 When the pendulum swung so far the other way, with regulations on mortgage, all us in the business were like, man, this sucks. And my mission statement of that company is to reduce the failure rate in the real estate industry one agent at a time. I'm listening because that objection is them telling me what they wanna do. Doing roofing in real estate at the same time, make my first sale back to real estate, then lose everything three years later back to roofing. This is this roofing real estate seesaw. Let me build the biggest brand in town around being the guy that just wants to help the most people. You see guys, I'm trying to help you understand that we're here to help you build your career. All kinds of different brokerages and legends in the industry, I was crushing them. Don't you believe that they need to feel like there's a sense that you're their friend? I come back. Six more years from coming back and understanding everything to get to the top. Three years at the top, before I even think I have the audacity to turn around and teach someone what I did. You can make all the videos you want to, but you're not talking to anybody, it's just videos. One of the cool things I love about our next speaker is this guy is, anytime I see him and we lock eyes, it's like a WWE SummerSlam promo in the back while people are talking, right? So let's wake it up, let's stand up real quick. Let's wake it up for our man here. He is an investor, a speaker, and soon to be remembered, in my opinion, as a legend in the industry. Let's get a little power clap going. Come on, let's start it slow. Ladies and gentlemen, make some noise for Ricky. Good morning. You guys awake? That dude will wake you up, won't he? Make some noise, one more good time for Ryan. Now, Ryan just blew my mind actually, because what I heard is he's gonna buy a baseball team. And I'm like, wow, because I take a look at that situation, and I see what he's done with his business, with finding the talent and everything, and I'm like, oh my God, this dude once again has blown my mind and showed me how much of a genius he is. Like this is how far out he's thinking. That's incredible. The same way that he built his business would be the exact same way that he would build out a winning baseball team. Give it up for Ryan again. That's crazy. Cool, so my name's Ricky Caruth, I've been in real estate for 21 years. I got in real estate when I was 20 years old, it was 2002, there was no Facebook, Zillow, iPhones, none of that stuff. I literally had to do it with the old-fashioned telephone, direct mail, all that good stuff. So I could talk about many things. I said, Ryan, what do many speak on? Social media, real estate, entrepreneurship, other businesses, whatever, hustle, motivation, speak on real estate. We already got everything else covered. So how many people here are actually interested in real estate? Okay, keep your hand up if you're a real estate agent. Okay, cool, so you guys are here because of you. All right, you're here because you wanna take something back home with you to your business that you can absolutely crush it, right? So I don't wanna make this about me, but what I wanna do is I wanna tell you just give you the cliff notes of my story so that hopefully you can take something out of the mistakes that I've made, apply it to your business, and then maybe I can answer some questions. So I got into the business of 2002, and we had nothing to work with. It's email, postcards, and phone calls. So this was 2002, remember? Now the market started heating up 2003, 2004. By 2005 it started slowing down, and then by 2008 the stock market crashed and all that happened. So when the market started to blow up, right? And I'm leaving a lot of stuff out for the sake of time, and I wanna get to you and what questions you have and how I can help you and bring you value, because that's where the most value's gonna be. But long story short, I made a million dollars before I'm 23, because the market blew up. Now I'm a hustler because I grew up roofing houses with my father, right? I was laying shingles when I was 12 years old in Alabama, in South Alabama in the hot sun. Now I took that work ethic with me everywhere I went, and still today, I mean I post four to six times a day on Instagram, I post on every single platform every single day, right? I'm out here absolutely grinding my face off to go as far as I can and keep the momentum going. But it all comes back from roofing houses when I was a kid. And when I got into real estate I said, okay, what can I equate laying shingles to real estate? Because every single I laid, I made money. What can I do in real estate that everything, that every single action like that I do, I make money? For me it was phone calls. How many property owners can I call? So at the end of the day, I make a million dollars, really fast. And what's the golden rule when you have money? Buy real estate, right? But I didn't realize there was a right way and a wrong way to buy real estate. So here I go, I'm 23, I got a million dollars. Let me go buy some real estate. I start flipping houses. I would flip one, get the money, flip two, get the money, flip four, get the money, flip six, get the money. And it got to where I was borrowing money without even telling them, I would tell them I was making a million dollars and they wouldn't even check. They were just giving money away. And they would call his appraisal buddy to go appraise the property and the banker would tell the appraiser what to appraise the property for. That's how it was back then. And that's why today you see the regulations between third party from the banks to the appraisers. The banker can't talk to the appraiser. It'll also be done through a third party. All the regulations that are in place right now that came in place after everything that happened in 2008 was so needed, I'm just so glad they did it because when the pendulum swung so far the other way with regulations on mortgage, all us in the business are like, man, this sucks. But as time went on and now we entered into the market that we're entered into, look how solid of a market we have right now. And in the mortgage world, it's so solid. Ridiculously, tomorrow I'm gonna speak on the big stage and I'm gonna give you details about where we are market-wise. I'm gonna break the market all the way down. But I made a million dollars, I start flipping houses, I start borrowing money to do so. Overleveraged, way overleveraged, going into an overinflated market where this whole house of cards was gonna fall. So here I am, 25, lost every single thing that I had. Everything, because I still had about $2 million worth of debt, trying to flip houses that aren't worth what they were yesterday and I didn't know what to do. So I knew that the golden rule was to buy real estate and I didn't realize there was a right way and a wrong way to do so. And so there were two things that took me out. One, I was flipping houses on borrowed money that I should have never borrowed. Two, I didn't realize when a market shifts that closings continue to happen every single day, no matter what the market does. I didn't realize that, because when you're new in the business and you're naive, you don't realize that closings never stop. That's why when this shift started to happen last year, this is the moment I've been waiting on. Because five years up I became the first completely free real estate coach in the industry. I wrote two books, started creating content and my whole thing was closings never stop and my mission statement of that company is to reduce the failure rate in the real estate industry one agent at a time. That's the mission statement, that's why it's free. And so the two ways that I planned to do that, it wasn't just a click bait mission statement, it was real. And the two ways that I planned to do that was to A, teach people how I built the business around building relationships versus just closing deals. Like I'm not trying to handle objections when people give me objections. I'm listening because that objection is them telling me what they wanna do. And so I'm just listening to what they wanna do and then trying to figure out how it can help them do it. As opposed to, oh, that's what you're saying. Well, let me try to turn this around to get a contract done today. That's not how I do business. I wanna figure out what it is you wanna do so that I can help you do it. And this is different than mainstream real estate coaching which teaches you handle objections, get the contract, get the appointment set. That's not how I do business. I'm listening to see what I could do to help somebody. And on the back of that, build a brand around creating the largest database in town full of people that know I'm not trying to do anything but help them do what they wanna do followed by a weekly email on the same day of the week forever. Boom. It's really that simple. This could be applied to any business. This could be applied to any industry. But at the end of the day, what I did was I took that database and let's just say in 2008, from 2005 to 2008, I sold nothing. I was homeless. I was sleeping in my car. I was eating out of people's refrigerators. I had absolutely zero and I went back to roofing houses. So here I am. I got out of roofing, went to college, got my real estate license, back to roofing, got in real estate, didn't sell anything for a month, back to roofing, doing roofing in real estate at the same time, make my first sale, back to real estate, then lose everything three years later, back to roofing. This is roofing real estate, seesaw. And I eventually landed a job on an oil rig in Mississippi every other week in 2007. 2008, I got laid off from the oil rig, back in real estate and I took everything that I learned. Here's what I learned. Closings happen every day, regardless of market conditions. I watched closings happen and I'm like, man, it's still happening. People don't realize this going in. The second thing was in the boom market, I didn't have to build relationships. I could make 10 phone calls, somebody wanted to make 100,000 that day, a seller. I could list the property sell in an hour, make 20, 30 grand and that seller disappears in my life. He's not gonna rebuy into this over-inflated market. I don't need him anymore because I can make 10 more calls and make 20 more thousand. So let me just make 10 call 20 grand, 10 call 20 grand, 10 call 20 grand until I can make a million dollars. I don't have to build relationships. This is the market I was born into. I didn't realize that the name of the game is long-term vision to build the largest database in town, the largest brand in town. I didn't realize that. So when I came back, I'm like, okay, I got you. Let me build the biggest brand in town around being the guy that just wants to help the most people and never really asked for anything. So in 2008, I got back in by 2014 and every conversation I had with prospects after I got back in the business was totally different. It was, they knew that I cared about them and I could feel this total different vibe that not only I was genuinely curious about what they want and how I can help them, but they also cared about me in returning. We were creating a lifelong relationship. You see guys in real estate, if you're investors, agents, not even real estate, right? You can apply this to anything. For me, applying it to just real estate as a real estate agent, every relationship that I put in place with someone within my market is worth 10 to 20 deals to me over the life of my career. The repeats, referrals and referrals over referrals. And when I start thinking about the referrals of referrals, how those are 10 to 20 deals to me as well, now I think every relationship is worth 100 deals to me over the life of my career. You see guys, I'm trying to help you understand that we're here to help you build your career, not your 2023. 2023 is just a foundational inflection point in your business where maybe you could take something from this conference or maybe you could take something from a podcast or a video or something like that and apply it to your business and begin these stepping stones to building this incredible foundation where you understand psychologically how markets work and how you can take advantage every step of the way. To where you have an amazing career regardless of what the market does. This is the kind of mindset that you need to have regardless of what industry that you're in. And when I developed that mindset, it was to the moon. By 2014, I was the number one remax agent in Alabama. I was selling 100 properties a year as a single agent, one assistant. I did that for eight years in a row. And I was the number one remax agent, number one agent in my MLS for eight years in a row. Out of teams, all kinds of different brokerages and legends in the industry, I was crushing them. And it was all, I didn't do anything crazy. I just said, let me go out here and create five new friends or property owners every day. Right? Just friends. When people choose an agent, when people do business with a investor, right? And sell their property. Don't you believe that they need to feel like there's a sense that you're their friend? This is just my belief that I'm here to create as many friends as possible. And so by 2017, that was the year, the first year I made a million dollars. And that was the year I decided, you know what, I got something here. I'm gonna start teaching other people how to do what I did. And that's when I wrote two books. I started speaking, writing and coaching. Now there's a lot of people in the business that've been in the business for two years. They sold 19 properties and they're selling courses for 500 bucks. Right? It's the wild, wild West when it comes to this kind of stuff. Look, listen to my story. I get in, I make it, I lose it. Like over the course of a decade, I come back. Six more years from coming back and understanding everything to get to the top. Three years at the top. Before I even think I have the audacity to turn around and teach someone what I did and try to write a book or speak or create content even. So in 2017 was the year that I turned off the prospecting key. I flipped that switch. I'm not building my real estate business anymore because once you build your business up to the point of the level of income that you want, you don't have to build anymore. You can live off that database. So from that point, just a weekly email and I continue to make a million dollars a year. I continue to sell 100 properties a year. Servicing. Because when you get to that point people aren't interviewing three agents. They're picking, they're calling one agent. You. They've done business with you. They were referred by someone. Whatever the case may be. So now I've turned it into a residual business where all I did was a weekly email. Still do the weekly email every Wednesday, right? 19,000 people, 8,000 open it up every week and I close 100 deals a year with no social media for my real estate business. I never did social media for my real estate business because I understand real estate is a contact sport. I have to talk to people. If you're building your real estate business on social media, that's fine. But it needs to funnel to a conversation or nothing's gonna happen. I was talking to a guy in the gym this morning. He's putting on all kinds of videos. But he's not talking to anybody. He's not turning into any kind of conversations. You can make all the videos you want to. But if you're not talking to anybody, it's just videos. Where's the conversion at? Where's the engagement at? Where's the conversations at with potential customers for your business? And so that's one thing you guys need to understand about social media is that it's great to create great content and have awesome engagement, a lot of likes and comments and all this stuff and shares and followers, that's great. But what are you doing to actually bring the most value where people actually view you as someone who is their friend that they can do business with? That's a good way for me to put it. How can you create content that people view you as their friend that they would like to do business with in whatever capacity that means? So in 2017 I wrote two books, started creating content around this. And this is where my content creation journey comes because I got bored with real estate. When I got to the top and was there for a couple years, I'm like, I am bored. Let me go do something else. And that's when I was like, okay, I haven't even messed with social media. Let me go crush this, cause this could be global. I'm out of my local real estate market. Now I can expand into any market I want to into any business I want to. Let's see what I can do with that. And so the journey began in 2017 for social media and it's been a wild ride, honestly. So to date I've got over 200,000 on Instagram, 100,000 on YouTube, 7,000 on Discord, 6,000 on text platform, 100,000 downloads on, I post everywhere, every day, right? And multiple times on Instagram. And so as you move through your journey on social media, the more you do, the more you learn about the algorithms, what works, what doesn't work, unless you're not paying attention, unless you're just posting and then you're not paying attention to anything, you're not looking at analytics, you're not engaging with other people, you're not reading comments, you're not answering DMs. You have no idea what's working and what's not working. So right now I'm picking up 200 new followers a day on Instagram every day. Ever since I started posting four to six times a day. For me it's opposite for stories. I post one a day and my views went from 2000 to 15,000. It's just little things that you pick up when you're in the game. So again guys, I can speak on a lot of different things, real estate agent, real estate investing, I'm building a brokerage, I have a mortgage company, real estate coaching company, the list goes on. I'm in collaboration with Ryan on his companies, which by the way, it's been an incredible partnership. The guy is a great dude, for real. I don't know how much time I have left, but I wanted to get my story, since this is VIP, tomorrow I'm not really gonna be able to dig into my story, it's gonna be more about the real estate market data, where we're going, where we are, and what you guys should be thinking about in that aspect. But let me take some questions if you guys have any for me, and I'll be glad to help. Like personally, mentally? What's up? Do you have a family at that time? No, no, no, I was just a single guy. So I have a three-year-old, and me and my wife have been married for five years, so this was long before all that stuff, so thank God. The cool thing about when I lost everything, was sleeping in my car, I was in my mid-20s. So I felt so blessed, because there were literally 50, 60-year-olds right next to me doing the exact same thing that also lost everything in their 50s and 60s. And I was in my mid-20s, and I thought, thank God. Look at the lessons I'm gonna learn from this to be able to take and really crush the rest of my life. So I felt incredibly blessed, number one. Number two, listen, a lot of part-time real estate agents come to me and say, I wanna go full-time, you know, I hate my job. I'm like, okay, well, right now you wake up every day and work your ass off all day. And then you come home, you go to bed, you do it all again the next day, right? Right, when you become a full-time real estate agent, what are you gonna do every day? Wake up, work your ass off, go home, and do it all over again. So how is your life gonna change at all, going from what you're doing now to real estate? None. I'm like, enjoy this part of the process because you're not gonna be here for long. You'll be full-time soon enough and you'll look back at this and this will be just a memory. So when I lost everything, I went from doing real estate the next day when I realized I had to do something else, I was on a roof. I got up every day and worked as hard as I could. Got up this day, worked as hard as I... I don't care what I'm doing. I could care less what I'm doing. My life doesn't... I could lose everything today and start all over again. My life doesn't change at all. I wake up and I work all day. That's it. I grew proof-and-houses. Yee-haw. When I had 30 active listings, at 30 active listings and the showing request from other agents was unbearable and it was holding me back from growing anymore. And that was the first task I had to take off my shoulders. Nose English. Breeze Air. Experience in real estate's great. If they know, if they have MLS experience, worked for another agent or something, that was key for me. Yeah. I would make calls all morning and I would do... I would make videos all afternoon. I didn't do social media at all from a real estate business back then, because there was none. And then even when social media came along, I was just... I kind of ignored it because I was so focused on this thing that was working. I mean, I wouldn't change anything, right? But if I was starting over today, I would crush the phone all morning and then crush social... And this goes for any industry. Right? Yeah. You know something, though, right? You know you. Make content around you. Your thoughts, like... You know, day-to-day stuff. Like, you know stuff, bro. And also, like, market research. So, like, sometimes doing the market research and making videos, right, helps you become very knowledgeable of the market. Like, I'll do research to make content and it makes me an expert on the market. It's two birds. I'm creating great content around relevant, you know, breaking news, you know, events and issues. And I know these... I know these breaking news. I understand the market. I've got my finger on the pulse. You know, like, you're a real estate agent? No. What do you do? Solar. Solar? There's tons of solar content you can do, you know. You know, Google Solar and click the news tab. Boom. You guys should go to my Instagram and look at the kind of content that I create, right? I have my speech reels. I have my podcast clips. I've got the article in the background, the green screen article, which gets the best engagement on my reels. Then I've got where I'm looking directly at the camera with the green screen with edited moving stuff. And then I've got Twitter quotes. I diversify. I didn't do a team. No. I'm a little different on that. Like, and honestly, I found my place in the world. Like, as an influencer, I'm more of like an affiliate marketer guy. I don't want 100 employees, right? So in my different businesses, I do have some people, right? Like, I have a director of growth for my brokerage. I've got an assistant, and my dad runs the day-to-day for the real estate sales business. On the mortgage side, I have an entire company that we're partnered with that handles all the logistics and everything. I'm on business development, right? And so I've been able to find ways where I don't directly have these employees that I'm responsible for payroll and their livelihood, but yet I can still build massive businesses. It's something that has happened over the course of 20 years, right? So some people are like, how do you do all this stuff? I'm like, how long have you been doing this? They're like four years. I'm like, well, there you go. I've been doing this for 20 years. It's something that has slowly kind of happened over time. It's like I've been doing social media for six years. And the whole reason why I did free real estate coaching was to build a massive following, right? Because I knew real estate agents aren't going to pay shit for nothing. So, but I knew that if I had massive value that was better than what people were paying for, then I would have a huge following. And then I just thought, okay, I'll make money on the back end through business opportunities from having such a massive following. But it's something that is still, like I'm still looking for, like I have ran into massive opportunities that I've taken advantage of, but there's still bigger opportunities coming, right? But I'm patient. See, the four keys to success are believe. If there's even an inkling of you that does not believe this is not, you are going to fail, right? Work hard. If there is just 1% of you that's lazy, probably not going to work. Adapt, right? Understanding, looking at analytics, thinking about what works what doesn't work, and tweaking what you're doing. A lot of people just do the same thing forever, and they never grow, right? But then the last one is patience. And sometimes it takes years and years and even decades for things that you're thinking about right now to actually come to fruition. You know what I mean? One more. Okay, two more. You and you. Well, three. One, two, three. And then we're done. Oh, man. That's a whole other key note. But what's my strategy on real estate investing now? So my flips, I pay cash for. So I buy flips at the courthouse steps. Cash, fix them, flip them. I'm always doing like three or four at a time. Then I buy personally single family homes, duplexes, fourplexes, commercial buildings all around my local market just for me, right? And then I do syndication deals with apartment complexes all over the southeast. And I just, I never made a key hire. Like it's just me. Like I post everything. I have editors that like edit the stuff, right? Send it back to me. I post all the comments, DMs. I answer every DM on Instagram. Everyone for ever. I'm caught up right now. I called up this morning. I was on a five hour total flight yesterday. It took me all five hours to get called up and I was like, gosh, damn. But it's worth it to me because I'm playing the long, long, long game. I'm looking like five, 10 years down. But I hired a real estate assistant to help me in real estate business. I'm not the big business guy. One more and then I'll bring Pat back up. I'm gonna hype you up, dude. Who did you call? That's too slow. Property owners. Just say property owners. Let's do short answers. Property owners. How many answered out of the 2,000? Short answers real fast. 500. That's a great pickup rate, by the way. And then what are you saying to them? Right off the gate. What's the script? Click. Click. Click. I'm fucking out of there, dude. That's not what you say, man. Okay, you're the property owner. All right. Ring, ring, ring. You're the property owner. I'm calling you. Ring, ring, ring. Hey, Mr. Johnson. Hey, Mr. Johnson, Ricky Caruth here, local real estate agent here in LA. How you doing today? Cool, man. Me too, man. Enjoying the day isn't it gorgeous? What's up? I said I'm just enjoying the day. Isn't it gorgeous out here? Cool, man. Listen, I don't want to take it too much of your time today. But a house right around the corner from you just sold didn't know if there's anything in the world I could do for you buying or selling real estate. Mr. Owner, are you there? Are you fucking there? I think he hung up on me. He just straight up like, I'm sorry, dude. My point is, man, as I have this down to it, give it up for him. Listen, bro, all my free real estate coaching, I have tons of courses, scripts, videos of me calling Prospects Live. I actually call Prospects Lives on YouTube every week. I call Prospects in my market every week live. But go to ZeroToDiamond.com. That's where all my stuff is. And hit me on Instagram. DM me if you need anything. What's your Instagram? Ricky Coruth. R-I-C-K-Y. C-A-R-R-U-T-H. Ryan laughed when I said I answered all my DMs. Okay, guys, listen. This next speaker, you're not going to believe this. This is just so exciting. I can't believe this guy's here. I can't believe we got him here right now at this point in time. But I'm going to bring him up here right now. This is the man, the myth, the legend, Mr. Pat Hilton. You're beautiful. Give it up for Ricky, everybody. Come on.