about off air, I'm actually in a syndication in Lynchburg. Yeah, that's so funny. That's so great. Wouldn't it be hilarious if you were in the syndication that Tim Bushnell, the agent on our team, is that he's in like a couple of investor groups there. That would be so funny. Yeah, that would be amazing. I don't think these operators are actually based out of Lynchburg. Okay, so probably not then, yeah. But anyway, it's, you know, to your point, like, you know, if you're just kind of making moves, like so they found the deal and I'm happy to pay into it because it gives me an amazing benefit. And the beauty about that on top of it is I have no headache to worry about really. I mean, I had to do analysis to try to figure out if the deal was right. And, you know, I have luckily really good friends with one of the operators. So I, you know, trusted that it was a good deal. You know, as a real estate professional, the first year that we got a K-1, actually we were, we like had just invested in like November or December, and then we got a K-1 for $66,000 to write off the taxes because of the bonus depreciation because of, you know. Man, that's sick. And we invested 50. And you can claim it all because you're a real estate professional. Well, I'm not a tax accountant, so don't take my advice, but I'm not a real estate professional because I do marketing, reminder media, where my brother is. So I don't get all the benefits. Only my K-1 can only go towards my real estate income. So I have enough real estate income now that, you know, the depreciation and the, you know, cost segregations and stuff like that helps a ton, but I don't get the full benefit on all my income. Right. And so it's like, yeah, if you're a real estate professional, man, how can you not be investing in real estate? Good gosh. Cost segregation, you could pay zero taxes. Imagine that, people. Yeah, so first year, invested $50,000 first year, which only was really a month of owning it. $66,000 written off the taxes. Second year, 23. So we're almost doubled the amount we invested in tax write-offs. And that's at the same time getting almost an 11% return on investment. Mattias, man, hit me up. I'm local to you. Kindly hit me up on those deals, bro. Don't be selfish, man. Don't be selfish. I do think this one was a little bit better than a better performer than others have. Every year is going to be a little bit different. They might not have as much to write off. I mean, I'm expecting the depreciation to not be as high the next coming years, but at this point, you know. It doesn't matter, man. You're up. I mean, it doesn't matter at this point. It's all gravy at that point. Yep, and then, you know, once they do a cash out refinance, get your money back and still have a 1% ownership in the deal is what I think my stake will be. So much less at that point, but again. What I love about real estate is we've never lost on a deal in terms of buying a, like a lemon, like buying like something where it's like, oh, wow, we totally screwed up here. But we have lost on two properties in terms of time. Like one actually very recently in this past couple months where the time it's taken us to flip the property and the foundation problem and the septic that came back, put it to where we're still going to make money, but instead of making the 30 grand on the flip, right? You're going to make four grand. And if you calculate your time, you lost money. So we have lost money on two deals specifically.

And what's interesting about both of them, both of them, we had what I call is biased because we lived in the areas that we bought the property. One was on the same street that Steven and Mark lived on. So they had a bias that they didn't realize. And we didn't learn, I guess, from the first one because we made this. Now, granted, we got a little screwed because we had some homeless people come and strip out all the wiring after we had just put it in. So that really hurt us. But yeah, I'm saying that to the audience knows, yeah, you will lose on something we've lost. Hopefully not, not everybody does. Some people are smarter than us, but if you want to go with speed, you're probably going to lose. So trying to build this up over the last five years, we've been trying to move fast. And so there's mistakes with speed. So you can go more conservative, but I love real estate because it is math. Like it is the numbers. Like if you just do the numbers on paper and then do worst case scenario and always go worse than you think, like worst case scenario. And if you still make money then, then you're probably safe. And you don't have to, I'm not, I mean, I went to community college for two years and that's not a knock on community college. It's just like, I'm not the best student. You know, and stuff like that. But- I think entrepreneurs often aren't. Yeah. Yeah. But it's just in the doing, it's in the doing. Yeah. And because, yeah, to that point. And I think it's because you see your real results. It's a lot more tangible than, you know, somebody assigning you some work that doesn't really seem like it matters. But not to digress, I would agree with you completely. And I think that also some people are fearful when they first get into like something like flipping because they think it's like almost a zero sum game. I'm investing $200,000, I can lose it all. And it's rarely the case. I mean, certainly you can lose money. Certainly there can be huge headaches and problems and it can take a lot longer than you expect. But normally on your losses, they probably weren't huge. And especially since you're at such a big scale, you're doing so many that you probably, you know, overall we're still way ahead. Because you can- And I mean, the biggest mistake we've probably made, honestly, was not getting solid accounting. And you would think with my background with ReminderMedia, we have a VP of finance, all that stuff. I would have paid for that upfront and done that. We didn't do that. We tried to use QuickBooks. We still use QuickBooks today, but tried to learn from these YouTube videos of how to set up classes and all this stuff within QuickBooks to account for the properties. And that has been a nightmare. Really only over the last year have we gotten it to where, you know, you can actually see everything really well. So I would really encourage people if you're getting in, spend the money or do the time on the accounting because it does hurt you in the end. Because it's just so hard. Like, you know at the big picture you're winning, but you want to know at the detail level because the money's in the details. And so that's another mistake we have made on the investing side that I said no to my brother, which I shouldn't have. I told him, I don't know, two, three years ago, he said, we need to hire an accountant. I was like, we don't need to hire an accountant. Are you crazy? We can't afford an accountant, you know, for this business. And I should have said yes right then instead of no, because I was thinking selfishly and thinking I'm going to do the work and figure it out. You got to know when you're not going to do the work. Yeah. You know what I mean? And that, admitting that is a prideful, you gotta be humility. I didn't have humility, obviously, because I should have said, yeah, you're right. We need to pay the money and take less for ourselves and give it because you can tell yourself all day, Luke, you're going

to get in there and figure it out, but you're not going to take the time to do it because you have your other job, family, all this stuff. And if you're not going to do it, you got to pay for it some way. And we're paying for it in lessons learned versus the money out of the door then, so. Yeah, and I think that's kind of where you can, you know, take the concepts of like 10X is better than 2X to heart, where if you think, you know, you're really going to build this to a point where you're not going to have time. Like, I think it is good to have a certain level of understanding so you can kind of check all that stuff. Oh, that's a great point, yeah. But, like, you know, you're not going to have time to do this because you're going to scale to the point where it's, you know, and then you just go ahead and make that higher and free up your time to focus on maybe acquiring more. Well, to tie it full circle goes back to what I was saying with the marketing for real estate agents, for any business, they don't spend the time with their list. Yeah. Right, because the list is the mundane. The list is the boring thing. The list is, I have to reach out to Mattias and get him to give me his address, right? That like, it's all that boring stuff. Accounting is very similar, setting up the classes, documenting the receipts, like all that stuff. It's like, and I should have taken my own medicine. Yeah, it's been painful, man. That's probably been the worst part about the whole business. The bookkeeping of flips is a nightmare, especially if you get into partnerships and stuff too. It's, yeah, it is really hard, but worth it at the end. So don't let that discourage you. Luke, we are, actually, probably, we could probably talk for another two hours, but. Yeah, this is like the Joe Rogan podcast, man. You want a cigar? Yeah, seriously, some bourbon, something like that, no. No, but I did want to ask if you have any golden nuggets that you want to share with our listeners. And I would just encourage you, I mean, you can see probably in the sign behind me, it's kind of my slogan, the difference between mediocre producers and top producers in every industry is top producers take action. So maybe you heard something today that triggered something for you that you know you need to do in your business. For the love of God, please act on it, and don't wait, go do it. That is truly the difference, the separator. I've been interviewing top producers on our show, Stay Paid, for eight years, and they are definitely not the smartest, and that's not a knock on them. It is not a planned thing. It's like some of them have great plans, some of them don't, but every single one of them act relentlessly. Like, they just take action, and I just would encourage you, whatever you're thinking about, that is what it is, and go act upon it. And the freedom that gives you is just immense. Like, the endorphins that come from completing the thing that you know you need it to do, that you've put off doing, is a powerful drug, but it is hard to do that, so go do it. That is such a good life hack, too, is whenever you are not feeling 100% in a day, to knock off something that's been annoying, that's nagging the back of your head. I cleaned the garage yesterday on Easter Sunday. You are a psychopath. No, it felt amazing. What about, let's ask about books now. Do you have any books that you think are fundamental for everybody to read, or just ones that you're currently enjoying? Yeah, the most important book to read, in my opinion, take it or leave it, is the Bible. If you want to apply it in life, right, and maybe you're not a religious person, or not to make it religious, right, just go read the book of Proverbs if you want to get immense wisdom with business, personal development, dealing with people. Book of Proverbs is a super easy read. It's one of the books of the Bible, but go read the book of Proverbs. It will change your life in business. I truly believe that.

Okay, cool. You know, I don't know if anybody's actually just left it at that, at the Bible. I think there might have been a couple that have mentioned it, but yeah, cool. Yeah, I believe it's the best business. One of my mentors built a big architecture and engineering firm. He's passed away recently, but he's an incredible man, and he built his whole business off of Proverbs 31 core values, and it's actually, Proverbs 31 is about a godly woman, but it applies so well to business as well, but he built his whole successful business, multi-million dollar company off of it, and it's pretty incredible. Cool, and then where can people find you? Is it social media, a website for your marketing company, et cetera? So I would love to connect with everybody on social, of course, so Instagram's probably where I'm the most active. It'd be @LukeAcree, so L-U-K-E is Luke, and then Acree is A-C-R-E-E, and then if you are interested in marketing, Reminder Media is the company, so you can Google Reminder Media or just go to remindermedia.com, and we will come up there. Luke, thanks so much for being on the podcast. This has been great. Yeah, thank you. I've enjoyed it. Thanks for listening to the REI Agent. If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe to catch new shows every week. Visit REIAgent.com for more content. Until next time, keep building the life you want. All content in this show is not investment advice or mental health therapy. It is intended for entertainment purposes only.

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