The two jobs of any size fund manager or syndicator are: 1) finding deals to invest in, or 2) finding investors to invest. In this video, we’re going to do a blast from the past from my coaching days, where I do a rapid implementation call on how to find investors offline. I know you’ll find it useful because it’s got so much information. Please review it, and I hope you enjoy it.
We are going to go deep into finding investors offline. You’re going to find a lot of value in this program, I hope, because we’re going to go really deep, but we’re also going to be exploring all those steps. At the end of today’s call, you should have an action plan of exactly what you need to do to move forward and take those next steps to get investors ready and lined up.
Let’s go ahead and get started. I want to start with basically a principle of spheres of influence. We’ve talked about this before, but it bears repeating, and it bears repeating because it’s so incredibly important. The more that this is just ingrained in your DNA, the more successful you’re going to become.
Let’s start with your inner circle. These are the people that you know – they’re your friends, they’re your family, they’re your partners, they’re people who are very, very close to you and that you know so well. Outside of that, we have the people who were your previous clients.
Both of these categories would qualify for being unaccredited investors if you chose to do a Reg D, Rule 506(b). So these are the people who are either in your inner circle and so close to you that it’s presumed you’ve done business with, or your previous clients – those who you really have done business with. They could all probably qualify as your 506(b) for unaccredited investors. You don’t need to worry about talking about your investments to these people. You can just talk to them about the investments, and they can subscribe if you are not in a 506(c) where you’re allowed to advertise.
Then we have the category of the people that you’ve met with. These are people who know who you are and they know what you do, you just don’t really have a business relationship with. If you’re a real estate agent, you may have met with them before and you may have done a listing presentation for them, or you may have cold called them a few times or met them at several events. These are people in that category. You’ve met with them, you just haven’t done business with them. Now, these people I do not believe would qualify for the 506(b), so that’s where we start taking a step outwards.
Then we have the target people you haven’t met. These are the whales in your community that you think would be excellent investors for you or referral sources. You just never have spoken to them. You just don’t know them, or you just know them so little that they don’t know your name.
Finally, we have the public. These are the people that you have never met with, you don’t know who they are. They’re just way outside of here.
So these are the categories that we’ve got: we’ve got the public, we’ve got target people that you haven’t met, met with, and previous clients. Now the goal here is to move each one of these down to the next category. We want them to become closer and closer, ultimately to your inner circle, or to become major, major clients. Obviously, if you don’t like any of these people and you don’t want to do business with them, don’t bring them into your inner circle. I shouldn’t need to say that, but I will just to cover all bases.
For each level, there is a different kind of program on how we deal with these people. Your inner circle, let’s actually start with the public. This is your advertising. You may choose to do advertising to bring people in. Those people might be targets, maybe I’d like to do business with them. This is the mechanism that you would use – advertising.
Prospecting, on the other hand, is for those people that are targets for you. The ones that you know are gold nuggets that you want to bring in closer, that you’ve met with and want to become clients of yours.
Inside the “met with” category, most often times we’re talking about some sort of drip campaign. I’m gonna go through specifics about what that would look like in a minute.
Then, for our previous clients, that would be something like a call and email campaign. You’re spending more and more time nurturing these people the closer that you get them into your inner circle. Your Inner Inner Circle really is your one-on-one items.
Let’s change to exactly who these people are a little bit more specifically. We’ve done this discussion before about whales versus fishermen. That’s an important place to start because there’s actually two different kinds of people we’re looking for.
Fishermen – what is a fisherman? They’re the ones with the big rod, looking for the next person for you. This is the one-to-many resource that you may have, the strategy where those fishermen can bring you deals and bring you investors.
And then, on the other hand, we have whales. I can’t draw a whale, so we’re just going to draw fish. But pretend that’s a whale. The whales are those big ones, the ones that you really want to be part of your investment.
For fishermen and whales, there’s actually two categories of these kinds of people that we would be interested in. We are interested in referrals and we are interested in investors. And there’s actually whales in both, and there’s fishermen in both.
I mean, there are fishermen in the investment community, the guys who talk a lot about their investments around the golf games with their buddies. Who can bring in all of their friends. Many of the investors who I’ve had in my syndications have come through referrals from people who were already invested in the syndication. So those people were acting as fishermen.
For referrals, we can have fishermen who bring us lots and lots of investors. Or maybe it’s just one that has a relationship with someone really big, like a whale that you’d really like to bring in. Think of a personal manager or a family office, or something like that. That whole person could bring in a gigantic whale for you. And so that referral source might even be just a whale themselves.
There are principles to go through in building referrals. First, we want to educate and add value. In order to build a good relationship, you need to be giving into that relationship. We do that through our ability to educate about the real estate industry, about investments, about those things that you know, and really add value to their lives.
This can be in the form of, if you’re coming from the residential community, providing information about what homes are, or real estate in general. Or if you’re a commercial agent, maybe you’re giving very specific information about what’s going on with a particular development in the area. It’s that education and adding value that builds the relationship.
Number two, what a lot of people don’t do is ask for help. Most people make the mistake of building referral relationships and they completely fail to ask for help at all. So they go into that relationship without really getting anything that they need, because they never asked for it. The Bible says “Ask, and you shall receive” and it’s that ask that’s required. So we’ve got to ask.
Third is we reward. Now we’ve talked before, we can’t give referral fees necessarily to our referral partners when we’re doing syndication. But what we can do is make sure that they’re rewarded in some way. Maybe you just take them to dinner, or maybe you take them to a golf game, or to some sporting event, just to say thank you so much. There’s nothing that’s stopping you from just impromptu sending a bottle of wine or doing something to give a gift to say thank you for that referral.
You should always be doing that reward. If they provided a referral to an investor for you, you reward them, and you make sure you reward them whether or not the investor actually decided to invest. Because they did what you’re asking them to. So you’re teaching them to do what’s important by giving them that reward.
The fourth principle is this idea of givers get. To build a great relationship and a great referral source, it’s that idea that if you put everything into that relationship, and you give, give, give, you’re going to start getting back in return.
One of my coaches, early on, gave an idea about how to do this. How do we even begin the givers get idea when building referrals? He said, what you do is when you’re sitting down for coffee with them, at the very end of the conversation, you say to them, “Look, if I run into somebody who’s a perfect candidate for you, or if there’s somebody on the street who’s just right for you, how will I know that person when I see them so that when I see them, I know I should give that referral to you? Who’s your perfect client? Who are you looking to find to get referrals for?”
Now, you may not know somebody right off the bat who needs that service. But it’s going to go in your mind and it’s going to be something that you generally can think about. You certainly should be keeping track of this in your CRM as well.
So that idea of who’s that ideal person is an important question to ask. It’s probably the most important question when you’re beginning a referral relationship. Now, why is it the most important? Because what you’re actually doing is you’re offering value upfront. But secondly, it’s a weeding out process. It’s a filtering process that takes place. Because I know if I ask that question and I get the answer, and then if the person who’s across from me doesn’t say, “Well, why don’t you tell me who the perfect person is who you are looking for?” If they don’t respond back and ask me the same question, that’s a relationship that’s going nowhere. So that’s a relationship that’s not worth even keeping them in your Rolodex. So givers get.
Let’s talk about the steps to build these relationships. There are five steps in building referral relationships.
Step one is you build a list. You generally think through all of the categories of those people who you think would add value to you. Is that your wealth managers? These are the ones most common for syndicators: wealth managers, accountants, small business consultants, and the big kahuna – real estate agents. While most of you are real estate agents yourselves, and they may think of these people as competitors, they’re actually not. We’ve talked about that before on finding properties. And they’re also great resources for you to find investors, because they’re talking to people about real estate all the time anyway. So you build that list.
Next, you make contact. These are your calls, your drop-bys, meet on Zoom. I know we’ve gone over this before, these are the steps that you need to be making right now. So we’re going to, as part of the work that we’re going to do and the email that will come out about this, these are the steps that I want you to identify and I want you to start laying them out exactly what you’re going to do in order to build your referral relationships. So yes, we are repeating to some extent, but the point of it is to make sure that there’s that forward progress, because these referral sources are critical.
Step number three is follow up. This can be notes, calls, whatever. So follow up, but now we’ll talk in a little bit about a follow up program, different follow up programs and I’m going to give you actual specific programs that you can implement immediately and that you can design and make just perfect for you. We’ll provide those templates for you as well.
Step number four is you provide exceptional service. It’s nothing worse than giving a referral to somebody and the service that the person you referred is getting from them is awful. You will never get another referral from them again if you don’t provide exceptional service. This is as simple as you care, and you communicate, and you communicate to both people – you communicate to who was referred to you and you communicate to who referred that person to you.
And then five, show your appreciation. Always, always, always go the extra mile.
Okay, so these are the steps for building a successful referral network. Now we’re going to put this into a list, so that you can have basically a template. So now you’ll have your own template for building your own action plan. And that will come along with the notes for this call.
Now, for investors, there are some principles that are a little bit different, and there are some principles that are the same. The first principle is exactly the same: educate. I was at a Tony Robbins event maybe four years ago, and Tony said something that still sticks with me every time I write something like “educate or add value” down. It snapped into my head today. And that’s in order for people to listen to you or want to listen to you, they want to know what’s in it for them.
So give them something that’s in it for them. Those people want to have a better life, they want to level up, they want more money, they want more love, they want more something, and they think one of the tools for doing that is knowledge and value. And so by offering that knowledge, offering that value, you can create that for them, and they’ll want to speak with you. So it’s first offer to help, and then we go from there.
Number two, and this one is absolutely critical: show up like no one else. You are not the only option out there for people to invest in. There are other investment opportunities out there, and there are other places that people can place their money. So you need to show up like no one else.
We talk about showing up like a professional all the time, in our pamphlets and our marketing materials and our PPM and our operating agreements. Everything we do, we show up like a professional, we show up ready and prepared. And already that puts us showing up like a lot of other people don’t. But now it’s show up like absolutely no one else by providing exceptional value and exceptional service.
Think about how Disneyland does it. When you go to Disneyland, is there any other place like it on Earth? There really isn’t. It shows up like no one else. It’s designed to just be absolutely different than the world that we live in. And that’s what people remember. And that’s what makes people your raving fans. And that’s what will get people to want to invest with you. Because it’s not great enough to just have them think you’re interesting – you need them to want to invest with you.
Principle number three is care. Ask what they are looking for. It goes down to the idea that we’re born with one mouth and two ears. So we need to do twice as much listening as we do talking. So ask what they’re looking for, really kind of explore that and really just care about what your investors are wanting. It’ll come across instantly to them.
Number four, again, givers get. If you do these steps one, two, and three, you’re going to be giving a tremendous amount of value and you’re going to start getting back in return.
So what are the steps in order to really start caring and nurturing and finding your investors? Let’s go through those. And again, this will also come in a template and I want everyone in the group to be working through that template and filling it out. You will be using it, it will add value to you, and it’s gonna help you get investors right away.
Step number one, what do you think it is? It’s build a list. We’ve got to build the list, we’re starting to identify targets, to start thinking about who everybody is, and all those categories. Who are all those people who are in your inner circle, who are all of your past clients, who is everybody that you know who does real estate or is interested in real estate or cares about real estate? Comb through your LinkedIn, comb through everything, and try and figure out who those people are.
Then, once we’ve done that, let’s categorize them. So we put them in: okay, this person is in our inner circle, this person is in our clients base, this person is in met with, this person is in our dream 100. Or is there a certain demographic that you’re interested in marketing to? Who is that? Put them in the public. You know, I want to reach out to small business owners in this category, I want to be reaching out to people in this area who’ve had a liquidity event. There are ways to get that information.
Once we’ve identified, once we’ve started building out that list, then we need to put together different programs in order to communicate. And so the first program is the one-on-one program. These are people primarily for your inner circle. And so this is making a conscious decision of, you know, how often are you going to go out to coffee with people? How often are you going to take them to dinner? How often are you going to take people to golf games or sporting events? How often are you going to do that? Put it on your calendar. Is it every Monday and Wednesday? Whatever it is, put it on your calendar, and just make sure that you fill those spots.
And then also, regular phone calls. How often you cycle through that list, if you’ve got your list of say 50 people, you should be able to go through, be able to call them once a month. Maybe you don’t want to call them once a month, maybe it’s once every other month or once a quarter or once every six months. Whatever it is, make a conscious decision on whatever it is. And then make sure that you’re showing up like no one else. And always ask them how they’re doing, if they need anything. And then you can filter in some of the information of what you’re working on. But really, it’s to make sure that you are top of mind, that you are one of the givers so that you get.
Number three step is your call or email program. I put together a program that I actually stole from Gary Keller. So this isn’t my brilliant idea, but it is a brilliant idea nonetheless. He has two different programs. We’ll put them here. He has what he calls the eight by eight and he has 36 touch (or 32 touch, I don’t remember how many touches he has).
So the eight by eight program in short is a program where you are actively every week doing one proactive thing in order to touch that prospect. So typically, we are doing this on our prospect list or we’re doing it with people that we are clients or that we’ve done business with just to make sure we’ve got a nice solid relationship with them.
The eight by eight program says that you’ve got eight weeks. And for every one of those weeks, you’re doing one very specific thing. And it can be any sort of specific thing. But it’s something that you’ve actually planned out and is ready to go. We’re trying to make a system here. So not something that you kind of do ad hoc, say, “Oh yeah, we’re now on week three, I need to figure out what to do.” No, you’ve got it all planned out.
So this is just a sample eight by eight, we’re going to do right here. So you do not need to do this. This is just to give you the idea about what it exactly looks like. So we’ve got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
Say, week one, you make a phone call, and you talk about the market or you talk about whatever is going on in their lives, you add some value into that phone call.
The second is you do a letter, send a letter of introduction. Obviously, if you know them, they know who you are, but they may not know what you’re doing, and try and add some value in there. And I would say even more than just like a business letter, send it in a card. So it’s actually interesting and actually gets opened.
Number three would be maybe it’s a flyer about your fit, you know, something of interest there. We’re always trying to make it more and more interesting, make it engaging, make it something memorable.
Number four, maybe it is you provide some market info. You’re all in real estate or in the market somehow, provide them some market info of value. You know, maybe it’s why doing investments is good, maybe put together a flyer about why it makes sense to invest in syndications.
Number five is maybe an update about what you do.
Number six, maybe it is something of value, maybe it’s more information, maybe it’s comps, maybe it’s something that adds value to their lives.
Number seven, maybe it’s more market info.
Number eight, maybe you call them again.
It’s not important what I put here as the eight things. What’s important is that you develop your own system of eight things that you’re doing that you’re going to do every week, and you keep track of these in your CRM. You definitely can use the one at app.how-to-syndication.com. That’s a great system in order to keep track of these people. You can build out a pipeline of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. You can even build it out so it will tell you and it will remind you of when those things are due. Okay, we’re in one so we need to make that phone call. Okay, we’re in two, I need to send them that letter and three, I need to send them the flyer and number four, I send them market info. I can build out all those tasks so you never have to keep track of all of this in your head. It’s just all automated into a system.
The other idea is this idea of 36 touch. So once people have gone all the way through the eight weeks, they now know who you are. So these people know that you exist and that you are somewhat on their mind. So the 36 touch is really just okay, now how are we going to stay in their mind? And again, we’re showing up like no one else because other than some residential real estate agents who happen to be in my area and probably are with Keller Williams and got the book from Gary Keller, there’s no one showing up like this. There’s no one, even those best agents in my neighborhood, are not showing up as good as this. And so if you want to, this absolutely applies to your regular day job as well.
So in the 36 touch, we break it apart into a calendar year. So now we’ve got a whole calendar year. And so once people are done with that eight by eight, they just come into this wherever they’re at. So maybe, what are things that make sense to do? The first of the month, maybe it’s a strategy mailing or New Year’s card, because a lot of people get holiday cards, but no one seems to get New Year’s cards. Maybe on the 10th, maybe you send your market forecast. On the 20th, you do something, and then I’m just gonna write these really quick.
You don’t have to do these dates, they just make sense. It can be whatever. And so we just make it equal 36. You know, et cetera, et cetera. So maybe on the first email, a holiday card, so I always put down, you know, what are those holidays or things like that, because they are getting holiday cards from everybody. And you might as well do holiday cards as well.
If you need to come up with ideas, first is, you know, Fourth of July card. And then start thinking about, well, what are these other things that are going on that I can give people some interesting information for? Maybe I can give them some information on taxes, or something like that. Maybe I can give them something, you know, the CoStar reports come out around the first, maybe I give them the CoStar report on what’s going on in the market that you’re serving. Or say RECON is in May, maybe I do retail, maybe I give them notes on RECON. Whatever it is, as you’re part of your day-to-day activity, you’re coming up with this list in order to add that value.
The template is going to be sent out along with the emails. And so I want to just reiterate, this is building your system. And if you do this right, you can actually automate so much of this. These kinds of interactions, you could automate it by combining what we’ve got for your tool for your CRM. Now, to automatically send holiday cards, let me know if you want to go over that in detail exactly how you can do it. You can set this up to do very, very, very little work for you, except maybe making a call every now and then and have everything very systematized and automated. So you don’t need to worry about maintaining that relationship with your clients other than what really matters – getting to know them, getting to understand them, not having to write out the card and send that to them.
So that is the idea of the 32 touch and the eight by eight. Let’s go back over here. So this was where we were at talking about investors and what steps you do. So I hope that helped, we’ll send those templates to you.
Number four is prospecting and coming up with a prospecting game plan. And then doing it. I mean, first is how – are you going to be doing cold calls? You definitely can do cold calls. If I was going to be cold calling right now, who would I be calling? I would be calling small business owners and I would be calling anyone with liquidity events. And maybe I’d be looking at news. Let me go through that.
Small business owners – what I mean is calling smaller businesses in the area. One of my best investors who’s been in multiple syndications with me was a cold call in. They just happen to own a company that had extra cash sitting around. Another one also came out of a cold call, and he owned a company that spit off so much cash, and he needed to just place it. Another small business owner, who’s been a major investor for me, was somebody who I knew only as my eye doctor, and he turned out to be a major prospect for me, and ultimately invested a lot, put his wife in a lot. They invested quite a bit.
So that’s what I mean by small business owners. You can get that list. I can even help you with that list. If you want to say, “Hey, I really would like to find small business owners, primarily doctors, or dentists or people with that kind of cash flow in my area?” And can you make me a list of it? Yeah, I can. So all you have to do is ask. So just let me know, I can get that all set up. And we can do it together, I can show you how to do it.
Same idea here. Anyone with liquidity issues. So just like here, I can help you with this, and I can help you with this. The caveat is you have to promise to use it. So I mean, it does take me a little bit of time to do. And so I am happy to do it, beyond happy to do it, if you use the work, if you use the data. But if you’re not going to use it, don’t ask so that way I don’t spend my time. But there are tools out there that identify people with liquidity issues.
For example, I can, through a tool that I have, it’s called “Identified It”, what it does is it combs through all the SEC filings, all of the news filings, everything that’s out there in order to build this idea of who is having a liquidity event anytime soon. And it’s surprising who they’re connected to and how they’re connected to you. It uses LinkedIn as kind of its back-end database of who these people are. But then they’ve got their own proprietary data about what’s there. But anyway, that program is there. And we can certainly explore it together. I actually haven’t used it too much. But as I build my list for the syndications I’m doing now, it’s absolutely going to be key for part of our prospecting game.
The third is news. And that can be just anyone that you read about who’s also having those liquidity events or it’s that, you know, you see that somebody mentioned in the paper that’s with a small family office or something like that. Clip the article out, you send it to them and say, “Hey, I saw this, I thought it would be of value to you. I thought it was really great. I’m going to give you a call next week and talk and I’d love to hear about what happened here.” You know, whatever. People like talking about this sort of thing.
So if it’s cold calls, fantastic. If it’s direct mail, fantastic. But who’s that list? Because direct mail can get expensive, it can sometimes be anywhere from 50 cents to $1 a mailing. And so you know, who are you going to be sending that to? You only want to send it to the real, real prime top prospects, right. But maybe there are people who are just on your list that have gotten so cold, people who you helped out a long time ago, but you think they still might recognize your name, maybe you start with direct mail, rather than cold call. So it all depends on how you feel about cold calling.
So this is our list of the steps for investors. Now, again, on just even this, I’m gonna send you a template, so you can fill it out. I really hope that everybody spends some time and fills these things out, because this is what is going to set you apart. This is going to get you investors if you put in the work, because it’s all there. And you’re taking this craziness of all this information you’re getting, and now you’re compacting it and putting it into a system in order to see who’s there and make the whole thing work.
Because when you have people coming in through your funnel, if you decide to do an online funnel, you know, you can start allocating them to different lists. Oh, this person is now in a “met with” or this person was on that my dream 100 list. And now I called them and now I’ve met with them. And hey, what do you know, they hired me and now you’re keeping track of who they are and where they are on the list. You can keep track of oh, they’re now they start in in my eight by eight from week one. And now they’re in week two. And now they’re in week three, all the way till when they’re in week eight. Okay, now we’re coming in on modern and February, on into my 36 Touch program. And I’m tracking how this came. And I’m also tracking on where they came from. I mean, maybe they were a cold Facebook lead. Maybe they were a direct mail person, you know, where did that person come from, so that you can do more of it.
Maybe it was a referral. And so you need to make sure that you really reward who it is on that referral, and then let them know how things are going. “Oh man, you referred Joe Smith to me, let me tell you, he’s such a great guy. I’ve met him, I’ve had coffee with him. He’s already says he wants to invest with us. We’re gonna do a really great job with him. Thank you so much for introducing me.” Simple as that.
So other ideas for contacting, for building out or for doing things with these people? Let’s talk about events.
Events are great places for marketing one to many. Now, I believe the webinar world is kind of slowing down. People are not watching as many webinars as they used to just because with COVID, we got inundated with so many webinars over and over. We still use webinars for altitude marketing. I don’t think I’m going to be using webinars for my investment marketing, for my syndications. But I’m not entirely convinced because it also is a great way to market one to many and not have to be there all the time.
So events, first thing to do is think about who, and I don’t mean who’s coming, I mean, think about who is presenting. If it’s just you, that’s great. If it’s someone else, okay, well identify who that person is, and start talking to them as soon as you have any chance of doing it.
Set the date. I am going under the assumption if you are in this program, that you are actually a human being, which means you may need a ticking clock in order to pressure you to get things done, just like the rest of us. If you’re not one of these people, then you probably aren’t human. And you don’t need a ticking clock. You’ll just get it done. Well, kudos to you. But set the date as quickly as possible.
And then start thinking about, okay, what’s the actual agenda going to be? Because you’re going to need to know this before you do anything else, before you start inviting people. You’ve got to know what you’re talking about. So am I going to be doing investing in real estate? The first small business person I mentioned, I invited him to an event. And it was one of these events, it was on investing in real estate. And he did end up investing.
What did we talk about? We talked about the different kinds of real estate they can invest in: single family homes, apartments. This is just how we broke it out. Not the way I talked about it. But this is how I totally butchered the spelling: commercial. And then ultimately, what we really wanted from them was investing in syndications. This was what we talked about, you know, what the pros and cons of each one.
But it’s not the only thing that you can present on. You could just do a presentation on the market update. And how do you do that? The best way in the world to do a market update is you find your wealth manager, and you partner with them. You get them to co-sponsor the event with you. And they will talk very intelligently about market update. This is the best way to do it. They do a terrific job. And it takes all the pressure off you, but you get all the kudos for it, which is great.
So in return, they get to market themselves to a wide base. But they also will – and this is outside of agenda, this also answers the question – but how do we feed them or give them booze? Because that definitely helps. So you’ll get more people if you have alcohol, and you’ll get more people if you have food. And many times your wealth managers will pay for that.
Now, on who those wealth managers are, they are a strictly regulated industry. And so they need to be very careful. They want to sponsor an event where they’re not speaking or are the main speaker, but they will sponsor an event if they are the main speaker. And it’s very clear what you are, what your role is going to be. So just FYI. So that also goes under the category of figuring out who pays.
And then lastly, you’ve got to market it, you’ve got to tell everybody, because not a lot of people are going to show up. It’s going to be a lot less than you think, even if you’re feeding them and buying them booze. If you’re not feeding them or buying them booze, then very few people show up. If you do, people will show up, you’ll get a good turnout, especially if you’ve got a really great speaker.
Sometimes the market update can be really super. They have wealth managers oftentimes have people in their industry that are really, really great presenters and can do a terrific job. And so they may talk about the market themselves, they may bring in the tax guy to talk about how taxes are going to be for the next year. We’re kind of getting to the point and we’ve got a while. So we’ve got a few more months until that becomes a really hot topic again. But that will certainly be one or any other kind of local issues there.
If there’s a public speaker, even if it’s not on point, they can be terrific to have there. I mean, what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to get the butts in the seats. You’re trying to get people to show up.
So this is events. Other things you can do is mailers, cold calls, coffee items like that.
Now the last thing I want to talk about is part of “show up like no one else.” And we do that through what we call shock and awe. In this day and age, everybody is expecting to get an email and a PDF. And that’s it. And they’re not expecting to get anything physical and they’re not expecting to get anything real. But when they do, the shock and awe package can really make you stand out and make you show up like no one else.
And what goes into a shock and awe? I mean, there’s a lot of great ideas of what you can do. You know, I would definitely do some sort of letter, like typed out and then hand signed by you. I mean, we’ve seen notepads and pens before. Flyers. And that can be flyers about either properties you’re working on, it could be flyers of past deals, or syndications that you’ve done. It can be a flyer about why they should invest in syndications, things like that. Sometimes people use gift cards.
You can actually get cards made at Starbucks that are personalized. I did this. I got these $15 Starbucks cards that are personalized. Actually, I’ll show you one. All right, so how’s this for reality? So I did this for my law practice. So in here, we’ve got a custom gift card. It’s got my logo on it. And then it says – this was done right during COVID, so we couldn’t really meet – it says “Thanks. Well, normally we’d buy you a cup of coffee, it’s just hard to do that on the phone or on Zoom. So please accept this gift card as our way of saying we look forward to working with you.”
How do you think this shows up? People were like stunned at how cool this was. I mean, it’s got a Starbucks card with your logo. And you also get the kind of, “Wow, these guys are big enough that they work with Starbucks,” which is just an added awesome benefit. Now that it cost more than just the value of the card, because you’re paying for the printing of the envelope and you’re paying for the printing of the card. But you know, at the end of the day, it’s a very cool way, especially to push someone across the threshold. And if you’re putting together a shock and awe package, think about it, because it’s pretty cool and very impressive when they get it. And it’s something that they’ll use and think about when they see it.
You know, other people do pens and things like that. But I think the gift cards are probably the coolest thing we’ve done. The other thing that’s also great is books. Now, you’ve probably heard about some great book programs before where people have identified their big whales, and they send a book a month to their big whale and just with maybe a little note card put in. You absolutely are going to be remembered. And it doesn’t need to be – I mean, it’s certainly great if it’s a book you wrote. But it doesn’t need to be, it can just be some other kind of book. I mean, books by Malcolm Gladwell are great or just anything that is that you think would really kind of meet your community.
Now I wouldn’t go – I would not do anything political unless you’re really just trying to reach investors who have certain political feelings one way or another. I would not do religion, I would not do any sort of comedy that is edgy. Boy, that’s comedy meets edgy together. But I think business, I think personal development is great, anything like that is just works out really well. Or it could be, you know, on the market specifically if there’s a – in my area right now there are books that are put out, I don’t think I have one in here. There are books that are put out just on our geographic areas. So it’s something like the history of the San Fernando Valley, which is a really cool thing to just get and send to somebody. And if they’re in this area, it’s like, “Oh, that’s pretty cool.” So that would be another book that if it was very local, that you were marketing to, would be totally appropriate to send.
But do think about what your shock and awe package is going to look like. Now it’s gonna cost you money. But this money is going to come around. These people are much more likely to invest with you. I mean, don’t you think that if you received this very cool set of things, especially a gift card of $15, Law of Reciprocity says they are probably going to be thinking very highly of you, and may very well do it as well. And I would also think about doing a shock and awe package for your fishermen because this is how they can keep you top of mind and be confident that you’re going to appreciate the referrals that they give you.
Wow, we went over a lot of topics today. We went over fishermen and whales, referrals, investors, the eight by eight program, the 36 touch program, events, other things, showing up like no one else, and shock and awe. So this was a big call. I hope you found that video useful.
My name is Tilden Moschetti. I am a syndication attorney with the Moschetti Syndication Law Group. If we can help you with your syndication or fund, all you have to do is give us a call, set up a meeting, and let’s talk about what you’re working on.