Episode #223 – From Dealing Blackjack to Success With Novations with Corey Geary, Part 1

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

(0:40) All right. Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of the REI marketing nerds podcast. As always, this is Daniel Barrett here from AdWords nerds.com. And look, as always, if you need help getting motivated seller leads and deals online. That's all we have been doing for over a decade now. People AdWords nerds.com is the place to go. Whether you want to get someone to do it for you or whether you want to learn to do it yourself. Alright. Man this week, I have a fun time fun conversation for you this week. Do you know Cory Gary, are you familiar with this guy? If you are not Cory Gary is the man behind Novation. nation.com. But even more than that, Cory is one of the most refreshingly transparent, and self aware real estate investors I have ever met. Like, so many people will have some kind of version of their entrepreneurial story where yeah, they struggled. And then they made good and, and it's always great, right?

I mean, it's great to hear somebody's story of triumph. And that's awesome. But Cory really shares what it was like to not just try and fail. But has he describes it, try and get his skull cracked open, right? I mean, this is a guy who has been through it. It's a guy who has had a past with a lot of downturns in it, but has worked consistently over time, to acknowledge his own shortcomings, build strategies to mitigate them and has been wildly successful. I will tell you, there's a lot of people who share their entrepreneurial story. But it's not always super useful, because it's hard to put yourself in their position because they're so far ahead of you, right. I mean, this is just a common thing. But Cory really tells a story in a way that I know is going to connect with you. Fascinating guy, tons of topics we get into, you know how he got started. We talked about being a blackjack dealer. Did you know that blackjack dealers make six figures a year? I mean, it's true, right? We talked about that.

We talked about the time he lost everything. We talked about how he got into Novations. And I was using Novations. Today basically completely took over his real estate investing business. And finally at the end, we talked about what he's doing now, which is crypto, which is the look at two years ago, everyone was doing crypto not a lot of people are doing crypto now. Men, this is a fascinating conversation. I cannot wait for you to check it out. So without any further ado, let's get into my conversation with Corey girI from Novation. nation.com I have this week Bori girI from Novation. nation.com that's N O V A T I O N nation.com. We're gonna talk about that quite a bit coming up. But Corey, Gary, thank you so much for being here, man. I really appreciate it a man pleasure to be here. Thank you so, so much for having me on your mask. truly a blessing and honor.

(3:54) Yeah, I am. I've been wanting to talk to you for a little while. We've been talking about Novations at AdWords nerds for I don't know it must be like a couple months now. Lou, who's on my team, sir brought them up to me. And we're gonna we got clients that are doing them and we're having a lot of success. And so it's been this whole thing like, what is the deal with Novations and Lou was like, Well, you got to talk to Cory Geary. He's the man he's going to sort of walk you through this. I'm super excited for this. Before we dive all the way down that rabbit hole for people who aren't familiar with about you are familiar with you or your work kind of zoom out. Give people a 30,000 view. 30,000 foot sir overview of you and what you do today. Yeah, so

(4:34) 30,000 foot overview is I used to be a blackjack dealer in my past life. And I did that for 16 years in a casino, making pretty decent money over six figures a year. You make tips, right? It's like similar to like being a bartender. So it was tough to leave that job. And I did that for a long time. And I was able to save up a lot of money. And that's how I got into Real Estate's because I was watching that show fix or flop, the one with teracle Musa that most people know about in the night, you know, the 2015 era 16. And yeah, I was watching that show one night and then there with my girlfriend at the time and she was a part time realtor and part time blackjack dealer. So like the real thing was her little side hustle. And she was watching this show, and she knew I had some money saved up. She was Why don't you flip a house so I can list it. And that was the first time it really, like dawned on me like, oh, maybe I ha, it seems easy enough. These guys do it in 30 minutes. And then they came. And I was doing this. And by the way, the exact same thing that happens between like, in my own head when I watched like Project Runway or something. I'm like, I shouldn't I think I could do this, right?

(5:51) Like, what can go wrong? You know, I don't get it like, okay, the roof is bad that I pay a roofer to come out like, you just don't think about the things that really could go wrong because you're just not in it every day, right? It's like, it's I'm like, okay, and it's funny, because the next morning, I'm on my morning run and I see one of those bandit signs, and it probably popped out to me because, you know, we had like a discussion like before, maybe it was always there, who knows. But I said fix and flip by price to 50, ARV 350 something to that nature and add a phone number on it on this site, and I stopped my morning run and I call that phone number. I bought that house. It took me six months to fix and flip and I made eight grand there wasn't a first deal. That was my first real estate deal I ever did. And second deal, I did well and went to some local RIAs started meeting, you know, wholesalers, these guys called wholesalers, who thought there was such a niche in real estate and I didn't know and I meet these wholesalers today and I buy a second deal and I make 20 grand on that one, which is really good. And then on my third deal, like a moron, I bought four houses all at once.

I also ended up switching contracts or the last one kind of sucked anyways, but like the next one select to go more. Yes. Because he took me to the cleaners and I lost a quarter million dollars on those four houses. I lost my 401 K money from the casino. I lost my life savings and I lost my previous flip money. me back to zero. All I had going for me is I still my job. He took advantage of me. He saw a mark on my head. I was gullible. And I was given a bunch of money without following up but his work. And yeah, he by the time I realized it, I had the real I was out of money when I realized that I had to re wholesale those properties back to the wholesaler, you know at a discount and then losing all my money down all the hard hard the hard money I paid on him all the it was just a train wreck on those four houses. And so I didn't want to give up real estate. And I was still working in the casino. So thank God I still had that money coming in. But I Googled literally went on Google and I typed in that want to know like you hear about these wholesalers now they get deals and and they get deals with no money and you're hearing all this stuff. When you go to these Rheas and I type on Google how do wholesalers get deals? And guess who popped up? Well, Papa, Don Terry.

(8:20) All right. The Sean Terry Terry popped up is on obviously he was doing either he was doing some PPC around that or he was doing some SEO I don't I'm not sure you know, because I don't remember any I don't remember to this day, it was an ad or not. And I clicked on. But I of course I clicked on his stuff and I went down the Sean Terry rabbit hole, his funnel, I got into his funnel and I bought his flip to freedom course. I you know, started going through the bins I joined his mastermind and everything. And so I went down that it took me about I don't know it was like 10 months to get my first wholesale deal which I sold to the wholesaler who was selling me the deals before and once I got my first deal was kind of like proof of concept. And then that was kind of off to the races like that second deal came like two weeks later the third deal and like it was it was off to the races that point and yeah, that's how I started I taught became a wholesaler.

(9:16) Wow, man, I first of all, Sean Terry, I will often tell this story because like when I first started doing this for investors, I think Sean Terry was like the only other investor I could find was doing PPC, it was like him with like, to other people you don't I mean, like oh gee, I Shawn is super smart. So I think that's amazing. But I want to there's I mean, first of all this story is bonkers. I love that story so much because there's so many like ups and downs and like sort of things that we can dig in on and I definitely want to make sure we spend most of the time kind of talking about what you're doing today because you've really built this kind of incredible, sort of the sort of world within real estate that I want to dive into but okay, Let's go back and let's talk about dealing blackjack for a second.

Yeah. I am super curious. It strikes me as you mentioned, it's kind of like being a bartender. It's this really odd. And this is just, I don't really play cards. So this isn't this is our own cavalry and things like this kind of from the outside looking in. But to me, it's like this really weird combination of you get exposed to so many different parts of human psychology. Oh, boy. Yeah. And there's a lot of like, mental sort of stuff going on, like mental math, or like a statistics and stuff. So I'm super curious, like, what did you take from your experience as a blackjack dealer that you still think about or apply today?

(10:44) Easy, okay, I want to have any sales, my ability to talk to people, and even when the situation is shitty, to still add a positive light to the situation and talk to people in a very positive manner. And sales in general, because in blackjack, dealing, what you're doing all day long, is taking people's livelihood away. Yeah, you're taking their mortgage money, you're taking their kids college funds are taking their food and gas money. They mean these people a lot. Most of them not all but most have really bad addictions to the to the gambling and the casino lifestyle. And it's a very dark lifestyle, even though the money's great. So you have to go out there and put your best show on in the middle of a kind of a shitstorm. And the most negative toxic environment with these people where you're taking their money, and you still have to like put the show on and get them to tip you and get them to still want to give you money.

And I was very good at that I was able to get them. I was one of the number one blackjack dealers in my casino, I was able to go out there and make the crap ton every single night by putting on the best show. And my celebrating when they win. And basically changing the conversation to something else when they're losing. So you want to focus on the wins, when they're winning, and they're making money, focus on the gambling at that moment, as Sue they sue, they goes for a turn and they start losing, you want to shift the conversation to something else. And then this is where it gets to, you need to know them personally, you need to know them on a deeper level, to know where to shift the conversation to and I got really good at that throughout my dealing career, because I I used to go there to make money. That was my job. And it's funny that a lot of dealers don't look at it that way 99% of dealers are going in there and they hate their lives, they hate their job, and they're just going into trying to make $1 But when they're out there, they're not showing it right. And it's it's funny because I'm like, Man, I'm here to make money. And I'm gonna learn how to do with this job well, so I can make money and it sells it's obviously sales and so that that transpired over to real estate because it was it gave me the capability in the beginning to connect with sellers when they are having shitty situations and they're going through a bad time in their life. And so I was able to connect with him on a deeper level because of that experience.

And then also now, you know, just as a business owner, high level business owner and owning many different types of companies, dealing you know, with different issues in the businesses dealing with employees, dealing with, you know, people trying to sue you, whatever it may be, although all that skill set has transferred over all of it, the whole entire thing. So it's given me great people skills, because I didn't have those people skills. I feel like before I was a blackjack dealer, and I was able to deal with for 16 years. I mean, it took me You know, I was I was there for a long time I did that job. That's a career. Essentially. It was a career. Yeah, I used to work six hours a night making over six figures a year and I was like, why am I gonna do anything? Why am I gonna do anything else? Yeah, you know, and until like, one day I finally woke up and was like, Man, I want more more on the line.

(13:58) Let's find motivated seller leads online but don't know where to start. Download our FREE motivated seller keyword report today. AdWords nerds have spent over $5 million this year researching the most profitable keywords for finding motivated seller leads. And you can grab these exact keywords when you download our report at www dot AdWords nerds.com/keywords. Well, let's let's talk about that, because that was kind of my next question. We laughed about the watching the TV and you know, I've watched you know, I always say like, having watched 10 hours of the Great British baking show. I can now bake a cake. You know what I mean? Like I just feel like I got it. Right. Right. Right. You probably still mess it up. Yeah, exactly. I know it doesn't come out.

Well, don't get me wrong, right. But I could judge other people's case really that's pretty pretty good for way but it's but you know, what do we kind of laugh about that but the vast majority of people myself included, right? We have that feeling we wash the thing but we don't take the next up, and you had a thing like you said that was going really well. And no, like your your girlfriend at the time was like, Hey, he had dude so I can list something. But there's clearly a part of you that was very comfortable taking very fast action taking a first step without, you know, like, really it's not like you bought 40 books and spent six months learning about it right? You kind of jumped into it. So is that I wish that one? finality. Yes, that's yeah, part of your personality. Like, tell me about that.

(15:30) Yeah, I'm a very fast action taker, I have a very high risk tolerance, I would say, you know, so yeah, I've always been that way. In my life. I've been risky with a lot of different things. I mean, for example, I was heavy into drugs and alcohol. For a long time I used that's a big risk. If you asked me, yeah, I'm sober. Now no longer in any drugs or alcohol anymore. I've been sober now, everything over three years? Well, there was a time in my life where it's like, anything risky. It never scared me, you know what I mean? I've even done some very, you know, fast action type sports, I love like snow skiing, I mean, snow skiing my whole life. And I could ski you know, going 70 miles an hour down the hill doesn't love it. It's I love the rush. I'm an adrenaline junkie. And part of that can you know, there's a good part and is a bad part is, the good part is is that I shoot first, then aim. But then, you know, some take an accident I'm getting I'm getting it done.

But then the bad part is, is that, you know, when I'm shooting, I'm hitting like, the guy off to my left. And it's like, I'm missing the mark altogether. And like, I'm in trouble, like, I'm in deep trouble now. And so like, and I do this time and time again, I've done it every single time I've gone into new business ventures, especially with business ventures. So worse, you know, I wish I would just slow down a little bit and be like, Okay, let's hire a mentor. Let's read some books. Let's join a mastermind first, and try to understand what some of the mistakes that some of the guys who've already done this, and try to learn that way instead of just jumping right into the deep end of the pool. And then, and then drowning a little bit before I learn to swim. And I've always been that way. And so, yeah, so yeah, it you know, I jumped in. And, you know, I just, you know, in my head, I was like, man, these guys on TV can do it. I can do it. I don't see why I can't do it. They're doing it. I just gotta go out there and take the risk. Yeah, not knowing that there was a huge learning curve behind it.

(17:25) Yeah, and it's, it's funny, right? Because in some ways, you mentioned like, they're off the roof is bad. I'll just call the roof guy. You know, I mean, it's like you don't really hear there's right, because you kind of don't know, the million and one things that could go wrong. That's really like the only reason you're able to take action, right? Like my wife and my wife. And I always say, if we knew what half the having our first kid was gonna be like, we might not have had a first kid. Right? You kind of got to go into it being a little stupid. You know? I mean, it's kind of like the whole point. But the thing that I'm curious about you is like, I know, you said like, Oh, you're always been this way.

I take a lot of risk. But it's clearly not just that, because you also went through this moment where like you said, you lost everything. You lost me. Right? You went out your savings. Yeah. And you still stuck with it. Right? Because I think I've seen I've seen people with a really high risk tolerance, but they also tend to bounce off things. If they don't work. You really stuck with it. And you stuck with it for stuff. Really. I mean, that wasn't like a six month period, that was a long period of time. So like, why, and where do you think that piece comes from? Because I just imagined myself in that situation. And I think I would have gotten totally thrown off the horse. You know, I mean, it's

(18:35) sucks. Oh, it sucked. I had some dark nights during that. During that moment in my life. I was you know, drinking extremely heavy to try and help mitigate the the thoughts in my head, right. It's like it was it was very dark for me during that time. And it's tough because I'm, the one good thing I have going for me is I'm very stubborn in like, if I'm determined to do something, I'm going to freakin do it and like, I'm going to let go let anything stop me. And I knew and I knew the only way the only way I was going to get that money back was if I pushed forward if I hadn't laid down and died and it's like, Okay, that's it. I'm not doing this. I'm gonna go do cards, the casino the rest of my life. I lost that money forever. It's gone forever. So I knew the only way and I knew that deep down inside.

The only way I've ever tried to get a chance to get this money back from this industry is if I pursued it, and went deeper into it. And I became successful in this industry was the only way and thank God I did because I made that money back multiple times over again. But it's just still it. I'm a very stubborn guy and I've done it you know, and multiple every time I do have a new business and I get my my head cracked open from the business. It's like, Ah, I want to like double down and I want to learn how to do it. I want to pursue it and that's usually when I have or mentors or go through mastermind, do the same when I first met you, when I first met you, I met us because I was going through a pain. I had put a bunch of money into PPC and it wasn't working. And it was once again need doing something without learning about it first taking that, because I'm very high risk tolerant. I'm like, oh, let's just do it. Let's just do it. And I do all this money in there. And it was not producing anything for me. And then other than that, I'm like, well, well, crap. Maybe I should find somebody who's good at this. Yeah. It's like, it's I do it every time and time again, in my life. I do this. And it's like,

(20:35) Well, I think it's, it's cool, man. I mean, I think it's, I completely understand where you're coming from, because I can imagine the whole getting your head cracked open thing is not pleasant. Right. So it doesn't feel good. But the other I think the flip side of that is, most people are so worried about getting their head cracked open, they never start. Yeah. Or they never get started to begin with. Right? So it's like, you might get your head cracked, but you all you heal up and then you just keep going back into steady glide, being like, oh, no, you know, I mean, so. Okay, so we've we're sort of caught up to the kind of the this moment where you're, you're a successful wholesaler, you're dealing or you're getting deals, you know, you're kind of putting it all together. I'm curious, where do Novations come in.

So we can list at the top right, Novation? nation.com, you're currently kind of doing a bunch of your workout, everybody should go check it out. If you have never seen it before, go check out what he's got there. But for people who aren't really familiar with what Novations are, how did that make its way into your business, like kind of tells the story of how you started to add that, or sort of portfolio of what you do. It was

(21:46) a solution to a problem I was having. And so once again, I did something in the business, I made a very rational move in the business pivot in the business that ended up causing more problems than what it could what it was worth at the time was well as local, I was local here doing about, you know, anywhere from eight to 10 deals a month, it was pretty decent, right? Like 10 deals a month is amazing in a local market. And I mean it where I had very little overhead. I mean, I had some overhead, but doing pretty good for myself.

And I even started doing some fix and flips and I was actually making money doing fixing. Yeah, I was making money doing flips, and I was learning the business. And it was, you know, it had his headaches, but it's still I was, I was I was being had a taste of success from it. And then I am going to these masterminds, and I'm still following Shawn. And there's another guy, he was a good friend of mine, his name is Nick Perry. And you know, and these guys, I'm talking about going nationwide, let's go nationwide. Like, let's go nationwide, the way to scale your business, divorce me I drink the Kool Aid, like I always do.

And I live I literally come into my office one day, and I recommend your viewers never do this. If you're if you have a local business model do not do this. I went in and turned on or off all my local marketing and turned on nationwide PPC, and was like, Okay, guys, we're a nationwide company now, let's go get it without like any training on comps, because I didn't know how to combination wise or how to train it. You know, I didn't have any buyers nationwide because I would never have any buyers and I've never worked in these markets before. The only thing we're good at is maybe some sales processes. And that's about it. You know, I mean, and our in house processes as far as the way we do stuff was was pretty good. But that was it. Right? And so literally man in the first month, I ran deep in the red, deep in the red, I ran the red three months, very deep in the red after I made that switch. And I'm in the local Matt, a little metal local mass. And there's a mastermind in Florida actually. And I'm out there in a mastermind in Florida and there was a guy who was doing a presentation this guy's if you're not mastermind, join masterminds. It's the best thing I've ever did in my whole journey in this space, bar none.

And mentorship too. So like I was in this mastermind, and I'm going through this pain at this moment. And this guy does a presentation and he's talking about how he in the local market he was in which was down there in the Miami area. He was doing he did $2.2 million last year and half of that was this thing he called Novations. And I'm like what the heck is innovation. And he goes on to talk about how he's listing these properties on the MLS for conventional finance buyers and I was like what we can do something like we can on the MLS or conventional buyers. So like a light bulb went off and I knew it like a crack that code. It was the solution to my problem that I was having because I was nationwide getting all these contracts. I I had no buyers whatsoever. So like maybe one out of five would close. And I'm like, Man, if I could figure out how to just sell these properties to conventional buyers nationwide, game over.

So I went on a mission, I learned his strategy, His strategy was a little dated. And I didn't like some of the techniques. And as some of the other gurus teach this old way of doing ovations and I didn't like it, I did it at first, it has a lot of liability. And by liability, meaning if you were to end up in a court of law, you can get in trouble. That's, for example, if you use a power of attorney, you're at a lot of liability for collecting sellers proceeds. It's a lot of liability. And if you're signing the deed, it's a lot of liability on you as a business owner. And so I paid my attorney like, I don't know, it was like 15 grand, maybe a little less 10 between 10 and 15, to read basically redraft the whole idea and he built, I mean, I didn't really build it, he did it. Because I'm not an attorney. He built innovation nation. Innovation nation is where now or we could do nationwide innovations, with the least amount of liability as possible. And the best way to think of it is Hotelling, without taking possession. And that's how we treat it as Hotelling without taking possession. And so we really turn the gas on in the end of 2021, when we were kind of doing in the beginning to 21 way in making like a full switch over in middle to the end of 2021.

And we were innovation company first, wholesale second so every I want to I want to every contract to be innovations and like I'm done with this whole selling thing I'd hate wholesaling. I hate lying to the seller, I hate lying to the buyer. I hate all the gray. Let's do everything ovations. And we did that in 2021 and 2022. I feel like so Novation has saved my company twice. It saved my company. Initially when I went first nationwide because that was a cool thing to do. It saved me then. And then it saved me I feel like in the turmoil that we just went through in 2022 with you know, the cash buyers kind of drying up everyone else experiencing their whole selling business kind of like not working out too well. My man I killed it in 2022 I killed it in Novations because I was selling to retail I was selling to retail buyer I didn't need cash buyers.

You know, I don't care like it's sometimes my houses are a little bit like yeah, you know, but I'm my price is adjusted accordingly. So like, you know, I'm not selling you know, a 200,000 ARV house for you know, if I get my Yena locked about 1/5 Either the true values 150 That's what I'm gonna sell it for, you know, so it's while I happen to get it locked up at 130 then but yeah, you get the point. Yeah, but yeah, man, it's so literally in 2022 I think I might have done three to five wholesale deals a whole year. The rest is Novations and I'm my peak and my peak we were doing 60 Novation deals about a time I think the most has ever been on my board was 68 deals. Wow, that might be holy moly.

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