all right we are live with another exciting episode of the team lead talks podcast i'm your host out of alexandria virginia andrew becker on today's show very exciting man i used to see your commercials growing up. It was crazy that now I'm talking to you on a podcast of mine, but welcome Brad Chandler. He's the founder of Express Homebuyers and of Limitless You. I know we want to talk about that as well, but welcome, dude. Thank you for being here. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me. So Brad, let's get right into this. You are a namesake in the real estate investing world. You're a local celebrity. We're just talking about we don't live too far from each other. We're both in the Northern Virginia area, but you didn't get started by running commercials on TV. Let's give, if you can give us like a three, four minute overview of like who you are, what you do, how you got into what you're doing today. Yeah, it goes all the way back to ninth grade when I read a book by Robert Allen on how to buy real estate with no money down. And at that time I was like, this means unlimited income, this meaning real estate. So I'm going to do it. So I went to school for real estate, undergrad, graduate degree in real estate. And then just by chance, someone bought my neighbor's house when I lived in Vienna Woods. He fixed it up and he resold it. And he said, hey, I buy houses below market, fix them up and resell them. This was in November of 2002. My son was just born that July. And I was like, I'm going to do this. And I am going to use TV commercials because my father back in the 80s started doing TV advertising for his law firm. So November to July, Andrew, I worked my ass off. I would work my full-time job actually here in the same building in Springfield, come home, spend some time with my son, put him to sleep and work tirelessly from like eight to 11 every single night, six months, seven months. It was like nothing was happening, but I kept getting more and more persistent. I think it was in the eighth month. Yep. So July, I bought my first house. July and August, I bought six houses. October, I went to my boss and I said, I quit, came home. I told my wife at the time, she was like, are you crazy? We have a newborn son and I have two kids and you just quit your job. I was like, it'll be fine. So you didn't tell her before? You didn't tell her. I didn't tell her. I just came back and said, it'll be fine. And here we are 22 years later in 5,000 houses and it was fine. We didn't work out, but Express Homebuyers did. Your company still lives strong. Yes. Very cool. Yeah. I share in that same kind of like dual career. I started in the Air Force doing nuclear weapons stuff at the Pentagon, actually, so not too far from where you are. I did an overlapping dual career from 2013 to 2015. 2015 is when we got rocking and rolling. I don't know if that's as fast as you did, but it was like a lot of conversations in Pentagon stairwells and, you know, late night conversations. But then I replaced my finances and resigned from the Air Force and haven't looked back since. So that's an amazing story of like, you know, you just never gave up. You're not going to fail if you don't, you know, give up. Never gave up. Thank you. And thank you for your service. I was a civilian. I appreciate that. I was just a civilian supporting women in the Air Force. But I appreciate that nonetheless. So, Brad, let's talk about your model for Express. You guys have done a ton of deals. I think you just mentioned 5,000 deals over the course of your career. How in the world did you accomplish that for such a long time? Because real estate, as you know, as well as everyone else listening, a lot of people fail. And a lot of people have to bail and go back to a W-2, but not you. You're still doing deals. You're still being consistent. How did you get up to that point I mean you already mentioned it right What got me the first six deals in July and August of 2003 was just persistence I cannot go work for somebody My dad was an entrepreneur and I think I got that from him. So when we, and we've gone through some really rough times where I thought we might be out of business, but we all just were like, no, we're going to figure this out. If it's, if it's me and my partner and that's it, just the two of us, we'll figure this out. If we have to fire everyone and just him and I go back, cause that's how it started. It was my partner and I, we were doing everything, stepping on each other's feet. And I came in one day and I'm like, hang on, Judd, you go handle construction and the sales and the financing of the house. Let me take care of sales and marketing. And then we just, we just grew from there. So it's really just persistence and tenacity. Yeah, man. So consistency as well. Let's talk about your business model. Obviously you, you, your target marketing, please correct me if I'm wrong, are homeowners in some sort of distress. Is that correct? Really, it's just any homeowner that wants to sell hassle-free in a matter of days. They could be in distress. I mean, one of the great house we bought, I can remember like 15 years ago, the guy told me he just cashed in $400,000 in Krispy Kreme donut stock. And he was moving to Florida and just wanted an easy sale. It's just someone who doesn't want the traditional sale with agents and the signs and the appraisals and the contingencies and the home inspections. Right. And then how do they come in to your database, like this inbound direct response marketing type of lead? But what exit strategies are in your business model? Like, are you wholesaling? Are you flipping? Are you buying and holding? What's your strategy? I mean, over the 22 years, we've done it all. We've bought, hold, we've wholesaled, we've novated, we fixed and flipped. We had a 180 unit rental portfolio of a bunch of houses at one point in time. very cool and a lot of like today's if you if you're active on social media whether you are brad or anyone you know listening right now it's all about like how am i going to get leads i need leads where are these leads coming from you've been doing that consistently i think you said you started in 20 in ot so for 24 years you've been consistently lead genning and getting business through the door can you talk about like some of your top performing ones i know we mentioned tv I'm assuming that's not your only lead gen source, but can you walk us through like your marketing strategy? Yeah. So the best $1,200 I ever paid for my business was in late 2002, I think, or early 2003. I hired a small company out of Harrisonburg to create a jingle for us. Express home buyers, we buy your house in seven days. So we've pumped that out millions and millions of dollars. That's why we have this brand reputation in DC. There's nothing magic about what we do. It's what every other investor does, you know, Facebook ads, Google ads, direct mail, radio, TV, just the same marketing budget like that. Like, what are you if you don't mind sharing? Like what what's your output every single month? It's fluctuated from, you know, when I first started, we were doing five, ten thousand dollars a month to, you know, four hundred thousand dollars a month is probably our high. Wow. Is that where you are today? Or we were there last year. We scaled that way back. Last year was a tough year in the real estate space, as you probably know. Yeah, for sure. So we scaled it way back and we're just kind of trying to find the sweet spot now. Very cool. So for an operation that does so much volume, I'm assuming you have teammates. Can you talk about the structure and how you're overseeing that entire operation? Sure. We have an accounting department, not even a department. We've really streamlined it through AI and automation. And then we have a fractional CMO. I kind of oversee the marketing as well. And then we have a disposition person who has a couple of disposition associates underneath him. And then we've got some three home buying specialists. We've got two project managers. My partner does a lot on kind of, like I said, still on the financial side and the sales side. And then we have a team of about 10 virtual assistants in the Philippines and Egypt that support us. Very cool. So relatively lean for the amount of volume that you guys are producing I guessing that through like your you mentioned AI your systems and processes over over 24 years are probably pretty efficient nowadays Yeah I mean we we we we doing 20 25 properties a month so it it it fairly lean Yeah. Very cool, man. Well, this is only about a 15 minute podcast, Brad. We get very, like really into it very quickly. And I know you wanted to talk about your other initiative here. So if you don't mind, if we can shift the conversation over, can you tell us about your, you know, your new exciting thing that, um, yeah, going on. Yeah. You'll probably see my face light up because I got into real estate in hindsight. When I talked about earlier, making a bunch of money, it was because I didn't feel enough because of the things that happened to me in my childhood. And what we always do when we, when we don't get our needs met as children is we come up with a story because we have to make sense of what's happening to us. You know, in my case, my father's hitting me with a belt, making fun of me. My parents are always fighting. And as a child, what we do is we internalize that because if it's their fault and it's our parents, We're completely helpless. What we do as children is we put it on ourselves and we say, it must be, if I can just be a better boy, daddy will stop hitting me, hitting me with the belt. So I was all about money, money, money, money, money. And what did that cost me? It cost me actually $9 million in business mistakes. It cost me two marriages that didn't work out. I used to use weed and alcohol quite frequently. My kids both had behavioral issues and anxiety. And five years ago, trying to get my son help for anxiety, this performance coach said, you have a tick. You blink like crazy when you talk about your childhood. You may have some unresolved childhood processing trauma that's affecting your son's anxiety. I'm like, no way. But okay. She was like, come out to Park City. Meet with my husband, who's an ex-Navy SEAL. We'll walk you through this program. And in this three-hour session, Andrew, my life completely changed. And I came back and I started sharing my story. And people were like, this is incredible. I'm getting more out of you than my therapist. So then I studied for thousands of hours under some of the best people. And I found the secret to happiness. And the secret to happiness is kind of what I just mentioned, is that our subconscious mind controls 95% of our daily behavior. That's why 30 years of therapy didn't work because therapy generally focuses on your conscious mind, which is only responsible for 5%. So that programming we receive as a child is stuck with us forever until we can go in and reprogram it. Unlike Western medicine that likes to diagnose, label, and give you a drug, we don't use drugs in our practice. We've helped people transform their lives, and all we do is we go back and we retell those stories, and there's actually something called neuroplasticity. And there's actually something called memory reconsolidation where the neural pathways that are holding those untruths and those negative emotions that are causing you whatever it is in your life, anything that's bad in your life, your relationship, your weight, your addiction, your business spiraling out of control is not your fault. It's from that shit that happened back between the ages of zero and 10. So all you have to do is reprogram it. In three hours, I was forever reprogrammed. And now the last five years have been the best five years of my life. And it just keeps getting better. Very cool. So is that something three hours and you're done, Brad? Or is it something that you have to practice, you know, ongoing? It's not a set it and forget it kind of thing. Although you're setting foundation level. I don't know even what you call it. Reprogramming? Yeah, you literally reprogram your mind. Or at least the neural pathways that are holding the negative emotions. We see massive shifts on our clients between hours three and five. The program we have now is a five-week program where we meet for a couple hours a week. And then there's ongoing weekly support. You will have a major shift because you're going to figure out, here's something that's, if you don't listen to anything else, every negative thing you have in your life that's going on, and I'm just going to pick drinking. Let's just say you drink way too much. You smoke pot every night. even though it's negative, your mind is saying, even though it's negative, it's keeping me from something over here that's even worse. And what you do when you do the deep search is you find out this thing that's driving the addiction. It's not worse. It's just the untruth that you made up 30 years ago. So when you rewrite this neural pathway, guess what happens to the negative thing? It goes away because there nothing fueling it So you see once that happens and that usually again in our three to five in our coaching program you see a massive like oh my God I can believe this. Exactly what happened to me. Oh my gosh, I've lived 47 years thinking I wasn't enough. And here it was, it was my parents that didn't feel enough. And they made me feel that way. Oh my gosh. So you have a major breakthrough. And then you get to spend the rest of your life kind of honing and just getting better and better and better. Every day, I kind of work on it. Every time I have a negative emotion, it's the universe's way of saying, Brad, you need to do a little bit of work. Because when you have a negative emotion, Andrew, it has nothing to do with what your wife said, or the guy cutting you off in traffic or your flat tire. It's how you respond to that in the meaning you tell yourself about that. So people don't have to go around being triggered, anxious, depressed, anything. It's all a state of mind that can be changed through this program that I've developed over the last five years. Very cool, man. Yeah. I remember when we connected like a month or two ago, whenever it was, I can hear the passion in your voice of how excited you were to kind of share that with me. I think my bad, I need to finish that survey that you sent me. I think it's in our text messages, but this is something that I shared with you that I'm really interested in too. So now hearing this a little bit more from you, I'm going to go back and I'm going to fill that out. And I'd love to continue this conversation, but Brad, if someone let's compartmentalize this into kind of like two things. If someone wants to reach out to you about express home buyers, how would one go about that? But then I think more excitingly, if someone wants to reach out and it's called Limitless You, I think. Yeah, that's the company name. It's unlocklimitlessyou.com. And there's a self-love quiz. You mentioned it's a survey. It's really 12 questions self-love quiz. It will tell you your level of self-love, i.e. your self-worth. If you score lack of self-love or mild self-love, that's an indication of every single layer of your life to some degree is negative. So bad relationships, your kids have problems. It's all from the same thing. So start with the quiz. So if you want to reach out to me there, you'll actually speak with Yvonne. She's handling that whole program now, and she's absolutely one of the best in the world at it. Unlocklimitlessyou.com forward slash quiz for the quiz. I'm all over social media, Brad Chandler. And if you need money, if you need transactional funding, I'm starting to do a little bit of that. But if you want to JV with me in the D.C. metro area, if you whatever, any way I can help you. If you want to sell us a deal, work on a deal together, just reach out and I'll try to help you the best I can. Very cool. And for those listening and want to reach out to Brad, we'll not only can you pick up on what he just said for how to reach out to him, but we'll include that ways to reach out to you in the description of this episode as well. So look down if you're watching this on YouTube. Brad, this has been awesome. Before we depart though, I always ask all of my guests this, and you've already shared so much with The Limitless You. So let's maybe shift to like a book or something. And I asked you this on our phone call, but if there's a resource, maybe a book here that can better someone's life, community, business, can you share that with us right now? I can, I just happen to have it on my desk. It's this little tiny pocketbook called The Way to Love by Anthony DeMello. Okay. Anthony DeMello was kind of, is a mix between Christianity and almost like Buddhism, Indian. So he brings the Eastern and the Western and this book is freaking unbelievable. Very cool. Well, I am trying to fill in, I appreciate that was a book that I've never heard of before, nor do I have. I'm trying to fill in the top shelf behind me here. So I always say this, but thanks to the good people at Amazon, I'm gonna have it tomorrow overnight. so I look forward to reading that too Brad thank you so much I know you're a busy dude we're both in the area so I'd love to keep in touch with you obviously I'm going to fill out that self love quiz today would love to continue that conversation but thank you so much for being here thank you for having me take care
