Help Others

An important key to your success is recognizing when people can be helped by your specialty and when they might need to see some other specialist like a bankruptcy lawyer.Good professionals with good reputations aren’t greedy. They don’t try to grab every single passerby and turn them into a customer or client. Successful professionals aren’t stupid either. They don’t waste a lot of time trying to solve problems with their particular specialty when it is never going to work. By learning to recognize the symptoms that might require another type of specialist, you can make a meaningful recommendation for someone else.

Why make recommendations? Besides being helpful and costing you nothing, it gives you legitimacy. Face it, everybody knows that the doctors, lawyers, accountants, plumbers, electricians, and auto mechanics all know their colleagues in town, and what’s good and bad about each one. Being willing to make a referral to another workout specialist helps establish you as a member of that community. An added benefit is that these other people will refer business to you if they’re not able to help someone by their particular specialty.

Your First Steps

Right now, the only thing you have to do is practice thinking about yourself as a trained professional—a workout specialist. As a professional, you need business cards. People just don’t think you are legitimate without them. Decide the information you want to appear on your business card. I would suggest your name, the title

“Workout Specialist Real Estate,”

or

” Professional Foreclosure Buyer “a cell phone number, and an email address.

Get Focused

Whether you are looking for a personal residence or an investment, you need to set up some parameters. If you don’t know how much something will cost, you don’t know if you can afford it or not. You have to prepare a budget. Your budget will help you in many ways. It will focus your thoughts on the steps involved in meeting your goals. It will help you remember what types of things you need to document, so you can write them off your taxes as business expenses. It will also help you determine what can be performed by other people and whether it makes sense to pay someone to perform particular chores, such as gathering names and addresses of potential referrers.

Some of the things you should budget for include the following.

• It will cost money to set up a data management system—either software or some sort of paper filing system. Be sure to include the time necessary to set everything up and to learn how to use software.

• You will have to spend time identifying possible referrers. u You will have to spend money on paper and postage sending letters to referrers.

• There is a cost for the mileage and time you spend visiting with referrers.

• You will want to invest in thank-you cards and postage.

• Seminars will have expenses as well—preparation time, seminar time, and the cost of a meeting room. (Many times you can get meeting rooms free at your Chamber of Commerce, community college, or church.)

• Snail-mail newsletters will cost you preparation time, plus the cost of paper, printing, and postage.

• There is no monetary expense for email newsletters, but you MUST keep some indication in your files that the person has given you permission to send email.Otherwise, you’re a penny-ante spammer.

• It will cost money to place ads in a community newspaper or thrift paper.

• You will have to spend time scoping out foreclosures and other legal notices or filings.

You might want to periodically compare your actual expenses—time and money—against what you thought they would be when you made your budget. That way, you can make changes if necessary.

Keep Track of Information

Even if you’re doing this just to buy a personal residence and nothing more, you still need to be as efficient as possible. Doing so will enable you to look at a lot more properties and find the one that is best for you, instead of settling for what you’re able to track on top of your head. Plus, things start to get confusing when you’re looking at several properties. I don’t want you to get confused and discouraged—you really can do this, but you need to be organized.

Systems and Procedures

I’m a big believer in systems and procedures. A system is a way of doing things so you don’t waste time. A procedure is a task that gets done every time, without fail, and fits into your system in a certain way. Three-ring binders with tabbed dividers, file folders in a plastic tub, and computer programs set up in a certain way—are all systems. For example, my systems usually involve putting a person’s name in Microsoft Outlook, assigning a category of something like “foreclosures,” and then putting enough information in the notes field to make searching easy.

Every time I do something in regards to that person, I open their file in Outlook and type in notes. I also have a directory called “Foreclosures” and subdirectories with people’s names. If a document fits into more than one subdirectory, I file it in all relevant places. Another system might be as simple as a three-ring binder with tabbed dividers for all your information and some blank pages for spur-of-themoment notes. Some people work well with labeled file folders, while others prefer shoe boxes.

The point is to set up a system that’s comfortable for you. If it’s not comfortable and designed the way your mind works, then it’s useless. Some of my friends have systems that involve nothing more than stacks of paper on the floor. It makes me crazy, but they can always find what they need. Look around you, see the ways you successfully keep track of things, and adapt that system to your foreclosure work. A procedure is a task. Filling out a form is a procedure. Always corresponding by email and then printing and saving your emails is another one. I’ll be giving you lots of procedures in this foreclosure blog. If they need a little adapting to fit into your system, then do it. There’s nothing magical about my forms, as long as you obtain the information and do the tasks you need.