You know, the family is a team sport.
That's what I love about this business – you don't have to go out and alone.
You can partner with other people, you can raise money from other people, and as a result, you can play into their strengths.
You can do the things that you already love to do, and you can partner with people who complement you in such a way, you can have more fun doing it. You can scale the business a lot faster together.
But how do you network to find these partners and investors?
I'm gonna share with you five ways to grow your network.
You're only one relationship away from reaching an entirely new level. When I first got started apartment buildings, my limit for buying a building was $500,000. It was my first one, and maybe I couldn’t wrap my head around a million dollars. I had to raise around $250,000, and I really struggled with that, especially from a mindset perspective.
Then I went to a real estate investing meeting, and I sat next to a guy and we got into conversation. We ended up having lunch, and as it turns out, this guy had just sold his development company. He wanted to invest in real estate, and he was looking for partners to do that.
His problem was that he was he wanted to deploy more than a million dollars per deal. I was barely wrapping my head around raising $250,000, and this guy wanted to invest a million dollars minimum. All of a sudden, within a second, my mind shifted from something that was completely impossible for me a minute ago, which is buying a $10 million building, to how can I find a $10 million building?
That shift happened because this guy sat next to me and just blew my mind.
I have noticed this over and over again with networking. When you get out of the house, both in person and virtual, when you get to meet people – magical things happen.
There's a variety of reasons why you want to go out and network:
- To find partners who complement you
- To help raise capital
- For support and advice
- To form a mastermind with others who are trying to do what you are doing
You can only meet those people when you go out networking.
Let's talk about the five different ways you can do that.
1. Join free groups
Meet-ups are a fantastic way to meet people. They were, obviously, an in-person thing, but a lot of them evolved to virtual, and some of them are hybrid, as well. These are typically free, and you can find them at meetup.com.
There are also online groups. You can join groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Bigger Pockets, for example. The pro to these groups is that they're free. The con is that the quality of the people in the room can be relatively low. There's a huge spectrum of people in there, including a lot of tire kickers, and a lot of noise.
That leads me to my second tip…
2. Join paid groups
Some Meet-ups are paid, and that eliminates a lot of people. There are other online virtual communities that are paid. For example, ours is called a Deal Maker Mastermind. For a small monthly fee, you can join a more exclusive group of people, and because there's a small monthly fee, it increases the quality in the room.
There's a lot of networking that happens, joint venturing that we talk about, and raising capital in that group. So you may want to consider the Deal Maker Mastermind, as a premium group to check out.
3. Target networking on platforms like LinkedIn or Bigger Pockets
You can join the conversation, and you can search people based on geography. LinkedIn has very sophisticated search, for example. You can search people by zip code, if you're an attorney and want to connect with other attorneys who invest in real estate, you can literally reach out and message them and have a conversation online – so you can network virtually, and make targeted connections with people.
4. Attend virtual real estate conferences
Almost every conference in 2020 went virtual could due to COVID, including ours at Deal Maker Live. In fact, check out episode MB 260 with Suzy Severe and Michael Barnhart, a couple of Americans who live in England and closed on an 88 unit deal. They raised money all from the United States using only virtual networking techniques, and the stuff they share on the podcast is ninja-like stuff. Listen to how systematic they were in networking virtually online.
5. Attend in-person real estate conferences
Ours is always in the summer. This year, Deal Maker Live is happening in July in Dallas. It will be hybrid – in person and virtual, so more people will be able to attend. Of course, the magic in these networking events is even more magical because you can have in-person conversations right then in there.
So, you're looking for potential partners. You're looking for capital, you're looking for peers for support network and you're looking for potential advisors.
And there you have it, five ways to network and four things you should look for when you're networking.
? Remember, Deal Maker Live is coming in July. Check it out and reserve your seats right now. It's going to be the multifamily syndication event of the year and you don’t want to miss it.
