Embark on a wild ride as we witness a real estate entrepreneur build a company from scratch in 2025; scaling to profitability and beyond is the name of the game in this explosive episode of Flip Talk! In this launch episode of the “Watch Me Scale” series, host Don Costa unveils his bold plan to document his journey of building a new business from zero deals to success, pulling back the curtain on the “Good, the Bad and the Ugly” of entrepreneurship with no fluff or BS. Don dives deep into strategies for scaling, choke points to avoid, and the mindset needed to break free from the hamster wheel, while revealing the key tools and services he’ll be using like Forefront CRM and Smartphone for Voiceover IP, along with lead sources like Property Leads and Lead Zolo and direct mail with REI Print Mail. Tune in for a raw, unfiltered, and action-packed look at what it truly takes to scale a business properly in 2025, with plenty of actionable nuggets and “Easter eggs” hidden along the way!

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Watch Me Scale In 2025: The Official Launch Of A Zero-To-Profit Business

Zero To Hero 2025: The Official “Watch Me Scale” Launch

We’re recording this in 2025. This is the relaunch, a new season of the show. I’ve been doing this show since 2016. It’s been insane. I’ve taken some breaks, some time off, and some hiatuses here and there. We come back and forth. I’ve been a little inconsistent the last couple of years. I’m not going to do that anymore. Officially, we are going to be doing a brand-new series called Watch Me Scale. I’ve been talking about doing this for almost a year, doing the Watch Me Scale challenge, the Watch Me Scale exercise, or the Watch Me Scale whatever. I have, at this point in time, made it official. We are launching it. It is going to be a cool experience.

What I’m going to do is going to be different than what some other people do out there when they talk about scaling or going into new markets. A lot of people have done something similar, where they start working on a whole bunch of leads, or they may have their team start working in different markets. This is an exercise that I’m going to do myself for the most part.

I have wound down my entire real estate business. I have zero deals in action. I’ve been talking about doing this for about a year, and I keep doing deals and keep having things come up. I wanted to do this with zero deals. At this moment in time, I’ve gone from doing hundreds of deals or multiple deals a month to zero, a big, fat goose egg. What’s going to be cool about this challenge is that I get to start from a complete and total scratch. I get to scale a company.

What is different about this? One of the things that’s different about this is that I am not doing this for somebody whose brand is making news. The idea is not to get your first deal from this. You can follow along and get juicy nuggets and details on how to get your first deal, but the avatar or person that I’m speaking to here is somebody who’s doing deals. You’re doing deals. You feel like you’re on a hamster wheel. You’re not sure how to grow your company. You got all this noise from Facebook and highlight reels. You’re trying to figure out what your next move is. What’s the next piece on the chessboard to move?

This isn’t about getting to $1 million. We’ve called it the Zero to Million Challenge in our back room conversations and stuff. We may have the Zero to Million Challenge logo represent this in some of our marketing, but this is about scaling the company properly. We don’t create a prison and a hamster wheel. All the things I’ve learned from building my company from zero to a couple hundred deals a year, and all the things I’ve learned from wholesaling and rehabbing are going to be in this conversation.

This is about scaling a company properly, so we don't create a prison and a hamster wheel. Share on X

This is designed for somebody who’s doing deals and wants to scale their company. There’s a lot of noise. There are a lot of shiny objects. I want to remove that chaos and communicate directly to you about how to do this. In order to do that, I’m going to be doing it myself, and I’m going to document it. That means, right out of the gate, we’re going to start working leads. Right out of the gate, we’re going to start hiring. Right out of the gate, we’re going to start doing the systems and processes and putting the tools in place in order to make this thing function the way it needs to function as a company.

The idea is to get to a place of profitability and peace. We all want to get to a place where our company runs without us. We’re not there to have to oversee everything, be a part of everything, and make every decision, and we make plenty of money. We’re also going to try to answer the question of when we should stop. When is enough, enough? Many of us make the mistake of getting to a certain point, and then we break it. I used to do that. I would get to a certain point, and then I’d break it and rebuild it. It was more so because I wanted to stay busy or had to stay busy, and not so much that my company needed to be broken and rebuilt.

 

Scaling Choke Points: Hiring And Systems

There are going to be conversations around all of this, the different stages of scale, the different pain points of scale, when you decide to step back or push through, all of that. I talk about the choke points that you hit when you scale. Your business has to grow through these choke points by either hiring or putting another system or process in place, or maybe both, in order to grow through these choke points. You hit these points in your business where you can’t handle the growth at that point. We’re going to be going through all that.

On this show, we’re going to be talking with different individuals and different providers to map out some of the options you have when you’re scaling. Those would be lead sources, different vendors when it comes to systems, processes, and tools, different individuals about how they’ve implemented certain things in their business as far as the different growth points, and so on and so forth.

This is the Watch Me Scale series for the next 52 weeks here. We’ll do a different week with a different topic. We’ll talk about our results and our own push-through. We’ll talk with other individuals who are following along and their results. We’ll talk to our ICE Mastermind Community and what they’re seeing in 2025, and then we’ll talk to all the different vendors and stuff like that.

We’ll do what we can to get you special pricing and everything else. Follow along and pay attention because there are going to be a lot of opportunities here for you to get in on some cool stuff. There are going to be different ways to follow along. If you go to WatchMeScale.com, you can sign up. You’ll get emails about how to do that and notifications about how to follow along.

What I produce here on the show is going to be different than what I put out on YouTube. Some of the episodes will probably be on YouTube. What we put out on YouTube is going to be different, for the most part, than what’s on this show. We also have a community that we have designed. It’s a free community. We’ll be putting some content there as well. We have some courses there. We have some other opportunities there for you to interact. We share tools, resources, and so on and so forth. We have a free community, which you can get invited to by going to WatchMeScale.com. You can sign up to be part of that free community.

It is off Facebook. It is on a platform where we house our courses and all our communication for the different levels of our community. You can ask questions. You can interact. It acts like a Facebook feed. You can post successes and wins. I’ll be going live there as well at different points. There, we have that. What we’re putting on the community will be different than Facebook, YouTube, and so on and so forth. We’ll put some stuff out on social media that’ll be different than all of the above.

The point is, there are a number of places where you can follow along on this journey and in this conversation. I want to make sure that you’re in all places so you’re getting all the information. You’re in our private community. You’re seeing some of the cool stuff that we’re not showing on YouTube or social media. You follow me on social media.

You can follow me @TheRealDonCosta on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. I encourage you to follow me on each one of those because we put different stuff in different places. We are trying to make it a fun experience. We’re going to be hiding Easter eggs in different places. There will be a lot of cool things. It’s going to be a lot of fun.

2025 Tech Stack: CRM & Lead Sources

There are a couple of things that I want to share. We’re going to be using Forefront CRM. If you go to ForefrontCRM.com, you can check that out. If you use the promo code ICE30Day, you can get 30 days free and test drive Forefront. It is an amazing CRM. It is very visual in how it operates. It integrates with smrtPhone and CallRail. smrtPhone is my preferred provider. It functions amazingly when you’re trying to run and grow your real estate investing business. ForefrontCRM.com is going to be the CRM we’re going to be using.

smrtPhone is also going to be the voice-over IP. If you sign up for Forefront, you can get a nice little discount on smrtPhone as well. You can go to TrySmrtPhone.com and also get that discount. Get discounts there. Forefront and smrtPhone are going to be our CRM and our voice-over IP provider. PropertyLeads.com and Leadzolo are going to be the two paper leads services that we’re going to be giving some love to on this journey.

REIPrintMail is going to be the mail house that we’ll be utilizing for direct mail and all things direct mail. We have a handful of other things that we will be doing on this journey. You can check out all those things and let them know that you heard about them from us, from me, as you want to start to check things out and follow along on this journey. We’ll have providers share their best stuff and their best content. I’m good at pulling out the secrets. They’ll be sharing discount codes with this audience, specifically for the Watch Me Scale Challenge. A lot of fun and a lot of exciting stuff are coming your way.

The Unfiltered Truth: Challenges Of An Entrepreneur

I have been doing this since 2016. I know that there are some of you who have been following me since I was doing a ton of deals. I started out rehabbing when we were doing the show. We moved into wholesaling and rehabbing while doing the show. I shared pretty much everything I could. I’m an open book. Let me be an open book here. It’s been an interesting couple of years. I’ve wound down the real estate business to this point so that I can do this rebuild.

One of my biggest regrets when I rebuilt in 2012 after losing everything was that I didn’t document it. Now, I get to document this. We’ve been working with our ICE Mastermind Community for the last couple of years. I’ve been working with people, helping them scale their business, helping them save their business, and helping them see around blind spots they didn’t see.

We’ve gotten into all kinds of things. It’s been a journey. I have been humbled in so many ways. I talked about challenges in my marriage, which is starting to come back together in a lot of ways. I’ve had personal challenges. I’ve had professional challenges, I made some great decisions, and I made some very bad decisions in the last few years. I’m going to be sharing that along the way here in 2025.

When we did our new season kickoff, I talked about going into our hole, sticking our head in the sand, hiding, not sharing our challenges and our problems with the people around us, and isolating ourselves. That’s a thing that we do as entrepreneurs. We isolate. We feel like we can’t share our challenges. We feel like we can’t share the things we’re struggling with. That’s hard as a man, as a woman, and as an entrepreneur, in general. Everybody is throwing arrows at us, and there are challenges with that. We’ll be talking more openly and personally about some of those things.

I’ll be sharing more openly and personally about some of the challenges that I’ve been through. It’s been a rough couple of years. I’ve lost some people who are close to me. I had a lot of trials and tribulations. I want to be as transparent as I can because it’s not always roses. It’s not always beautiful sunsets and walks on the beach. There can be some major stints of being kicked in the nuts over and over again when you’re an entrepreneur, especially when you’re moving into different laterals that aren’t aligned with your core business or core competency. We’ll be sharing those.

Win 2025! Your Blueprint For Business Scaling And Success

What I’m most excited about is helping you scale profitably and properly. That’s going to be the mission for 2025. I encourage you to tune into every single episode because they’re going to be action-packed and knowledge-packed. This is how we’re winning in 2025. If you want to scale to your best potential, then the Watch Me Scale Challenge is going to be where you go. Go to WatchMeScale.com. Sign up to get notifications when we’re releasing information. Get the invite to our private community, and get on board to win 2025. With that said, I will see you on the other side. I hope you kick butt.

The mission for 2025 is helping you scale profitably and properly. Share on X

Also, make sure you check out all things Flip Talk on FlipTalk.com. We have some amazing resources there as well. Follow me on YouTube. Make sure you are subscribing because I am going to be dropping some major nuggets there. Follow me on social @TheRealDonCosta on all platforms because I’m going to be dropping some real nuggets there.

 

Make sure you are part of that community. You will not be disappointed with what we are going to deliver to you in 2025. My goal is to make your business a thousand times better than what it is. If it’s amazing, that means it’s going to be even more amazing. With that said, I’ll see you on the other side. I hope you win the day.

 

Important Links

• Join the ‘Watch Me Scale Challenge’
• Don Costa on TikTok
• Don Costa on Instagram
• Don Costa on Facebook
• Don Costa on YouTube
• FlipTalk – smrtPhone
• Forefront CRM
• Property Leads
• Leadzolo
• REIPrintMail