There's an art and science to capital raising for commercial real estate and this week's guest Hunter Thompson is an absolute expert at this. Jump in for some amazing advice. 👉👉Learn About Investing Together at https://theinvestormindset.com/invest Hunter Thompson has raised over $30M for over $90M in real estate and he's here to give us his secrets on building relationships at scale. We go into his “attract, educate, nurture, close” process and why this is much more effective than just focusing on traditional sales techniques. The aim here is for investors to come to YOU… not you continuously chasing them. This episode is going to give you a ton of information on how to grow your capital raising game the smart way. Hunter is a full-time real estate investor and founder of Asym Capital, a private equity firm based out of Los Angeles, CA. Since founding Asym Capital, he has raised more than $35 million and directed the purchase of more than $90 million of commercial real estate across a variety of asset classes. He is the author of Raising Capital for Real Estate: How to Attract Investors, Establish Credibility, and Fund Deals. Hunter is also the host of the Cash Flow Connections Real Estate Podcast which is frequently listed in the top 200 Investing podcasts on iTunes. Hit subscribe to join the community and grow your investing knowledge today. Let us know in the comments: How do you go about raising capital?
There's an art and science to capital raising for commercial real estate and this week's guest Hunter Thompson is an absolute expert at this. Jump in for some amazing advice. 👉👉Learn About Investing Together at https://theinvestormindset.com/invest
Hunter Thompson has raised over $30M for over $90M in real estate and he's here to give us his secrets on building relationships at scale. We go into his “attract, educate, nurture, close” process and why this is much more effective than just focusing on traditional sales techniques. The aim here is for investors to come to YOU… not you continuously chasing them. This episode is going to give you a ton of information on how to grow your capital raising game the smart way.
Hunter is a full-time real estate investor and founder of Asym Capital, a private equity firm based out of Los Angeles, CA. Since founding Asym Capital, he has raised more than $35 million and directed the purchase of more than $90 million of commercial real estate across a variety of asset classes. He is the author of Raising Capital for Real Estate: How to Attract Investors, Establish Credibility, and Fund Deals. Hunter is also the host of the Cash Flow Connections Real Estate Podcast which is frequently listed in the top 200 Investing podcasts on iTunes.
Hit subscribe to join the community and grow your investing knowledge today.
Let us know in the comments: How do you go about raising capital?
KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. Over the last 10 years we've seen a tidal wave of interest in passive investing.
2. Being able to raise capital is the most lucrative and sought after skill in the entire sector.
3. It's not scalable, replicable or lucrative to go around trying to convince people to invest with you.
4. You have to create a lead nurture mechanism that allows you to use the same resources over and over again so that your time isn't required on a one on one basis. This is called the: attract, educate, nurture, close process. This can be done via podcasts, email blasts, YouTube channels, books etc
5. Consistency is far more powerful than the channel itself. So pick a medium that you feel comfortable with and something that you're going to be able to do consistently.
6. It's critical that you move the people from your medium to your sales list.
7. Each investor has a specific way of being moved into taking action which can sometimes be broken down into senses. So we want to have our communication available to people in thier favorite medium.
8. The concept of time is so critical because when a deal is available you need to raise the money in a short amount of time. It doesn't matter how much money you can raise, if you can't do it in time you'll lose out to a competitor.
9. Some people believe that by reading sales books they're going to win through rebuttals but what they should be doing is focusing on the attract, educate, nurture, close process.
10. Pick a single thing that you're good at and be "that" guy.
BOOKS
The Passive Investing Playbook - https://theinvestormindset.com/passive
https://www.amazon.com/Raising-Capital-Real-Estate-Credibility/dp/1712882120
LINKS
https://www.linkedin.com/in/hunterthompsoncfc/
https://cashflowconnections.com/
Learn more about investing with Steven at https://theinvestormindset.com/invest
Join the MultiFamilyMBA and get exclusive free training: https://theinvestormindset.com/mfmba
Steven: [00:00:01] There's an art and science to capital raising for commercial real estate, and today's guest is an absolute expert who's raised over $30 million for over $90 million worth of real estate Hunter Thompson. He talks to us about his strategy for going out and building relationships at scale. One of the people that I look up to and I think you guys are going to really enjoy this episode.
INTRO: This is The Investor Mindset Podcasts and I'm Steven Pesavento. For as long as I can remember, I've been obsessed with understanding how we can think better, how we can be better, and how we can do better. And each episode we explore lessons on motivation and mindset from the most successful real estate investors and entrepreneurs in the nation.
Steven: [00:00:47] It's wonderful that so many of you have stepped up and registered to partner in future multifamily opportunities together. We follow a very strict vetting process when selecting our operating partners, and all of which have a serious track record, at least five years of experience, at least 2500 doors that they've actually managed and owned, and over $250,000 of assets under management. These kinds of guidelines help make sure that we are investing together in some phenomenal deals, you can learn more by registering at theinvestormindset.com/invest. These institutional silo investments bring benefits to busy professionals and real estate entrepreneurs looking to reduce their taxes and increase the returns and you can join us by getting started at theinvestormindset.com/invest. I look forward to seeing you on the next deal.
Steven: [00:01:44] All right guys, welcome back to The Investor Mindset Podcast. I'm your host, Steven Pesavento, and today I've got a very special guest and friend, Hunter Thompson. How are you doing today, Hunter?
Hunter: [00:01:52] Hey, thanks again for the opportunity.
Steven: [00:01:54] Of course, man. As you guys know, Hunter is a full-time real estate investor and founder of Asym Capital, a private equity firm based out of Los Angeles, California. And since founding Asym; he's raised more than $35 million and directed the purchase of over 90 million of commercial real estate across a variety of asset classes. He's the author of Raising capital for real estate, how to attract investors establish credibility and fund deals, and he's also the host of the Cashflow Connections Real Estate Podcast, which is frequently in the top 200 investing podcasts, I highly recommend that you guys check out Hunters book, it's one of my favorites. I've read it three or four times already, And we're going to dive into some fun topics about raising capital, you're ready to dive into things, Hunter?
Hunter: [00:02:38] Let's do it.
Steven: [00:02:39] All right. So you're a big advocate of building out a platform to attract investors, and serving them and building your business around this philosophy. Talk to me a little bit more about it and where you discovered it and how it's really led into you building a phenomenal business.
Hunter: [00:02:56] Yeah. I appreciate the opportunity. So generally speaking, I think that the world of capital raising is on its own very interesting, but we're seeing an incredible interest in the space because there's incredible interest in the world of passive investing generally, just in the last 10 years, we've seen the job Zach [00:03:14 Unintelligible] created, we've seen this tidal wave of interest into the world of passive investments. And within that world, everything that helps people accomplish that goal of investing passively, is going to be very lucrative, and in the world’s commercial real estate, particularly scalable. But from my perspective, raising money, just simply acting as a placement agent, or directing capital is the single most lucrative sought-after skill in the entire sector. So one thing that if you can do this one thing, [00:03:49Unintelligible] an email, do a webinar and raise $5 million, you can ensure you'll have a place in the business. Now that's no easy fit, we'll talk about some of the reasons in this conversation. But I have always found myself less inclined to actually focus on the operating side of the business implementing the business plan at the property specific level. And I just really like talking to investors engaging in really interesting and kind of unique conversations at the high level with people that are interested in investing $100/200,000. That's what I want to do all day every day, so I built a business where that's basically all I do. And we can talk about how I've done it, but that's kind of my position on the capital raising side of the business.
Steven: [00:04:34] Yeah. It makes so much sense. It's something that I kind of sensed myself, that was the direction that I got the most joy out of when I was flipping houses, it's one of the things that really attracted me to commercial, and so when I first met you, I thought, Man, this is exactly the type of business model that I'm looking at. So I would love to dive into things for those of you who are listening, who are interested in maybe going down this path or just understanding more about some of the strategies that go into it and why it's really valuable. So talk to us about your kind of attract and educate strategy and then we'll kind of pick up each of the different pieces that play into it.
Hunter: [00:05:08] Sure. So as you mentioned in the bio, I wrote a book called Raising capital for real estate, and sold 1000s of copies all over the world, from Shanghai, to Los Angeles, and everywhere in between and I'm very proud of that. But in that book, I tried to give away everything I knew about this topic, and like every author, the moment you click publish, which we published through Amazon, I realized, Oh, my gosh, there's a really important element of this, that if I don't give this away as well, people are going to blow it. And here's what that element is time. So the book is all about the concept that I don't want to chase around investors, I want them to chase me, I tell a story in the beginning in the first chapter where I had all of the things that you could have an advantage to raising money, I had developed a track record with my own capital, I had an excellent strategic partner, I created a presentation I thought I would give today, not a problem in terms of the presentation itself, I gave the presentation a room of 30 people, each of which had a net worth of $1 million and I completely failed. I didn't raise one nickel, and that was a really important moment for me, I basically realized, first of all, all the things that got me to that point, they aren't going to help me get to the next level, just having good sales strategies, for example, isn't going to help savvy accredited investors, give you their quarter million dollars. So I took about six months to cry and complain about how badly I had performed, and then I realized I had made a big mistake. It's not scalable, are replicable or lucrative to go around trying to convince people to invest with you, you have to create a lead nurture mechanism that allows you to use the same resources over and over again, so that your time isn't required on a one on one basis. And so the system that I talk about is the attract, educate, nurture, close, process. So instead of actually going around, chasing people around, they're attracted to me through things, I put out lots of podcast interviews, and then I exchange some sort of value with them in exchange for their email address, let's say an E book or a due diligence checklist, bunch, by the way, I find those to be extremely helpful. Any kind of list you can do it's instant credibility, because when people give you their email, the first thing they're trying to figure out is, is this person credible? So when you write a 100, page, E-book, that's the first interaction you're anticipating someone to have with you, that takes a ton of credibility, just to get that person to read your E-book. So we started shortening the things we do, doing a lot of bullet points and going, pow, you gave me the email, here's instant credibility now into emails, I'm going to say, guess what, as a bonus for being on my list, you get this very cool 100 page E-book or something like that. So long story short, just thinking about it in that framework, which is to attract, educate, nurture close. That alone can help you tremendously because it's going to allow you to avoid years of trying to chase your friends and family around and do investing in your deals.
Steven: [00:07:45] Yeah. I love it because it's digital marketing one on one. We used this in the startup space when I was working in startups, and it's definitely been a key piece of being able to serve you guys in the community, right? So I've put out different opportunities, different lists, different things you guys have subscribed, that's given us an opportunity to engage with each other. And so at the core of what Hunter is really talking about, is creating a mechanism so you can engage with as many people as possible at one time, in a skilled manner. So what I'm curious about Hunter is, as you've been going out there and raising capital and attracting people into kind of the top of the funnel, if you will, what have been some of the best channels to reach new investors that you found?
Hunter: [00:10:30] Well the key as opposed to the channel is the medium that you feel you're going to be most consistent on. Consistency is far more powerful than the channel itself. So if you really don't like speaking publicly, you shouldn't be speaking publicly. Now of course, there's things where you have to be good enough at certain things like writing emails, and I'd say speaking publicly, may be one of those things as well. But if you don't like it, you don't want to spend all your day doing that, but for me, I really love the podcast medium. I love the fact that I can do it from the comfort of my home, I love the fact that I'm genuinely a very curious person, so I love to have conversations with experts that I look up to and agree with or disagree with and so the podcast medium for me has been fantastic. I was very fortunate to start just a few years before the podcast medium really started to blow up. But I believe, and I quote the data in my book, but I think the numbers went from 14 million downloads in 2014 to 50 million downloads a year in 2018, in iTunes, something like that. So that's not going anywhere, so I've really loved the podcast mechanism, but this is really important, regardless of what channel you use, it's critical that you move people off of those channels and into your own list. I'm doing a keynote presentation in a couple weeks, that's titled grow your list, scale your portfolio, and if you're listening to this right now, and you have a podcast or you're thinking about having a podcast, and you have a list of 100 people, you're going to have to be the best email marketer in the history of email to close a $5 million raise, if you only have 100 investors, you'd have to have a 100% close ratio, basically a $50,000 minimum. So I want to look at it the other way, I want to look at it in the sense of if I can grow my list, even if my close ratio decreases significantly from let's say, 10% to point 1%, if that list is large enough, all my deals are going to be funded instantaneously, and that's what I spend all my time doing the top of that funnel. But then once you're on the podcast medium, you've got to give away additional resources, webinars, E-books, checklists, etc, in exchange for that email address so that people go from the podcast medium over to the other list and I'll tell you one thing that people make a huge mistake on on their website and it's very common. So if you're doing this right now, don't be embarrassed, I've done it too, thinking that the exchange of value, especially in that initial conversation, should be a phone call. So a typical thing you may see on someone's website is, "hey, click here, to learn more" and to learn more, is an opt in to schedule a call 20 minutes or 30 minutes. The problem with that, though, is that you're so early in that relationship, that number one, usually those people aren't willing to give you that 20 or 30 minutes, and second of all, you shouldn't be in a position to give away that 30 minutes. The goal at the beginning is just to smash the credibility index all the way forward so that they're willing to open your emails, entertain a call with you at some point and investment.
Steven: [00:12:18] Yeah. It's super helpful because I see a lot of people run into this challenge where they're first getting started raising capital, maybe it's for their deal, maybe they're partnering with some other people, but they have a list of 50 or 100 people, and they're thinking to themselves, "I can raise a million or I can raise $5 million." but at the end of the day, if any one of those people that you're relying on doesn't come through, you're kind of in a pretty tough spot, and so you really have to figure out well, "how can I reach more people and have them impacted and educated on being able to want to do business with me so that I'm not in a place where I need them to do business with me, where it's an option and opportunity for them. So what I'm curious about is what are some of the habits of a successful capital raiser? What are some of the things that should be done on a daily or weekly basis for raisers to be able to build this type of business that you kind of envision in the book.
Hunter: [00:13:11] Again going back to the system of attract, educate, nurture and close, all of your time should be focused on some piece of that system. So all of them should be strong, but generally speaking, I would say that the attract phase is the most critical, the top of the funnel is the most important. But once you get through that, I would say that working on the educate and nurture phase, so attract is "hey, I'm Hunter Thompson, go to my website," educate would be "in exchange for your email address, I'm going to give you this free E-book on self-storage," so they're educated now, they understand my business, they recognize what type of investments I'm interested in and why I like recession resistant assets and such, and how we're positioned the marketplace, and then it's time to nurture. So when you ask how should capital raisers be spending their time, this is where it's really the meat and bones of the whole business, focusing on generating those leads, and then how can I nurture that relationship once we're on the same page. So this is something that I actually got from Joe [00:14:16 Unintelligible], who I interviewed many years ago, but it's stuck with me. Each investor has a different way of really being moved to take action, and this sometimes can be broken down into senses. So I want to be able to send them audio for people that only like audio, I want to be able to send them E-books, for people that only like E-books or reading, then I want to have an annual conference, which is what we do at IIRC, the intelligent investors real estate conference, people actually can come meet me and meet some of the operators we invest with, etc. And then also, as we're talking about offline, we're just about to launch I guess we just did launch the 5 million in 30 days summit, which is a virtual summit where some of our investors, a lot of capital raisers are going to come learn from other experts, and that's such a powerful stage of the nurture piece of this because I'm putting myself in a position where I get to reach out to other absolute top tier capital raisers and industry and say "do you want to come be part of my platform? Can I position you as an expert on one particular niche in the capital raising business?" And I'm not saying that they owe me a favor, or something like that but it's a very good strategy for building relationships with what Russell Brunson considers your dream 100. I'm talking about the best of the best, I mentioned Joe Fairless, he's not going to be speaking at the event but his partner Ben, who does best ever conference, he's going to be talking about how to throw a conference, [00:15:48 Unintelligible], one of the best public speakers I know of, he's going to talk about how to be a great public speaker, we got Whitney [00:15:52 Unintelligible], who has an incredible podcast and Cathy Fettke, and Michael Becker, and just all these top tier people are going to come to the conference or the summit, I should say, and then add a ton of value. And by the way, for people that are already on my list, this is such a great nurture campaign, but a summit, especially a free summit, is one of the best ways to generate leads at all right now. It's so good, you're probably seeing a lot of pop ups. Well it's going to keep happening until it stops working because we're anticipating 1000s of people to register and get that email into our system in exchange for this awesome value bomb that's about to take place.
Steven: [00:16:34] Yeah. It's a beautiful way to do it. About a year ago, we did the Investor Mindset summit, and it was an opportunity to reach so many people, and so I think that's genius. Where can people find out more about that summit or potentially register if they're looking to join?
Hunter: [00:16:49] Yeah. So it's 5millionin30days.com. I'll tell a quick story about why that is, it's free registration, all those all stars are going to be there. I mentioned at the beginning, the concept of time being so critical and it is important to build up your capacity, so that when a deal is available, you can raise the money in a short amount of time because it doesn't matter how much money you can potentially raise, if you can't do it in 30 or 60 days, it's going to slip through your fingers, it's going to not be able to close through escrow and one of your competitors is going to get the deal. So we recently did a raise, we raised more than $5 million in 30 days, and I realized this is actually a really important milestone, because $5 million, let's say you borrow 10 million, and use the five as a down payment, you're talking about $15 million piece of property that is consequential, right? In terms of real estate, that's where the elite players play, below the institutional players anywhere between 15 and 30 or so million dollars of purchase prices, you're unquestionably up there with the top 1% in the real estate sector and that's where a lot of people want to be. Now a lot of people know how to underwrite, a lot of people know how to asset manage, but if you can't snap your fingers and make the $5 million appear, you're always going to be playing at a level that's below your potential. So that's the point of the summit. What strategies are these individuals using to ensure that when the deal becomes available, they can sign the contract knowing with 100% confidence, they're not going to lose the deal due to lack of funding? That's a very different ballgame when you're able to have that confidence.
Steven: [00:18:31] Yeah. Huge difference. It's so impressive to be able to raise $5 million. I know that that was a fit that it completely changed your business, being able to do that and being confident. So you obviously followed your system to be able to do that you've been building this list and educating and nurturing folks for quite a long time. What was one of your biggest takeaways after hitting that milestone that other people could be able to leverage your model that ended up leading to you being able to raise 5 million in under 30 days?
Hunter: [00:19:01] Yes. So that's a really important question. There are two things that I think are related, but it's just so common. People always focus on the close and I mean, myself included, I thought because I could communicate effectively and was passionate, and could convey that excitement I had about a deal, that the money was just going to show up, and you have so many sales books out there but it really is not consequential when you look at the bottom line, how you spend your time if you're going to focus on closing strategies. Now closing strategies are important; you don't want to blow the sale in the last minute in the fourth quarter, or even in overtime, I'd say because it's super like that's the last stage, but as an example, if you're in a room of 10 accredited investors, and you have a 10% close ratio; that's one investment, Right? So if you're going to do all the sales training and hire Grant Cardone personally to come and just teach you how to smash and not taking no for an answer and stuff, you may get your close ratio up 100% from 10% to 20%, which by the way would have been incredible fit but then you're at 2 investors. And again, I've been at the 1 investor, 2 investor level. So I'm not saying it's not something to be proud of but that's not going to help you create a scalable and lucrative real estate career. So I have put everything on the other side of that equation. It's all about going from presenting in a room to 10 people to basically saying, I don't ever want to present in a room with only 10 people, in fact, I don't know if I ever want to present in a room again, because I want to present in front of 10,000 people and if I'm already at the level of presenting at 10,000, I want to be in a room or online, or through a mechanism where there's 100,000 people. And here's why. If I go from a 10%, close ratio to a 1%, close ratio, or let's say a point 1% close ratio, if it's 10,000 people, and you get 100 investors from that, which is totally reasonable, by the way, a $15,000 minimum investment, that's $5 million, right there. So that's the big misconception, the big mistake that people make is thinking that they're going to read all these sales books, which are really focused on rebuttals, which is something that I never do or objective handling, and they should always be focused on this attract, educate, nurture closed system. So hopefully, those are the two kinds of takeaways. Don't focus exclusively on the closing strategies, you don't want to push investors across the finish line, especially in this business but also the saying is, if you're good at something, you can be broke and be really good at that thing, but if you're really good at marketing, you're probably going to be rich no matter what. Right? So if you're really good at Real Estate plus marketing, it's like a no brainer, and that's the goal we're always striving towards.
Steven: [00:22:14] Yeah. I think that's a huge takeaway, because people then can focus on instead of trying to pull the juice out of the one lemon that they have in front of them, they can go out and figure out, hey, how can I build a lemon tree that's continuing to produce all the lemons that I want, so I can never run out of lemonade. So I'm curious to dive into some specific numbers here on what your business is and I'm curious if you're comfortable sharing this, how many investors were on your list that ended up leading to how many investors invested that led to $5 million?
Hunter: [00:22:45] Yeah. So we have about 350 investors who have made an investment in our offerings, and some of you may hear that number and be kind of unimpressed by that number and I totally get that. So like, the gross number of investors is just a few 100 but that should be exciting because if you have 200 investors, and they're accredited, and they're willing to invest, let's say $60,000, every time you put out a deal, you have an incredible business, you have something really special that you should be striving towards and proud of at that level, it's so within your grasp, if you focus on the top of the funnel, so we have about 1300 registered accredited investors in our company and that can create some really incredible things. Now in 2020, we were very slow in terms of the cadence of our deals, we've done one deal so far, it was a non-real estate deal, it was actually the deal that we raised 5 million, or five and a half million or so in 30 days, and it was just from, let's say, 60 investors. So there's a book that's about how you only need 1000 great fans. In this business, it's not 1000, a few 100 can solve all your funding problems that you need, as long as you deliver on your promises that you've made over the years.
Steven: [00:24:06] And so that's really at the core, I think of what people need to be considering when they're going about doing their first deal, doing their second, doing their third, is making sure that you have a high level of confidence you're going to be able to deliver so that when you're going out and you're building, the nurture factor of once somebody invests with you, is that you're going to continue to nurture them by delivering for them, by actually being able to make those smart decisions. It's something that I've looked to you for, for advice and training on how to do this due diligence process. So you make sure that you're only selecting the deals that have the highest likelihood that removes the majority of the risk, and that's what's led to over a number of years you being able to deliver for investors so they continue to invest with you and come back day after day.
Hunter: [00:24:51] Yeah. Let me make a comment about that real quick, because there's an important learning point for myself and for listeners as well. So I was very hesitant to be the capital raising guy because anyone that knows me or listens to my podcast knows that I am so not that guy. I am not the guy that just wants the money to come through the bank account, come to the bank account, because we built our whole business around an incentive structure that is not really focused on that. I'm usually one of the largest investors in each of our deals, our compensation is incredibly weighted, usually 80% or more towards performance. So we don't really make any money, in fact, we'll likely lose money if the deals don't perform, because of the CO investment. So raising capital is an incredible tool, but it has to be given the respect it deserves. I spent several years only focused on due diligence, and then only investing my own capital and then like my close, immediate family, my mom, my sisters, before I started to scale the business and bring on additional investor capital, however, I saw a great opportunity to write a book that wasn't written and I thought it was going to be written if I didn't write it, because of the timing and the interest and the level of focus on the space. And so I put everything I knew into a book, which by the way, is available for like, $8 on my website, raisingcapitalforrealestate.com. I'm not joking, when I say it's not fluff. It's like everything I know, but basically, I knew that when I wrote that book that, at least for a period of time, I was going to be the capital raising guy and that's important, because it's important that you be the guy of something. And it's hard for me, I'm so glad you brought this up, this is really important. It's hard for me because I want it to be no, I understand due diligence, and I really like economics, and I really like passive investing but I also like this thing called a hybrid approach. I can do whatever, but whatever doesn't get you clients and also it makes everyone your competitor. That is so heavy, so I went from having everybody's a competitor of mine to now, only people that focus exclusively on capital raising could be considered competitors of mine. And guess what? We're friends, so we work together anyway. Does that sink in? Steven, I know that you focus on marketing as well. You're the mindset guy, but does that mean that's all you do or know about? No, but I got to ask you, was it challenging for you to be known as that guy when you're like, but I've got so much more to offer?
Steven: [00:27:25] Yeah. It supersets in, because it's difficult for people to know you as multiple different things and so it's hard because when people know you as the capital raising guy or the mindset guy, they put you in this box, and they think, well, that's all that you're able to deliver, but at the end of the day, the only reason I'm the mindset guy is because I figured out, well, it's the most important thing to do everything else that you want to do and so if you want to go invest in real estate passively, you got to know mindset, you got to be able to understand how other people think and how you can apply those same skills. And I'm really glad that you wrote the book, Raising capital for real estate, because truly, it is one of the best books that I've read on raising capital and I'm actually impressed that you wrote this book, reading the book, knowing you, I look at it and I'm like this is absolutely incredible. So I highly recommend people go and do that. But what was it that led you to making that decision that you were going to be that guy, that you were going to put your stake in the ground and say, this is me, this is what I do?
Hunter: [00:28:28] Well a couple of things. I was at a conference and this is kind of the story of my career, I was at a conference I wasn't asked to speak at, because I'm always thinking I'm about six months ahead of where I actually am. So I'm always like, "wait, why isn't this happening?" and then six months, it actually happens. But I was at a conference and one of the speakers asked, has anyone raised a million dollars? everyone put your hand up that has done that. Okay, keep your hand up if you've raised more than 5 million, keep your hand up, if you raised more than 10 million, and then it was me and two other people and I was like, man, I got to write this book. And a lot of speakers were talking about concepts that were similar to what I wanted to discuss but I felt like I had an interesting angle on it and I'm pretty competitive as a person. So I wanted to write “The book” about the topic, there are other books about raising capital, but the angles aren't exactly the same but I knew it was going to happen. So it would kill me if I waited six months and didn't do it and someone else did, so that was really when I decided at that moment. And by the way, the conference I was at, Michael Blanc was speaking, an incredible person [00:29:40 Unintelligible] and he could have written a book that was very similar to mine and we all want to be up with the greats in the industry, and that was kind of my way to put myself on the map in that capacity.
Steven: [00:29:52] Yeah. That's huge and that's what's definitely led to you being recognized as that person. I mean by you putting this book out, it's been a dramatically valuable tool for people to get to understand how you think, even if they're not looking at raising capital, even if they're just looking to understand, well, what is this business that I'm investing and I'm sure that's attracted people into the space. As we're getting close to wrapping up here. I want to give you the last word, what would you want to leave people with if they're looking to go down this path and start raising capital for their business?
Hunter: [00:30:21] Well I've got to say the summit that's coming up and here's why, the way the summit works, it is recorded interviews where I'm talking about one particular strategy with each speaker and that structure, I completely underestimated how powerful just that structure is because there are so many general podcasts about these topics but you're not really focusing on one strategy. So the actionable stuff is limited, you hear a lot about people's background, and why they're interested in real estate and about their business but you don't hear the second, third and fourth and fifth question that actually allows you to instantly go and take action. So I'll give an example we had someone talk about hosting a No Sales pitch networking event as a strategy for raising capital. It's not just about "oh, you should have a networking event." it's like, how much to charge what the cadence should be, how frequent you should meet? How do you come up with new content? Should you have speakers? How many? Should you do panels, should you keynote it's like that level of detail and that's just one of the 30 or 25 interviews. So go to the summit, 5millionin30days.com. It's free, trust me, it's worth it on a risk adjusted basis, and pick just a few strategies that really feel from your gut, in line with what you want to accomplish in this industry, and then take action because they're going to give you all the playbook. I'll give you another example, Richard Wilson, who runs familyoffices.com, he talks about getting investor databases and how to use those databases to reach out to people on LinkedIn, that are clients or work directly under billionaires. Now that's not something I implement in my business at all, I just don't have the time to do all these different strategies but it's like if that's what you want to do, and you have an admin that can help you do that. Boom, all the details for that. So go and check it out at that website.
Steve: [00:32:13] I highly recommend it, look forward to seeing you there and thanks so much for dropping so much value.
Hunter: [00:32:19] Thanks again.
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