Managing your Note Investing Portfolio with Note Rules | Real Estate Notes Show

Episode: Managing your Note Investing Portfolio with Note Rules Dave's Goals and Plans: - Managing up to 20 notes was manageable without tools, but at 50 notes it became chaos without a CRM - Uses color-coded spreadsheets with red for urgent issues and orange for time-sensitive matters - Finally implemented a CRM tool which made portfolio management much easier - Planning to leverage end-of-year deal activity to make purchases and get money flowing Nathan's Goals and Plans: - Received unexpected new tapes (deals) in fourth quarter beyond what was anticipated - Currently trying to gather money together to make purchases during busy Q4 period - Emphasizes need to maintain stable existing portfolio while pursuing new acquisitions - Snowboards early mornings before returning to office by 10-10:30 AM to manage business Key Recommendations: - Implement a CRM or portfolio management system once you exceed 3-5 notes to avoid chaos and poor decision-making - Automate data collection from servicers and law firms rather than manually checking repeatedly - Actively manage your service providers, attorneys, and other professionals - they won't self-manage - Monitor servicer portals daily for changes to maintain velocity and prevent delays in deal progression - Maintain portfolio stability during active deal sourcing to handle transitions effectively Topics Discussed: - Importance of CRM systems for scaling note investing portfolios - Fourth quarter deal activity surge and year-end purchasing strategy - Portfolio management challenges and organizational chaos without proper systems - Seasonal weather patterns and work-life balance during peak seasons - Managing service providers, attorneys, and contractors across multiple notes Guest Insights: - Richard started note investing 4 years ago with software engineering background while maintaining day job - Recognized need for systems when scaling beyond initial notes and built custom Podio-based solution - Conference discussion revealed universal pain point: investors with 2+ notes struggle with chaos and poor decision-making - Velocity of money is critical - delays in servicer updates and professional responsiveness cost time and money - Podio provides infrastructure stability and extensibility to build custom note-specific workflows with automation you hey everybody dave putz here from jkp holdings alongside me mr nathan turner good day hello hello gorgeous day in the afternoon we've been hitting 50 and 60 out here in jersey it's been uh been fabulous i would say um i think for us it's a nice change but december's on its way how are things up there we actually we we got that same warm spell but for me it's disaster we had about a half an inch of snow on the ground and we lost it all yesterday so it's all gone the ski hill's out making snow still though so they actually opened two days ago on the first so uh looking forward to hitting the hill here next week cool um do you snowboard a lot or ski a i snowboard yeah so i get i've had seasons past forever but so i go uh usually it's really fun actually i'll go first thing in the morning go on the hill for an hour so get all the fresh stuff before everyone gets tracked out and then come back i'm in the office by 10 10 30 and nobody knows the difference nice nice so i know up there you guys get cold and cold whatever but right you know you guys are probably in the warmest time you've been a while does that make it difficult for in our investing world to like not want to go outside with the kids and enjoy like just that extended fall yeah the extended fall was really nice uh it was interesting it was a little bit weird because uh because of the extended fall we also had later colors which is something we noticed we go to the hill here often enough and and took some friends out and it was second week in october uh but the leaves hadn't even started changing yet or middle of october somewhere in there and and uh hardly anything but but uh the year previous most everything was already done by that time so it's interesting it's weird to see how even just a few weeks makes a difference cool so you the service or integration web capture lead capture off the websites automated emails and text messages um and partials management those features are not included in the essential package so you brought some good stuff what is the web lead capture what is the automated campaigns can we talk about this and this is a really cool feature a lot of us use different mail services to do for us right so you we've all been to a website where there's a forum that says put your first and last name in your email address your cell phone and submit and we'll give you a free book right that's all this is right it basically in the crm there is a contacts app here's a contacts app right that contacts app basically has a form that's exposed you put that that form code on your website whatever your website is right if you don't have a website you got to get one if you want to use this feature right and you put that form code up there as a couple of text sentences you give your web developer and then a form pops up on your page and that form's got the fields that you want to see first and last name email whatever right and submit when they hit submit that then comes in and creates a contact in your crm nothing fancy there but it creates a contact in your crm the add-on that i put on that is if you specify if you ask for that you can have it have an automatic campaign run when the new person shows up so a lot of my customers they collect leads off their website the leads come in and that person then automatically starts to get put on a drip campaign and they'll get an email once a week or once a day or whatever whatever the frequency is that they've got set up and it's their new lead capture campaign that gets them interested in whatever they're doing selling notes buying notes whatever it is that they're trying to do um uh jamie gateman and chris seventy are using it for their their webcast uh justin bogard using it for his webcast several folks are using it to automate fourth quarter has i i don't know about you a man when you get a chance to talk too much before this just came like a storm um between deals you know a lot of people works out of the 903 assets we've had tapes turn on us deals accepted things are just abnormal how has it been for you yeah same i've got a bunch of uh new tapes that i wasn't necessarily expecting i i yes and no just because it is fourth quarter we see that a lot uh so that's it's fun to see uh trying to get all the money together i can to make some purchases here get our money flowing it's interesting because you know all year it's been kind of a weird situation and deals being set there right now people are trying to get things up the book the end of the year we're going to leverage that right if they want that enough the books we're going to make a short work but for us but that also means nice little segue here that means you got to maintain what you have going on to make sure it's stable for everything eyes are dying teeth across as much as possible so you can make that transition and focus on new purchases yeah i i noticed and i wonder about you because uh you're you don't do this full-time so i think you're probably even more so than me but i could get up to about 20 notes not so bad i could do that no problem by the time i was up to about 50 notes i didn't have any kind of crm any kind of tracking tool or anything and it was chaos like it was i could barely manage everything i had you know spreadsheets with color coding so red is like i got to do something about amelie and orange is it's you know urgent but not depressing and you know it was crazy and so i i finally got myself a a crm tool something that helps me organize everything and now it's a breeze and but the problem is when you get to crms you don't know what is good what's not good what's struggling and your crm is not what you do you're investing that's it so it's interesting that we struggle with understanding this stuff because at the end of the day we so i i so i sorry you asked about emails and then notes you mean you mean comments comments yeah okay yeah so absolutely so um the comment section over here on the right um will show the time stamp and who made the comment the time stamp that it was made right so i can see quickly who's in here making comments who's making changes you can see next step and follow-up data's changed pretty frequently for a while you can see i'm mr systems in here and then you'll see uh john bork who's my llc partner on this asset um and you'll see my wife christine harvey in here and you can just see we're going back and forth on different things that are happening here's a comment that he made april 2020 right and so this allows us a running history of what's happening i'm not clogging the form up over here with the with the details on it but here's my running history on what happened on the asset over time if i want to be you wanted to um send an email it's as simple as clicking this email button it'll pop up a form and i can draft an email out um the comments though so this is the primary method for storing comments it's all over here in this window over here and you just type in you know this is a comment right and hit enter i'm not going to do it since it's my live site sure um but that's the basic that's i think did i answer your question there yeah yeah i think so so you also double accounting right how is accounting put into the system to kind of run numbers later accounting like like bookkeeping yeah bookkeeping is it entered to here yeah no i um i spent a lot of time working on integration with quickbooks and another accounting package at the end of the day i think the value um accounting is a complex topic nice it's a non-trivial double-entry accounting don't know what what works what doesn't work what is for us what's not for us and i think that as investors we figured we make it a lot too often because without it what do we do right yeah well and even five years ago there were no note specific platforms they just didn't exist it's too new of a of a world to have somebody build a system yeah and you know there's been you know systems you've built over time and you kind of say listen if i restarted i would do something completely different yeah um and there's sometimes where you get a product that you come in that reaches their shows that it's like whoa i should look into this as an investor i've been doing a certain way for so long this makes it 10 times easier so right without further ado richard welcome on our friday call i appreciate you jumping in here and joining us as other fellow note investors are watching intently can you share a little about who you are where you came from how did you get bothered notes a little bit of your background sure awesome thanks for having me on guys really appreciate it and i totally felt your pain regarding having the right systems in places i was trying to scale my note business i started in node investing about four years ago uh came from big corporate uh corporate world software engineering background um still have a day job but decided i wanted to get in the notes to augment my retirement and try to get out of the corporate world a little bit earlier right i knew when i started that i was going to try to go after quite a few notes and i had a lot of friends with money and so i wasn't going to just be happy with two or three notes um it was funny i bought my first one about four years ago i still can tell you the number of square feet the address of the place the borrower's last name i can tell you everything about that asset i don't need any information systems in order to keep track of that particular note i just know it like back in my head yeah back in my hand but as i was starting to scale i quickly saw that i was going to need a good system to be able to keep track of things so i started building one and i i started with a a baseline crm called zoho um it got that up and running had a full system up and running on that and i was talking with some node investors who were more interested more into the environment than i was and they said they were using podio and that that was a much more extensible uh broader system with lots of different capabilities so i switched everything over to podio about three and a half years ago and i've been on that platform ever since um i decided i was in a note conference uh eddie speeds nope conference about three and a half years ago or so and we broke us all up into these different tables ten people on each table and said go talk about what problems you're having in a group and then come back and tell all of us as a group report out how things are going and where you guys think your biggest challenges are and over and over and over again what everybody was talking about anybody who had more than one or two notes what they were talking about was i just got too much going on it's chaos and i'm not making good decisions and this business is about making money move fast it's about velocity of money it's how you make money right and i'm bogged down on all these dumb little things and chasing things around looking the same information up 14 times a week i'm just wasting time and not efficient and i thought that's weird how come they're having these problems it's not that hard and then i remembered oh yeah whoops i've got the crm that i'm using i got this whole solution when i built why don't i find a way to make it available for everybody else yeah that's that's kind of what got me started so what is podio podio is a workflow management solution uh a website on your cell phone or on your on your laptop or your desktop whatever where you can go in there and you can customize forms to match the scenario that you're working if you're selling cars you can have a car for if you're buying and selling notes you can have a note form and so on and so forth and you basically can build up a business business management system that allows you to manage your workflows right so i spent hundreds of hours building up that workflow putting automation in place to be able to scrape service her websites and pull their information down so i don't have to go to their websites and get their information generating documents automatically generating the mortgage and the launch and you know assignments and all those different things doing right signature automating all that stuff so that people don't have to go i don't have to go out and use four or five or six different software packages to get my day job done i'm not bouncing around in 14 spreadsheets and you know sticky notes and going to my fireproof safe to find some information i've got everything right there with me yeah that's really interesting so is your system now then is it based off of podio or is it from ground up i've debated on walking away from podio but the reality is podio is owned by citrix they've got a uptime that's amazing their their servers are super high robust they've got great backup systems in place there's you know a ton of stability that comes with relying on a third party for all that infrastructure and then all i do is put on front of that a note user a user front end for the node environment and all the back end automation to be able to move data around and make things available quickly for all of us that's really interesting so with with with that so if your basic beginner note investor what are some of the things you learned over time that was difficult to maintain in some of the things that you struggle with where you just you hit your head against the wall or you hurt other people i gotta say man i struggle with this what are some things you struggle with in the beginning that this system kind of helped you manage yeah it's a good question so um the the i i really do believe myself my system a system is necessary when you get beyond a few notes if you're just gonna own one or two notes you can do that in your head because you know things are pretty simple and you just know what's gonna happen as you start to get beyond three or four or five you start losing track of who the contractor was on that asset who's the servicer who's who's the lawn mower you know because these notes don't just stay unless you unless you're lucky they don't just stay performing and the servicer takes care of everything for you right um and even in mine and also then if you believe that making money in this business is about moving your money through it right and not just sitting on it long term sitting on a pile of performing notes that are just paying that's one piece of the business model here but if you believe it's about moving notes then you get into the you have a lot of delays and every delay costs you basically time which costs you money right so if a servicer puts a node in the portal and you don't see it for 45 days you just lost all that time yeah if you don't see it for 10 days is it that big a deal i don't know right so i get my system my system pulls that data down automatically every day and notifies you when there's a change so i know right away when something's changed i can go in and keep that thing moving same thing's true with law firms and people like that every all of the people that we work with that we expect to manage our business for us right need to be poked they don't do it for us the goodness of their heart right they need us to go and ask them how things are going and so keeping track of what's important and what's coming up next is critical yeah and i think a good point you we have to manage our managers right we had to manage our services adventure attorneys follow open attorneys yeah it's nothing to do with our purpose just what it is it's just a system you know we work harder for our assets than anyone else absolutely right somebody asked like who's your best servicer in one of the groups and it's like it depends and you know it's like when you get started you hate the word depends and when you get involved you say i understand why it depends now because it comes down to it it's really about you know what works for you what what do you have to manage there are services out there that will do everything for you but you still have to maintain what they do yeah right yeah yeah your attorneys are just as good as you are and the problem is if you don't catch up hey and a lot of people say listen how do i feel bad about reaching through my training reminding them just hey listen i'm just looking to follow up so these systems as nathan said before when you get a ton of assets or even a ton of problems on a deal yeah you need something to tell you this deal has this coming up and when and almost a to-do list but also know who you reach out to what email was a thread was it in right as we all know if you know replying to the wrong thread it can get lost easily right so let's do ourselves a favor here you know so back up we work with podio the online system right so you can get on your phone you can get on your computer you can anywhere you want to get it to that's right yeah and then the system allows you to upload these assets which is all confidential right that's what yeah when we got into it is it something that is cookie cutter it's clear or are you able to kind of manipulate things and change things and adapt things to what fits you that's a great question yeah so um i i find there's two primary classes of folks in this space there are the tinkerers like myself who love to go muck with everything and change everything and have exactly the fields i want and exactly the spots i want and i'll invest lots of hours in that kind of activity right when i'm doing that of course i'm not making money right but there are people like me that love to tinker and then there's the folks that just want to make money and they want to they want to run deals and they want to talk to people and they want to they want to have velocity of money those folks shouldn't be wasting their time with podio or you know acuity center or or salesforce or whatever pick the crm of your of your flavor they shouldn't be wasting time fine-tuning a crm they should just go buy one use something that's off the shelf and now like like nathan was saying earlier three or four years ago there wasn't any software out there no investors there was a couple of really big packages if you were a big boy you could get some really fancy stuff but there was nothing on you know 20 30 40 bucks a month nothing like that existed back then right and so with that low end price point and keeping it really simple the average investor can get in get their data done and then go off and hang out with their family or go go mountain bike riding or do whatever else that they wanted to go do and they're not wasting time also building out a crm because we can all do it right most of us are engineers that come into the note business because we have this mental you know ability to attack problems right but is that the right space for you to apply your time i think is the question i ask folks if it is great go for it if you want to go figure out how to automate crms i'm all in i'll help you figure it out yep so can you tell me what the difference i so i use pipedrive so i'm curious what's the difference between pipedrive and podio there's no difference in any crm it's which buttons are in which locations and how you use them what comes down what it comes down to is how are you using the crm right what features do you need and how easy can you put them in place and then how much time do you have to invest to put those features in place for example if you wanted to send automated emails out of pipedrive or out of podio the baseline system doesn't support that but you can build up around it and you can package everything together and you can make it send emails or text messages or voicemails or letters or postcards you can make it generate documents you can make it connected to quickbooks you can you can hook all these things up however you want each one of those activities takes you pick a number two to twenty hours right and that's time that we are spending tinkering instead of investing right and so it's just a matter of what you enjoy doing i think nothing's wrong with pipe right nothing wrong with podio or salesforce they're all great systems but but the one that you've done is built off of a system specifically for notes and and like you say that's the problem with with the pipe drive or something like that um i had to get help to get it set up because i don't know how to work it and so i had a good friend of mine help me set it up yeah and and you know you probably spent a few hours and a few of his hours and that's all good right and you've got something that's functional and you have something that's really great probably not i mean i don't know i haven't seen your solution yet sure i've been working on mine for four years and i spend you know 40 hours a week on it i'm always i mean it's fine tuned it's awesome but it's not necessary for the average investor if you're doing more than 10 10 or 15 notes i think you should come look at what i'm doing and just see if it's better than what you got i think you'd be pretty pleasantly surprised um that said you know i can build it i can take this off a podium and i can put it on pipedrive tomorrow and you know within a you know a couple of weeks i could have the same solution running on pipe drives so let's let's ask a question i know they've been asked before you know we get an email in the system am i importing the information from the email to the system how does that work for those people who are getting emails from all different deals and i get imported into it or is it actually integrated with your email that it tracks it because you're working inside the system yeah okay so so email is an interesting topic right um i'm not a fan of putting email volume email into a website right except gmail is awesome at it they've built an awesome website for managing email traffic and outlook you know microsoft outlook has done a great job of managing email traffic taking pipe drive or salesforce or any other tools and trying to manage email through a tool that's not built for email to me is clunky at best i've never seen a really pretty solution there are guys out there that are doing a good job of it but it's really hard what i do um i have two solutions primarily if i'm working on an asset right um i and i want to send that uh i want to send the lawyer an email um i go to my my outlook and i send them an email from there right if i want to have a dialogue with one of my note customers right one of my note node rules customers my software customers i do that out of my help desk which is another podio workspace and every all the dialogue with that person is through the podio interface there's an email button i click on that it sends them an email the responses come back into the indepodio everything's in and out of podio it's all managed nicely inside of there but that's a low volume email system right if i want to do lawyers and lawn mowers and contractors and servicers and everything having all that funnel through an asset in podio doesn't make a lot of sense it pulling all those dialogues together into one long list is not a pretty way to do things it's much much better to have folders and outlook or flags in gmail right and manage it inside of a high volume well-funded email system that's my position there are those out there on on uh bigger pockets that say you have to use pipelines got great email integration the email integration is crap right compared with gmail and outlook right so sorry if you want crappy email systems yeah go use pipedriver podio they can do it if you want good high volume easy to maintain and manage email you just need to use a good email system that's my that's my thinking gotcha i'm sure i pissed somebody off out there but whatever so when you're dealing with an assad list what happens to notify you that something's due request you get notified there's two primary ways i get messages out of podio or out of no rules um number one let's say uh david potts pings me on an asset and i get that notification um on my phone my phone will vibrate because the podio app goes off and i'll go look at it and go oh yeah it's a message from from david but he wants me to get some information i'll click on that and i can go type in on that one or i can run over to my computer if it's going to be a longer session and i can do it over there as well that's one set one way that that messages or notifications come in the other way the other thing that i do my my to-do list if you will my my what do i need to work on right now is just an ordered list of all of my assets let's say i've got 30 assets in my portfolio it's an order list ordered by the next due date on each asset yeah so today i'm working on 123 main street i've got 15 minutes i go in there i check on the taxes everything's good and before i close the asset in my crm i just update two boxes one is the next step what is the next thing i need to do on this thing two weeks from tuesday i need to contact daniel singer to find out what's going on with a lawyer and i put the date in there two weeks on tuesday now when i close that asset when i come back tomorrow to look at my portfolio that asset is down at the bottom of the list because it's not due for two and a half weeks i don't have to think about it i have to go figure out what's next on it and i don't know about you my memory is not perfect and when i get 30 assets i don't know when the due dates are on each of those 30 assets yeah so that simple step of just updating what's my next step and when is it due every time i touch an asset i do that and that way it's all that list is always in an ordered list and then i just check that so how do you handle sourcing notes and stuff like that you know that's something that's a you know struggle for some people how do you you know pay history anything like that how is that integrated into the system yeah today it's a good question so um i have most of the major servicers integrated in so sn fci uh nam uh there's another big one um allied um they're all integrated in basically you provide your login and credential information into the system it's all password protected it then goes out to the site pulls the information down i pull down all the current collateral information around pay history and comments and unpaid balance those those values pull them down and it all gets put into the same form with your asset so in the asset form you have all your different fields regarding the asset but in there there's i um by default i pulled the last six comments in the last six payments and so if we can pull more than that you just change a value but by default i pull six and so you can quickly glance at it you can see okay the last payment came in it was november 1st today's the third of december okay fine is probably not quite due yet right but then when that payment comes in tomorrow you're going to get a notification on your phone saying payment came in on 123 main street so you know things are up to date right because it's pulling that information daily for you same thing on the comments when the servicer goes out and says hey taxes are due and you're you're getting close to the delinquent date what do you want to do about that when they put that comment in once a day you're going to get a notification that that comment was put in and there's something to go do at the servicer so does it tell when something is due like a server make a comment you never know if it's something you have to do or just data does it pin you every time a service no pops up how does that work so yeah so um much like we all have iphones or android right we have these apps on our phone right and each one's got a little number in the top right corner that shows you how many things are due right you can ignore those or you can keep them wiped out or anywhere in between right podio's app is no different on the on your phone and on the desktop or on the on on your browser there's a little icon the top right corner that shows you how many notifications you have and for me when i'm active in my business and i'm trying to get a lot done i watch that little indicator and when it goes off i'll glance at it to see what when what happened if i ignore it i miss all the notifications that's fine i can go back and look at it two weeks from tuesday when i'm ready to work on the business again but that's basically what's happening is those indicators are going off there's a long list of notifications i can clean them all out when i'm done with them all right and i can keep track of them when i want to stay on top of it cool so i'm just going to copy some comments in your questions so i think it would be really good if you can kind of show the system features um as cindy asks a question regarding you know how does this compare to uh program call really flow um and whatnot so if you could could you share your screen show us a little bit more awesome yeah and we can do a side-by-side comparison of different software out there um i i've gone and looked at all the different packages that are out there the different crms that are available you guys able to see my screen here no yeah yeah oops i didn't hit share that's why there it is all right so um uh all the crms have the basic capability of creating forms and then organizing forms and linking forms together that's basically what a crm does and then a lot of them you add email and messaging and other things like that on top of it to be able to give you more features and then you can keep going from there what this form here is an asset form this is basically an asset is a note or a rental or a private private money loan right an asset is a real estate related item and most of the fields in here apply to most of the different types of assets the first field is the address because the real estate we care about the location of the property right so simple little address i have a little bit of summary information here at the top that basically is summarizing a lot of the fields down lower in the form and these are the fields that people give me feedback that they want to have at the top they don't want to have to scan down the form to find them right so what kind of node is it what's the loan number what position is the lien what's the current p i what stage is the asset in when did i purchase it who's the borrower uh who's the who was the investor on the asset um who's the servicer when was the last payment received and how much was it and then what's the current unpaid balance right this is all updated automatically on every asset once you get your initial data in and you hook up the servicing data all the fields are updated for you cool so you know i've got a picture of the asset of course you can have more than one here's my next step in due date right the concept i was talking about earlier if you come in here and say you know next step is talk with um service there uh let's talk with the uh uh elite that will talk with legal foreclosure options and we'll say we'll come back in here we don't they're gonna be out to christmas we'll come and ping them on the 6th of january right so just something along like that now when i close this the sort of list january 6 is going to be below the next item due and it'll just when january comes along january 2nd i'm done with holidays i'll come in here and look at this and i'll go oh okay this guy's due january 6th i better go take a look and see what's going on right and you get some basic information right you everything you're going to see in this form is just stuff that of course a node investor would want to have at their fingertips when they're thinking about their notes right it took me five to ten minutes per asset to plug this information in if i've got more than a few assets then i'll upload a spreadsheet pull the whole tape in all of one shot right but once the information's in there i don't have to go out and look for it i can click on the asset i can drop right in and find exactly what i'm looking for it's organized like you might expect there's information about the note information about the asset information about the you know who owns it right which energy did you use to purchase it that's important because later on we're going to be able to run reports and see this entity has 14 assets and they've got a half a million dollars invested this energy's got three assets with 200 000 invested right and we can then figure out you know roi and we can look at you know profit and loss things like that once we have that information sorted by entity we also i like to keep track sorry go ahead that's cool that's great because the last thing when we report and it's sometimes just too difficult because you put the information in all different areas and they're all in different spreadsheets right i got this entities assets over here in this spreadsheet and i bought some notes with my mom i got these assets over here in this spreadsheet buddy bob bought two partials and they got those notes over here in this spreadsheet oh my god which spreadsheet was note with john's notes in yeah right all right um so crm is just to whatever crm you choose to use in this business to you know you're gonna this is a beautiful part of it it links everything together and makes it really easy if i wanted to come over here and look at big investor i don't have to go out and go find a spreadsheet with big investors name in it i can click on big investor here and it'll bring me over to their contact information of course you can see it's a dummy dummy investor so there's no information on it but there could have been the phone number the email you know whatever it was i wanted to do i could also email that um that contact right from here if i wanted to of course there's no email address so that won't work in this particular dumb example but you get the idea right it's that quick so as cindy asks what would you say this comparison really flow what do you see it's something that you didn't see and really flow that you really built it we often do that we build things because we don't see it anywhere else um yeah i think i think uh i don't i don't think i've used really flow i've not heard of that one i mean i've looked at a lot of different crms um be happy to to do a side by side if someone wants to schedule some time with me we could put them up on site and look at them side by side and figure out pros and cons sure so you've been using the system regularly in your space to maintain all your assets and i think to me there's a lot of people walking into space who are software developers um encoders and some of that but they they lose the feature of being the investor and i i struggle because that doesn't make sense to me sometimes because you're constantly trying to catch up to what someone else showed you because oh you need this okay i'll go ahead versus i need this i'm going to adapt it to do what i need and you build it first to solve your problems versus trying to build something to solve everyone else's issues right and we build our portal our jkb portal and due diligence portal to scrape and get data for that same reason right we talked richard we talked about wisco is that we both did this not for the idea we're gonna make it public but to make our business easier right yeah right and it's like people say well i don't have a system like this and that's when you're both and i've talked about he said we should make this more public version of it right so we came out with our due diligence for the same idea that people have no way to get data some people have no way to maintain their assets and as they grow they're not in the space of crms and meetings they want to do an investment and that's all they want to get into right and now we need something even just as automated to just take it off their hands that's right yeah so um i agree with everything you said there um at the end of the day i don't i don't disparage anybody who says hey i just want to make it custom great i'm i'm that guy i like to go tweak the system and make it better right and if that's you don't don't think that i'm saying you should use my system because that's the wrong answer right if you i'd be happy to sell you my system and you can go customize the crap out of it and make it better and all that i'm not married to the way i've done it i've just done it to make it easy and now i'm making it available to others so they don't have to waste their time investing in tinkering if they don't want to yeah could somebody take the one that you've tinkered and further tinker it absolutely yeah look at that yeah the downside will be if you go in here and delete the payment history field or delete the service or comments field guess what the automation is not going to find that field and it's not going to push the payment industry back right so yeah you you're welcome to take my solution and start tinkering with it and change any way you want i've got people to call me and they tell me yeah i just broke everything oh right now i have to figure out i'm going to invest a couple hours to figure out what you broke and why and how we struggle with is this idea of we need to make sure our system's built to be able to get service of data right the pay history the notes that we've gone on the asset i love the fact payment issues involved in this because you need to know this if you're going to try selling the acid or running any kind of data on the asset that's immediate knowledge that you need to know about right so i think for me that feature right there is worthwhile yeah well and and and i i'm not going to go through all the different features i've got um one of my one of my big customers asked me to put together a tape generator so basically he hits a button in his system and it generates the tape of all the assets he sells a lot of assets every day right so um he basically hits it marks the assets that are for sale hits the sell button and it kicks out of tape which then he sends off to his investors right so um that's again you can do that out of any crm you can do that manually you can export everything into excel and you can delete all the columns and format everything why not take something that's already functional if you don't want to invest that time yourself yeah so nathan i know you use pipedrive we've built our own stuff internally how is you know what are some things in pipe drive that you don't that are not in pipe drive do you see here that's something beneficial i i don't keep track of the pay history like this i think that's a great feature um mostly though that may be something i want to incorporate going forward mostly up until now um for the pay history i'm not keeping too close tabs on it because i'm not holding it long term yeah so i would have it performing for a few months and then resell it out so i wasn't really concerned if it performed for 12 months because i didn't own it for 12 months yeah and it kind of depends on how how twitchy you are for your business right if you want to know what's happening right away it's nice to get notified every day that something changed payment came in him and didn't come in right they have that knowledge but that again depends on how fast response you are on the business if you don't really care and letting it sit and ride for a few months and then you go check on it then you don't you don't need you can just check on it when you go to the service or site so how how do you break this out um let's go back to like the assets tab um just to see kind of a will that give us a summary of the different assets so the first view is the um uh the uh first we could actually go to a different space go to my business okay so you'll see my business live here um so the high level front page summary will give us um how many assets i have how much money is invested with each other which llc that's running it's owning the business you can see keen funding is my biggest llc right now i've got a lot of money pulled out right now waiting for the crash that doesn't seem to want to happen um but uh i'm ready ready to reinvest if we look at just the assets view let's say we want to dig in and manage my portfolio we'll come over here and we'll see uh probably that i'm a little delinquent yeah what is december 3rd i'm a little delinquent in following up on my assets things are pretty stable but you can come in here and you can see they're ordered by date so elkhart i needed to check the listing on paper stack i'm selling this property on paper stack you can check the listing october 20th right damon avenue also checklisting on paper stack um chino valley i need to contact the servicer this is a performing loan everything is running great this is just the high level summary of the assets i can see this quickly and when i'm in there you know high twitch mode and making changes on a regular basis on my assets this is this table is where i spend most of my time i click on each one of these assets and work my way through that's very cool and then for the any emails that have come in on this you say you keep that separate so if it's gmail or outlook or whatever yeah so and then you make notes in here right the accountants think it's easy but for most of us it's not so easy yeah right i decided not to track accounting information in the system here i i use quickbooks my accounts take care of all that stuff i update my bank statements and my my quickbooks uh online portfolio monthly and everything errors just flows through that set of stocks how do you say that because i've seen a lot of programs out there that try and agree counting into it and it really doesn't do justice because your quickbooks is not a simple easy program that can be developed it's a it looks nice and pretty right but it's not as simple as everyone look makes it out to you right plugging into a program like this that's not built to do that right it's a crm it's not built to do what accounting features are you gotta let the email do the email job let the accounting do the quickbooks job and let the crm do the crm job that's right now we can do reports right and we can um we can run automated reports extract data out of quickbooks extract data out of the servicing site and mash it all together and have a page that's got a bunch of pretty charts on it if event if a customer wants that i could probably put that together in three or four hours i typically charge 100 bucks an hour to do custom work like that no problem that's easy enough to do i don't have a standard offering that just i backed away honestly from quickbooks just because it that is an amazing tool and i pay my my accountant a lot of money to keep it and keep it up to date right um not so much these days i don't have that many assets but when i had a lot of assets running that was you know that's their day job it's what they're good at why would i reproduce that here now i've seen guys try and i've seen some some decent hacks at it but yeah i agree i keep it totally separate so i've got like you say crm is is what i'm doing every day all day the accounting uh if i'm doing it right i don't ever see it yeah i can't stand accounting i'd rather have needles in my feet and you can pull up your profit and loss statement in quickbooks right your balance sheet that's quick you can scan through it you can figure out what's going on if somebody wants me to extract that and shove that into podio in a form no problem i can stick a picture in there pretty quick um but again that's just that's just customization it's easy enough to do yeah but i agree they're two separate animals so treat them separate so i know that you know a lot of people are going to start asking about pricing and whatnot um and you know it's hard to come up with a price that makes sense for everybody i understand right but pricing was really straightforward yeah most people expect and can you break down why what what each package offers yeah sure so um i try to make this really simple so um i i'm not into i've got a day job i make good money my no business makes me good money i'm not trying to make a fortune off of this software if you look at most crms out there they're charging x amount per user and they've got all these little fancy add-on fees i don't have any of that and maybe i should add that maybe i should try to be more greedy but to me it's not about that to me it's about sharing the information making friends right because at the end of the day i make money by having great partnerships with you guys not by trying to make 30 40 50 bucks a month off some software of course if i had a thousand customers getting 50 grand a month 50 a month that's a nice profit i could live with that but i don't need five hundred dollars per customer i don't even know one time everybody so i've kept it really simple basically if you're a new node investor and you've only got a couple assets you don't pay me anything click on get starter you don't put your credit card information and you get it download on your system and you can start using it today there's nothing stopping you from use going out logging and using it today it's all free it's all automated everything is easy if you want to start putting your business in here you're going to have more than three assets i ask you to give me some compensation right 40 bucks a month is my lowest tier on that right and it basically allows you to have an unlimited number of assets in companies and contacts and transactions and tasks and email management but doesn't give their outreach so let's let's back up this is a different not different product but it's the same product but different feature on it right yeah so those people who are using you know jetblue or you know and mailchimp and and all these other programs you could remove that program from your service needs and use this system which also has your assets in there and do what it is right that's right that's right yeah you know i'm not going to compete just like i'm not going to compete with quickbooks i'm not going to compete with mailchimp and activecampaign and salesforce on their high-end you know heavily funded uh email automation systems right this does basic automation a series of up to ten males and one shot you know and you can specify how many days out each one goes and and which types of your your contacts get them it's a pretty robust system but nowhere near the millions and millions of dollars that have been spent on making mailchimp an active campaign and those solutions great if you need to have an email sent out and then if they click on this link send those 14 emails and then if they do that go over that direction i don't have any of that built in i've got a straight shot through up to of the ten messages which works for most node investors that i know right it's basic straight through email and email or twitter let's go back to the other features and see the additional things so that 10 emails per month no so there's no limit on the number of months you send so basically the if we look at how a campaign is configured let me just go in real quick and show you how that's configured so a campaign is a couple of things a campaign is a step is a series of steps so as i have an app in here call it a step and basically um you could have a step that is a in this case it's a text message it's got this information hi first name it's justin blah blah blah blah blah right and that message is going to get sent out when the campaign runs back step and so then if we look at campaigns a campaign is just one or more steps um and here's here's an example of a campaign that has one two three no just two two steps step one fires on day zero step two fires on day one and so in this particular campaign it looks like this is a new contact campaign when new contact comes in on the day the day that they sign up they get this first contact email and um and then on day two on the day one after right they get a text message with additional follow-up information right and so i did notice also besides email sms can you share a little bit about that i know it's a feature that's not fully on that you have to use additional services but share a little bit about that feature too which is also tracking and people say what do i need to know about in this space about you know text messaging people yeah yeah text messaging is a big deal right so people they they say email is dying i don't believe that but you know of course i'm an old dude so maybe if that's why i don't believe it but um yeah uh text message marketing is absolutely viable and is a way to get a hold of people and and most people open their text messages so it's it's absolutely important and we added it a couple of years ago we used twilio as a service right so twilio.com is the service that we use any crm can integrate with twilio so i'm not saying podio is the only one to do it right so i've basically put the automation in the background to be able to hook up to twilio and send sms messages as a customer when you sign up with me and you want sms you you request a phone number i ask you what area code you want the messages to come from because i can't send them from your cell phone they come from another phone number which is nice if you're in the node business you probably don't want to give out your personal number anyway right so you get a number let's say you're in the the 925 area code well then i'll get you a phone number in the 925 area code and that's where your text messages will come from beyond that you don't need to worry about it the automation system runs it sends the messages either emails or text messages to the numbers or to the text message numbers that you ask for it to go to when they reply it goes back into the system and so it goes back into their contact and notifies you that their contact made a reply and so then maybe i should show you an example let's do that real quick i'm sorry i'm distracted someone's asked that comment we'll follow up with that question so um i'm just trying to get clarity on what the question is referring to as well sure all right so here's my contact in this system right and so you can see i've been playing around with it over here but let's say the automation ran and sends them an sms i can also just do it manually here and my phone number is over here yep it's going to go so this will send the text message to the phone number of the contact right and um that phone number happens to be mine so my phone just went off and you probably can't see it but it's there and if i come in here and reply that message is going to come right back into the system um usually within a couple of seconds but the the the dialogue all happens right here inside of the contact right if and when we were talking about campaigns a minute ago if the campaign had sent a message out to richard mcgrew here um that oh i haven't come back in yet but um if the campaign had sent a message out and they replied the reply would come back in here to their contact and i would get notified that that reply came in that way i can come back in here and i can continue the dialogue just by typing sms colon and sending another message to them this allows me to stay engaged and keep all that contact information directly inside of the contact with them does that make sense yeah yeah so when they reply though just making sure it clarified they respond to the system or you also get it in the app or how does that work when if you were sending a message to me and i respond through the system there's fine back then number how does the person you sent it get notified that i responded so there's the response there i just i just typed in reply on my phone so you can see the reply came back in um and so this is that sent only to the app does that get sent to your notification does that get sent to your cell phone is like hey i got a message it gets sent to the platform the platform then if i'm on the website if i'm sitting here talking to you guys i'm on the web i will get a little indicator that fires off up here showing there's been a notification a change i can click on that and i can find out what happened right in this case it was somebody else but um because i've got so many contacts inside of inside a note rule inside of note rules and podio but um i don't know if i'm answering your question if my phone also vibrates every time a contact comes in so this basically i get notified both on my phone because i have the podio app turned on and also notifications turned on and i get notified if i'm on my browser because i have the browser notifications turned on within podio gotcha that's pretty good and but the notification is just a general notification or does it specify text so the notifications will look like this so here's on the browser as you can see that this is a notification that justin bogard commented on a contact named me straight probably shouldn't show that on the video here right but the bottom line these these these notifications are always because i have so much going on in podio i get thousands of these notifications and i can turn them off but i i'm working the business so um but the average investor someone like justin he probably gets 10 or 15 notifications a day depending on how active he's interacting with his his clients and outreach folks so yeah awesome so let's let's disconnect from the share screen just kind of talk a little bit more about this um i think for me that the common investor says this is overwhelming for them right um one of the common questions came back was um you know someone was asking eric was asking about uh api for this i'm not sure what they would need why would they need an api because the api is already set up for this right i don't know so maybe i'm not understanding but they said you know is there an api for this i think absolutely absolutely api yeah so let's talk about api so for those of you that don't know what an api is it's basically a programming interface application programming interface i use apis all the time with podio and other third parties that's how i hook them all together i'm a software guy right and whoever just asked you that question is a software nerd just like me right if you're educated on how to use apis and you want to use apis to interact between podio and or servicing sites and or whatever feel free to reach out to me i'm happy to sit down with you and figure out if there's some way we can work together um i can tell you what i'm supporting and what i'm doing and we can go back and forth there are a million options and i have no idea which question you want me to answer so i'm probably not yeah that's okay i mean you know for those who are confused what api means it's just basically an automated system that allows you to pull data and send data from one location to another right but this is more of a receiver of information versus a provider right it's not sending information out unless i mean maybe it exports data to a servicer but usually you know that's what email does and what not but um usually receives the information from all the different sources so yeah absolutely so eric feel free to reach out um you know what you're looking for maybe more clarity so reach out to richard and ask questions so this is awesome so richard i think that your system not only does certain small stuff but it also does the bigger things in systems that allow people like us who are looking to do more networking and resources and servers or that and stuff like that but also starts a beginner to say listen where's where do i have what information do i need to get started you know i need my service to your information okay i need to get that information um i need no upb it's asking me for it i must need a node for some reason um so the basics are are there almost like a checklist and that's the nice thing about the the asset forum that's put together in the system right if it most likely the fields i can tell you the fields that are there are the ones that folks have asked me to add and then i've been negotiating for four years on removing and adding trying to make that form as simple as possible so that it can be filled out as quickly as possible but have enough information so you're not always having to go back to that damn fireproof safe to find the asset file to find out what that value was right yeah and i don't know the couple months once our due diligence platform is built we'll be talking to richard about how to import and get data from our system uh which also use api of course and be gathering data and then send it to the system uh we'll be talking rich in the next few months once we get it up and running and get some um stuff going on you know what we didn't touch on document generation and not many of your audience are probably that interested in this but if you're buying and selling notes you have to generate no longer note and mortgage assignments and all those different things right and you can do those you can send those off to a service and we all know guys that will do it for anywhere between 20 and 500 bucks a pop depending on how you know how educated you are and how to find those folks if you're doing it on a regular basis you know um whatever that frequency is for you that becomes painful it starts to get painful to wait for the guys to send you back the documents it starts to get painful when they make a mistake you got to send it back and go back and forth and so i put in automation to be able to generate those documents for you automatically now you have to give me the contracts i'm not going to give them to you but once you give me the documents i can have them put in the system and then you literally click one button and the document gets generated for you it gets generated as a pdf at that point you can send it off and and get it signed um if there is demand i have the right signature done i have the integration with right signature completed i haven't rolled it out as a feature yet but it's pretty much done i can use it myself um so basically i can have it have the document sent out to somebody have them signed and passed back and now i have a legal signature just like docusign right cool nice so not many of you so it's also maybe a feature you know there's a ton of features here not just a simple crm program give you document creation and that's good for personal sales good for assignments it's good for anything because once you get a system set up for a pdf you're going to want to be and create any document you want that's right the sms is awesome right if you're looking to reach out to don't forget the borrowers with it but you can reach out to different people you know colleagues of yours um email chains like that um and i even thought about doing sms for us because of the way we run our our vpos and how we change we do things it's a feature i'm looking at doing um but it's awesome it's awesome so i know i know that a lot of people are having a lot of questions um i know that we're techy guys versus the other side of those or i think cindy said like technology gets in her way of organization times because she's need tech but she's understand it right um and a lot of people out there like that so for those people my system is really built for the lesser techy people i've tried to keep it extremely simple i've not added a lot of bells and whistles most of the lesser techie people will never touch my campaign's features and i don't think they should right campaigns are a whole other world if you want to get into sending email and letters and postcards and all that i've got it all automated it's easy to do but there's real work there to figure out how to make it work and how to make it home even if you're going to go get mailchimp or salesforce or anything else crm sending that automated messages is an investment of time but if you're just managing a nor note portfolio and you're not super techy my solution's great it's done you don't have to go create anything it's fully functional and it's simple right and that's the key i've purposely made it simple so we're gonna we're gonna be reaching out to richard after this interview um through those who want to know where we're each other richard and we're gonna see if we get this special discount for those who are listening see if we can get a special in for the first month or so and see if we can help out and get you started with this because you may be unsure if this is for you or not all right and we're gonna see if we can work with richmond see we can get to for you guys so yeah richard i appreciate you jumping on friday afternoon with us hopefully uh i know i saw a little early in the morning for you but i think mornings are our our thing where we're at so awesome feel free to let us know if you have any questions guys reach out to us directly shoot us an email um you can reach out to richard as well through the site and we'll go from there yeah very good thanks so much richard yeah thanks for having me on guys really appreciate it you better get a chance to talk too much before this just came like a storm um between deals you know a lot of people works out of the 903 assets we've had tapes turn on us deals accepted things are just abnormal how has it been for you yeah same i've got a bunch of uh new tapes that i wasn't necessarily expecting i i yes and no just because it is fourth quarter we see that a lot uh so that's it's fun to see uh trying to get all the money together i can to make some purchases here get our money flowing it's interesting because you know all year it's been kind of a weird situation and deals being set there right now people are trying to get things up the book the end of the year we're going to leverage that right if they want that enough the books we're going to make a short work but for us but that also means nice little segue here that means you got to maintain what you have going on to make sure it's stable for everything eyes are dying teeth across as much as possible so you can make that transition and focus on new purchases yeah i i noticed and i wonder about you because uh you're you don't do this full-time so i think you're probably even more so than me but i could get up to about 20 notes not so bad i could do that no problem by the time i was up to about 50 notes i didn't have any kind of crm any kind of tracking tool or anything and it was chaos like it was i could barely manage everything i had you know spreadsheets with color coding so red is like i got to do something about amelie and orange is it's you know urgent but not depressing and you know it was crazy and so i i finally got myself a a crm tool something that helps me organize everything and now it's a breeze and but the problem is when you get to crms you don't know what is good what's not good what's struggling and your crm is not what you do you're investing that's it so it's interesting that we struggle with understanding this stuff because at the end of the day we don't know what what works what doesn't work what is for us what's not for us and i think that as investors we figured we make it a lot too often because without it what do we do right yeah well and even five years ago there were no note specific platforms they just didn't exist it's too new of a of a world to have somebody build a system yeah and you know there's been you know systems you've built over time and you kind of say listen if i restarted i would do something completely different yeah um and there's sometimes where you get a product that you come in that reaches their shows that it's like whoa i should look into this as an investor i've been doing a certain way for so long this makes it 10 times easier so right without further ado richard welcome on our friday call i appreciate you jumping in here and joining us as other fellow note investors are watching intently can you share a little about who you are where you came from how did you get bothered notes a little bit of your background sure awesome thanks for having me on guys really appreciate it and i totally felt your pain regarding having the right systems in places i was trying to scale my note business i started in node investing about four years ago uh came from big corporate uh corporate world software engineering background um still have a day job but decided i wanted to get in the notes to augment my retirement and try to get out of the corporate world a little bit earlier right i knew when i started that i was going to try to go after quite a few notes and i had a lot of friends with money and so i wasn't going to just be happy with two or three notes um it was funny i bought my first one about four years ago i still can tell you the number of square feet the address of the place the borrower's last name i can tell you everything about that asset i don't need any information systems in order to keep track of that particular note i just know it like back in my head yeah back in my hand but as i was starting to scale i quickly saw that i was going to need a good system to be able to keep track of things so i started building one and i i started with a a baseline crm called zoho um it got that up and running had a full system up and running on that and i was talking with some node investors who were more interested more into the environment than i was and they said they were using podio and that that was a much more extensible uh broader system with lots of different capabilities so i switched everything over to podio about three and a half years ago and i've been on that platform ever since um i decided i was in a note conference uh eddie speeds nope conference about three and a half years ago or so and we broke us all up into these different tables ten people on each table and said go talk about what problems you're having in a group and then come back and tell all of us as a group report out how things are going and where you guys think your biggest challenges are and over and over and over again what everybody was talking about anybody who had more than one or two notes what they were talking about was i just got too much going on it's chaos and i'm not making good decisions and this business is about making money move fast it's about velocity of money it's how you make money right and i'm bogged down on all these dumb little things and chasing things around looking the same information up 14 times a week i'm just wasting time and not efficient and i thought that's weird how come they're having these problems it's not that hard and then i remembered oh yeah whoops i've got the crm that i'm using i got this whole solution when i built why don't i find a way to make it available for everybody else yeah that's that's kind of what got me started so what is podio podio is a workflow management solution uh a website on your cell phone or on your on your laptop or your desktop whatever where you can go in there and you can customize forms to match the scenario that you're working if you're selling cars you can have a car for if you're buying and selling notes you can have a note form and so on and so forth and you basically can build up a business business management system that allows you to manage your workflows right so i spent hundreds of hours building up that workflow putting automation in place to be able to scrape service her websites and pull their information down so i don't have to go to their websites and get their information generating documents automatically generating the mortgage and the launch and you know assignments and all those different things doing right signature automating all that stuff so that people don't have to go i don't have to go out and use four or five or six different software packages to get my day job done i'm not bouncing around in 14 spreadsheets and you know sticky notes and going to my fireproof safe to find some information i've got everything right there with me yeah that's really interesting so is your system now then is it based off of podio or is it from ground up i've debated on walking away from podio but the reality is podio is owned by citrix they've got a uptime that's amazing their their servers are super high robust they've got great backup systems in place there's you know a ton of stability that comes with relying on a third party for all that infrastructure and then all i do is put on front of that a note user a user front end for the node environment and all the back end automation to be able to move data around and make things available quickly for all of us that's really interesting so with with with that so if your basic beginner note investor what are some of the things you learned over time that was difficult to maintain in some of the things that you struggle with where you just you hit your head against the wall or you hurt other people i gotta say man i struggle with this what are some things you struggle with in the beginning that this system kind of helped you manage yeah it's a good question so um the the i i really do believe myself my system a system is necessary when you get beyond a few notes if you're just gonna own one or two notes you can do that in your head because you know things are pretty simple and you just know what's gonna happen as you start to get beyond three or four or five you start losing track of who the contractor was on that asset who's the servicer who's who's the lawn mower you know because these notes don't just stay unless you unless you're lucky they don't just stay performing and the servicer takes care of everything for you right um and even in mine and also then if you believe that making money in this business is about moving your money through it right and not just sitting on it long term sitting on a pile of performing notes that are just paying that's one piece of the business model here but if you believe it's about moving notes then you get into the you have a lot of delays and every delay costs you basically time which costs you money right so if a servicer puts a node in the portal and you don't see it for 45 days you just lost all that time yeah if you don't see it for 10 days is it that big a deal i don't know right so i get my system my system pulls that data down automatically every day and notifies you when there's a change so i know right away when something's changed i can go in and keep that thing moving same thing's true with law firms and people like that every all of the people that we work with that we expect to manage our business for us right need to be poked they don't do it for us the goodness of their heart right they need us to go and ask them how things are going and so keeping track of what's important and what's coming up next is critical yeah and i think a good point you we have to manage our managers right we had to manage our services adventure attorneys follow open attorneys yeah it's nothing to do with our purpose just what it is it's just a system you know we work harder for our assets than anyone else absolutely right somebody asked like who's your best servicer in one of the groups and it's like it depends and you know it's like when you get started you hate the word depends and when you get involved you say i understand why it depends now because it comes down to it it's really about you know what works for you what what do you have to manage there are services out there that will do everything for you but you still have to maintain what they do yeah right yeah yeah your attorneys are just as good as you are and the problem is if you don't catch up hey and a lot of people say listen how do i feel bad about reaching through my training reminding them just hey listen i'm just looking to follow up so these systems as nathan said before when you get a ton of assets or even a ton of problems on a deal yeah you need something to tell you this deal has this coming up and when and almost a to-do list but also know who you reach out to what email was a thread was it in right as we all know if you know replying to the wrong thread it can get lost easily right so let's do ourselves a favor here you know so back up we work with podio the online system right so you can get on your phone you can get on your computer you can anywhere you want to get it to that's right yeah and then the system allows you to upload these assets which is all confidential right that's what yeah when we got into it is it something that is cookie cutter it's clear or are you able to kind of manipulate things and change things and adapt things to what fits you that's a great question yeah so um i i find there's two primary classes of folks in this space there are the tinkerers like myself who love to go muck with everything and change everything and have exactly the fields i want and exactly the spots i want and i'll invest lots of hours in that kind of activity right when i'm doing that of course i'm not making money right but there are people like me that love to tinker and then there's the folks that just want to make money and they want to they want to run deals and they want to talk to people and they want to they want to have velocity of money those folks shouldn't be wasting their time with podio or you know acuity center or or salesforce or whatever pick the crm of your of your flavor they shouldn't be wasting time fine-tuning a crm they should just go buy one use something that's off the shelf and now like like nathan was saying earlier three or four years ago there wasn't any software out there no investors there was a couple of really big packages if you were a big boy you could get some really fancy stuff but there was nothing on you know 20 30 40 bucks a month nothing like that existed back then right and so with that low end price point and keeping it really simple the average investor can get in get their data done and then go off and hang out with their family or go go mountain bike riding or do whatever else that they wanted to go do and they're not wasting time also building out a crm because we can all do it right most of us are engineers that come into the note business because we have this mental you know ability to attack problems right but is that the right space for you to apply your time i think is the question i ask folks if it is great go for it if you want to go figure out how to automate crms i'm all in i'll help you figure it out yep so can you tell me what the difference i so i use pipedrive so i'm curious what's the difference between pipedrive and podio there's no difference in any crm it's which buttons are in which locations and how you use them what comes down what it comes down to is how are you using the crm right what features do you need and how easy can you put them in place and then how much time do you have to invest to put those features in place for example if you wanted to send automated emails out of pipedrive or out of podio the baseline system doesn't support that but you can build up around it and you can package everything together and you can make it send emails or text messages or voicemails or letters or postcards you can make it generate documents you can make it connected to quickbooks you can you can hook all these things up however you want each one of those activities takes you pick a number two to twenty hours right and that's time that we are spending tinkering instead of investing right and so it's just a matter of what you enjoy doing i think nothing's wrong with pipe right nothing wrong with podio or salesforce they're all great systems but but the one that you've done is built off of a system specifically for notes and and like you say that's the problem with with the pipe drive or something like that um i had to get help to get it set up because i don't know how to work it and so i had a good friend of mine help me set it up yeah and and you know you probably spent a few hours and a few of his hours and that's all good right and you've got something that's functional and you have something that's really great probably not i mean i don't know i haven't seen your solution yet sure i've been working on mine for four years and i spend you know 40 hours a week on it i'm always i mean it's fine tuned it's awesome but it's not necessary for the average investor if you're doing more than 10 10 or 15 notes i think you should come look at what i'm doing and just see if it's better than what you got i think you'd be pretty pleasantly surprised um that said you know i can build it i can take this off a podium and i can put it on pipedrive tomorrow and you know within a you know a couple of weeks i could have the same solution running on pipe drives so let's let's ask a question i know they've been asked before you know we get an email in the system am i importing the information from the email to the system how does that work for those people who are getting emails from all different deals and i get imported into it or is it actually integrated with your email that it tracks it because you're working inside the system yeah okay so so email is an interesting topic right um i'm not a fan of putting email volume email into a website right except gmail is awesome at it they've built an awesome website for managing email traffic and outlook you know microsoft outlook has done a great job of managing email traffic taking pipe drive or salesforce or any other tools and trying to manage email through a tool that's not built for email to me is clunky at best i've never seen a really pretty solution there are guys out there that are doing a good job of it but it's really hard what i do um i have two solutions primarily if i'm working on an asset right um i and i want to send that uh i want to send the lawyer an email um i go to my my outlook and i send them an email from there right if i want to have a dialogue with one of my note customers right one of my note node rules customers my software customers i do that out of my help desk which is another podio workspace and every all the dialogue with that person is through the podio interface there's an email button i click on that it sends them an email the responses come back into the indepodio everything's in and out of podio it's all managed nicely inside of there but that's a low volume email system right if i want to do lawyers and lawn mowers and contractors and servicers and everything having all that funnel through an asset in podio doesn't make a lot of sense it pulling all those dialogues together into one long list is not a pretty way to do things it's much much better to have folders and outlook or flags in gmail right and manage it inside of a high volume well-funded email system that's my position there are those out there on on uh bigger pockets that say you have to use pipelines got great email integration the email integration is crap right compared with gmail and outlook right so sorry if you want crappy email systems yeah go use pipedriver podio they can do it if you want good high volume easy to maintain and manage email you just need to use a good email system that's my that's my thinking gotcha i'm sure i pissed somebody off out there but whatever so when you're dealing with an assad list what happens to notify you that something's due request you get notified there's two primary ways i get messages out of podio or out of no rules um number one let's say uh david potts pings me on an asset and i get that notification um on my phone my phone will vibrate because the podio app goes off and i'll go look at it and go oh yeah it's a message from from david but he wants me to get some information i'll click on that and i can go type in on that one or i can run over to my computer if it's going to be a longer session and i can do it over there as well that's one set one way that that messages or notifications come in the other way the other thing that i do my my to-do list if you will my my what do i need to work on right now is just an ordered list of all of my assets let's say i've got 30 assets in my portfolio it's an order list ordered by the next due date on each asset yeah so today i'm working on 123 main street i've got 15 minutes i go in there i check on the taxes everything's good and before i close the asset in my crm i just update two boxes one is the next step what is the next thing i need to do on this thing two weeks from tuesday i need to contact daniel singer to find out what's going on with a lawyer and i put the date in there two weeks on tuesday now when i close that asset when i come back tomorrow to look at my portfolio that asset is down at the bottom of the list because it's not due for two and a half weeks i don't have to think about it i have to go figure out what's next on it and i don't know about you my memory is not perfect and when i get 30 assets i don't know when the due dates are on each of those 30 assets yeah so that simple step of just updating what's my next step and when is it due every time i touch an asset i do that and that way it's all that list is always in an ordered list and then i just check that so how do you handle sourcing notes and stuff like that you know that's something that's a you know struggle for some people how do you you know pay history anything like that how is that integrated into the system yeah today it's a good question so um i have most of the major servicers integrated in so sn fci uh nam uh there's another big one um allied um they're all integrated in basically you provide your login and credential information into the system it's all password protected it then goes out to the site pulls the information down i pull down all the current collateral information around pay history and comments and unpaid balance those those values pull them down and it all gets put into the same form with your asset so in the asset form you have all your different fields regarding the asset but in there there's i um by default i pulled the last six comments in the last six payments and so if we can pull more than that you just change a value but by default i pull six and so you can quickly glance at it you can see okay the last payment came in it was november 1st today's the third of december okay fine is probably not quite due yet right but then when that payment comes in tomorrow you're going to get a notification on your phone saying payment came in on 123 main street so you know things are up to date right because it's pulling that information daily for you same thing on the comments when the servicer goes out and says hey taxes are due and you're you're getting close to the delinquent date what do you want to do about that when they put that comment in once a day you're going to get a notification that that comment was put in and there's something to go do at the servicer so does it tell when something is due like a server make a comment you never know if it's something you have to do or just data does it pin you every time a service no pops up how does that work so yeah so um much like we all have iphones or android right we have these apps on our phone right and each one's got a little number in the top right corner that shows you how many things are due right you can ignore those or you can keep them wiped out or anywhere in between right podio's app is no different on the on your phone and on the desktop or on the on on your browser there's a little icon the top right corner that shows you how many notifications you have and for me when i'm active in my business and i'm trying to get a lot done i watch that little indicator and when it goes off i'll glance at it to see what when what happened if i ignore it i miss all the notifications that's fine i can go back and look at it two weeks from tuesday when i'm ready to work on the business again but that's basically what's happening is those indicators are going off there's a long list of notifications i can clean them all out when i'm done with them all right and i can keep track of them when i want to stay on top of it cool so i'm just going to copy some comments in your questions so i think it would be really good if you can kind of show the system features um as cindy asks a question regarding you know how does this compare to uh program call really flow um and whatnot so if you could could you share your screen show us a little bit more awesome yeah and we can do a side-by-side comparison of different software out there um i i've gone and looked at all the different packages that are out there the different crms that are available you guys able to see my screen here no yeah yeah oops i didn't hit share that's why there it is all right so um uh all the crms have the basic capability of creating forms and then organizing forms and linking forms together that's basically what a crm does and then a lot of them you add email and messaging and other things like that on top of it to be able to give you more features and then you can keep going from there what this form here is an asset form this is basically an asset is a note or a rental or a private private money loan right an asset is a real estate related item and most of the fields in here apply to most of the different types of assets the first field is the address because the real estate we care about the location of the property right so simple little address i have a little bit of summary information here at the top that basically is summarizing a lot of the fields down lower in the form and these are the fields that people give me feedback that they want to have at the top they don't want to have to scan down the form to find them right so what kind of node is it what's the loan number what position is the lien what's the current p i what stage is the asset in when did i purchase it who's the borrower uh who's the who was the investor on the asset um who's the servicer when was the last payment received and how much was it and then what's the current unpaid balance right this is all updated automatically on every asset once you get your initial data in and you hook up the servicing data all the fields are updated for you cool so you know i've got a picture of the asset of course you can have more than one here's my next step in due date right the concept i was talking about earlier if you come in here and say you know next step is talk with um service there uh let's talk with the uh uh elite that will talk with legal foreclosure options and we'll say we'll come back in here we don't they're gonna be out to christmas we'll come and ping them on the 6th of january right so just something along like that now when i close this the sort of list january 6 is going to be below the next item due and it'll just when january comes along january 2nd i'm done with holidays i'll come in here and look at this and i'll go oh okay this guy's due january 6th i better go take a look and see what's going on right and you get some basic information right you everything you're going to see in this form is just stuff that of course a node investor would want to have at their fingertips when they're thinking about their notes right it took me five to ten minutes per asset to plug this information in if i've got more than a few assets then i'll upload a spreadsheet pull the whole tape in all of one shot right but once the information's in there i don't have to go out and look for it i can click on the asset i can drop right in and find exactly what i'm looking for it's organized like you might expect there's information about the note information about the asset information about the you know who owns it right which energy did you use to purchase it that's important because later on we're going to be able to run reports and see this entity has 14 assets and they've got a half a million dollars invested this energy's got three assets with 200 000 invested right and we can then figure out you know roi and we can look at you know profit and loss things like that once we have that information sorted by entity we also i like to keep track sorry go ahead that's cool that's great because the last thing when we report and it's sometimes just too difficult because you put the information in all different areas and they're all in different spreadsheets right i got this entities assets over here in this spreadsheet and i bought some notes with my mom i got these assets over here in this spreadsheet buddy bob bought two partials and they got those notes over here in this spreadsheet oh my god which spreadsheet was note with john's notes in yeah right all right um so crm is just to whatever crm you choose to use in this business to you know you're gonna this is a beautiful part of it it links everything together and makes it really easy if i wanted to come over here and look at big investor i don't have to go out and go find a spreadsheet with big investors name in it i can click on big investor here and it'll bring me over to their contact information of course you can see it's a dummy dummy investor so there's no information on it but there could have been the phone number the email you know whatever it was i wanted to do i could also email that um that contact right from here if i wanted to of course there's no email address so that won't work in this particular dumb example but you get the idea right it's that quick so as cindy asks what would you say this comparison really flow what do you see it's something that you didn't see and really flow that you really built it we often do that we build things because we don't see it anywhere else um yeah i think i think uh i don't i don't think i've used really flow i've not heard of that one i mean i've looked at a lot of different crms um be happy to to do a side by side if someone wants to schedule some time with me we could put them up on site and look at them side by side and figure out pros and cons sure so you've been using the system regularly in your space to maintain all your assets and i think to me there's a lot of people walking into space who are software developers um encoders and some of that but they they lose the feature of being the investor and i i struggle because that doesn't make sense to me sometimes because you're constantly trying to catch up to what someone else showed you because oh you need this okay i'll go ahead versus i need this i'm going to adapt it to do what i need and you build it first to solve your problems versus trying to build something to solve everyone else's issues right and we build our portal our jkb portal and due diligence portal to scrape and get data for that same reason right we talked richard we talked about wisco is that we both did this not for the idea we're gonna make it public but to make our business easier right yeah right and it's like people say well i don't have a system like this and that's when you're both and i've talked about he said we should make this more public version of it right so we came out with our due diligence for the same idea that people have no way to get data some people have no way to maintain their assets and as they grow they're not in the space of crms and meetings they want to do an investment and that's all they want to get into right and now we need something even just as automated to just take it off their hands that's right yeah so um i agree with everything you said there um at the end of the day i don't i don't disparage anybody who says hey i just want to make it custom great i'm i'm that guy i like to go tweak the system and make it better right and if that's you don't don't think that i'm saying you should use my system because that's the wrong answer right if you i'd be happy to sell you my system and you can go customize the crap out of it and make it better and all that i'm not married to the way i've done it i've just done it to make it easy and now i'm making it available to others so they don't have to waste their time investing in tinkering if they don't want to yeah could somebody take the one that you've tinkered and further tinker it absolutely yeah look at that yeah the downside will be if you go in here and delete the payment history field or delete the service or comments field guess what the automation is not going to find that field and it's not going to push the payment industry back right so yeah you you're welcome to take my solution and start tinkering with it and change any way you want i've got people to call me and they tell me yeah i just broke everything oh right now i have to figure out i'm going to invest a couple hours to figure out what you broke and why and how we struggle with is this idea of we need to make sure our system's built to be able to get service of data right the pay history the notes that we've gone on the asset i love the fact payment issues involved in this because you need to know this if you're going to try selling the acid or running any kind of data on the asset that's immediate knowledge that you need to know about right so i think for me that feature right there is worthwhile yeah well and and and i i'm not going to go through all the different features i've got um one of my one of my big customers asked me to put together a tape generator so basically he hits a button in his system and it generates the tape of all the assets he sells a lot of assets every day right so um he basically hits it marks the assets that are for sale hits the sell button and it kicks out of tape which then he sends off to his investors right so um that's again you can do that out of any crm you can do that manually you can export everything into excel and you can delete all the columns and format everything why not take something that's already functional if you don't want to invest that time yourself yeah so nathan i know you use pipedrive we've built our own stuff internally how is you know what are some things in pipe drive that you don't that are not in pipe drive do you see here that's something beneficial i i don't keep track of the pay history like this i think that's a great feature um mostly though that may be something i want to incorporate going forward mostly up until now um for the pay history i'm not keeping too close tabs on it because i'm not holding it long term yeah so i would have it performing for a few months and then resell it out so i wasn't really concerned if it performed for 12 months because i didn't own it for 12 months yeah and it kind of depends on how how twitchy you are for your business right if you want to know what's happening right away it's nice to get notified every day that something changed payment came in him and didn't come in right they have that knowledge but that again depends on how fast response you are on the business if you don't really care and letting it sit and ride for a few months and then you go check on it then you don't you don't need you can just check on it when you go to the service or site so how how do you break this out um let's go back to like the assets tab um just to see kind of a will that give us a summary of the different assets so the first view is the um uh the uh first we could actually go to a different space go to my business okay so you'll see my business live here um so the high level front page summary will give us um how many assets i have how much money is invested with each other which llc that's running it's owning the business you can see keen funding is my biggest llc right now i've got a lot of money pulled out right now waiting for the crash that doesn't seem to want to happen um but uh i'm ready ready to reinvest if we look at just the assets view let's say we want to dig in and manage my portfolio we'll come over here and we'll see uh probably that i'm a little delinquent yeah what is december 3rd i'm a little delinquent in following up on my assets things are pretty stable but you can come in here and you can see they're ordered by date so elkhart i needed to check the listing on paper stack i'm selling this property on paper stack you can check the listing october 20th right damon avenue also checklisting on paper stack um chino valley i need to contact the servicer this is a performing loan everything is running great this is just the high level summary of the assets i can see this quickly and when i'm in there you know high twitch mode and making changes on a regular basis on my assets this is this table is where i spend most of my time i click on each one of these assets and work my way through that's very cool and then for the any emails that have come in on this you say you keep that separate so if it's gmail or outlook or whatever yeah so and then you make notes in here so i i so i sorry you asked about emails and then notes you mean you mean comments comments yeah okay yeah so absolutely so um the comment section over here on the right um will show the time stamp and who made the comment the time stamp that it was made right so i can see quickly who's in here making comments who's making changes you can see next step and follow-up data's changed pretty frequently for a while you can see i'm mr systems in here and then you'll see uh john bork who's my llc partner on this asset um and you'll see my wife christine harvey in here and you can just see we're going back and forth on different things that are happening here's a comment that he made april 2020 right and so this allows us a running history of what's happening i'm not clogging the form up over here with the with the details on it but here's my running history on what happened on the asset over time if i want to be you wanted to um send an email it's as simple as clicking this email button it'll pop up a form and i can draft an email out um the comments though so this is the primary method for storing comments it's all over here in this window over here and you just type in you know this is a comment right and hit enter i'm not going to do it since it's my live site sure um but that's the basic that's i think did i answer your question there yeah yeah i think so so you also double accounting right how is accounting put into the system to kind of run numbers later accounting like like bookkeeping yeah bookkeeping is it entered to here yeah no i um i spent a lot of time working on integration with quickbooks and another accounting package at the end of the day i think the value um accounting is a complex topic nice it's a non-trivial double-entry accounting right the accountants think it's easy but for most of us it's not so easy yeah right i decided not to track accounting information in the system here i i use quickbooks my accounts take care of all that stuff i update my bank statements and my my quickbooks uh online portfolio monthly and everything errors just flows through that set of stocks how do you say that because i've seen a lot of programs out there that try and agree counting into it and it really doesn't do justice because your quickbooks is not a simple easy program that can be developed it's a it looks nice and pretty right but it's not as simple as everyone look makes it out to you right plugging into a program like this that's not built to do that right it's a crm it's not built to do what accounting features are you gotta let the email do the email job let the accounting do the quickbooks job and let the crm do the crm job that's right now we can do reports right and we can um we can run automated reports extract data out of quickbooks extract data out of the servicing site and mash it all together and have a page that's got a bunch of pretty charts on it if event if a customer wants that i could probably put that together in three or four hours i typically charge 100 bucks an hour to do custom work like that no problem that's easy enough to do i don't have a standard offering that just i backed away honestly from quickbooks just because it that is an amazing tool and i pay my my accountant a lot of money to keep it and keep it up to date right um not so much these days i don't have that many assets but when i had a lot of assets running that was you know that's their day job it's what they're good at why would i reproduce that here now i've seen guys try and i've seen some some decent hacks at it but yeah i agree i keep it totally separate so i've got like you say crm is is what i'm doing every day all day the accounting uh if i'm doing it right i don't ever see it yeah i can't stand accounting i'd rather have needles in my feet and you can pull up your profit and loss statement in quickbooks right your balance sheet that's quick you can scan through it you can figure out what's going on if somebody wants me to extract that and shove that into podio in a form no problem i can stick a picture in there pretty quick um but again that's just that's just customization it's easy enough to do yeah but i agree they're two separate animals so treat them separate so i know that you know a lot of people are going to start asking about pricing and whatnot um and you know it's hard to come up with a price that makes sense for everybody i understand right but pricing was really straightforward yeah most people expect and can you break down why what what each package offers yeah sure so um i try to make this really simple so um i i'm not into i've got a day job i make good money my no business makes me good money i'm not trying to make a fortune off of this software if you look at most crms out there they're charging x amount per user and they've got all these little fancy add-on fees i don't have any of that and maybe i should add that maybe i should try to be more greedy but to me it's not about that to me it's about sharing the information making friends right because at the end of the day i make money by having great partnerships with you guys not by trying to make 30 40 50 bucks a month off some software of course if i had a thousand customers getting 50 grand a month 50 a month that's a nice profit i could live with that but i don't need five hundred dollars per customer i don't even know one time everybody so i've kept it really simple basically if you're a new node investor and you've only got a couple assets you don't pay me anything click on get starter you don't put your credit card information and you get it download on your system and you can start using it today there's nothing stopping you from use going out logging and using it today it's all free it's all automated everything is easy if you want to start putting your business in here you're going to have more than three assets i ask you to give me some compensation right 40 bucks a month is my lowest tier on that right and it basically allows you to have an unlimited number of assets in companies and contacts and transactions and tasks and email management but doesn't give you the service or integration web capture lead capture off the websites automated emails and text messages um and partials management those features are not included in the essential package so you brought some good stuff what is the web lead capture what is the automated campaigns can we talk about this and this is a really cool feature a lot of us use different mail services to do for us right so you we've all been to a website where there's a forum that says put your first and last name in your email address your cell phone and submit and we'll give you a free book right that's all this is right it basically in the crm there is a contacts app here's a contacts app right that contacts app basically has a form that's exposed you put that that form code on your website whatever your website is right if you don't have a website you got to get one if you want to use this feature right and you put that form code up there as a couple of text sentences you give your web developer and then a form pops up on your page and that form's got the fields that you want to see first and last name email whatever right and submit when they hit submit that then comes in and creates a contact in your crm nothing fancy there but it creates a contact in your crm the add-on that i put on that is if you specify if you ask for that you can have it have an automatic campaign run when the new person shows up so a lot of my customers they collect leads off their website the leads come in and that person then automatically starts to get put on a drip campaign and they'll get an email once a week or once a day or whatever whatever the frequency is that they've got set up and it's their new lead capture campaign that gets them interested in whatever they're doing selling notes buying notes whatever it is that they're trying to do um uh jamie gateman and chris seventy are using it for their their webcast uh justin bogard using it for his webcast several folks are using it to automate their outreach so let's let's back up this is a different not different product but it's the same product but different feature on it right yeah so those people who are using you know jetblue or you know and mailchimp and and all these other programs you could remove that program from your service needs and use this system which also has your assets in there and do what it is right that's right that's right yeah you know i'm not going to compete just like i'm not going to compete with quickbooks i'm not going to compete with mailchimp and activecampaign and salesforce on their high-end you know heavily funded uh email automation systems right this does basic automation a series of up to ten males and one shot you know and you can specify how many days out each one goes and and which types of your your contacts get them it's a pretty robust system but nowhere near the millions and millions of dollars that have been spent on making mailchimp an active campaign and those solutions great if you need to have an email sent out and then if they click on this link send those 14 emails and then if they do that go over that direction i don't have any of that built in i've got a straight shot through up to of the ten messages which works for most node investors that i know right it's basic straight through email and email or twitter let's go back to the other features and see the additional things so that 10 emails per month no so there's no limit on the number of months you send so basically the if we look at how a campaign is configured let me just go in real quick and show you how that's configured so a campaign is a couple of things a campaign is a step is a series of steps so as i have an app in here call it a step and basically um you could have a step that is a in this case it's a text message it's got this information hi first name it's justin blah blah blah blah blah right and that message is going to get sent out when the campaign runs back step and so then if we look at campaigns a campaign is just one or more steps um and here's here's an example of a campaign that has one two three no just two two steps step one fires on day zero step two fires on day one and so in this particular campaign it looks like this is a new contact campaign when new contact comes in on the day the day that they sign up they get this first contact email and um and then on day two on the day one after right they get a text message with additional follow-up information right and so i did notice also besides email sms can you share a little bit about that i know it's a feature that's not fully on that you have to use additional services but share a little bit about that feature too which is also tracking and people say what do i need to know about in this space about you know text messaging people yeah yeah text messaging is a big deal right so people they they say email is dying i don't believe that but you know of course i'm an old dude so maybe if that's why i don't believe it but um yeah uh text message marketing is absolutely viable and is a way to get a hold of people and and most people open their text messages so it's it's absolutely important and we added it a couple of years ago we used twilio as a service right so twilio.com is the service that we use any crm can integrate with twilio so i'm not saying podio is the only one to do it right so i've basically put the automation in the background to be able to hook up to twilio and send sms messages as a customer when you sign up with me and you want sms you you request a phone number i ask you what area code you want the messages to come from because i can't send them from your cell phone they come from another phone number which is nice if you're in the node business you probably don't want to give out your personal number anyway right so you get a number let's say you're in the the 925 area code well then i'll get you a phone number in the 925 area code and that's where your text messages will come from beyond that you don't need to worry about it the automation system runs it sends the messages either emails or text messages to the numbers or to the text message numbers that you ask for it to go to when they reply it goes back into the system and so it goes back into their contact and notifies you that their contact made a reply and so then maybe i should show you an example let's do that real quick i'm sorry i'm distracted someone's asked that comment we'll follow up with that question so um i'm just trying to get clarity on what the question is referring to as well sure all right so here's my contact in this system right and so you can see i've been playing around with it over here but let's say the automation ran and sends them an sms i can also just do it manually here and my phone number is over here yep it's going to go so this will send the text message to the phone number of the contact right and um that phone number happens to be mine so my phone just went off and you probably can't see it but it's there and if i come in here and reply that message is going to come right back into the system um usually within a couple of seconds but the the the dialogue all happens right here inside of the contact right if and when we were talking about campaigns a minute ago if the campaign had sent a message out to richard mcgrew here um that oh i haven't come back in yet but um if the campaign had sent a message out and they replied the reply would come back in here to their contact and i would get notified that that reply came in that way i can come back in here and i can continue the dialogue just by typing sms colon and sending another message to them this allows me to stay engaged and keep all that contact information directly inside of the contact with them does that make sense yeah yeah so when they reply though just making sure it clarified they respond to the system or you also get it in the app or how does that work when if you were sending a message to me and i respond through the system there's fine back then number how does the person you sent it get notified that i responded so there's the response there i just i just typed in reply on my phone so you can see the reply came back in um and so this is that sent only to the app does that get sent to your notification does that get sent to your cell phone is like hey i got a message it gets sent to the platform the platform then if i'm on the website if i'm sitting here talking to you guys i'm on the web i will get a little indicator that fires off up here showing there's been a notification a change i can click on that and i can find out what happened right in this case it was somebody else but um because i've got so many contacts inside of inside a note rule inside of note rules and podio but um i don't know if i'm answering your question if my phone also vibrates every time a contact comes in so this basically i get notified both on my phone because i have the podio app turned on and also notifications turned on and i get notified if i'm on my browser because i have the browser notifications turned on within podio gotcha that's pretty good and but the notification is just a general notification or does it specify text so the notifications will look like this so here's on the browser as you can see that this is a notification that justin bogard commented on a contact named me straight probably shouldn't show that on the video here right but the bottom line these these these notifications are always because i have so much going on in podio i get thousands of these notifications and i can turn them off but i i'm working the business so um but the average investor someone like justin he probably gets 10 or 15 notifications a day depending on how active he's interacting with his his clients and outreach folks so yeah awesome so let's let's disconnect from the share screen just kind of talk a little bit more about this um i think for me that the common investor says this is overwhelming for them right um one of the common questions came back was um you know someone was asking eric was asking about uh api for this i'm not sure what they would need why would they need an api because the api is already set up for this right i don't know so maybe i'm not understanding but they said you know is there an api for this i think absolutely absolutely api yeah so let's talk about api so for those of you that don't know what an api is it's basically a programming interface application programming interface i use apis all the time with podio and other third parties that's how i hook them all together i'm a software guy right and whoever just asked you that question is a software nerd just like me right if you're educated on how to use apis and you want to use apis to interact between podio and or servicing sites and or whatever feel free to reach out to me i'm happy to sit down with you and figure out if there's some way we can work together um i can tell you what i'm supporting and what i'm doing and we can go back and forth there are a million options and i have no idea which question you want me to answer so i'm probably not yeah that's okay i mean you know for those who are confused what api means it's just basically an automated system that allows you to pull data and send data from one location to another right but this is more of a receiver of information versus a provider right it's not sending information out unless i mean maybe it exports data to a servicer but usually you know that's what email does and what not but um usually receives the information from all the different sources so yeah absolutely so eric feel free to reach out um you know what you're looking for maybe more clarity so reach out to richard and ask questions so this is awesome so richard i think that your system not only does certain small stuff but it also does the bigger things in systems that allow people like us who are looking to do more networking and resources and servers or that and stuff like that but also starts a beginner to say listen where's where do i have what information do i need to get started you know i need my service to your information okay i need to get that information um i need no upb it's asking me for it i must need a node for some reason um so the basics are are there almost like a checklist and that's the nice thing about the the asset forum that's put together in the system right if it most likely the fields i can tell you the fields that are there are the ones that folks have asked me to add and then i've been negotiating for four years on removing and adding trying to make that form as simple as possible so that it can be filled out as quickly as possible but have enough information so you're not always having to go back to that damn fireproof safe to find the asset file to find out what that value was right yeah and i don't know the couple months once our due diligence platform is built we'll be talking to richard about how to import and get data from our system uh which also use api of course and be gathering data and then send it to the system uh we'll be talking rich in the next few months once we get it up and running and get some um stuff going on you know what we didn't touch on document generation and not many of your audience are probably that interested in this but if you're buying and selling notes you have to generate no longer note and mortgage assignments and all those different things right and you can do those you can send those off to a service and we all know guys that will do it for anywhere between 20 and 500 bucks a pop depending on how you know how educated you are and how to find those folks if you're doing it on a regular basis you know um whatever that frequency is for you that becomes painful it starts to get painful to wait for the guys to send you back the documents it starts to get painful when they make a mistake you got to send it back and go back and forth and so i put in automation to be able to generate those documents for you automatically now you have to give me the contracts i'm not going to give them to you but once you give me the documents i can have them put in the system and then you literally click one button and the document gets generated for you it gets generated as a pdf at that point you can send it off and and get it signed um if there is demand i have the right signature done i have the integration with right signature completed i haven't rolled it out as a feature yet but it's pretty much done i can use it myself um so basically i can have it have the document sent out to somebody have them signed and passed back and now i have a legal signature just like docusign right cool nice so not many of you so it's also maybe a feature you know there's a ton of features here not just a simple crm program give you document creation and that's good for personal sales good for assignments it's good for anything because once you get a system set up for a pdf you're going to want to be and create any document you want that's right the sms is awesome right if you're looking to reach out to don't forget the borrowers with it but you can reach out to different people you know colleagues of yours um email chains like that um and i even thought about doing sms for us because of the way we run our our vpos and how we change we do things it's a feature i'm looking at doing um but it's awesome it's awesome so i know i know that a lot of people are having a lot of questions um i know that we're techy guys versus the other side of those or i think cindy said like technology gets in her way of organization times because she's need tech but she's understand it right um and a lot of people out there like that so for those people my system is really built for the lesser techy people i've tried to keep it extremely simple i've not added a lot of bells and whistles most of the lesser techie people will never touch my campaign's features and i don't think they should right campaigns are a whole other world if you want to get into sending email and letters and postcards and all that i've got it all automated it's easy to do but there's real work there to figure out how to make it work and how to make it home even if you're going to go get mailchimp or salesforce or anything else crm sending that automated messages is an investment of time but if you're just managing a nor note portfolio and you're not super techy my solution's great it's done you don't have to go create anything it's fully functional and it's simple right and that's the key i've purposely made it simple so we're gonna we're gonna be reaching out to richard after this interview um through those who want to know where we're each other richard and we're gonna see if we get this special discount for those who are listening see if we can get a special in for the first month or so and see if we can help out and get you started with this because you may be unsure if this is for you or not all right and we're gonna see if we can work with richmond see we can get to for you guys so yeah richard i appreciate you jumping on friday afternoon with us hopefully uh i know i saw a little early in the morning for you but i think mornings are our our thing where we're at so awesome feel free to let us know if you have any questions guys reach out to us directly shoot us an email um you can reach out to richard as well through the site and we'll go from there yeah very good thanks so much richard yeah thanks for having me on guys really appreciate it you better you hey everybody dave putz here from jkp holdings alongside me mr nathan turner good day hello hello gorgeous day in the afternoon we've been hitting 50 and 60 out here in jersey it's been uh been fabulous i would say um i think for us it's a nice change but december's on its way how are things up there we actually we we got that same warm spell but for me it's disaster we had about a half an inch of snow on the ground and we lost it all yesterday so it's all gone the ski hill's out making snow still though so they actually opened two days ago on the first so uh looking forward to hitting the hill here next week cool um do you snowboard a lot or ski a i snowboard yeah so i get i've had seasons past forever but so i go uh usually it's really fun actually i'll go first thing in the morning go on the hill for an hour so get all the fresh stuff before everyone gets tracked out and then come back i'm in the office by 10 10 30 and nobody knows the difference nice nice so i know up there you guys get cold and cold whatever but right you know you guys are probably in the warmest time you've been a while does that make it difficult for in our investing world to like not want to go outside with the kids and enjoy like just that extended fall yeah the extended fall was really nice uh it was interesting it was a little bit weird because uh because of the extended fall we also had later colors which is something we noticed we go to the hill here often enough and and took some friends out and it was second week in october uh but the leaves hadn't even started changing yet or middle of october somewhere in there and and uh hardly anything but but uh the year previous most everything was already done by that time so it's interesting it's weird to see how even just a few weeks makes a difference cool so fourth quarter has i i don't know about you a man when you get a chance to talk too much before this just came like a storm um between deals you know a lot of people works out of the 903 assets we've had tapes turn on us deals accepted things are just abnormal how has it been for you yeah same i've got a bunch of uh new tapes that i wasn't necessarily expecting i i yes and no just because it is fourth quarter we see that a lot uh so that's it's fun to see uh trying to get all the money together i can to make some purchases here get our money flowing it's interesting because you know all year it's been kind of a weird situation and deals being set there right now people are trying to get things up the book the end of the year we're going to leverage that right if they want that enough the books we're going to make a short work but for us but that also means nice little segue here that means you got to maintain what you have going on to make sure it's stable for everything eyes are dying teeth across as much as possible so you can make that transition and focus on new purchases yeah i i noticed and i wonder about you because uh you're you don't do this full-time so i think you're probably even more so than me but i could get up to about 20 notes not so bad i could do that no problem by the time i was up to about 50 notes i didn't have any kind of crm any kind of tracking tool or anything and it was chaos like it was i could barely manage everything i had you know spreadsheets with color coding so red is like i got to do something about amelie and orange is it's you know urgent but not depressing and you know it was crazy and so i i finally got myself a a crm tool something that helps me organize everything and now it's a breeze and but the problem is when you get to crms you don't know what is good what's not good what's struggling and your crm is not what you do you're investing that's it so it's interesting that we struggle with understanding this stuff because at the end of the day we don't know what what works what doesn't work what is for us what's not for us and i think that as investors we figured we make it a lot too often because without it what do we do right yeah well and even five years ago there were no note specific platforms they just didn't exist it's too new of a of a world to have somebody build a system yeah and you know there's been you know systems you've built over time and you kind of say listen if i restarted i would do something completely different yeah um and there's sometimes where you get a product that you come in that reaches their shows that it's like whoa i should look into this as an investor i've been doing a certain way for so long this makes it 10 times easier so right without further ado richard welcome on our friday call i appreciate you jumping in here and joining us as other fellow note investors are watching intently can you share a little about who you are where you came from how did you get bothered notes a little bit of your background sure awesome thanks for having me on guys really appreciate it and i totally felt your pain regarding having the right systems in places i was trying to scale my note business i started in node investing about four years ago uh came from big corporate uh corporate world software engineering background um still have a day job but decided i wanted to get in the notes to augment my retirement and try to get out of the corporate world a little bit earlier right i knew when i started that i was going to try to go after quite a few notes and i had a lot of friends with money and so i wasn't going to just be happy with two or three notes um it was funny i bought my first one about four years ago i still can tell you the number of square feet the address of the place the borrower's last name i can tell you everything about that asset i don't need any information systems in order to keep track of that particular note i just know it like back in my head yeah back in my hand but as i was starting to scale i quickly saw that i was going to need a good system to be able to keep track of things so i started building one and i i started with a a baseline crm called zoho um it got that up and running had a full system up and running on that and i was talking with some node investors who were more interested more into the environment than i was and they said they were using podio and that that was a much more extensible uh broader system with lots of different capabilities so i switched everything over to podio about three and a half years ago and i've been on that platform ever since um i decided i was in a note conference uh eddie speeds nope conference about three and a half years ago or so and we broke us all up into these different tables ten people on each table and said go talk about what problems you're having in a group and then come back and tell all of us as a group report out how things are going and where you guys think your biggest challenges are and over and over and over again what everybody was talking about anybody who had more than one or two notes what they were talking about was i just got too much going on it's chaos and i'm not making good decisions and this business is about making money move fast it's about velocity of money it's how you make money right and i'm bogged down on all these dumb little things and chasing things around looking the same information up 14 times a week i'm just wasting time and not efficient and i thought that's weird how come they're having these problems it's not that hard and then i remembered oh yeah whoops i've got the crm that i'm using i got this whole solution when i built why don't i find a way to make it available for everybody else yeah that's that's kind of what got me started so what is podio podio is a workflow management solution uh a website on your cell phone or on your on your laptop or your desktop whatever where you can go in there and you can customize forms to match the scenario that you're working if you're selling cars you can have a car for if you're buying and selling notes you can have a note form and so on and so forth and you basically can build up a business business management system that allows you to manage your workflows right so i spent hundreds of hours building up that workflow putting automation in place to be able to scrape service her websites and pull their information down so i don't have to go to their websites and get their information generating documents automatically generating the mortgage and the launch and you know assignments and all those different things doing right signature automating all that stuff so that people don't have to go i don't have to go out and use four or five or six different software packages to get my day job done i'm not bouncing around in 14 spreadsheets and you know sticky notes and going to my fireproof safe to find some information i've got everything right there with me yeah that's really interesting so is your system now then is it based off of podio or is it from ground up i've debated on walking away from podio but the reality is podio is owned by citrix they've got a uptime that's amazing their their servers are super high robust they've got great backup systems in place there's you know a ton of stability that comes with relying on a third party for all that infrastructure and then all i do is put on front of that a note user a user front end for the node environment and all the back end automation to be able to move data around and make things available quickly for all of us that's really interesting so with with with that so if your basic beginner note investor what are some of the things you learned over time that was difficult to maintain in some of the things that you struggle with where you just you hit your head against the wall or you hurt other people i gotta say man i struggle with this what are some things you struggle with in the beginning that this system kind of helped you manage yeah it's a good question so um the the i i really do believe myself my system a system is necessary when you get beyond a few notes if you're just gonna own one or two notes you can do that in your head because you know things are pretty simple and you just know what's gonna happen as you start to get beyond three or four or five you start losing track of who the contractor was on that asset who's the servicer who's who's the lawn mower you know because these notes don't just stay unless you unless you're lucky they don't just stay performing and the servicer takes care of everything for you right um and even in mine and also then if you believe that making money in this business is about moving your money through it right and not just sitting on it long term sitting on a pile of performing notes that are just paying that's one piece of the business model here but if you believe it's about moving notes then you get into the you have a lot of delays and every delay costs you basically time which costs you money right so if a servicer puts a node in the portal and you don't see it for 45 days you just lost all that time yeah if you don't see it for 10 days is it that big a deal i don't know right so i get my system my system pulls that data down automatically every day and notifies you when there's a change so i know right away when something's changed i can go in and keep that thing moving same thing's true with law firms and people like that every all of the people that we work with that we expect to manage our business for us right need to be poked they don't do it for us the goodness of their heart right they need us to go and ask them how things are going and so keeping track of what's important and what's coming up next is critical yeah and i think a good point you we have to manage our managers right we had to manage our services adventure attorneys follow open attorneys yeah it's nothing to do with our purpose just what it is it's just a system you know we work harder for our assets than anyone else absolutely right somebody asked like who's your best servicer in one of the groups and it's like it depends and you know it's like when you get started you hate the word depends and when you get involved you say i understand why it depends now because it comes down to it it's really about you know what works for you what what do you have to manage there are services out there that will do everything for you but you still have to maintain what they do yeah right yeah yeah your attorneys are just as good as you are and the problem is if you don't catch up hey and a lot of people say listen how do i feel bad about reaching through my training reminding them just hey listen i'm just looking to follow up so these systems as nathan said before when you get a ton of assets or even a ton of problems on a deal yeah you need something to tell you this deal has this coming up and when and almost a to-do list but also know who you reach out to what email was a thread was it in right as we all know if you know replying to the wrong thread it can get lost easily right so let's do ourselves a favor here you know so back up we work with podio the online system right so you can get on your phone you can get on your computer you can anywhere you want to get it to that's right yeah and then the system allows you to upload these assets which is all confidential right that's what yeah when we got into it is it something that is cookie cutter it's clear or are you able to kind of manipulate things and change things and adapt things to what fits you that's a great question yeah so um i i find there's two primary classes of folks in this space there are the tinkerers like myself who love to go muck with everything and change everything and have exactly the fields i want and exactly the spots i want and i'll invest lots of hours in that kind of activity right when i'm doing that of course i'm not making money right but there are people like me that love to tinker and then there's the folks that just want to make money and they want to they want to run deals and they want to talk to people and they want to they want to have velocity of money those folks shouldn't be wasting their time with podio or you know acuity center or or salesforce or whatever pick the crm of your of your flavor they shouldn't be wasting time fine-tuning a crm they should just go buy one use something that's off the shelf and now like like nathan was saying earlier three or four years ago there wasn't any software out there no investors there was a couple of really big packages if you were a big boy you could get some really fancy stuff but there was nothing on you know 20 30 40 bucks a month nothing like that existed back then right and so with that low end price point and keeping it really simple the average investor can get in get their data done and then go off and hang out with their family or go go mountain bike riding or do whatever else that they wanted to go do and they're not wasting time also building out a crm because we can all do it right most of us are engineers that come into the note business because we have this mental you know ability to attack problems right but is that the right space for you to apply your time i think is the question i ask folks if it is great go for it if you want to go figure out how to automate crms i'm all in i'll help you figure it out yep so can you tell me what the difference i so i use pipedrive so i'm curious what's the difference between pipedrive and podio there's no difference in any crm it's which buttons are in which locations and how you use them what comes down what it comes down to is how are you using the crm right what features do you need and how easy can you put them in place and then how much time do you have to invest to put those features in place for example if you wanted to send automated emails out of pipedrive or out of podio the baseline system doesn't support that but you can build up around it and you can package everything together and you can make it send emails or text messages or voicemails or letters or postcards you can make it generate documents you can make it connected to quickbooks you can you can hook all these things up however you want each one of those activities takes you pick a number two to twenty hours right and that's time that we are spending tinkering instead of investing right and so it's just a matter of what you enjoy doing i think nothing's wrong with pipe right nothing wrong with podio or salesforce they're all great systems but but the one that you've done is built off of a system specifically for notes and and like you say that's the problem with with the pipe drive or something like that um i had to get help to get it set up because i don't know how to work it and so i had a good friend of mine help me set it up yeah and and you know you probably spent a few hours and a few of his hours and that's all good right and you've got something that's functional and you have something that's really great probably not i mean i don't know i haven't seen your solution yet sure i've been working on mine for four years and i spend you know 40 hours a week on it i'm always i mean it's fine tuned it's awesome but it's not necessary for the average investor if you're doing more than 10 10 or 15 notes i think you should come look at what i'm doing and just see if it's better than what you got i think you'd be pretty pleasantly surprised um that said you know i can build it i can take this off a podium and i can put it on pipedrive tomorrow and you know within a you know a couple of weeks i could have the same solution running on pipe drives so let's let's ask a question i know they've been asked before you know we get an email in the system am i importing the information from the email to the system how does that work for those people who are getting emails from all different deals and i get imported into it or is it actually integrated with your email that it tracks it because you're working inside the system yeah okay so so email is an interesting topic right um i'm not a fan of putting email volume email into a website right except gmail is awesome at it they've built an awesome website for managing email traffic and outlook you know microsoft outlook has done a great job of managing email traffic taking pipe drive or salesforce or any other tools and trying to manage email through a tool that's not built for email to me is clunky at best i've never seen a really pretty solution there are guys out there that are doing a good job of it but it's really hard what i do um i have two solutions primarily if i'm working on an asset right um i and i want to send that uh i want to send the lawyer an email um i go to my my outlook and i send them an email from there right if i want to have a dialogue with one of my note customers right one of my note node rules customers my software customers i do that out of my help desk which is another podio workspace and every all the dialogue with that person is through the podio interface there's an email button i click on that it sends them an email the responses come back into the indepodio everything's in and out of podio it's all managed nicely inside of there but that's a low volume email system right if i want to do lawyers and lawn mowers and contractors and servicers and everything having all that funnel through an asset in podio doesn't make a lot of sense it pulling all those dialogues together into one long list is not a pretty way to do things it's much much better to have folders and outlook or flags in gmail right and manage it inside of a high volume well-funded email system that's my position there are those out there on on uh bigger pockets that say you have to use pipelines got great email integration the email integration is crap right compared with gmail and outlook right so sorry if you want crappy email systems yeah go use pipedriver podio they can do it if you want good high volume easy to maintain and manage email you just need to use a good email system that's my that's my thinking gotcha i'm sure i pissed somebody off out there but whatever so when you're dealing with an assad list what happens to notify you that something's due request you get notified there's two primary ways i get messages out of podio or out of no rules um number one let's say uh david potts pings me on an asset and i get that notification um on my phone my phone will vibrate because the podio app goes off and i'll go look at it and go oh yeah it's a message from from david but he wants me to get some information i'll click on that and i can go type in on that one or i can run over to my computer if it's going to be a longer session and i can do it over there as well that's one set one way that that messages or notifications come in the other way the other thing that i do my my to-do list if you will my my what do i need to work on right now is just an ordered list of all of my assets let's say i've got 30 assets in my portfolio it's an order list ordered by the next due date on each asset yeah so today i'm working on 123 main street i've got 15 minutes i go in there i check on the taxes everything's good and before i close the asset in my crm i just update two boxes one is the next step what is the next thing i need to do on this thing two weeks from tuesday i need to contact daniel singer to find out what's going on with a lawyer and i put the date in there two weeks on tuesday now when i close that asset when i come back tomorrow to look at my portfolio that asset is down at the bottom of the list because it's not due for two and a half weeks i don't have to think about it i have to go figure out what's next on it and i don't know about you my memory is not perfect and when i get 30 assets i don't know when the due dates are on each of those 30 assets yeah so that simple step of just updating what's my next step and when is it due every time i touch an asset i do that and that way it's all that list is always in an ordered list and then i just check that so how do you handle sourcing notes and stuff like that you know that's something that's a you know struggle for some people how do you you know pay history anything like that how is that integrated into the system yeah today it's a good question so um i have most of the major servicers integrated in so sn fci uh nam uh there's another big one um allied um they're all integrated in basically you provide your login and credential information into the system it's all password protected it then goes out to the site pulls the information down i pull down all the current collateral information around pay history and comments and unpaid balance those those values pull them down and it all gets put into the same form with your asset so in the asset form you have all your different fields regarding the asset but in there there's i um by default i pulled the last six comments in the last six payments and so if we can pull more than that you just change a value but by default i pull six and so you can quickly glance at it you can see okay the last payment came in it was november 1st today's the third of december okay fine is probably not quite due yet right but then when that payment comes in tomorrow you're going to get a notification on your phone saying payment came in on 123 main street so you know things are up to date right because it's pulling that information daily for you same thing on the comments when the servicer goes out and says hey taxes are due and you're you're getting close to the delinquent date what do you want to do about that when they put that comment in once a day you're going to get a notification that that comment was put in and there's something to go do at the servicer so does it tell when something is due like a server make a comment you never know if it's something you have to do or just data does it pin you every time a service no pops up how does that work so yeah so um much like we all have iphones or android right we have these apps on our phone right and each one's got a little number in the top right corner that shows you how many things are due right you can ignore those or you can keep them wiped out or anywhere in between right podio's app is no different on the on your phone and on the desktop or on the on on your browser there's a little icon the top right corner that shows you how many notifications you have and for me when i'm active in my business and i'm trying to get a lot done i watch that little indicator and when it goes off i'll glance at it to see what when what happened if i ignore it i miss all the notifications that's fine i can go back and look at it two weeks from tuesday when i'm ready to work on the business again but that's basically what's happening is those indicators are going off there's a long list of notifications i can clean them all out when i'm done with them all right and i can keep track of them when i want to stay on top of it cool so i'm just going to copy some comments in your questions so i think it would be really good if you can kind of show the system features um as cindy asks a question regarding you know how does this compare to uh program call really flow um and whatnot so if you could could you share your screen show us a little bit more awesome yeah and we can do a side-by-side comparison of different software out there um i i've gone and looked at all the different packages that are out there the different crms that are available you guys able to see my screen here no yeah yeah oops i didn't hit share that's why there it is all right so um uh all the crms have the basic capability of creating forms and then organizing forms and linking forms together that's basically what a crm does and then a lot of them you add email and messaging and other things like that on top of it to be able to give you more features and then you can keep going from there what this form here is an asset form this is basically an asset is a note or a rental or a private private money loan right an asset is a real estate related item and most of the fields in here apply to most of the different types of assets the first field is the address because the real estate we care about the location of the property right so simple little address i have a little bit of summary information here at the top that basically is summarizing a lot of the fields down lower in the form and these are the fields that people give me feedback that they want to have at the top they don't want to have to scan down the form to find them right so what kind of node is it what's the loan number what position is the lien what's the current p i what stage is the asset in when did i purchase it who's the borrower uh who's the who was the investor on the asset um who's the servicer when was the last payment received and how much was it and then what's the current unpaid balance right this is all updated automatically on every asset once you get your initial data in and you hook up the servicing data all the fields are updated for you cool so you know i've got a picture of the asset of course you can have more than one here's my next step in due date right the concept i was talking about earlier if you come in here and say you know next step is talk with um service there uh let's talk with the uh uh elite that will talk with legal foreclosure options and we'll say we'll come back in here we don't they're gonna be out to christmas we'll come and ping them on the 6th of january right so just something along like that now when i close this the sort of list january 6 is going to be below the next item due and it'll just when january comes along january 2nd i'm done with holidays i'll come in here and look at this and i'll go oh okay this guy's due january 6th i better go take a look and see what's going on right and you get some basic information right you everything you're going to see in this form is just stuff that of course a node investor would want to have at their fingertips when they're thinking about their notes right it took me five to ten minutes per asset to plug this information in if i've got more than a few assets then i'll upload a spreadsheet pull the whole tape in all of one shot right but once the information's in there i don't have to go out and look for it i can click on the asset i can drop right in and find exactly what i'm looking for it's organized like you might expect there's information about the note information about the asset information about the you know who owns it right which energy did you use to purchase it that's important because later on we're going to be able to run reports and see this entity has 14 assets and they've got a half a million dollars invested this energy's got three assets with 200 000 invested right and we can then figure out you know roi and we can look at you know profit and loss things like that once we have that information sorted by entity we also i like to keep track sorry go ahead that's cool that's great because the last thing when we report and it's sometimes just too difficult because you put the information in all different areas and they're all in different spreadsheets right i got this entities assets over here in this spreadsheet and i bought some notes with my mom i got these assets over here in this spreadsheet buddy bob bought two partials and they got those notes over here in this spreadsheet oh my god which spreadsheet was note with john's notes in yeah right all right um so crm is just to whatever crm you choose to use in this business to you know you're gonna this is a beautiful part of it it links everything together and makes it really easy if i wanted to come over here and look at big investor i don't have to go out and go find a spreadsheet with big investors name in it i can click on big investor here and it'll bring me over to their contact information of course you can see it's a dummy dummy investor so there's no information on it but there could have been....