The Top Guru Phrases: Which Have Value and Which Don't

Foreign welcome back to the show today. Kind of want to have some fun, but also, you know, it's going to definitely be valuable, hopefully. But while we're here, let's get into it. So kind of want to talk about.

And I've been thinking about this for past week or so and probably longer than that, but finally hit me, I was like, maybe I should just do a show on this.

It'll be, be kind of fun and also kind of, kind of take some lessons and some something, you know, I'm sure there's value in this, but it's interesting especially since I've gotten into more of the real estate investing space since as far as social media and all that's concerned, Masterminds, all that's concerned probably in 2020, 2019, somewhere in there is when I really, you know, kind of graduated from listening to bigger pockets podcast and then more or less following individuals.

You can kind of call them gurus or educators, joining some masterminds, going to some events. So all that kind of started happening in, in 1920, 19. And it's interesting, I guess, kind of looking at the patterns, some of the shared com, I guess, language and then just kind of hot terms or hot topics that gurus seem to latch onto. And then it's like spreads like wildfire, right?

Like one guru will, will say it and then you hear 30 other gurus say it in the next couple months, which is interesting. And then it kind of, I won't say it fades away, but sometimes it does. But yeah, just want to kind of go over a few of those actually. I've probably got eight or ten of them here that I wrote down. And the first one I've got is mastermind. And I would say up until, man, probably 2018, 2019. I don't know if I had heard of the word mastermind before that.

And this is tossed around a lot. And I remember I should have looked it up before I got on the show here, but I, I remember hearing about what a mastermind, actually, I think I heard about it and then I looked it up. See, you know, what the heck is a mastermind? When did it come about? And the term mastermind's been around for a while, but just wasn't used as definitely not as much as it is today.

But I think around 2018, 1920, it really took off and now like everyone thinks everything is a mastermind. If, if there's a gathering of people, I guess if there's a gathering of more than one person, right, there's two people now all of a sudden it's a mastermind. I, that's not necessarily the case. And, and really, you know, kind of going through these and kind of giving you some value, like in terms of the mat of a mastermind.

I think I've talked about this before, but find someone you relate to, find out what they're doing. Are they currently in the space and act actively and will relate to real estate investing, because that's easiest. Are they currently a real estate investor or are they just selling an educational program? Know and do you trust the person you know?

And you can find a lot out digging through some of their social media, some of their YouTube videos, podcasts, all that stuff, interviews, you can kind of get a feeling of who's legit, who's not. And I'll tell you the, the ones that you see regularly on social media, they're not actively investing. They may have a team that's doing it, which is great. You know, they, they were able to scale far enough to where they can kind of systematize their real estate investing business.

And now that's somewhat on autopilot, which is absolutely awesome. And now they can kind of do their, their guru thing, which at times is great. At times it's, it's definitely a little too much guru. I'm all about spreading, you know, the right information, especially since a lot of this stuff, none of this stuff is talked about in schools. You have to find it nowadays.

It's a lot easier to find, but it is harder to weed through who's legit, what's legit, and, and just find the right trainings for you. But mastermind, right, That's a top Fraser guru term that's been tossed around the past five, six, seven years a lot. And that's, that's number one. That's the one I want to hit on the first one. These are in no particular order, but I did want to hit that one first because that kind of just leads off to where we're gonna go from here.

Number the, the second one I was thinking of is, and I went through this coaches telling other people to coach. And it seemed like a lot of groups that I was in. And it's interesting because the groups were. And I've been, I've talked about this, I've been in several different groups, but the groups were, it's like you had coaches kind of coaches or coach kind of leading the group.

And then I guess newer kind of investors came into the space and, or came into the, the event or the, the mass the mastermind. And now the coaches are kind of pushing them to coach. Not everyone should coach. If you've got it in you and you want a mentor, sure, you know, find one or two people to do that. And, and maybe it is something that works for you, but there are just way too many coaches, way too many people pushing that. And maybe that's changed a little bit.

But I know just through my progression over the past few years, it was pushed a lot and on anybody and everybody. And just because you've done 1, 2, 3, 4 good deals doesn't mean you could teach. Even if you've done 100 great deals, that doesn't mean you can teach. Right. That, that just doesn't mean that, you know, you should, you know, dive full in the coaching.

But yeah, that's number two for me is coaching telling, telling others to coach, which, sorry, I lost my pen there, which is again, very interesting to me, very guru like to me, because a lot of times those, those coaches or people leading that group, they may even have a program to put you through how to become a coach or become a guru. And again, some of this is good for the right people. It's good to me. There's just too many of that going on. Too much of that going on.

And we've kind of swung the, the pendulum too much one way and now we've got kind of too many gurus. But I do, I have seen in the past, I don't know, six months or so, it's starting to dry out a little bit. I think some people that kind of want to hit the guru space or the coaching space, their real estate investing portfolios and what it is or what they thought it was going to be, and they're, they, they're, they're just more quiet now, which isn't a bad thing.

Third one, and this is an interesting one. I hear this a lot of times from even gurus that I, I really respect. And I'll call out Dan Martell. I really respect what he does. Now, even with that, there are things that I don't, I don't agree with what he says. One of them is everyone needs an ea. That's not true. Not everyone needs an ea. And an EA is an executive assistant. I do have one and I've been able to kind of piece some things together to make one work.

And the one I've got is absolutely awesome. But two years ago, I didn't even, A year ago I didn't need an ea. Two years ago I didn't need an ea. Not everyone needs an executive assistant to give you kind of a sneak behind the scenes. I maybe get, and I've looked at this before, I maybe get on average two to three emails a day that I need to answer. The rest of them are like crexy leads or just junk that I can just junk on my own. It's not a big deal. Right. So I'm not spending time in my email.

So for me I needed to, I don't. I've got an assistant again, she's absolutely awesome and, and she's probably listening to this because she's going to cut some, some reels up from the show. But not everyone needs an ea. If you, if you're inundated with emails, absolutely. If you've got scheduling problems, if you've got clerical problems, yes, find an ea. Get, get some stuff off your plate. But not everyone needs one. So that kind of goes back to knowing what you need.

And even though the gurus are telling you you need an ea, you need an ea, not everyone needs one. So you've got to figure out, you know, if, if you need one, what does that look like? What are they getting off your plate? And obviously there's steps and we're not going to go into it, but there's steps to figure out, you know, what your day to day looks like.

And if you need an EA and kind of piggyback off that are VAs, which are virtual assistants. That's been talked a lot about social media gurus. I mean since I got got kind of in the, at least in the self storage space, everyone's always been hot and heavy on VAs. Again, those are virtual assistants so they could be, they could be somewhat local. But a lot of times VAs are from different countries where honestly they're getting paid a little bit less or quite a bit less. And it's cheaper labor.

But a lot of times you do get better quality work. Sometimes you don't. And I have not used the VA in, in terms of, you know, I've used I guess part time VA for one or two off, just one off jobs that I had that was like a three hour job. So I don't have a ton of experience with it. I have some buddies that absolutely use VAs. It's an integral part to their business. But again, not everyone needs a VA or VAs. You got to figure out what works for you.

For myself I would rather hire either people locally or somewhat local locally to me to where? You know, I guess, I don't know that's just me. I wanna. I wanna, for me doing what I do, I want to give back to our community, to our state, to our nation. Right. I kind of want to. I'm not saying I need. I want to keep money here in the States, but that's just my thinking is I want to help people out here for right now as much as I can. So that's why I've always hired locally or somewhat locally.

So, yeah, Vas, that's another thing. Kind of piggyback off EAs. You'll hear gurus say you need to hire VA. Well, again, take inventory. Do you really need to hire VA or an ea? Another top phrase of gurus, and it's quite down quite a bit. It was for, like, it seemed like 12 to 18 months is all I heard. And to be honest, I wrote an article, was fortunate enough to write an article for ISS about this topic, and I was kind of caught up in the term as well. But it is important.

It's just, you know, for 12 to 18 months, this is all people talk about. And that's relationship capital, which, again, it's super important to have relationship capital. And I don't think I need to define that term, but basically, that's your network, right? How strong is your network? And. But the term relationship capital just kind of took off. Who knows where it started? It is important to have a great network and, and, and people you can lean on, people can learn from.

But just the term relationship capital definitely came from a guru in the past few years, and it caught like, wire wildfire. And it seemed like that's all I heard for, again, 12 to 18 months. Again, super important. Relationship capital is super important. I value my network 100%. I don't need to call it relationship capital. It's just my network, right? It's people around me.

So, yeah, let's move on to the next one. Next one actually just threw in. I was thinking about it and that's. And I haven't heard in a while. It kind of took off for a little bit. That's evergreen. And technically, this show, this podcast, is evergreen. And evergreen means that it'll be around forever, right? This should be around forever, which a thousand years from now probably won't be around. But the term evergreen, the word evergreen definitely took off a couple years ago.

And it seemed like. I remember, first time I heard, it was one of my buddies, and he was talking about content he was putting out, and he's like, yeah, I just don't need to put out, you know, this is evergreen. And I'm like, I didn't, I didn't ask him what, what, what that meant, but in my mind I'm like, the heck is Evergreen? Like, why does that even matter? And you know, to a certain point, it does matter, right?

Like, I'm, I'm hoping that these videos are around and this, these podcasts are around for maybe myself when I listen to, when I actually listen to them at some point, maybe down the road and think, you know, what an idiot, why is he saying those things? Or, you know, my kids or future generations, maybe they will listen to them. And if so, that's absolutely awesome. But yeah, the term evergreen was tossed around for a little bit and just want to throw that one out there.

A few more here and, and this one kind of. I heard this from a couple bigger name gurus for sure that my guess is if you're listening to this podcast, you've probably heard of them. Heck, we've probably even had a couple of them on the show. But it's, it's revolves around syndicating.

And I heard quite a few people talk about how if you're not syndicating, which is raising money, raising private money, and specifically they're talking about raising private money from family members and friends, but they basically said if you're not syndicating, you're selfish.

In their mind, they're thinking, all right, I'm bringing my Uncle Bob's, you know, a hundred thousand dollars that he's got and I'm going to make him a better return over here, over here in this real estate deal that I'm doing, which is great. If you can do that. Absolutely awesome. If you've got, you know, family members, friends, whatever, close network that, that can do that for you. Absolutely awesome.

I remember thinking that and, and kind of fighting it because a lot of people would kind of echo that statement. For myself, again, I don't syndicate. However, I would probably argue that, and it's, you know, relatively speaking, I help out my family as much as I can and I don't need them to syndicate, I don't need them in deals to help them out. And I found ways to help them out without bringing them in deals. And that's just what's worked for me.

And, and you know, everyone, again, every, everyone's situation is different. But even I, for an example, I had a family member come to me, I forget the dollar amount, let's call it 25, $50,000, something like that, they wanted to put in one of my deals. They Want to make some money from that. They want to make a better return in one of my deals than what they were getting wherever the stock market or whatever they're doing, retirement account, whatever it was.

And I kind of dug in further and I'm like, you know, how much do you have in savings? They basically said that was all they had. And I'm like, wait a second, I, I like, I can't take all your money, put it in my deal. Because even though a lot of these real estate deals could be safe, there are a lot of, a lot of them, especially in the past year or two that are absolutely hurting and syndicators are hurting and disbursements have been paused a lot of times, especially in the past year or so.

So that money, that 25, 50 grand, that's your life savings and now you want to put it into one of my deals. Like that's, that's, that's a lot. And again a lot of times it works out, sometimes it doesn't. But just because you're not, you're not syndicating doesn't make you selfish. So that really irked me when I heard that and again I heard that from multiple high level real estate investors that you've definitely heard their names.

And it just irked me that they said that, that if you don't syndicate your, you're being selfish. That's not the case. There's so many other ways to help your family and friends out and you don't have to bring their money, their last, their life savings into your deal. And again, you know, that's one example. Now maybe you've got an example of yeah, your uncle Bob's got 5 million in the bank and he wants to put 500,0001 year deals. Yeah, you know, maybe that makes sense.

But where I was at, where I'm at, situations I've been in and, and family members around, like to me there's better ways for me to help them out than bring them into one of my deals or multiple deals. So that's one that, that kind of bothered me and then kind of piggyback off that. And these other ones are guru's telling you how to live your life. And I see that a lot and I like to pick out little things from everybody.

And I've talked about this before, I think it was a few episodes ago about distractions. Right. I try to use best I can social media as an educational platform where I pull things from other people that I can learn from. But there are a ton of things on there that people are literally telling you how to live your life, right? You've got to figure out what works for you. Okay? Their guys are absolutely grinding. You know, just top of mind.

Grant Cardone seems like he's absolutely grinding, but it also looks like he is spending some time with family. I don't know the balance there. I have no idea. You've got to figure out what works for you, right? You've got to figure out. And not just work life or work, family life, balance everything else, right? You've got to figure out what works for you and it's going to change more than likely. And even with me saying this, I'm kind of telling you how to live your life.

You got to figure it out, right? For myself, it does change. I mean, the past, what's it been? I don't even know five or six years. But well, going back before that, even when I worked at 9 to 5, I always woke up at 6am this past week or two, I've been waking up more about 7, 7:15am I've just kind of changed my routine up a little bit just to. Just to change things, see how my body reacts, just see how different things react when I do that.

So you know these gurus saying they're up at 4am, you know, grinding. Maybe that doesn't work for you. 4am Definitely doesn't work for me. I'll admit that I've tried to make 6am working, it has for a while. But maybe my body's changing where 7am is just better for me. I get my lift in more like midm morning and we'll see how it goes. I don't know. But to kind of sum that up, don't let them tell you how to live your life.

You got to figure out how to live your life, how to run your business, take things from other people that they've learned, right. And that can pass along to you, that may work for you, but not everything that they're doing has to fit your life and then to kind of wrap up. And I've, I've. I don't know if I've talked about this on the show, but have definitely seen this, which is an interesting trend.

So not that this is a phrase or term by gurus, but definitely a trend that I see specifically with gurus and specifically with real estate investors. So there's this cycle, it seems that. And this is everybody, right? There are some people kind of skip some stages and get in different ways, but this seems to be the Cycle. And it seems like the more you're, more you're around, I guess people in the space, the more people are, are following the cycle and, and they'll continue with it too.

So the cycle is, you know, you're working, maybe you're working 9 to 5 or maybe you're not and you're just trying to grind and figure, figure life out. But you kind of start in wholesaling, maybe that's wholesaling, slash marketing, trying to find deals off market. But we're going to say just wholesaling, right? And then you seem to have some success there because you can find some deals, which is absolutely awesome.

Again, a lot of this is, I'm kind of poking fun a little bit at gurus and some of the things they're doing or saying. But there's still some value in a lot of this too. But the first stage is wholesaling, right? You make some money and then you're like, you know what, I found some deals that maybe we can, we can flip on our own so we can buy them. Found this off market deal, we can buy it, we can fix it up, flip it, make some money that way.

And sometimes those either go hand in hand or reverse order. But it seems like a lot of people kind of start in those areas. Wholesaler flips. And then from there it's like, well, now we've got some little bit of extra money. And now I found this really good deal in this really good neighborhood. Let's keep it as a rental. So now that they've gone from wholesale to flips to rentals, right?

And then they get some rentals and now, you know, a few years in, they're like, we need to really scale this thing. So now they start looking at commercial, right? Commercial asset classes, whatever that is, self storage, industrial apartment complexes, whatever it is. Now it's the, now they're in commercial and now things are flow.

And this is specifically the past 15 years. This is exactly what I mean. The market's just been going up, up, up, up, up, up, right? So this has worked, but now they're in commercial deals right now that's working out. So now people have kind of seen their success, whether they're not in groups or maybe they post a little bit on social media. Now they have people reaching out to them and now they're like, yeah, you know what, I need to start coaching.

Or maybe like we talked about before, they're in groups and people are like, well, you've done some good deals, you need to start coaching. Right. So now they start coaching. And what I've seen is again, this isn't for everybody, but for some people it seems like their other businesses or business because maybe they start with wholesaling and once they got in the rentals, maybe they kind of dropped the wholesaling and just marketed for their own deals.

But once they got into coaching, it seems like something in their business that they're doing beforehand kind of fell off and it didn't run as well. Again, it's not everybody. There are some people that kind of get those other niches on autopilot, hire the right people, put the right systems in place and then they can get in the coaching. And then at that point obviously, and each one of these is a different business, right? Wholesaling is a business on its own. Flips is a business on its own.

Rentals is a business on its own. Each one of these, even though it's all in real estate, it's a separate business on its own. And people don't really treat it like that from what I've seen majority of the time. But yeah, now they're now their guru, right? Full time guru or part time guru, still trying to manage their, their portfolio and do flips and wholesaling, whatever else they're doing.

And then from there it seems like, and maybe the last part of the, when I say cycle, maybe it's not a full cycle but it's a, it's more linear. But the last one is now they've got some money, things are working, what do I do with this money? And now, and they've got a network too, right? They're coaching so they probably have some type of social media network or network and they have people coming up to them wanting to get into deals, you know, people just people surrounding them, right?

Wanting information, wanting deals, whatever. So now they get into hard money and they start lending money to people that are finding deals. And yeah, to me that's, it's kind of the cycle of again, not really cycle, but kind more of a linear thing of real estate investor. Especially the past 15 years with social media kind of showing us this, you know, again, none of these are bad. I do think each one of those are separate business.

And as long as you have it set up to where you run each one as a separate business and it's running on its own without you, then you can move on to the next thing. But most times people are wholesaling and then they're like, well, we're going to start flipping too. So now you're not only wholesaling, you're also running the flips yourself. So now you're running two businesses by your maybe by yourself or maybe you have some help, I don't know. But you're probably running both businesses.

And then you get in the rentals. Now it's a third business, and so on and so on. And we've talked about this before, but yeah, that's kind of the cycle of the real estate investor that I've seen, especially with these gurus. It's kind of what you know, you know, watching them, kind of progress, that's kind of the progression of them. So hopefully that was valuable. Went longer what I thought, longer what I planned.

But obviously with, with any guru or educator or whatever, I mean, you can probably consider myself a guru with this podcast, even though this is free, you know, it is, I guess, kind of a guru. I just don't get paid for it. But yeah, sift through the stuff that you're listening or watching. Get the stuff that's valuable to you. Not everything's valuable to you. Some things work for you, some things may not work for you. Figure out what does and, and go crush it.

And again, as we wrap up, I want to appreciate everyone for listening, for watching. Hopefully we're gonna have some changes. A little, few changes here go out going on with the show next couple months, but we'll see you guys next time. Thanks. Thanks for following subscribing and listening to this episode of the Do More podcast, hosted by John Farling. To learn more or ask questions, go to L4Investing.com.