Hello, my friends. And welcome to another episode of Passive Real Estate Investing. I’m your host Marco Santarelli. So interestingly enough, today’s interview with one of my mentors and someone who I’ve learned quite a bit from Robert G. Allen, very famous well published author, and very, very successful real estate investor. I had an interview with him today, which you’re gonna hear in a few minutes. And before you kind of discount the subject matter, don’t write it off. I think this interview is very good, well worth listening to it’s a little different than what you might expect, but I guess the point I’m trying to make is it was completely different than what I was expecting to do with Robert and the conversation I was expecting to have with him. I was completely set up to discuss one of my favorite books that he’s written called the One Minute Millionaire full of great content.
It’s a very interesting book. And I’ve been thinking about it for the last day or two. What am I gonna talk to him about? What do I want to ask him? I even have a signed copy of the book right here with me, and it’s just such a good book, but we talked almost about nothing in that book during this interview. And so it was an interesting twist, but it’s still worked out very, very well because I talk about side hustles and being able to make money to have more investible capital. So you can invest in more real estate and build a portfolio faster. In other words, how do you compress time? How do you get more down payment capital to invest in any kind of investment, but real estate specifically, and often that means that you either double down on your employment, you raise your income.
If you can, you do more business, if you’re running a business or you bring on another business, what I call a side hustle. And it didn’t hit me until towards the end of the interview, that everything he was talking about in terms of writing and publishing a book, which is not all that difficult can be your side hustle. It is an opportunity to generate more income, but more importantly, open more doors, get exposure to more deal, flow, access to more people. So your network expands and you can tap into other people’s networks. And also probably most importantly is have the ability to raise capital from other people, OPM-other people’s money. And that could be through just syndicating. That could be through partnerships, simple partnerships, just two people or a small group or raising dead capital. I mean, there’s just so many ways to, to finance real estate and raise capital and do more deals.
And a book is just a great, great way to open those doors and do more deals. It separates you from everybody else because everybody else is just talking a talk or handing out a business card, which quickly goes into the trash. When you have a book, especially a book with value, because it’s got good content and you can hand it to someone with an autograph inside, they’re gonna keep that it becomes a sticky item. So Robert talked a lot about the idea of a book and the benefits of a book and why everybody should have one in this episode and how he can tie it back to Multiple Streams of Income. Another one of his very popular bestselling massive bestselling books, Multiple Streams of Income, but he ties it all back in how you can use and leverage that book. Even if it’s a small book into expanding, whatever you’re doing, especially you’re investing.
So with that, let’s jump into that interview. I hope you enjoy it. There are quite a few golden nuggets and takeaways from this episode and heads up. I did invite Robert back on the show for a follow up interview, call it part two, where we are gonna talk about real estate, real estate investing, and mostly about the topic of the One Minute Millionaire of the book and the content in that book. It is a thick book. So there’s no way we can cover it all, but we’re certainly gonna hit on some of the major points. All right, well enjoy today’s interview. And if you have any questions, you know, hit me up with an email afterward and let me know if you enjoyed the show or if you did not anyway, enjoy today’s interview and we’ll get back to you at the end.
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Well, I have a very special guest with me here today. A long time mentor of mine, Robert G. Allen is an author and mentor he’s beloved for his down earth style and highly effective systems. His purpose in life, as far as I know is to really help people to achieve their financial dreams or dreams of all kinds, but I’ll let him explain that he’s been teaching and writing towards that purpose for over 40 years. His first book, it’s a colossal New York times bestselling book, nothing down how to buy real estate with little or no money is the largest selling real estate investment book in history, which is an amazing feat. Then his massive bestseller, one of his follow up books titled Multiple Streams of Income was coined by his book. And that phrase has been used by countless number of thought leaders, authority, marketers, and entrepreneurs. It’s an amazing book. And now people all over the place talk about Multiple Streams of Income. So another great book, one of my personal favorites, although I love them all is the One Minute Millionaire, which we’re certainly gonna touch on today, Bob or Robert. It’s a great honor to have you on the show.
Hi Marco. We met in the power room and I was blown away by what you’ve been able to accomplish your real estate all over the country and helped so many investors. And to realize that I had a, a little part of that inspiration to help you do that. I meet people like you all over, all over the world. And I, I, I don’t know you until I meet you. And then you share that with me. And I blows me away.
Yeah, that was about almost two years ago, year and a half, for sure. One of our early power room mastermind meetings, but for the audience listening, you know, just to quickly tell them, you know, that connection, you had a significant influence on me. I mean, your books were certainly a source of mentorship for me. I learned a lot from your books and your courses in terms of buying real estate, especially nothing down techniques, which I did actually use and employ back then, but you really helped kick me in the butt in 2003, when I was essentially not working by choice, I guess you can call me successfully unemployed, but I, I got an email from you and you were putting on an event in orange county, California by Anaheim. And it was this free two or three day event under one of your brands and companies back then the enlightened wealth Institute.
And I thought, Hey, you know, I’ve got time. I’m gonna go and attend this event. So it was an incredible event. It was great. And I bought into the boot camps and I did go city by city, by city going to learn more from these different instructors all around. But the turning point, the thing that helped me is you kicked me in the butt and accelerated my real estate investing. And I actually acquired 84 doors in a nine month period. Wow. Yeah. So I really pushed the gas pedal all the way down and it wouldn’t have happened unlikely to go that fast and that hard if you didn’t have that free three day event. So thank you for that.
You’re welcome. Wow. That’s, you know, people always say, thank you for, you know, changing my life. But the bottom line is you did the work. You, you took the risks. You, you made it happen. I was a catalyst maybe, but
Yeah, you were definitely a catalyst.
I’ll take a little bit of that. I’ll take the 1% of the credit you take 99%.
Well, I, I give you a lot more credit than that. Like, you were definitely a catalyst, but there is a lot of truth in what you just said. You make a good point. You know, you can be the most educated person in the room, but unless you actually take action, nothing’s gonna happen.
That’s right. Absolutely.
So enough about me. You were definitely an influence and a mentor of mine, but for those not familiar with you, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself?
We all have dreams. I had a dream. I wanted to be a millionaire. When I graduated from the university, trying to get a job, nobody would hire me. So I said, well, I, I think, why do I need a job? Why don’t I just go become a millionaire? Why don’t I just still buy real estate and just go heavy whole hog into it. I was single. Let’s just go for it. Like you. And I acquired, you know, a bunch of doors. It’s like you did at the very beginning, my, you know, dozens of properties and 12 unit, apartment buildings and 40 units and 10 units. And, you know let’s see, I, I talk about doors probably about the same amount of doors you acquired, frankly in a short period of time. And and then I decided that I would like to tell the story of how I did it.
I found, I found that I’d like to share that with my, my friends and I, so I’d have a little seminar at night in my office and invite people to come. And I say, Hey, this is all what I’m doing. Let’s try this. You know, and, and this was fairly early in the, in, in the game. And so anyway, the bottom line is I started teaching these seminars and eventually that it grew into a massive organization teaching millions of people over the decades. And then when COVID happened, second, when, when the 2008 happened, everybody was buying real estate. They were using mortgages that they didn’t qualify for. And, and so the supply and demand just was outta whack, too much supply. The demand was just unbelievable and prices were going up and everybody was buying and then they took away the demand. They said, you can’t, you can’t get mortgages anymore.
So you had all these properties that nobody wanted. So having a, a seminar teaching people how to make money in real estate was that was not the good time to have a business like that. So we just shut that business down. It’s what entrepreneurs do. And I went international and I started just speaking in China and Japan and Russia and South Africa and, you know, Australia and Singapore, you know, all around the world. And I liked to speak. I like to teach because when I buy a piece of real estate, the people who are the tenants, they get a little benefit from living in my property, but I don’t change their life. Really. You know, what, what I, I like to do is what I did with you, Marco, I literally directed a totally different future for you. And now you did it. And now what are you doing?
You’re doing it with thousands and thousands of people all around the United States. And you know, most of those people have never heard my name at this point. And yet my influence has gone just, you know. Yeah. Viral. And you know, I wouldn’t get that kind of influence if I owned another a hundred real estate doors, you know? So I get a, more of a buzz when I get success stories. That’s my that’s my success is to create success stories. Yeah. And yours, yours. Now you are my son. Therefore you teach other people. They become my grandchildren. And then when they teach somebody else, they become my great, great grandchildren, you know? Yeah. And so the influence goes on and on and on when you change somebody’s life, you change a generation of lives. So I’m 74 as of last Friday. I, I still do this.
I still teach, I still share my messages with, with audiences like here today with you and your audience somebody’s gonna listen to this and they’re gonna go, wow. Yeah. Never thought of it that way. You know? Yeah. Let me dig a little deeper. Let me have a look at, let’s go to his website, robertallen.com. Let’s, let’s check him out. You know, who is this guy? Most of them have never heard of me because I’ve been out of the game in the United States for the last 10 years. Cuz when the 2008 happened, I was international. And then when COVID happened that shut that down, you know, I couldn’t travel any longer. So I had to do it on zoom like everybody else did. Then from time to time during that two years hiatus, my international speaking went to follow. I started just teaching a handful of people, how to write a bestselling book.
I, I said, you know, I, I like Multiple Streams of Income. I that’s my, one of my most favorite books, my most famous books. Like you said, I created that wording and you google Multiple Streams of Income and you see it all over the place. Same thing with nothing down. I kind of coined to nothing down too. So it’s a few things I’ve coined. And so with Multiple Streams of Income, one of those chapters is how to become an info printer because that’s what I did. I went from real estate, which is a mainstream to becoming an info printer, a marketing information. And some people, they are wholly excited about real estate. They don’t wanna do anything else, but for me, I just stumble into, you know, teaching and writing about success in real estate. And I got such a buzz from the success stories that that’s where I spent the last 30 years of my life.
Just creating success, stories like that. And so Multiple Streams of Income. The second stream is infopreneur and your audience here are real estate investors. And they may have never thought about writing a book before they might thought, you know, I’m not a writer. I don’t, I, I don’t know how to do that. Why should I spend time on that? And I’m gonna say to you that a book is the best business card you’ll ever hand out to anybody. When you autograph a book you wrote and give it to somebody has a business card, they’ll never throw it away. They’ll put it in their library and move it from apartment to house, to wherever they, you know, condominium, they’ll move it wherever they go. It’s the best business card in the world. If you, if you have a business card and you give it to somebody, a little piece of paper, guess what happens to that business card?
They’ll throw it away within a couple of days after they meet you, right? Unless you, you know, really peak their interest and you feel like they, they really, you know that you really need to contact them. But business cards are worthless. Nobody really cares, frankly. But when you give somebody a business book, a book that you wrote mind you, it’s more expensive and it’s harder to do. And it takes a year to figure it out. But when you give it it’s permanent, your legacy is permanent. And so as a, as a real estate investor, I would recommend that you write not the big book for a 50,000, 80,000 word book. Like my books are. I suggest you write a smaller ebook that talks about you as a real estate entrepreneur. You know, as a real estate entrepreneur, you need deals. You need deal flow. You need deals.
And it’s harder these days cuz the market’s hotter. Although it’s starting to cool, the signs are showing up, but number two, you need money. You need real estate deal money. You know, you’re gonna run outta money before you’re go. You run outta great deals and you can use my nothing down techniques. There are 50 nothing down techniques, but one of the best ways to get the money is to have a book that you literally give away on your website. You give it to anybody who wants it. You go, you can give it away on your social media. You can give it away by doing Facebook ads, Google ads you, you literally make it part of your brand and your brand now becomes you as a real estate professional. You just give it, if you invited to speak at a conference, you give it away to everybody in the conference.
If it’s a digital book, it doesn’t cost you any money to give it away. And if it’s a physical book, yet it cost you two or three bucks to print. Yeah. Each if it’s a small audience and they’re a qualified audience, if they really have got the money and you’ve been invited to speak to that audience, you give everybody your book, you just give it to ’em. And and in the book, it’s it designed, you design it so that your, your unique selling proposition is highlighted. Meaning why should they invest with you? Why should they invest with your way of doing it? What is makes you unique? I’ll give you an example of what you would do. You’d go the seven mistakes that beginning real estate investors make don’t make these mistakes. So what, what are they, you know, well make ’em up, whatever they are.
They would that you’d want to make sure that each of the mistakes is something you’ve fixed in the way you do it. So as a real estate investor, maybe you’d say we don’t buy real estate. We actually only flip contracts. We do wholesale. For example, we never take title. We only flip the piece of paper we don’t want to have, we never fix up a piece of real estate because it’s riskier. In other words, you’re trying to point out what are the mistakes that most real estate investors make? They, they, they go the fix and flip. Well, the fix and flip is dangerous, you know? And especially when the market shifts and you end up with this property, you can’t sell. So you highlight all the dangerous things that beginner could do and you then tell them, you don’t make any of those mistakes. You will not allow them to make mistakes like that.
When they work with you, you, you have fixed all of those mistakes. So the book ends up being a bigger brochure of you sharing with them. The secrets you’ve learned. Now, what happens is the reader of that book. Since you’re giving it away, they read it and they’re gonna go. I like, I like this sense. This making sense here. Yeah, this, this seems good. It’s not too pushy. It’s lots of good information. It’s only a, maybe one third of a regular size book. It’s 15,000 words, not 50,000 words. And therefore a digital book you can send ’em and it’ll take, ’em a couple hours to read an hour maybe. And now in a quick read, they literally top touch all the points that make you different, make you unique. And then they find them coming back and they say, you know, would you do that for me? You know, let’s let’s work together. And maybe this would be kind of cool and…
And so eventually you’ll have people who want to throw money at you. And most people, when they’re in a real estate game, they run outta money and they’re not good at raising it. And therefore they, they run outta money. They run outta good deals. And so what I’m trying to say is you should be doing both. You have to do an outreach to find deals and an outreach to find the money. And your little book can do both. It could actually be a two-sided book. It could be a book that’s upside down on one side. It’s how to find the deals on, on the other side is how to raise the money to do the deals. And therefore you’re, you’re reaching your audience in the same book. You know, trying to say, if you’re, if you have a deal, you want to get rid of call me and I’ve got the money. And then the other side of the book is if you have the money, but you don’t have the time I’ve found the deals let’s partner. Yeah. Share the money, share your money with me will be 50, 50. You’ll be a passive investor. And anyway, so the, the book idea is the best business card you could write. And I would challenge all of your listeners, viewers that this should be on your to-do list.
Yeah, I agree. So if I kinda summarize for our listeners, really what you’re saying, this is my takeaway. Essentially, the book becomes a marketing tool. It builds your credibility helps build your brand. It positions you as an expert or authority in a particular area. It’s like a calling card. It sticky stays around. Yes. And it opens doors for you for more deal flow and more capital raising. If you’re in the real estate or investing space, I mean, you could write a book about virtually anything or whatever your expertise or passion is. But in our example here, it’s about, you know, doing more deals and growing your real estate portfolio.
Then there’s talk about mistakes that people make in the real estate game. There are a lot of mistakes that beginning authors make when it comes to writing their book. So let’s cover some of the fears that people have. They don’t know how to write a book. You don’t have to know how you just have to know what your message is.
And spend time thinking about what makes you different, unique from everybody else. There’s a quote that Dave Chappelle said, I’ll never forget it. I absolutely love this quote because it represents those who go into what I call best seller status. There are a lot of books that’ll get published and they’ll be just marketing books and, and they’ll fade away and no one will care, but a, a bestselling book is a book that does things a little bit differently. And so here’s a quote, the sign, the mark of greatness is when everything, before you is obsolete and everything after you bears your mark. So why have I achieved a kind of a level of greatness in this space is because when I came out with nothing down, there was no book like this. It was creative financing. There just, wasn’t a really fun and, and public popular book on real estate investing.
And it was done fun. I had pictures in it and it was about a message called how you buy real estate with little, no went down, which is a very, you know, outrageous title really. But it put all my competitors out of business. They couldn’t compete with me. Yeah. I would go in a hotel. And which was similar. Would you go to how to fix up real estate or how to buy real estate with nothing down, you’re gonna come to my seminar and it put it literally put them out of business. It made them obsolete.
Yeah. Well, you created a category, you know, Nothing Down Real Estate is a category and you put a label on it and it’s very attractive. I mean, who doesn’t wanna buy real estate with no money down? I mean, duh.
Eventually, you run outta money. You just do
Right. Well then that’s the second book. How do you raise capital? How do you raise, how do you bring on partners?
One of those, maybe I should do one of those. That’s the book that your clientele should be writing. Yeah. The second part of that quote is everything before you is obsolete everything after you bears your mark. So look at all the seminars that are out there, there are lots of competitors, but just like you, you, for example, you’re gonna give credit to what you learned as a result of what I taught you. And therefore your, as you teach your seminars and you spread, spread your message out, I’m gonna be in that message somewhere. So the same thing goes with an apple iPhone. When it came out, it was a 2007, came out everything before apple was, is obsolete.
Right! It’s a category killer.
Obsolete and everything after them bears their mark. Because look at every phone since that, yeah, it’s got a screen with all of the, the apps on it. It looks like an iPhone. And so the hardest part to do marketing is to actually step back from it and go, what can I do this revolutionary? That’s that’s what does revolutionary mean? It means to revolt. When you say your message, it makes everything before you revolting, like why would you wanna do it that way? Because you’ve rethought it. And you said, this is the new way of doing it. And therefore, as you reach your, you know, mark of greatness, they pick up your vocabulary, they pick up everything about what, the way you do things. You look at every great brand. It fits that quote. I just gave you. So for your book for everyone anyone’s book, you gotta think about how can I make me stand out so that I’m revolutionary that everything before me is revolting and everything after me says, Hey, you gotta do it this new way now, real, estate’s an old as hill game.
It’s you know, how, how can you make it fresh? It’s apartment buildings, it’s commercial buildings. It’s, you know, well, you’ll look at all the competitors out there in the marketplace right now. And there must be maybe a hundred different little guys and bigger guys. And then some huge guys and gals that are out there doing their little seminar thingy. And you’ll look at ’em, you’ll just see that they do all of them, have this little slight twist. Yep. The way they do it. Some of them are single family home. Only some of ’em are commercial real estate. Some of’em are apartment buildings. Some of our, you know, don’t take title at all. Just flip the paper. Some of ’em are land development. You know, only working with out-of-state owners, you know, they all got their little thing. And so when you do your book, you, you gotta ask yourself, how can this book, that I’m writing talk about the seven mistakes that ordinary people make when they, when they go into real estate, how can I make it fresh?
How can I make it different? So the 12 mistakes that stupid mistakes that beginning authors make let’s just cover those really quickly. Because if you have a book you probably already made half or more of these mistakes. And if you’re in the middle of writing a book, you need to stop and you need to go back to the drawing board because these mistakes will, you want your book to be a best seller. So when people think about authorship giving away this free book is kind of like, it’s been done a lot. So when you go out in the world, you’ll find people have a website and you opt in and you get something for free, right? Well, everybody does it. You still need to do that, frankly, but eventually your book is gonna get a following, you know? And the ultimate goal is to get 10,000, those books out there somehow, so that you start to create a little sense form of buzz. And eventually you’ll write a bigger book. You’ll a publisher will publish it, you know? And when you go to a publish, now, this is the thing that most people don’t understand about authors. They think, man, you write a book you’re you become rich. Right?
Right. That’s the opposite of that.
I’ll tell you what, what I make it’s 15% of the cover price of the book. So go in the library and look at whatever the cover price is. If it’s a paperback, it’s 10%. If it’s a hard cover, it’s 15%, unless you’re Stephen King, you know, and it’ll probably be more than that. Sure. if you’re, if you’re, if you’re really, really, really famous, you probably can negotiate a better deal. But traditionally that’s what it is. It’s 10%. So if it’s a $15 book, your, your book’s gonna sell, you know, how many copies? Well, the average author sells about 5,000 copies in the lifetime of the book. And if the book is say a $20 book and the royalty is 10%, that’s two bucks, times 5,000 copies. That’s 10,000 bucks, 10,000 bucks in the lifetime of your book, is it worth it? And the answer is no, it’s not worth it. It’s not gonna make you rich.
Yeah. The way I look at a book is it’s an indirect money maker, not a direct money maker. You’re not selling books because you’re gonna make a lot of money or get rich off of the sale of the book. Now, if you self-publish, that’s a different thing. You know, you’ll make more money, but it still won’t make you rich. However, all the things I mentioned before the branding, the credibility, the ability to find deals, raise capital, open doors, to other things. Those are, you know, the intangibles of the book that become tangible.
Well, not only are they intangibles, the very purpose for writing. Is not to make royalties. That’s why you can give it away. The purpose of the book is to generate a lead, to generate a name. So the information marketing business boils down to two fundamentals. There’s only two things you’re really trying to do. And if you can’t do these two things, then the leads that flow into your business to help you with your real estate marketing, raising the money and finding the deals for real estate. If you don’t do at least these two things, then you know, it’s not worth your, your time. The, the first thing is, is words. What are the words? How are you are organizing the words in such a way that you set yourself apart. You get ’em to want to be your customer, your client, the words, and the way you write them.
There’s two kinds of words. There are marking words and message words, and the message words are gonna be most of the words in the book, right? The marketing words are the things that entice them to continue reading. So like a headline in a magazine, if the headline doesn’t work, then won’t read the article. So the headlines are the chapter titles, the title for the book, the subtitle for the book, the, the interim chapter descriptions in the middle of the chapters. You know, the headlines in there, they, these are marketing words and most people don’t even think about that. They think I’m just gonna write my book and whatever. So words that’s number that’s number one. And the second thing, the second item you’re looking for is names. You have to have names. The names are the people who are reading your book. It has to be a lead generator.
It has to gather the name of the person who read, read it. So I learned this lesson the hard way. When I wrote nothing down, there was no way to reach me. I didn’t have my name or my number, my address, nothing. And they wouldn’t have, they wouldn’t let me do it. This is back in, you know, a few years ago. And they were a little less excited about letting the offer promote himself. And then by the time I got to my third book my first two books sold a million copies each Nothing Down and Creating Wealth. Number one, New York times, bestsellers million copy bestseller. My third book title wasn’t as good, but I’d, I’d fixed the problem. I’d got the names of the people who read the book because I sprinkled throughout the book in 18 places. What I would give them, I would give them an audio cassette.
I would give them a special report. I would give them a, a wall, a hanging plaque with all the 12 secrets of entrepreneurship. I gave them like 18 different things. I got, I had to get the name and I did get the name. I got about 20,000 names from the 60,000 people who bought the book. Now 60,000 is not a million. In other words, it was a catastrophically poor selling book for my brand. It was a terrible failure. Terrible. The editors gave me $500,000 to write it. And so I made 500 grand on it and they didn’t make that money. Which book was that one? The Challenge, The Challenge, right? Challenge. by the way, you know, when you go to Robert allen.com and you enter in your name on the, to opt in there, I’ll send you a copy of think and go rich an audio version of that, that I recorded my own name.
When you get that, it’ll come back with an email from my team, just send it back and just say, would you send me a copy of The Challenge? Send me a copy of that book. The Challenge, cuz it’s about me going to an unemployment line and people who were on the unemployment line in St. Louis, Missouri. And I taught them how to make five grand in, in 90 days, starting with nothing, no job, no credit, nothing. And then one of couples went on to make over a hundred grand in the next 12 months. And so it’s, it’s a, it’s a fabulous book. It’s the best book I ever wrote. And it’s the worst selling book that I ever wrote. But the, this is where I, I, I made the, the, the change, those 20,000 people, because I worked hard to get them, to give me their name, their address, their email letter, their telephone number. We contacted those 20,000 people and a quarter of them, 5,000 of them said, Robert, will you do for me? What you did for those people in St. Louis, will you teach us how you taught them? Will you have a seminar, like a week long thing, a wealth retreat. We called it, how much would that be? Robert? And I said, it’s 5,000 bucks. Well, 5,000 people sent me $5,000. So how much money is that? That quarter of a million? No. Is that 2 million five hundred thousand? No is $25 million.
We’re talking serious money. And the reason with serious money is because I worked hard to get the second thing I was telling you about today. Two things, you need the right kind of words and the right kind of names. And I gathered the names. And so from that point on, I’m a name gatherer. If you’re not, if you’re an entrepreneur, you’re not gathering names, you’re not a business person.
Yeah. You know, so people listening to this, if you haven’t figured it out by now, and clearly Robert, you’re very passionate about it. I mean, you’ve written so many, you’ve authored it. And co-authored so many books. Many of them were New York times, number one, bestselling books. You’ve got such a great history in publishing. And not only that, just to let people know, and I’m gonna kind of plug this for you. You also teach people how to write and publish bestselling books, right?
So before I forget saying what I wanna say, if people haven’t figured it out after listening to you for the last, whatever, 15, 20 minutes, and in this conversation about books, a book is nothing more than a powerful marketing tool, right? That’s all it is. It’s a powerful marketing tool. And what I like about it is it’s a great way to do everything you talked about before. It’s not just the, you know, the branding and the lead generation, but it’s really, how can you find more deals, do more deals and raise more capital to do more deals.
And then some of your listeners are going to go, well, you know, there are other things I could get done with a book. Could I attract some people that I could coach myself? You know, you’ll notice that you’re doing that. And you learned a lot of that from me. I, I don’t have a royalty from what you’re doing, you’re just doing it. You know? And so I would say to everybody, who’s listening. Sometimes you buy a lot of real estate and you end up with negative cash flows or cash flows that are really tight. Cuz if you’re buying property with high leverage, the cash flows are really tight at first. So sometimes a little extra money from maybe a little mastermind you’re doing or maybe a little seminar you do once a quarter where you have 20 people in the room and they’re, they’re paying you two grand, you know, and it it’s just another 40, 50,000 bucks that comes into your life.
That kind of smooths out the up and down chunky ma major of real estate deals. You’re flipping deals and sure, sometimes you go a month or two and you don’t have any cash flow. And so what if I just taught 10 people? You know, it’s not that not that big a deal. What will happen is by teaching them, you’ll learn a little extra cash flow, but some of those people will wanna turn into your partners. Yeah. You know, they’ll be your bird dogs for you. And they’ll, you’ll be out there looking for your deals for you. They’ll bring you the deals that you have a hard time finding. And and then you split profits with them. They pay back their investment in your education. They had with you. And now you start to turn this, this extra stream of income. So let me, let me ask you, which do you think worked better for me? Robert Allen, where did I make my most money? Was it in the real estate deals I did. Or was it in the teaching people how to do real estate deals? Where do you think I made my most money?
Well, based on what I know and what I’ve seen in years past, I’m gonna have to guess it was in the infopreneurship side of the equation.
Yeah. So I made my, I made millions of dollars in real estate, but I’m not as passionate about real estate as I am about changing people’s lives. Right. So as I did in my publishing, when I did by publishing, I had licensing deals with people who would do seminars on with using my name and my systems. And I do them all over the world. You know, I’ll do in Japan, I’ll have a licensing deal and China, Taiwan, and, and in Russia, you know, in other words, somebody is promoting me in other countries and sending me royalties. So that’s, that’s called licensing which is a powerful way to do it. So in all the partnering shipping I’ve done with all of my partners, all around the world, some are still existing. Some of ’em have gone away, but I’ve generated 1.3 billion us dollars through the infopreneuring space, not even close to that in a real estate space, the got started, you know, I do what I’m loving to do. So I mean, I’m talking about if you are the guru type, you know, some people aren’t, they don’t wanna do that. You know, they don’t wanna do that at all. Like they hate to speak. They are, they are afraid of what people think of ’em they, they, that’s why they’re doing real estate. So they don’t have to bother with anybody else. Right.
There’s a couple of your clientele are listening this right now and they have always wanted to teach. They’ve always wanted to guru it up a little bit. So I’m talking about serious money, although it is a different game. Yeah. The systems for making money in real estate are very different than making money on the internet, making money, marketing information. Yeah. That requires a different system. So in the book model up streams of income, I, I talk about 10 different ways of making money. Infopreneuring is one of my favorite chapters.
Yeah. Cool, great book. So I think that’s a good segue. Sorry, go ahead.
Let’s just do a couple of quick mistakes, more mistakes. And then, well, I think we’re gonna be running out of time. I’ll send everybody once I send you the audio of Thinking Grow Rich, you’ll have my email address. Send me back an email immediately and say, Robert, send me the 12 Stupid Mistakes. This is an article I’ve written for them to read through. Take that to your publisher. They’ll probably won’t believe a lot of it take. If you have a ghost writer, let your ghostwriter use this. And I’ll send you the an article called the 12 stupid mistakes that all beginning authors make. I’ll tell you the second mistake. And then, then that’s about it. Most people, when they show me the book they’ve written, I can look at the first chapter and I can tell that it’s going to be a dog.
There’s no way this will work. I probably will just look at the title and I’ll tell that’s a dog because a title is a biggie. And I know what it’s like to have a doggie title, cuz it’s the difference between 1,000,060 thousand books. You know, the title is wrong and the book won’t be a best seller period. But when they open up the book and they read the first chapter, there’s one ratio that I look for. And if this ratio is outta whack, I know this book will fail. I know it cuz I’ve been doing this for 50 years. So I got it. I figured this out. This is the ratio. It’s the ratio of two words, the word I, and to the word YOU, you go into word and you search define all of the letter. I, the eyes that are throughout in first chapter and then search for the word you and it’ll tell you how many I and how many You’s were in that chapter as suppose the chapter is, you know, 3000 words long. And the ratio is 200 of the words I, and 50 of the words You, what am I gonna tell that author?
This book is a dog. Yeah. And it will not sell because nobody wants your autobiography. Right? And yet that’s what everybody wants to write because it’s what they know. It’s their story. And they want to tell their story. And unfortunately, nobody cares about your story. Nobody.
Yep. Makes sense.
You know, even if your grandfather wrote a book, it’s you probably haven’t read it yet. You know, it’s, it’s just, nobody wants to know your story. However, if you can take your story and share with your story at a different ratio. In other words, yes. You can say some eyes, but it’s, I am gonna tell you my story briefly here, because the system I’ve created from my success is the system. I want to teach you how you can succeed. And I’m gonna teach you exactly the expense mistakes that you are gonna make. And when you follow the steps that I will teach you, you will. Yeah. Yeah. You, you, you, you, you, you got a, you up the book and if you don’t it’ll fail, it’ll just, nobody wants it. Nobody cares. That’s is it possible to have a book? That’s your autobiography. Yes. It very rare.
One in a thousand will ever be really successful. But generally speaking, I can tell you almost right off the bat, it, it ain’t gonna work period. Right? So when I look at books from authors and they’re so proud and they work so hard and I look at one ratio, it takes me five minutes to do this one ratio mm-hmm <affirmative>. And I can tell, ’em sorry, this book is gonna die and no one will see it. Did you spend 10, 20,000 bucks going to one of these self-publishing of people that want you to, you know, they’ll do the book for you and they’ll get it all done. And they don’t understand the game either. And they they’ll, you charge 15, $20,000 to have them write a book for you. So you can put your name on, it ends up being crap. Self-Published crap. And you can tell I’m bugged about that.
It’s because they make these stupid mistakes and that’s mistake number two. So there’s 12 of them. Yep. That I don’t want you to make. So go to robertallen.com and sign in. And when you get that free audio from me, you’ll have my email address, respond back. Tell me you want not only The Challenge book, I’ll give that to you for free the whole entire book that people pay me $500,000 to write. And nobody saw except for those 5,000 people who, who wrote me a 5,000 check you’ll, you’ll see all the little places where I, you know, create the need. So you’ll get that book and you’ll get also the, the, the little tiny book on the 12 Stupid Mistakes. Maybe I’ll throw in some other gifts there too for you.
Okay. So Robert let’s just tie a nice, tight, big bow around this entire conversation about books, book publishing the benefits of it. So not gonna summarize everything, but I think it’s a good place to kind of pull it all together. Sure. What I’m hearing you say is that virtually everybody should publish a book. They’ve got a book inside them, at least one, at least that’s my belief. And people should publish a book one or more to get your story out, your name, out your knowledge outta your head, onto paper, out to the masses. So that way you can build a brand, build a name. If you’re in business, create a lead generator, be able to raise more, find more deals or open doors just through the opportunities that it could bring to you. And it makes a great much better business card or calling card. And I’m sure I’ve missed a couple of points there, but I think all the benefits are compelling and whether they, you know, do it on their own, do it with you. Or if you had to do it yourself course, you’re basically just recommending people, especially people who are investors that want to grow and expand, get involved in publishing a book.
Absolutely. Okay. Yep.
So that’s a good summary.
The reason I actually I’ve never done this before actually, but when COVID happened, cuz I was busy, busy traveling all over the world and having a lot of fun. And when COVID happened, it shut it down. I said, what shall I do? Well, let’s see, I’m more passionate about information marketing that I am about real estate. Should I go back into real estate? You know, do more of that or should I, so I said, I’m gonna select 12 people and I’ll work with these 12 people and I’ll, I’ll make work with them until they get a bestselling book. Yep. And so I’ve got my, my 11, you know, I’ve got that group and now my businesses are exploding in other areas. So on my time to do that, coaching one on one, I spend one on one time with people, not group coaching, but just me on the phone with one person. And I like it. I like it, but it’s, you know, it takes a lot of time. So I don’t do very much of it.
Yeah, for sure. Honestly, this is not the direction. I, I didn’t know, you know, we were gonna have this conversation, but it’s very interesting. And what I like about it is many times in the podcast I’ve mentioned to people, look, we have two types of clients. We have clients who, you know, just have a certain amount of savings to invest in real estate every year, because that’s all they can unmask between them and their partner. And then we’ve got others who are more affluent. They are higher income earners. They have more access to capital and they’re not limited in how much property they can buy. It’s just a matter of what speed you want to go. So that my recommendations to those people who have a limited amount of capital is to get yourself a side hustle, build yourself a small business or two, in addition to whatever your main stream of income is, you know, call it Multiple Streams of Income, but get yourself a side hustle or two going.
So you can accumulate your down payments faster. So you can invest in real estate faster and build that portfolio in a shorter amount of time. So that ties into everything we’ve been talking about today, because as you had mentioned, and everything you had talked about, the book can be that side hustle side hustle. Yeah, exactly. So I like where this ended up, because to be quite honest with you, Robert, where we started this conversation today is not anything I had planned or anticipated. We’d be talking about today. This is a hundred percent different and that’s fine. I’m just gonna have to have you back on the show and we’ll do kind of a part two, but we’ll talk about some of the things that I wanted to talk to you about, especially with this amazing book that you’ve autographed for me. The One Minute Millionaire, it’s a beautiful book literally and figuratively. And there’s a lot in there. A lot of great content that I think our audience would love to hear from you. So if you’re willing to come back on for, you know.
Let’s do it, let’s do a One Minute Millionaire show. It’s a, it’s a very unique book. It’s true.
It really is. There’s so many things I could have just tied in with the conversation you gave today into that book. So I’ll get you back on the calendar. We’ll do kind of a revisit part two and we’ll focus on that book and some of the content in there, but for this one, any final comments and takeaways, and then let’s tell people where they can follow you and learn more.
Where do you wanna be five years from now?
Good question.
Where do you wanna wake up? What house do you wanna wake up in? What is it like five years from now? Because the more clear you are about that, the more your brain will know how to take you there. Your brain is a computer, it needs numbers. It doesn’t work very well with concepts like financial freedom. When you say to your brain, I need to make 20,000 a month while I sleep. What kind of side hustles do I need to do to generate that? Or maybe it’s a real estate investing. What kind of door? I mean, doors do I need, I mean, you get more specific on your targeting and what you’re really trying to accomplish. The more specific you get, more clarity you get clarity is what we want to talk about. Clarity. What is your clarity map? And there’s another book I wrote called The Four Maps of Happy, Successful People. And the first map is clarity and most people are not clear and, and even you’ll ask them, what do you want? And they’ll tell, well, I, you know, I, I they’ll tell you what they don’t want. It’s just the brain doesn’t work on that. They’ll tell you what they do about in concepts, where they, they don’t get really specific. And the, the more vague you are, the less probability that your brain will compute.
So you can see around you the opportunities that would take you there, cuz you know, just like driving off a car lot in a brand new car, you know, you’ll see an orange Lexus, like you just bought everywhere you look because you’re now magnetized to the fact you’re driving an orange Lexus and you’ll see ’em everywhere. So you need to be magnetized to your, to your dream. You need to be clear, really clear. This is what I want. This is what, and there’s seven questions. This is what I want. This is when I want it. This is who I want it with. And for this is how much I want, this is how I want to get it, that this is why I want it. This is, you know, these questions create clarity. There’s seven questions. And if you can’t answer those seven questions more than likely you won’t get it.
You can answer those seven questions and then write them down every day. Say, this is what I want today. You write, you write down those numbers. Literally. That’s what I do when I do my journaling, I write down my 10 numbers every day. And when I am on my prayers every day, I’m saying heavenly father, these are the things I kind of would like. Does it fit in alignment with what you want me to do? You know? And I go through those 10 numbers in my prayer every day. So that would be my final lesson for today.
Yep. Very cool.
Get clear. Numberize your life.
A lot of the things that you just said that I’m listening to are talked about in the One Minute Millionaire, you, you actually talk about virtually everything you just said. So this is a great place to basically bring it to an end for today, but we’ll definitely pick it up from this point for the One Minute Millionaire episode and we’ll do that, you know, hopefully soon. So. Excellent. Okay. So robertallen.com is the website. We’ll put that on in the show notes. We’ll put that on the website
Yep. Thank you for all the, the gifts and giveaways. So I, I appreciate that. I’m I’m sure the audience will too.
Marco, have a wonderful day. See you everybody.
I appreciate you taking the time, Robert. Thank you very much.
You’re welcome. Bye-Bye
That is it for today. I hope you enjoy today’s episode. It was a little different than what I anticipated, but it was a great interview and some great content. So thanks for sticking around. It went a little bit long, a little longer than normally. I like to go. That is it for today. So if you haven’t subscribed to the show, remember to do so, help us spread the word, share the Passive Real Estate Investing show with your friends and family. If you can visit us on iTunes, leave us a rating review. It only takes a few seconds and thank you for listening. We will see you all on our next episode.
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