Episode #44 – What Greg Dickerson Learned About Investing From Running 12 Businesses

You're listening to the REI Marketing Nerds podcast, the leading resource for real estate investors who want to dominate their market online. Dan Barrett is the founder of AdWords Nerds, a high tech digital agency focusing exclusively on helping real estate investors like you get more leads and deals online, outsmart your competition and live a freer, more awesome life. And now, your host, Dan Barrett. 

Dan: Alright, hello everybody and welcome to this week's REI Marketing Nerds podcast. As always this is Daniel Barrett here from AdWordsNerds.com. How are you wonderful people? I hope you are well. This week I have a really fascinating interview with Greg Dickerson. [0:01:01.9]
Now if you don't know Greg. He's over at GregDickerson.com. He is a real estate developer and investor and coach. He's investing all over the Southeast U.S.; North Carolina, North Virginia, the D.C. area. He started over 12 businesses in his life and he works with investors all the way from the very beginning to people doing hundreds of deals a year. The thing I love about this interview and the thing that I really like about Greg is that he has a very rational and methodical approach to business. He can come into a business, see where the problems are, strip away all the sort of ridiculousness and get down to brass tacks, and just make progress through this certain methodology that he has. It's really fascinating and he brings a really, really, really unique take to real estate investing and to business in general so without further ado, let's get into my interview with Greg Dickerson from GregDickerson.com. Alright, I'm here with Greg Dickerson. Greg, how are you man? [0:02:06.8]

Greg: I'm doing good, Dan. How are you today?

Dan: I'm doing pretty well. I hurt my hip the other day so my hip is a little sore, which makes me feel 500 years old but other than that I am doing pretty awesome. Where are you at right now, Greg? Like, where are you located?

Greg: Well, right this minute I am on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I live full time in Charlottesville, Virginia, but you know I invest throughout Northeast North Carolina up into the Northern Virginia areas, throughout the D.C. So, today specifically I am down the Outer Banks and I am helping one of my investors/client with a short-term vacation rental project. He is purchasing a house and we are going to gut it and renovate it and he is going to do Airbnb, so that's like a popular little model for vacation homes.

Dan: Yeah, that's really interesting. It's so wild to me that Airbnb even just like five years ago Airbnb almost seemed like an impossibility to me, you know what I mean? [0:03:08.6]
Like, I remember everyone being like someone's going to murder someone in your house and all this stuff that people said the reasons why it couldn't work, and now it's like it's such a mainstream thing. Not only that, it's this whole other sort of element to real estate investing that wasn't even a thing five or ten years ago. It kind of blows me away.

Greg: Yeah, it's pretty interesting. I mean, I guess the idea was if you had an extra bedroom or room over your garage or guest house or suite or something, you know it kind of started out that way, and then it was like well, if you're going to be gone and you travel a lot, rent your house out while you're gone. Yeah, it has turned into a whole investment vehicle and model, especially in resort communities; you know ski resorts and beach communities. The Outer Banks of North Carolina, I'm sure you're familiar with it, you're in Connecticut, is that where you're at?

Dan: Yeah. [0:03:59.4]

Greg: Yeah, so the Outer Banks of North Carolina it's a barrier island off of the coast of North Carolina. It has been a summer vacation destination forever and it's a very strong rental market; however, it is seasonal. So, you've got 16 prime weeks out of the year. The typical season is 26-28 weeks that most houses rent, but Airbnb has really expanded that into the shoulder seasons of the spring and the fall, especially with smaller properties where people instead of getting a small hotel room, which are limited down here, not a lot of hotels, it's not a Virginia Beach or a Myrtle Beach, it's mostly houses. Now they can come down and rent a small house for less than or the same price as a hotel room. So, it has really expanded the rental pool down here and a lot of people are putting their houses in Airbnb. It used to be VRBO. So, VRBO, Vacation Rental By Owner, was around before Airbnb down here and then now Airbnb has just kind of taken off. These houses, I mean, I'm looking at a deal today. The guy is going to pay $300,000 for it. We will probably put $50,000 in it to get just like really shiny and smoking for renters, and it will do $50,000 to $55,000 a year in rent. I mean, you just can't get those kind of numbers anywhere else. [0:05:14.2]

Dan: Yeah, I mean it completely blows my mind. Let's take a step back because you're hitting on a whole bunch of different stuff. I think it's like you're sort of a little bit different. You know, a lot of interviews I do they are people that are just strictly real estate investors, right? But you're in multiple kind of aspects of this industry. So, you are an investor in sort of the classical sense, but you're also a real estate developer. You also coach and help real estate investors. So, let's kind of take a step back for a second. Tell me how did you get into this space, like what got you started in real estate investing or development. Like, how did you get started?

Greg: Yeah, so I'm a natural born entrepreneur. You know, starting as a young kid cutting grass, raking leaves, doing whatever I could do to make a buck. I'd knock on your door, "Hey, Dan. My name's Greg Dickerson. I'm your neighbor. I need money. I'll do anything. What do you need done?" [0:06:06.5]
So, you know, that was at 5th grade, 6th grade. That was my door-to-door pitch. I just needed to make some money, I'll do anything, what do you want me to do. You know, I'll watch your kids, wash your car, rake, whatever, anything. That's how I grew up. I mean, that was 5th grade, 6th grade. So anyways, I worked in restaurants through high school and I also was a general laborer on some construction sites. There was a guy doing an addition on a restaurant that I was working in and he hired me to come clean up after him, so I'm a hard worker and he liked me and so I started working with him when I wasn't at the restaurant. Restaurants at night, worked at construction during the day and did that for my senior year of high school, and then went in the Navy right out of high school and did my 4 years, got out of the Navy and got back into construction again during the day and restaurants at night. I was always a 2-job guy because, you know, without a college education your options are limited and were very limited back in the 80s when you had to have a college degree to make any kind of a salary. [0:07:07.9]

So, I was learning the hard way. Fast forward to 1997 I moved to the Outer Banks of North Carolina and I moved here to open a restaurant. I was working as a regional director for a restaurant chain at the time, so I had some good management training, some good business training from the restaurants and moved down to the Outer Banks to open a restaurant and I got into construction instead. I started a little remodeling handyman company and my first year in business I did $250,000 just me, myself, my truck and tools, and then 7 years later I was one of the largest builder developers here. We were doing $30,000,000 a year in volume and I started 12 other companies along the way during the 7-year period, all kind of related to the construction industry except for one or two. You know, and that's how I got into real estate investing and development along the way was I used the profits from the businesses to invest in real estate and to develop real estate and I started with flipping lots and then I started building spec houses and then I did some commercial and I did some land development subdivisions and things like that, so it all kind of grew from there. [0:08:10.6 ]
You know, I made connections and developed relationships with other investors and developers that were coming down to the Outer Banks and buying and building beach houses and learned from them, did deals with them, did work for them, built houses for them, remodeled houses for them, and just kind of learned from them. That's how I got into it.

Dan: Wow man. Alright, so there's a whole bunch in there that I really want to ask about. So, I've got two questions that are kind of things that pop up to my mind specifically. So for one, I find the whole restaurant industry connection interesting. So, was there anything you learned in the restaurant industry that you found ported over to real estate or that helped you in the real estate part of your business life?

Greg: Yeah, so the biggest thing was leadership and management, you know recruiting, interviewing, hiring, training, managing, delegating employees because I was a manager. [0:09:04.3]
So, I had employees underneath me so first and foremost I learned how to be a leader, manager, delegator, and those are my gifts. That's how I did everything I've done so quickly and so successfully was being able to do that, to be a leader, to delegate, to motivate and manage others and teach others how to manage and lead. That's the first thing. The second thing was the numbers. So, the group that I was with, Lone Star Steakhouses, they were really solid on the numbers. I mean, you learned how to squeeze a nickel out of a penny and that's what the restaurant business is all about – very thing margins, it's all about volume. I mean, you got to watch everything. So, out KPI's in the restaurant industry, it wasn't called KPI's it was just your numbers, we just referred to it as the numbers, which in the real estate industry is KPI's. So, we broke it down to like labor in the kitchen, labor in the restaurant. Labor is your biggest expense in a restaurant behind food, so you have to control that. So, we would do labor matrixes, so we would say you are going to $30,000 this week in business, you can spend $5,000 in the kitchen on labor, so you had to break that down by the hour and write your schedule based on the average dollar per hour and number of people that you had and hours available. [0:10:13.7]

So, just like in the real estate business where you break it down so many dollars spent to generate so many leads, generate so many appointments to generate so many deals, you know breaking your KPI's down and all that, we did the same thing with food, with labor. I mean, we broke our food down by each category of food. You know, seafood, steak, chicken, pork, cheese, this, that, and the other. We did inventory on a weekly basis and we would go back and track our usage to our sales so that you knew hey, if we did the same sales this week as we did last week but we use twice as much cheese, why? You know, did we sell more something that required more cheese or are we just wasting or is there theft, you know, what's going on. So, I really learned how to track and run the business by the numbers, which takes all the guess work out of everything. So, those are the 2 major components I learned from a business standpoint in the restaurant. [0:11:00.6]
The other things you learned is how to operate under pressure, how to deal with people, how to interact with people, sales, customer service, hospitality, all those types of things as well. Multitasking you know is huge, but at the end of the day leadership and management by numbers, running a business by the numbers are the two biggest takeaways from the restaurant industry that translated extremely well into the real estate and construction and development world.

Dan: That's awesome. I mean, it's the same with me. It's the thing I love about marketing is your ability to go back through a line of metrics and say, like, where are we falling off and why. So, when you're hiring, are you primarily looking for a skill set, or are you looking for someone that has a certain set of personality traits. I've gone back and forth. Like, in my own business I tend to just hire people who have personalities that I'm looking for, because I'm always like I can train you to do the actual thing, and sometimes that has been great and sometimes it's probably suboptimal. How do you think about that problem, or is it not necessarily one or the other? [0:12:08.3]

Greg: Well, it can be. So, a lot of times the adage is hire the attitude note the skill, and in a general business where you don't need a specific skillset that's not super technical where pretty much everything could be trained, then you hire the individual, right? You hire the attitude, you hire the individual, not necessarily the experience, and I've found a lot of times, not so much in the restaurant industry but in the construction industry you do need people that have experience and skills and an understanding. I mean, you know, when you're doing high-level projects, you can't hire just anybody that has a good attitude. I mean, they got to know construction, they got to know what they're doing to build a million dollar house or to build a $5,000,000 commercial building, you know or to do site work and development. You know, you can't just train that in a week or two or a month. In the restaurant business, almost any position in the restaurant can be trained very quickly, so it's more about attitude, it's more about an individual that's willing to take initiative and is willing to learn. [0:13:05.6]

You know, you can train that and then cross-train that and that's how I came up in the restaurant industry. I started as a bus body dish washer and I was moved into management very quickly because I had the right attitude, the right work ethic. I had no clue what I was doing but they trained me. You know, that's works. In your business you could probably do the same thing. I mean, there are some technical aspects and experience that you need, but pretty much everything in marketing, especially digital marketing business, that can be learned and trained. You know, you're not coding, right? You're not writing computer codes, you're not developing software, you're learning things that can be taught. So, it all depends on the job. If you need an engineer, you got to have an engineer with experience and education. Going back to that, you know, I've hired a lot of people in my career that had tremendous experience but poor attitudes and they didn't do well and they didn't last long, and I've had people that had less than equivalent experience but great attitudes and they did extremely well, even though they weren't quite there but they had enough technical knowledge to where I could take them to the next level. So, I'm all about hiring the right attitude over the experience all day long. [0:14:13.0]

Dan: Yeah. The other question I had for you almost immediately was, just to go back to this, so you said you started 12 different companies, right? So, how many of those were at the same time? You know what I mean? Like, are you starting one and selling it and moving on or do you have multiple businesses at a single time?

Greg: Yeah, I had one time probably 7 or 8 all at the same time. What I do and the way I did it was I would find great operators and partner with them. So, my first company was a plumbing company. So, I had a remodeling business. When I started out we did nothing but remodeling and I was having trouble getting trades contractors to do my work because they were small jobs. So, one of my plumbing companies it was just him and he had two trucks and he had a helper and he was struggling and he was about to go bankrupt and leave town. [0:15:00.7]

He's a great guy, good plumber, poor business man. So I said I'll tell you what, I'll buy your company, I'll pay off all your debts, you run it, I'll coach you, I'll put an office manager in place, we'll grow your business, you do all my work and then we'll grow the business beyond my company. So that's what we did. I bought him, paid off his debts, put an office manager in place, got him an office warehouse. Actually, he shared mine at the time, I was still in my office warehouse at the time at my first facility. I went out and bought six trucks. There was another plumbing company that was going out of business and we hired all their mechanics. Instantly overnight, literally overnight, he went from two trucks to eight, became the largest plumbing outfit in the area. You know, I'm a gorilla marketer. That's the other thing from the restaurants that I took away, plus I’m very self-educated. I didn't go to college but I educated myself. One of the first books I ever read of marketing was Gorilla Marketing. So, back then everything was offline. There was no online marketing. I lettered up the trucks, put full-page ads in the phone book. We blew him up and turned him into the plumbing outfit on the beach at the time. [0:16:00.7] A very small community so when you do something like that it looks like you're everywhere, you look huge, and so I knew how to do that. So that was one. I had my construction company at the same time and then I added a real estate arm to the construction company, a separate business. Then I did an electrical company, then I did a storm shutter company, I did a painting company, I did a pool/spa/landscaping company. So I had all of those and some restaurants all at the same time. Then I did a gymnastics/cheerleading/trampoline school, another situation where I was high profile and I did a lot of stuff in youth sports. My kids were growing up so I coached every sport they were in and I had a passion for kids and youth sports. We didn't have a gymnastics program around here beyond parks and recs that after five years you might be a cart wheel, right? So, there was this guy that called me up and we met because I was on the board of Babe Ruth Softball, and he said man I got this business and I'm struggling. I got 70 kids in this program and you need to come check it out, I need help, I need to move into a bigger facility and grow this thing. [0:17:01.8]

So, I went and checked it out and it was high quality. I mean, this dude was a junior Olympic level coach. He had cheerleaders in there doing high level stuff, and he had this trampoline program that I had no idea that there was a competitive trampoline thing, right? So, fantastic coach, great operator, poor business man. So I bought the program, went and leased up a 10,000 square foot space, he was in like a 2,000 square foot space, and built it out, turned into a gymnasium, and we are in a very small community of 30,000 people. I took him from 70 kids to 350 in less than 6 months. That was at the same time I had all of the other business, so we just blew that program up and then I ended up taking it, turning nonprofit and all that, you know donated everything to the company. So that was another one. [0:17:50.2]
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Dan: I mean, so would you say like your primary skillset is really you're bringing the systems and the marketing to people that are already good at what they do, they just lack that kind of centralized business skillset?

Greg: In the business oversight, yes. So, the business intelligence and sophistication, leadership number one. Leadership, management, delegation, systems, business operations, knowledge of the numbers and how a business runs because a business is a business is a business, right? It's all about the numbers. So, I don't care what business you're in it's all about the numbers in terms of the operations of the business and the financial strength of the business, then beyond that it has its nuances and languages and tricks and trades and all that. [0:19:08.9]
Then marketing is marketing is marketing, right? So, you have marketing, you have advertising. A lot of people don't understand the difference between the two. And you have branding, so understanding what those things are and bringing that expertise is the table, but more importantly than anything else just being a coach and a mentor. You know, that's what I did. I found great operators and I coached them to success and I taught them what I did and what I learned is you have a business, you automate that business, you grow it, scale it, automate, and you take the profits from that business and you invest it in other assets that are going to pay you for the rest of your life. I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, one of the first books I read when I launched this company in 1997. A lot of people got real estate out of Rich Dad, Poor Dad. What I got out of Rich Dad, Poor Dad was business. Create businesses that provide cash flow to invest in other assets. That was my takeaway from Rich Dad, Poor Dad. That's why I did all those different businesses, just like rich dad did. When you read the book he had all these different companies and he invested in real estate. So, I just did what the book said. [0:20:12.0]

Dan: You know, the whole idea of like snowballing all of those things together that's really powerful once you figure out how to make it happen.

Greg: Yeah, so it was real easy. So, if you're good at what you do, I would come along side of you, and, again, it was somebody who approached to me. Somebody came to me and said hey, they either already had a business and they needed help getting to the next level or just staying alive and I saw something in them that I knew they had the potential, so I came along with them and I would partner with them. I didn't work one day in any of those business. Never set foot in the operations of those businesses. I did it just like we're doing right now, in the car on the phone, in the office on the phone, coaching them, leading them, and teaching them how to be leaders, delegators, motivators, managers, and how to run their business and scale their business. I did it all through them and they just did what I told them to do. They just went out, executed, and made it happen. [0:21:03.5]

Dan: So you are currently developing real estate, you're also investing in real estate and working with investors. So, your kind of touching a lot of different parts of the market. I'm curious like what you see or feel about the housing market, specifically for investors, that we're in right now. I've told this story a couple of times, but last time I was in a room with a lot of bigger investors, you know people doing a significant volume of deals, I felt a lot of anxiety about 2019 and 2020 and kind of what that was gonna bring. Maybe not anxiety, but just the sense that things were tightening up and it was going to get harder for investors to find deals. What's your take on that, both from an investor yourself but also dealing with students who are probably at an earlier place in their investing careers than you are?

Greg: Yeah and I've got both. So, I've got some clients that are in that 10-20 deals a year range and I've got some guys that are in the 200-300 deal range that I coach and work with. [0:22:06.9]
So, yeah, everybody is concerned about where things are headed. It's getting harder and harder to find deals because there's more people getting in the game. You know, you have the I House buyers. You know, the real estate market is changing, more realtors are waking up and becoming more savvy at doing what investors are doing because they are competing with each other, so that is something that's affecting the market. Prices are inflated, interest rates are cheap, so that's putting pressure on pricing so it's getting harder to find good deals that make sense. You know, there's a lot of new investors get in the game that are overpaying from wholesalers for flip, so it depends on which end of the business you're in, if you're wholesaling or if you're flipping. So yeah, it's getting difficult but it's like anything else. It all has its cycles. There's always opportunity. You know, the key is consistency, knowing your business, knowing your numbers and sticking with it, but it is getting more and more difficult to find better deals. [0:23:04.9]

What we've seen is on the wholesale side we've seen the wholesale fees climbed to really huge levels. What's going to happen ultimately is that those wholesale fees are just going to get reduced. You know, so at the end of the day to stay to competitive, to stay in business, keep going, it's going to get back to that $5,000 to $10,000 wholesale fee on most projects because it's not sustainable to generate a $20,000 wholesale fee on a $50,000 or $70,000 house. That's just not sustainable. Those investors are buying those house they're not making money and they're not going to go back and do more, so you're going to run out of a buyer pool at some point. So it's just a matter of evolving and changing your business model and just staying current with what's happening out there.

Dan: When you talk to investors that are worried about the whole kind of venture-backed I Buyer, whether that's Open Door or Zillow Instant Offers, all these kind of big venture-backed companies trying to disrupt what we would think of as the investing space but I think a lot of people just think of as the real estate space in general. [0:24:08.6]
What do you say to them? How do you see the investor, the kind of individual investor or the investor with a small team, fitting into that new go system. Do you think those companies are here to stay or is it just kind of like they're floating along on a lot of investor money themselves. I don't know. Where do you see all that going?

Greg: Yeah, they're not making any money, so those companies are buying a database is really what they're doing. They are not profitable, they are not making money. Zillow Offers has lost money. I House Buyers has lost money. Open Door is a loss leader. So they are looking at themselves as early stage tax startup where you don't make any money for a certain period but you build this huge following, right? The other thing too is that they're inefficient and they're very linear. [0:25:03.7]

So they have one thing and one thing only to offer you and most of the time their offers aren't great and they're paying close to retail but not quite retail. So, if they're competing with realtors, which is really what they're after. They're really after competing with that real estate agent space, they're not really after the real estate investor because they're not able to be or become a transaction engineer. So what I would tell investors is that whatever level you're at, if you're not already, you've got to become a transaction engineer in order to stay relevant, meaning you got to have more than one solution for your homeowner, right, for your seller. If you're truly out there to serve people and to try to solve problems, which is what real investors are supposed to be doing on the residential level, solving a motivated seller, a distressed sellers problem, then you've got to be able to offer them a number of solutions. One if I can buy your house for cash and legitimately be able to take that thing down and close. [0:26:01.8]
Number two is if that doesn't work for you then maybe we can do a rent-to-own or a lease option. Number three, if that doesn't work for you I know a realtor who can list and get this house sold for you, or I'm a realtor myself. So those are some of the options as a real estate investor you've got to be able to offer that seller and being a transactional engineer that these other companies can't be and they never will be and they are inefficient. So I think that's where investors are going to have the advantage is that they got to be more personal, more relational and more transactional-based where they've got a number of solutions for people.

Dan: Yeah, I mean I think that's absolutely huge. I think you really nailed it in the sense that these companies cannot replace that human element of that transaction and it's such a big part of what investors do. Yeah, it will be really interesting to see what happens with those companies. They're definitely kicking up a lot of dust, so when it settles it will be interesting to see what everything looks like. [0:27:01.4]

Now, we didn't really talk about this beforehand and I wasn't really sure I was going to bring it up, but I wanted to ask you about your coaching program specifically because the thing that makes you and what you do interesting to me is like you have a very varied background, right? Like, I think a lot of people in the real estate investing coaching space specifically, they have done one thing and they may be really successful and they kind of teach the thing that worked for them, right? You know, someone's like I'm going to show you how to win the lottery and I’m going to do that by giving you my winning lottery number, which is like cool and it worked for them but it doesn't necessarily mean that number is going to work for you, but you have done this a lot of different times, you've been in the business space. You know, you've been in a lot of different parts of the industry and I think that gives you like a really interesting background. So, if I'm looking to get into real estate investing or I'm an investor and I'm early or whatever, what does your coaching process look like? [0:28:07.3]
Like, if I want to work with you, what does it look like? What do you help me do, how do we work together, that kind of thing?

Greg: Yeah, so it's one-on-one and we look at what you're already doing, so if you're already in a business or doing something then we come in and help you scale that, grow it, and then automate it so that you can do some other things. You know, take the profits and invest in other assets because, again, if you're wholesaling or flipping, that's transactional and it's one at a time, right? I mean, you could do 100 a year, 200 a year, whatever, but it's still one transaction at a time, however many you're doing in a year. So, that's going to be affected with economic market cycles, so you've got to have passive income coming in from somewhere. When I say passive, you've got to manage the assets that you own, so passive income can be a business, it can be real estate, it can be any number of things. It can be financial instruments. Whatever it is, stocks bonds, mutual funds, you need other income coming in. [0:29:02.3]

\ You need multiple streams in case of an economic event to hedge a downturn in your residential flipping business. So, I just come alongside of people where they are, whatever business it is, and I work with people in business as well, not just real estate. I've got software companies, I've got construction companies, I've got retail businesses, restaurants, I mean any number of things. So I was geographically limited so I was wide in my asset base and the strategies that I used, right? So that's one way to look at it. If you're geographically limited then you expand your asset base and you expand the types of investments and opportunities you get into. If you're narrowly focused on one technique or one asset class, then you can go big with your market. You're going to have to go big with your market. So, I just look at where people are and what I help them do is grow in scale, automate, and systemize the business we're already in. I go in, find the road blocks, find the barriers and help remove those so that we can instantly and quickly grow that business and then I help them automate it, put it on autopilot so that they can take those profits and reinvest into other vehicles, whether it's continuing to grow and expand the business or get into another business or get into some real estate assets that are going to pay them over time, so it all depends on where they're at. [0:30:16.5]

If it's somebody just starting out, I tell them look, let's look at some things, study some things. Usually, somebody has some idea of what they're interested in whether it's wholesaling, fix and flip on the real estate side, single family rentals. You know, one strategy isn't the best strategy for everybody, right? Some people are more bent towards commercial and multifamily, some are more bent towards development, some would want to flip houses. Whatever it is, I don't tell anybody you should do this or you should do that, what I say is whatever you're called to, whatever you feel like fits your personality and what you're drawn to right now, let's do that, let's grow it, scale it, automate it, so then you can explore other options and opportunities once this thing is on autopilot. That's really what I do regardless of what asset class you're in, what investment strategy you're using, whatever market you're in, and whatever business you're in. [0:31:05.7]

That's really what I do. It is really cool that this is 23 years down the road for me and developing myself every single day as an entrepreneur, as a leader, as an individual. You know, I pour into myself every single day. I've got mentors and people that I work with at some very high levels and I've got people at the billion dollar level that I work with that mentor me, and I work with some of the top people in the industry. So, what's really cool is when I work with people, they're getting the benefit of all of that through me, just like books, right. If you read 1,000 books then you're getting the benefit of every book that those 1,000 authors wrote, so you're literally reading millions of books when you read 1,000 books or 100 books. You're betting everything that they've ever learned, everything that they’ve ever read that they compiled into that book. Same thing with me. Everything that I do with the guys that are flipping 300 houses a year, 200 houses a year, the apartment investors that have an $800,000,000 to $1,000,000,000 portfolio to the software company that is doing whatever he's doing, all of that translates through to the individual I'm working with so that they know what's working out there right now, what strategies, what techniques, what marketing methods, and there is no secret method, there is no secret list, there is no secret anything. [0:32:14.0]
What there is is discipline, consistency, knowing your numbers, finding a niche, getting it going, automate it, systemize it, grow it, scale it before you do anything else. Focus is 100% of the game. Let's pick something, let's go with it, let's grow it, scale it, automate it, and then expand from there.

Dan: Yeah, I love it man. I just think the ability to look across all those different businesses and all those different experiences, I think that's really unique in the space, and I think that's awesome. If people want to come and check you out, how can they find out more about what you do and look up everything there is to know about you?

Greg: Yeah, so GregDickerson.com, all my information is on there, contact info, social media profiles, YouTube, and Facebook and everything. GregDickerson.com, it's got all my information there and the good thing is I'm in it, so I'm developing, I'm doing single family, I'm flipping, I'm developing properties, I'm doing multifamily, so I'm in it every day just my clients are and I'm always looking for business opportunities as well that I get into. [0:33:15.2]
I do equity capital and I look for companies that have the ability to scale and I'll come in as the intellectual capital. I can raise capital as well if it's required and appropriate for the business that we're looking at and needed. You know, I'm in it in the trenches doing what I'm telling other people to do all day every day.

Dan: Awesome. Yeah, so everybody in case you're listening to this, I'll put some links to Greg's stuff in the show notes as well, which you can get to at AdWordsNerds.com/podcast. Greg, thank you so much man. This was super fascinating and awesome. I had a great time and I really appreciate you taking the time and talking to me and the REI Marketing Nerds folks. It's awesome, dude. Thank you so much.

Greg: Absolutely. I appreciate you having me. It was a lot of fun.

Dan: Alright. Cheers, man. Have a great rest of your day.

Greg: Yep, you as well. [0:34:01.2]

Dan: Alright everybody, that was it for our interview this week. I hope you had a great time. I really did. I really was interested in Greg's approach and talking to him really made me want to sit down and get back into my own numbers, so I hope it did the same to you. As always, if you are not in our free Facebook group, I don't know what's wrong with you. At this point, I've said it to you so many times it's really on you. You should totally get in there and see REI Marketing Nerds Facebook group. You can find us by going on Facebook and just typing in REI Marketing Nerds or you can go to AdWordsNerds.com/group. It's totally free. I'm in there posting every single day, posting awesome stuff. We do free trainings, Facebook Lives, all sorts of cool stuff so make sure you get in there and thank you as always. If you are enjoying this podcast, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you listening and I will see you next week. Until then, have a great rest of your day.

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