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The Flip Talk Podcast | Tony Javier | TV Commercials

 

Ever wondered how a late-night TV infomercial could change your life? In this episode, we’re diving deep into the incredible journey of Tony Javier, owner of 10x TV and a real estate mogul who took a leap of faith with a $200 TV course and turned it into a multi-million-dollar empire. Tony shares his harrowing battle with long COVID, the valuable lessons learned, and how it all shifted his perspective on health and life. We’ll explore his groundbreaking approach to real estate investing through TV commercials—an untapped goldmine in today’s crowded market. Tune in to hear Tony’s inspiring story, from his humble beginnings to his innovative strategies that could revolutionize your own investing journey. Even if you’ve never considered TV before, this episode will challenge your thinking and open doors to new possibilities. Don’t miss it!

Listen to the podcast here

 

Tony Javier 10x TV

I want to make sure that you’re taking advantage of everything we have over at FlipTalk.com and the Flip Talk Universe and go check that out. We have some amazing free resources along with all the episodes we’ve done since 2016. We have information about how you can become part of one of our communities and accomplish some great things in your real estate investing future. With that said, Tony, how are you doing?

I’m doing fantastic. It’s good to see you.

Good seeing you. You probably don’t want to get too into it, but you rescheduled this show a few times and you were talking to me about having long COVID and some of the ways that that’s impacted you. I don’t know if you want to share with the readers a little bit about that and then we’ll jump into what you know, what you can do, and what we can help them with.

Long COVID

You take your health for granted until you don’t have it anymore or you think that you’re not going to basically live. I was telling you December 9th, I went to the emergency room. I was shaking, convulsing, and all kinds of different things. My wife called the ambulance. My son was four years old. I hugged him before I left and I was hoping that I’d see him again. I didn’t know. I went to the hospital. I had a bunch of tests done. They couldn’t find anything. They told me to get on anxiety medication and I’m like, “What are you talking about?” I’ve been having issues for the last two months of fatigue and shortness of breath. I’d get up and walk out to the living room and I’d have to sit down to catch my breath.

That’s the point it got to. All my life I’ve pushed through things and all of a sudden I’m like, “I have something I cannot push through.” It put things into perspective. You take life for granted. I thought about death more in the last few months since I’ve been going through this, than my whole life combined. It shakes your world a little bit. It makes you grateful for what you have. It made me realize that I’ve got a great team in place, I’ve got a great support system, I’ve got a lot of people that understood what I was going through, and when I posted on Facebook to share my story, the amount of people that reached out for support that gave me love and shared their story because it wasn’t just long COVID it was some mold exposure and some other things that happened at the same time.

 

The Flip Talk Podcast | Tony Javier | TV Commercials

 

I didn’t realize how many people went through similar things. Many people were like, “I went through mold exposure. I felt like I was going to die. I had long COVID, I thought I was going to die,” and people that I had no idea. It shakes your world. I’m of the thought process like they say, “If it doesn’t kill you it makes you stronger.” I’m not quite 100% recovered, but enough to be able to start doing podcasts again and ran my team meeting for the first time in five months. I’m on the upswing. If there’s anything you can take from that man, luckier health is the number one thing because if you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything else.

The Flip Talk Podcast | Tony Javier | TV Commercials

TV Commercials: Your health is the number one thing because if you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything else.

 

That’s something that needs to be said and reminded. As entrepreneurs, you made a comment, and you push through things. I think a lot of us as entrepreneurs, we’re built that way. We’ll show up when we’re sick, tired, or hungover and we’ll push our bodies a lot harder than we should. You definitely have to take care of your health. Some of the biggest regrets I see from people who haven’t are because once you get to a certain point with your health, you can’t undo the damage. The issue right there is getting to a point where you cannot do the damage. Definitely good advice. Take care of yourself, pay attention to your body. Take a break when you need to and need to be heard.

I was listening to a podcast or video, I think it was Warren Buffett. He was on a video or interview. He said, “If I told you you could have one car for the rest of your life and that was it, how would you take care of that car? You’d probably change the oil all the time. You need to make sure it is full of gas. You’d do everything to make sure that 40 or 50 years from now that car won’t break down.” Think about it. That’s the way our bodies are. You have one body. You have one life. People don’t take care of themselves like they should.

I was eating well. I eat all organic and don’t eat dairy, wheat and all that stuff and all of a sudden, this starts happening. Pushing through used to be the thing that I would not value but you know what I mean. It’s like, “I’m tough. I’m tired. I’m going to go in.” One thing that I got out of this is when I’m tired when I’m not feeling well, rather than pushing through and working through the day, in fact, right before I took a nap a little bit ago. I went and took about a one-hour nap. It’s one of those things where you learn some lessons and you take the good out of it and become better for it.

First Deal

Let’s get into real estate investing and the conversation everybody wants us to have here. I can talk about health and all kinds of other things all day long, but tell me about your first deal because you’ve been around for a while. You’ve been on podcasts. You’re a known quantity in the real estate investing space. I don’t know how often you talk about your first deal. How’d you get started and what was your first deal like?

I’m many years now in the business. I feel pretty old because I know people in the business who were not even born when I started a business. There are a lot of youngsters in this business now. Many years ago, I knew I wanted to make money. I went from wanting to play in the NFL and all that stuff to going and playing college football, then hurting my knee and realizing that wasn’t going to happen. I transitioned into the business world and I said, “If I can’t make money being an athlete, how do I make money on the other side?” I started getting into business and getting my Business degree, doing accounting and that thing. I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to do, but I knew I wanted to do something with money or financials or whatever.

One night, I’m 21 years old waiting tables in college and this Carlton Sheets pops up on the TV, “Make money in real estate with no money down.” It was called the no down payment system. I pulled my credit card out and called. I don’t even think at that time you can go online and order, you had to call. I gave my credit card. I got the course within 7 to 10 days and I was infatuated with it. That was April 2001. I did exactly what the course said, “Call people out of the newspaper. Make phone calls and figure out how to get in front of people, how to look at houses and evaluate them and get going.” I bought my first two houses in the same month in September. It’s 9/11.

I can’t remember if it was right before or right after 9/11 that I closed these two deals. One of them, my dad owned as a rental so I convinced him to sell me that one, give me the down payment and that’s how I purchased that one. I called out of the newspaper on the other one. I remember the price. It’s $19,000. I can’t remember exactly what I said. It was a pretty simple ad, “Fixer upper,” kind of thing. I called and looked like a good deal. Knowing what I know now, I probably would’ve paid half the price. I was young and I was like, “This looks like a good deal.” I paid full price. It still worked out. It appraised at $60,000 or $65,000 after it was fixed up. I spent $10,000 or $15,000 fixing it up.

By the time I refinanced it, I was able to get back. I think it was at least $10,000. It might have been $15,000, which at that time, for a 21-year-old, that’s a lot of money. It’s like, “I was able to buy this property not only with no money down, but once I refinanced I was able to get tax-free cash back.” From then that’s when I started BRRRRng a ton of properties. I was doing the BRRRR method before it was the BRRRR method. I’d buy properties. I would buy them cheap.

I would fix them up enough to be able to rent them and look pretty nice and appraise well. I’d refinance them. I’d get all of my money back and then some, like most of them I was getting anywhere from a couple thousand to I think the best one I did back for the first 10 properties I did, I got like $30,000 back because I bought the property cheap. I remember getting that check and I was like, “I think I’ve made it.” That money goes somewhere else and goes back into the business and whatnot. By the time I was 23 years old, I had 10 rental properties. I got my real estate license. I was selling real estate at the same time and had $250,000 to $300,000 worth of equity in properties. I didn’t use any of my own money to do it.

That’s how it started. I do the exact same thing nowadays. I don’t do quite as many BRRRR properties a couple of years ago when the market started going up and rent started going up. I kept fifteen properties and they all went up substantially over the last couple of years. I’m glad that I made that decision, but mostly I do fix and flip. The simple course of $200 and back then that course was simple. There was no texting, there was no cold calling, there was direct mail. What was the other marketing? I think it was mostly outbound, like calling realtors and going to the newspaper. Outbound was the thing because nobody was doing it and it was cheap, and it was a lot of low-hanging fruit, but now it’s a lot different. It’s fun reminiscing about how that was many years ago because things are totally different.

They’re more complicated now. There’s more opportunity and more information, but I think that almost muddies the water. I think the simple was the better way to go in a lot of the ways we do things.

If I could go back to 2001, knowing what I know now, I was one of the first ones around the country to do TV. I was one of the first ones to do phone book advertising. I started with a little small ad and eventually, a half or full-page ad in the phone book. I would spend $300 a month on the phone book. I would make anywhere from $10,000 to $30,000 a month. You remember back in the day when you could send direct mail pieces. There weren’t that many people sending direct mail.

If you sent out a direct mail piece, you knew almost for sure you were going to get a few deals. That’s the way direct mail was, depending on how many you sent out. Nowadays, it’s a lot tougher. You have to have your message dialed in. You have to have your list dialed in. When you send a postcard, they’re probably getting 5 to 10 others. That’s the way it is these days. You’re totally right, it was more simple back then and there wasn’t nearly as much competition.

I did the phone book thing myself too. This is totally off-topic, but I remember pulling data. It was almost like dial-up even though it wasn’t dial-up, but there was this thing that I had to log into and it would dial into the system. I would pull the list that I wanted to market to. It was very interesting but a lot of fun. Fast forward to nowadays, you are big on TV. What made you even start to go into TV? Why was TV even an option for you and how did you get started in it?

TV Commercials

It’s interesting. There are moments in my career and my life that are little small things that if I hadn’t done something, it wouldn’t have led to something else. Buying the course on TV was one of the biggest things that I ever did. In 2011, it was Christmas, I was supposed to go to a networking party. I ended up getting sick, a cold and I wasn’t going to go. Someone talked me into going. They’re like, “Come on. Have a drink. You’ll be fine,” or whatever. I’m like, “I’m not feeling super well. I’m at the tail end of a cold.” They talked me into going. I go and I meet this guy named Brian. I’m not super social, but he comes up to me and starts talking to me. He’s a young guy. He was in his early twenties.

In life, there are little small things that, if you wouldn't have done something, wouldn't have led to something else. Click To Tweet

He’s like, “Let me get your number. I’d love to pick your brain,” because he was getting into the business. I’d been in the business for about 10 or 11 years at that time. Him and I become good friends. About six months later, he invited me to this guy who he met by chance on an airplane going to Vegas. He was like, “This guy is super cool. His name is Cody. He’s having a poker game. Why don’t you come and hang out? I know you like poker.” I go down to the basement of this guy’s house, Cody. I see these two guys off in the distance and I’m like, “I recognize those guys. Where do I know them? Both of those guys have TV commercials. They’re on TV.”

I get this celebrity shock little thing of like, “These guys are on TV. This is super cool. I’m playing poker with these guys.” I purposely sit next to one of them and I’m like, “That’s cool. I see you on TV all the time. Tell me about that. How’s it going?” I expected him to say something to the effect of, “It’s good. We brand ourselves,” and something of that nature. His eyes lit up and he was like, “We annihilate it with TV.” He owned a construction business. He was like, “We do millions and millions of dollars a year of construction business and it’s all from TV commercials.” I’m like, “Wow.” I started drilling him and asking him questions.

He was like, “A lot of those questions, you could probably get from my media guy, Drew.” He gives me Drew’s number. I called Drew on Monday morning. This was a Saturday night when I met this guy. I said, “I hear you’re the TV guy. I’ve got some questions for you. I don’t know if it’d be good for me or not, but curious.” I tell him about my business. He said, “Give me about a week. I’m going to call the local stations. I’m going to get you a rate sheet and I’ll quote you what it would be for you to be on TV.” One week later he called me and he was like, “I got some good rates for you. For $3,000 a month, I can get you 250 to 300 commercials a month.”

I’m like, “Holy crap, that’s crazy.” $3,000 was still a pretty decent amount of money back then. I’m like, “Let’s give it a try.” In the first month, I spent $3,000 and I made $35,000. It’s been the number one lead channel for me. It’s been the most consistent and it absolutely crushes for me and my market. It was about a few years ago, someone convinced me to show them my formula and what I was doing. I called my guy Drew and I said, “I’m going to meet with this guy. His name is Ben.” He’s still a client now. I said, “I’m going to show him everything that I did. Can you help him in his market?”

He’s like, “We can do TV commercials all over the country. We’ve been doing it for, 10 or 15 years or something like that.” It crushed in his market. A few months later I was telling someone about that. They’re like, “Why don’t you do that for other people? Why don’t you do that for other investors?” I was like, “I showed them what I did. It works in his market, works in mine, I guess it could work in others.” I went to about eight people that I knew that were investing in real estate that I knew could afford TV. 6 or 7 of them were like, “I’ll totally test it in my market.” I did a test run with those investors. I think there’s only 1 or 2 that have dropped out in the last three years since I did that test run with them.

The results were almost the same in every single market. It crushed right out of the gate. That’s when 10x TV was born. We decided to start marketing and telling people what we were doing and show them what we’re doing. I went to my media guy Drew. Before I did the test run, “I think this could work throughout the country. If I were to show people my scripts, my formula, what shows, stations we’re on, how we formatted our commercial, how to buy the phone number, how to do your web domain and all that it all ties together and works together well, would you do the fulfillment and help negotiate with the stations and do everything you do on the back end?” It’s been a perfect business relationship and marriage. We have over 100 real estate investors running TV with us now and it’s absolutely crushing.

TV is one of those things that people don’t really think about that much. Now I’ve been on these podcasts and helping people to understand that inbound marketing is the way to go. More people understand TV. When I started three years ago helping other people, there weren’t very many people doing TV commercials around the country. Even now when you look at all the other marketing methods compared to the population, there are not that many people. Even if people call us and they’ll be like, “There are two investors running TV in our market, do you think it’s saturated?” I’m like, “Do you know how many investors are sending out direct mail and cold calling and texting and you only have two real estate investors running TV commercials? There’s so much more room for other investors to come in and do it.”

The Flip Talk Podcast | Tony Javier | TV Commercials

TV Commercials: TV is one of those things that people don’t really think about that much.

 

That’s where I’m at now. I’m all in on TV. I was fortunate enough many years ago to automate my real estate investing business where it didn’t need me anymore, then I started other businesses. This is my baby right now. What I’m trying to educate people about is the power of branding and the power of inbound leads. TV to me is the forefront of that. It leads everything. When you look at marketing from a business perspective, my philosophy on marketing is to find 1, 2, or 3 channels that work well, start with that and then go and find as many channels as you possibly can. I go from the top down. To me, I think TV helps everything and I’ll bring it full circle on how TV ties it all together.

To me, TV I believe is the number one marketing method. I think radio is next. We help our clients with radio as well. TV and radio are the two best inbound channels in my opinion and are the easiest because once you get those set up, they work in the background and they continue to perform. Then you’ve got direct mail, and then you have PPC, Facebook, pay-per-lead, and all the other outbound channels that are texting, cold calling, and driving for dollars.

TV is the number one marketing method. Click To Tweet

If you look at that from the perspective of, “What is the easiest and produces the most results,” it’s the things at the top that I mentioned. The things that are harder and take a lot more time and energy are the things at the bottom. What I try to do is focus more on the top and then we sprinkle all those other things. The only thing I don’t do out of all of those is texting and cold calling. Then there’s one thing that I didn’t mention is billboards. Unless you’re doing TV and radio, I don’t think I’d recommend billboards because they’re not a huge return. They’re going to help your TV and radio efforts and your mass media efforts. That’s my perspective on TV and marketing as a whole.

I don’t recommend billboards at all.

I’m guessing you tried it.

Before Getting Into TV

Ask me how I know. One of the things I’ve heard about people who do TV is that celebrity status when you’re walking in the door to do the acquisitions, especially if you’re the one doing the acquisitions or even your team if you could because you’ve been on TV that your team will have some of that celebrity aura to them. I know that definitely helps in negotiations with sellers and that is an advantage. What’s something that somebody needs to understand before they get into TV? A lot of marketing channels have a runway. If you’re going to be doing direct mail or cold calling, there’s a little runway before you get traction in that marketing channel. Is there a runway in TV before you can start to count on results or is there something else, something we need to understand before they get started?

I’ll give you my philosophy on marketing in general and then I’ll bring it back to TV. When people say marketing channels don’t work, like you’ve heard people say, “Direct mail doesn’t work in my market. Whatever doesn’t work in my market.” There are three reasons that they didn’t work. It’s either they didn’t do it right so they pulled the wrong list or they used the wrong provider or whatever on that side of it. They didn’t handle leads correctly, their sales process wasn’t dialed in. You could run the same channel with two different businesses. 1) Totally dialed in and does three deals with the same ad spend and the same marketing medium, and the other one either does zero or one. The differences are dramatically different. One of them you want to continue to do and crush. The other one you may give up.

I know this because we worked with many real estate investors. For a period of time, we were buying the phone numbers and recording their calls and getting some data. We realized even some high-level operators, if I mentioned their names, would probably not have a great sales process. That’s a big deal. 1) They didn’t give it enough time. When I say enough time, here’s my philosophy on marketing and how you measure your marketing. For TV commercials, for instance, we’ve been anywhere from a 5 to 12 times return. Good returns but still different. If we measured one year and we said, “5 times return and we wanted to get 7,” we may not have been super happy. Five times is still a good return no matter what marketing channel you’re at.

My point is that it can vary from year to year. If someone runs for one year, they may get pretty good data but it’s going to be multiple years that tell what it’s going to do from a long-term perspective. Bringing that back down to a smaller sample size, I think that you need to run at the very minimum three months. That is the absolute minimum. If someone comes to us and says, “We’ll try it for a month if it doesn’t work, I have faith that it’s going to work.” Most of our clients in the first month are banging. I mentioned the test run that we did. I mentioned my results in the first month and it’s almost that way with all of our clients. They’re surprised but not surprised because we tell them, “In the first month, you’re going to be getting calls whether you do deals or not. Mostly that’s up to you.”

We tell them within three months they’re going to be able to tell whether they’re getting calls and if we need to make some changes we will. Six months is a little bit of a better timeframe to look at. Our success rate for people that are over six months is dramatically different than looking from a 1 to 2-month perspective. Unfortunately, there are people that didn’t have the cash that went in the first month, and even if they made a little bit of money, got gun-shy or whatever it is and decided to stop. If someone goes six months with us, the success rate is astronomically high. The reason being is that they gave it six months. Sometimes it performs in one month but usually within a six-month period. On that same note, we’ve also had people at six months say, “I’m getting 2 to 3 times return.”

That’s okay but we want 5 to 10 times return because that’s what their other marketing channels are getting. There are two things on that. 1) If you’re getting a 2 to 3 times return on a marketing channel that’s inbound, you’re not having to filter through a ton of leads to get to a deal. It’s automated. It’s not like you’re having to every month pull lists and figure out who’s going to text and cold call and all that stuff.

2 to 3X is still okay, but at the same time, you still need to give it a longer period of time to see if it’s going to work. We’ve got a bunch of clients that we know at the six-month mark were questioning whether they wanted to continue. Luckily we’ve got quite a few that did and then they ended up with 5 to 7 times return over a period of time. That was a long answer, but my opinion is to commit to six months. If you don’t have the money for six months then don’t do it. Commit to six months because it’s like digging for gold. You could be right at that cusp of finding gold and if you stop right before you get to that gold, you don’t know that it was there.

The Flip Talk Podcast | Tony Javier | TV Commercials

TV Commercials: Commit to six months. If you don’t have the money for six months, then don’t do it.

 

There’s the unmeasurable TV may not be where the deal came from, but the deal may have come from another marketing channel because of your TV presence. That’s something that people don’t always take time to account for. Another thing is I’ve looked at a couple of businesses that did TV and then stopped. While TV may not have been working for them or at least they felt it wasn’t in the first handful of months, what I’ve noticed is after they stopped or paused over the next sample of months. In fact, we had a member of our mastermind community that was a customer of yours that had paused TV and was still getting deals from the TV commercials that they had run in the past because of follow-up and people had saved the number and different things like that.

When we pulled back the curtain on all the things they were doing, TV was the best marketing channel that they were ultimately utilizing. For whatever reason, they had paused it because they had lumped it in with all their other marketing. They didn’t know their numbers is what it came down to. It’s paying attention to your numbers, understanding the unmeasurable, and giving something a chance to work. It is great advice to take away from what you said.

You hit on a good point, the immeasurables, I mean the celebrity status. Those guys, when I went to that poker game, I don’t want to say it flippantly, but I wouldn’t have given a shit about at that point looking across the room if I didn’t know they were on TV. I wouldn’t have wanted to sit next to one of them. I’m an introvert by nature. I may not even talk to him that much, but I started the conversation of like, “I wanted to know about TV,” and chatted with him. In my perspective of him is that he is a big deal. He’s on TV so there’s something that I have to learn from him. Whereas if someone had told me, “That guy was a construction company,” I would’ve been like, “Okay,” whatever.

As I mentioned with postcards, the returns that I said 5 to 12 times do not include the deals that we did when they got a stack of postcards, they called us from that postcard, but when we got to the appointment they said they called us and only us or called us first because we’re on TV. Lately, we give TV a little bit of credit because it should get some credit for it. There are those intangibles that you don’t see that help you, even things like private money. I’ve had a lot of conversations with people who lent us private money, they would refer someone else to us, we’d get on the phone with them and then we’d be like, “Do you know much about our business?”

“Yeah, I’ve seen you on TV throughout the years.” It seems like it’s a way easier conversation than if someone’s in California and they’re like, “Tell me about your business and what do you do?” You have to tell them exactly what you’re doing, and it’s a totally different conversation. When someone sees you on TV, the trust factor is astronomically different than meeting someone randomly off the street.

The trust factor is astronomically different when someone sees you on TV than just meeting someone randomly off the street. Click To Tweet

Reach Tony

If somebody’s interested in getting to know more about TV and what you can do for them in their business, how do they get a hold of you?

The way we work our program is we license spots throughout the country. Even though there’s probably room for way more than we put in a market, we only do so many people per market. If you want to learn about TV, we can go through and look at the map and show you where the TV is going to reach. TV has a pretty broad reach, you’re going to hit a lot of people for a pretty small ad spin. You hit 10 to 20 times more people with TV than direct mail for the same price.

We can look at the map. We can quote the areas. We probably already have numbers in almost every major market. If someone wants to learn about it and go through that whole process, you can go to Rentv.com and book a call with us. We can go over everything with you, see what your ad spend would be on your market, and see if it’s a good fit for you because not everybody is a good fit. There are some businesses that it’s an absolute no-brainer for TV, but there are some businesses that may not be ready for TV. We can go through all of that with you. I originally called it RealEstateMastersTv.com, I bought the domain Rentv.com to make it short and sweet. If you guys go there, it’ll redirect to a page where you can get more information about the program, what we do, and how we can help.

Thank you very much for your time and everything you share with us. I appreciate you.

Thanks. I appreciate it.

If you got value from this episode, make sure you’re checking out what Tony has to offer at Rentv.com. Don’t forget to go over to FlipTalk.com and check out what we have going on at Flip Talk Universe. If you’re looking for a community, a mastermind of like-minded real estate investors, go to BeInThisRoom.com and check us out. Tony, thank you very much and have a wonderful day.

Thanks.

 

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