A Smarter Way to Generate CRE Leads (No Cold Calling Required)

Aviva (00:00)
This week's listener of the week is Josh from afar. Josh, thank you so much for leaving us a five star review. And if you leave us a five star review below, you might be next week's listener of the week, week, week.

today's guest here on Commercial Real Estate Secrets, we have Mr. Ed Winslow. Ed is the author of the book, Proof Stacking. know, Ed and I could kibitz all day because we have two of the same hobbies and

ultimately professions, which are commercial real estate and marketing. And we found a synergy in, ⁓ that we're very passionate about both and honestly the integration of the internet.

to enhance both of those. So Ed, thank you so much for being on the show today.

Ed Winslow (00:53)
Thank you for having me. It's always exciting to talk about this topic.

Aviva (00:56)
Absolutely. It's a very opportunistic topic that I feel like we're just only beginning to understand the capabilities of. Mr. Winslow can you tell the listeners who you are, a bit about you, and how did proof stacking come to be?

Ed Winslow (01:19)
Yeah, so my story starts at Coldwell Banker, which became CB. So it was basically CBRE. And I was in New Jersey when I started, I was in an office that had leasing brokers, no investment sales brokers. And that's what I wanted to do. So somebody told me about Bob Knakal and said, you ought to give him a call and talk to him about what he's doing. And maybe you could do that out here. And so I talked to Bob.

We started to chat He said come on in went in on a saturday and for about a year I went in almost every saturday and worked with bob on what he was doing and that's what ⁓ about a year later when he started his firm, I went to work for him and know, I learned a lot from Bob. it's that he has a great story has a great system and you know the long story short

is that I took that model that was so successful working with Bob for numerous years and I years later, I applied it online and I found that the same thing that worked offline worked online. And, you know, it was sort of by chance I bought a property, did a rehab on a 12 unit building, built a website, got it ranked on the search engines and all the local brokers, residential brokers who I was going to hire to market these properties said you're never going to sell them.

And so once I got the exposure online, all the units sold. And at that point, I was hooked on the internet.

Aviva (02:51)
You are speaking my language, Ed. I have so many questions, but what gave you the first idea that there was this, there was something there.

Ed Winslow (02:56)
Yeah.

Yes.

All right. I'll tell you. It's an amazing story. So when I was working with Bob and Paul, it was back in the early 90s and deals were few and far between because all these properties were, either a property owner didn't need to sell because they were had money or properties were being foreclosed on. So there was like all these properties went through this black hole and there was nothing going on. I happened to get

Aviva (03:17)
Hmm.

Ed Winslow (03:30)
hired to sell a property, sold the property. There was a little five story mixed use building down at Gramercy Park in the city. And as I'm walking back to the office with a commission check, finally, I was like, well, how am going to sell another building? You know, I can go back tomorrow. I'm to be cold calling and, you know, stuff and envelopes.

And I came up with this idea and I went back in the office and I sat down with a white piece of paper and I started jotting down ideas about the building. And I saw a story emerge and I ended up typing up this story about the sale of the building. Not so much like the price and all that, even though I did include that, but more about the history of the building, why it worked, where it was, that kind of thing. And I put it in and

8 by 11 envelope with a picture of the building and I sent it into the New York Times and two months later they published it on the front page of the Sunday New York Times real estate section. And that was a wild story and that really that was like my first amazing experience with marketing. didn't you know nobody I never took marketing classes. I didn't know anything about market and

Aviva (04:31)
Stop it.

Ed Winslow (04:46)
What happened was amazing because I thought the next day, you know, Monday morning, I'm going to walk into the office and everybody in New York city is going to call me because they've seen me in the New York times. And it didn't happen. Nobody called me. I mean, and I'm wondering why the heck would anybody advertise in New York times if you're not getting calls? But what happened was about a month later, I got a call from a guy who was in this little territory that I worked.

Aviva (04:55)
I'm

Hmm.

Ed Winslow (05:16)
who I'd spoken to numerous times and he called me up and I had had many nice conversations with this guy. You know, like I knew the guy and I thought he knew me, but he called me up and he introduced himself as if I had never heard of them before. And he said, I was, I was told by so-and-so the so-and-so person. have no idea who that person was told me that you're the guy to talk to to sell my building. And I'm thinking,

I don't know who that person is that referred me and you don't even know me. I was just a voice on the other end of the phone. And I ended up getting the business. I ended up selling the property. And that was an amazing experience because it taught me a lot about the cycle, like how you have to stay in front of people, how you have to create proof that people you think are listening to you.

are not. You're just a voice on the other end of the phone because there's a million other competitors out there. About nine months later, I sold another property and I did the same thing and I sent it into the New York Times. did it again. What happened was I ended up, I, know, here I am, you know, less than a year later, I'm on the front page of the Sunday New York Times again. And what happened was that visibility just gave me so much credibility.

Aviva (06:33)
Heh.

Ed Winslow (06:40)
And, but I never got anything outside of the focus, my focus, know, smut. We were selling small to midsize buildings. those are the kinds of buildings that we got. That's all we got. And it taught me a lot about branding, about focus, about being in front of people over and over. And that's how I got everything going. And what was really interesting.

is when I sold 10 years later when I bought that multifamily, I didn't know anything about Google search or SEO or any of that stuff. But what I did know is I knew how to write content that was picked up by the New York Times. So I wrote the same way on a website that I did on the New York Times thing.

Aviva (07:16)
Hmph.

Ed Winslow (07:23)
And it worked there too. So all of a sudden I found something. The New York times likes us, this structure. Google and the other search engines like this structure. There must be something to this structure. And I just kept repeating it. I just repeated the model and it worked and it worked and it worked. And I never ever in a million years would have thought I would have ended up with a marketing agency. but I did mainly because of demand and

Aviva (07:27)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Ed Winslow (07:52)
You know, it was just amazing how it opened up doors for me that I never even knew possible that I would never ever have achieved. It was just one of the, just a real quick story because I know we are limited on time, but I got a call one day from a guy who said, at this point I had had, you know, my own firm at this point.

And I got a call from a guy who said, call me up out of the blue. And he said, I heard that you're really good at adding value to real estate. And I'm like, okay. That's a pretty interesting call. And so anyway, what happened was this guy, somehow or other, he found me, this is inbound. This is inbound leads. You know, this is the power of building your brand in a local market.

Aviva (08:24)
Yeah!

Ed Winslow (08:40)
And it doesn't matter whether you're in New York City. This happened to be this call came in from Stanford, Connecticut, where, I live in Connecticut and I was working in Connecticut and I was doing deals. This guy called me said, I heard you really good at adding value to real estate. Turns out he owned a auto repair shop that he was taken over from his father's father used to built a business repairing Volkswagen's.

He wanted to take over and get into repairing like Mercedes, BMW, that kind of thing. So we needed a whole new image. So what we did was we, I'd never done this before. We, I helped him, we hired an architect, we hired contractors and we put a whole new facade in his building and made it look amazing. And I said, why don't we build a website for you and get it ranked for.

Aviva (09:09)
Hmph.

Ed Winslow (09:32)
you know, BMW repair, Mercedes repair, all that kind of thing. And voila, we got the rankings on the search engine. Now he's got this amazing looking building and almost immediately people started coming in and it worked.

Aviva (09:48)
Yeah.

Ed Winslow (09:49)
And those are the kind of things that if you're not in the internet game, you're never opportunities like that are never going to find you. Those are opportunities that found me.

Aviva (10:01)
Ed, I have a company called the warehouse hotline. We're a warehouse exclusive brokerage. Extremely internet facing. 90 % of our leads are inbound from the internet. So I know, I know the power of it. But I, you know, linked up with Rod Santamassimo. Now he's making me rip the phones, but I love.

Ed Winslow (10:18)
Yeah.

Aviva (10:27)
I know what you're talking about with the inbound and the proof stacking and the social visibility, credibility. I'm sure, you know, those New York times being on the cover of the Sunday, you know, not only was your mother probably thrilled, but it's like you said that the credibility speaks for itself. If you're a broker today, maybe you're...

Ed Winslow (10:48)
Thanks.

Aviva (10:52)
just starting out, what are you doing to proof stack, to build credibility, to get to some form of inbound progress?

Ed Winslow (11:00)
Yeah.

Yeah. So, okay. The formula is really simple. And, you know, when I started at Coldwell Banker, you my first 15 minutes in the business, I was sitting in a conference room, I had a suit on, first suit I ever owned in my life. I don't think I'd ever worn a tie. And the guy who was running the office, I was in this like little training program, he came in and he said, you know,

We have a we're the largest most successful real estate company in the world for a reason we have a system if you follow the system You will succeed if you deviate if you think you're smarter than us and you or you cut corners you're going to fail And I never forgot that and really I think for anybody that's just getting going and and even at any level of your business It doesn't matter if you're

You know, if you're selling, know, whatever you're doing, if you want to step up your game, you still have to implement the same system on different levels. You know, if you're selling two to 20 unit apartment buildings, well, if you want to step it up and sell 50 to 200 unit apartment buildings or 300 to 500 unit apartment buildings, it's the exact same system. So the system is really, really key. And that's the basis. That's like step one of the whole proof stacking model.

Aviva (12:14)
Hmm.

Ed Winslow (12:18)
Number one, you need to know your market. Now, if we want to take a chapter from Bob Knakal, what does he say? He says, you know what? I've got, I've got a market of people that I call, which is about 1200 owners. And what I do is I call, I, my goal is to get 20 of them on the phone every day. He's very disciplined about that. Uh, it's easier today to hit for him to get people on the phone, but he still does that 20 people a day, hundred a week.

Aviva (12:21)
Hm.

Ed Winslow (12:46)
400 a month 1200 every quarter start again That's the model You've got to have a market that sales 101 It's the second part of that is once you define your market That's the hardest thing if you can define your market and you just got to be willing to go you know it's like you're putting your stake in the ground and this is what i'm doing and the next part is Okay, how are you going to position yourself

Aviva (12:57)
Hmph.

Ed Winslow (13:16)
You we never we were never focused on like being transactional brokers. We were like information brokers. And if you listen to Bob, he'll tell you like I think I saw him on LinkedIn today. He there was a post where he said, you know, we realized many years ago we were not really so much in the real estate business as the information business. And so what we did back then and what anybody at any level, whether you're just getting started,

Aviva (13:37)
Sure.

Ed Winslow (13:46)
or you're a seasoned broker, market reports, market information, insightful information, not the same stuff that everybody else is doing, but you can look at it so many different ways. You can look at it and say, if you're in the business of selling, I don't know, strip centers, let's say. Strip centers are all a little different. There's 10 store strip centers, there's five store strip centers, there's rehab opportunities.

So there's a lot of things that you could identify a thousand owners of strip centers. And within that, all gonna be, there might be some kind of common denominators based on size, but they're all gonna be a little bit different. They're all in different locations. might be straight, they might be in an L, they might be on a light. And so there's a lot of different variables, different parking, different access.

So now you can start to really dig in and start to talk about all these different properties and you can start to create market reports and get that information out in front of the owner. You know, you can put it on a website. You can go after Google search. You can post on social media. I social media. I've got a killer killer strategy. Nina, who we were talking about, she's posting about every single building in her market on LinkedIn.

And she's creating these one little, these little one page case studies, we call them. And she's doing that building after building after building in her market in California. And people are recognizing her. She's not been doing this for too long. got her, you know, I showed her the strategy, let's do this. And she kept posting, posting, posting, and people all over the country are recognizing what she does and they're referring business to her. So that's it.

Aviva (15:09)
Wow.

Sure.

When you say posting about these are like properties that might not even be her listing. It's just this is the... That's crazy.

Ed Winslow (15:41)
Yeah. Yeah. She's a tenant rep broker. So if you go look at, if you

go look at it, you know, it might be, ⁓ you know, 123 main street in Brentwood or play a Vista or something like that. And what we're doing is, she'll mention something about the building address, a little intro, maybe about the restaurants nearby, maybe about the landmarks nearby, nothing self-serving.

just giving information. Here's a building in my market. You could do this over and over and over and you just keep repeating, repeating, repeating. That's an amazing strategy. It works. It produces business. And you don't have to have the success stories, to post that content. So if you're new and you're just getting rolling, that is a killer strategy because people are going to see what you're doing and where you're doing it. That's that's step one.

Aviva (16:36)
I have a funny story and you'll understand this thoroughly. My family has been in warehousing in Colorado for multiple generations and my father has done a lot of work, land work south of Denver International Airport before there was even an airport there.

And there happens to be the perfect storm with industrial real estate south, you know, on that land by Denver international airport. So we've spent a lot of time learning about it, selling, talking, you name it. So I have become a person that writers or reporters will come to talk about it. At the end of last year, Amazon sold a warehouse for $96 million right there.

And a reporter calls me to get my two cents on it. Had nothing to do with the sale. Article comes out in the Denver Post and we start getting calls. Congratulations. Congratulations. Everybody thought I sold the property. I didn't sell the property. It was just the association people, people, and I've noticed that with the internet. People think if you post about something, you're involved with it.

Ed Winslow (17:41)
and you're just given the information.

Aviva (17:53)
And you don't have to say that you are or aren't. It's just what I've noticed is like a trend with just human nature and.

Ed Winslow (18:03)
I'll tell you a pretty wild story. I have a guy that I work with in New York City and he works by himself and we built out a strategy for him. And my strategy for him was, cause he came to me, he's working by himself. He's like, I don't have the time to solicit business cause I'm just working by myself. And I said, well, I think your strategy is to go after individual buildings. Like trying to rank for office space for rent in New York City, too big, too, too.

competitive. said, why don't you go after individual buildings? I said, if I put myself in the shoes of your potential client, I'm not looking for office space in New York City. I'm looking for specific buildings. And more specifically, said, I think I would want to know how much it cost at a specific building. So why don't we build a strategy around that, and let's take building after building after building, and let's write about the building.

Aviva (18:45)
Hmm.

Ed Winslow (19:02)
And one of the buildings, if you do a search for office space costs at the world trade center, he ranks the number one, one single guy, right? Solo broker. If you do a search for office space costs at the world trade center, you'll find cogent realty under rentnyoffice.com is his website. And he's not, he's not the listing agent. He just wrote about the building and

Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, all these different buildings, he's ranking at the top and he gets calls from people searching, people from around the country, people from overseas are searching office based costs at the World Trade Center or the Empire State Building. And he put four kids through college with the business that were inbound calls coming from that strategy. You can do that strategy in every single town.

in the country, whether it's retail, shopping centers, know, lot of, especially like you look at a strip center, nobody's thinking about search engine optimization. You could write about a strip center and you're going to get those calls from tenants that are searching for different properties because the competition online is so light. You can even do that in big mall.

Aviva (19:59)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Hmm.

Ed Winslow (20:23)
because

you're competing against, okay, you're competing against the mall, but nobody's really thinking about this. And today we have these amazing tools, ChatGPT You can go back to this New York Times formula that I did many years ago, that structure, you follow that structure and you can rank on Google for anything you want. And you can convert that into social media posts.

videos, press releases, you can turn it into handouts. when you're meeting somebody, you've got, and so now you've got this information strategy. That is, don't care what level you are in your business, that model works. It's very simple. It's a lot more fun than, you know, it's a lot easier to make a phone call. you're, if you're making phone calls, I know Rod Santomassimo is into like beating the phones. but you know, it's

Aviva (21:02)
Hmph.

Ed Winslow (21:20)
It really stinks making cold calls. But if you're calling on somebody and saying, do you want to sell? That's, that's a tough call. You know, if you call somebody and say, Hey, I'm Ed from, you know, whatever proof stacking brokerage, for example, and Hey, there's a property down the street. just want to see if you might want to buy another property. they might say,

Aviva (21:29)
Yeah.

Ed Winslow (21:43)
Yes or no, whatever. I'm not looking to sell if they if they're a seller they're going to tell you they want to sell No, I don't want to buy a property I want to sell mine But you could say, know, I have this great market report that I put together on a thousand strip centers In this area, you know, would you be interested in you know having me send it over to you? Boy, that's a lot better phone call Because you're giving something you're giving something

Aviva (22:02)
Hmm.

that do you want to sell?

Ed Winslow (22:09)
And they will appreciate that. And if you keep doing that and doing that and doing that, you're going to build a fabulous business. You just got to stay focused. But if you're all over the place, you're just not going to succeed. And I talk about that in the proof stacking book. talk about the consumer I call the consumer a doubter.

You know that and you know when you look at it, you know what prevents what holds somebody back from buying from us or doing business from us? It has to do with consumer doubt. they might look at it. Maybe they're not clear about who you are. Maybe they wonder are you the right person for me? I'm not sure I've been burned by others before. Maybe I'm a little, skeptic. You know there's all these characteristics of the consumer.

And what the proof does is it starts to disarm that doubter. It starts to break down that barrier of doubt. And the only way you can do that is by staying in front of these people, the same people over and over as soon as that's why, you know, Bob's model 1200 owners now in his market, the average owner owns, you know, maybe 10 buildings, right? So if he's going after 1200 owners, that might be 10,000 buildings.

So he knows, like Bob knows, that there's, I think, that average over 40 years, the turnover rate is 2.6 % a year. So he knows that out of those 1,200 owners and 10,000 buildings, that there's about 260 properties a year that are gonna sell. He's looking to get as big a market share as he can out of those 260 buildings. And so if you know your, that's what I'm saying, you gotta know your market first.

Aviva (23:51)
Hm.

Ed Winslow (23:51)
But that's the whole model. That's the whole story behind proof stacking. mean, it's an SEO model. It's a social media model. It's a way to use information to get hired when you give your presentations. It's a multipurpose. It's like a Swiss Army knife of marketing. But it only works. It works most effectively when you're focused on a single market. As soon as you deviate and go all over the place,

when you understand the consumer that there's, you know, numerous steps you have to take with that consumer. As soon as you start to deviate, you know, let's say there are five steps that you have to take to convert a, let's say a potential to a, to a client. Well, if you take them up to step level four and you then deviate or you're spreading yourself too thin, you're never going to get them to number five.

And that's called the five steps of consumer awareness. That is a thing in marketing. And it's really important for brokers to understand this. This is why, because I've analyzed what Bob's done, like nobody. And I've turned it into a business model. And that's what proof stacking is all about. It's a business model. It's a business model of converting the doubter to a believer with information.

Aviva (24:52)
Hm.

Well.

Cut.

Ed Winslow (25:18)
Market

information and success stories. It's as simple as that.

Aviva (25:24)
So say you were a warehouse peddler in Denver, Colorado. No, it's a joke because that's what I do. You know, something I have found is like, I understand the value of SEO and then I'll talk to every SEO person and they're like, there's no way you can rank because right, we're competing against CoStar LoopNet. They're like, yeah, you can rank, but it's going to cost you $100,000. And it's like, ugh.

Ed Winslow (25:51)
That so

wrong. That is so wrong. You know what? I did, I'm not going to mention what I did, but I'm working with a client right now. We just created a little one page website for a client and we went after one particular niche in her market. I wrote a press release yesterday that links over to her site. I'm ranking number one, 12 hours later.

Aviva (25:53)
So how am I ranking?

Ed Winslow (26:22)
for numerous combinations of words. Now what happens, yes, yes, I could show you, I'm not gonna, I'll show you privately, but I don't want it public, but it took 12 hours to get the ranking. And here's the way it works. If you look at keyword tools, what these SEO people are doing, they're looking at keyword tools. They're looking at the same keywords as everybody else.

Aviva (26:30)
You

Ed Winslow (26:50)
I learned long, long time ago that it's not, that's not how the game works. You have to look at, you have to put yourself in the shoes of the consumer. Like if, if I, I, I have shown the office space costs at the world trade center to SEOs. I've spoken in front of 200 people, 200 SEOs and said, look at this client right here. I've got him ranking, you know, for office space costs to the world trade center. And I got laughed at by everybody in the room is laughing at me like,

You don't know what the heck you're talking about. And I'm like, and they said, well, of course there's no competition for that in theory. And there's nobody searching for that. Of course you can rank for that. said, well, why is he getting 500 visitors a month? And why is he putting four kids through $75,000 a year colleges? If nobody searches that, why is he getting all this business? If nobody searches office space costs at the world trades center or some variation.

and their minds are blown and that's not how works. You have to look at the world from the perspective of the consumer. that's how people are going to search. They're not searching like it's the yellow pages. I mean the yellow pages are long gone. People are like talking to Google and the way it works and that's one of the beauties of the one-page case study model is that

Aviva (27:54)
Right.

Ed Winslow (28:16)
We start with a very specific headline that tells a story. know, look at bobbkrea.com. Look at all the success stories. And you'll see elevator apartment building sold on 123 East 84th Street in Yorkville, NYC. And we'll do, you know, very detailed neighborhoods. use location information. Location information is so important.

Aviva (28:32)
Thank

Ed Winslow (28:44)
I mean, think about every movie you've ever seen or every book you've read. It's like location is everything, right? It's all about what's happening where. And so you can say, for example, the One World Trade Center in New York City, and you can use that as a line item in your one-page case study. Or you can say, One World Trade Center is in downtown Manhattan, three blocks west of Wall Street.

Two blocks south of Tribeca, it's adjacent to the Four Seasons Hotel and Harry's at Hanover restaurant is right there and here the trains to New Jersey and the ferry to here. Boom, add a little bit more detail. Nobody's doing that. You could start to get into breaking down the statistics. How much is the World Trade Center? Well, it's different.

Aviva (29:30)
Hmph.

Ed Winslow (29:42)
Depending on the level floor you're at, you know, it can go from 73 a foot on the lower floors to 78 a foot to 85 a foot. But what does that mean to the consumer? Get out my simple calculator and it's like well if I was gonna rent the lower floor at 73 a foot and it's 2500 square feet Here's how much it is a month. Here's how much it is a year Do that for 5,000 square feet and 10,000 square feet and now you have this nice little chart

Aviva (30:11)
Hmm.

Ed Winslow (30:11)
Google

eats up the statistics. That's why this guy's ranking so well. You could do that over and over. And then what happens is when you start to take, you start to build a portfolio of these kind of pages and you link one to the other, to the other, to the other within your own website, Google, the way Google works, they crawl through a page. When they see a link, they follow that link. where does it go? it's to this page. So they see the relevance between this page and this page.

Aviva (30:41)
Hmm.

Ed Winslow (30:41)
And then

it goes to the next page and they keep following the links. So imagine you had 12 pages, 12 buildings in your, in your market and they follow, they go to number one and they, the links lead to number two to three to four to all the way back to 12. then 12 links to one, they sort of get caught in this loop and now they get to learn all the relevance. And now you start to, it's not like you're ranking for one thing. You're all of sudden you're ranking for a hundred things.

I mean, that's how people, that's how we all learn. mean, that's how we are as human beings, right? We don't learn just one thing. Google knows it all and they're looking to, you know, Google is based on trust, right? There's this thing, Google, it's called Google E E A T expertise, experience, authority and trust. And that's what the basis of that's what Google is built on. So when you're giving them the best information, authoritative content,

And then we do a lot of press release marketing, press release marketing, especially from really quality news sources like business insider or MSN. That's like get me getting, or you getting a, referral or recommendation by Bob Knakal You know, so if Bob recommends you, boy, do you have a lot of credibility or if the New York times publishes me, I've got a lot of credibility. You know, Joe, the plumber does well, it's not quite, it doesn't carry the weight.

So this is the model and this is not just how it works online, it's how it works offline in the real world. that's why, that's how this whole model of proof stacking works. It's sort of interesting, it's pretty amazing. Pretty amazing. People don't realize how to dominate local markets and it's not that hard. It's easy, frankly.

Aviva (32:34)
So is this like

having an article section in your website and then you put valuable articles like you're saying? And it's the blogs. Yeah.

Ed Winslow (32:43)
It's like blog. It's like blogging. It's like old school blogging. It's like,

you have web pages and then you have like your blog pages. I mean, it's to me, they're sort of the same. you have to figure out the right structure on your website. You have to have the right messaging, like if you think about in your market in, where you are, you know, let's say you implemented a model.

Aviva (32:53)
Hmph.

Hmph.

Ed Winslow (33:03)
Let's say you could implement the model, right? You could create a thousand pages. Today, you can create a thousand pages because we have the AI that can help us create this. And when your prompts are created the right way, you can bang out the content and bang it out, boom, post it on your website, do another one, post it on your website. there's a little format. It's like a cookie cutter. You just sort of keep doing it and doing it and doing it and doing it and doing it. That's how you do it.

Aviva (33:31)
Wow.

Ed Winslow (33:33)
What happens a lot of times, most of the time is you find opportunities that like the internet is going to open up doors that you never even thought existed. It's going to create relationships with people. I mean, I'll just tell you a real quick story. I got a call one day, a number of years ago. And this was sort of like early in the game when I was getting this SEO agency going, which I didn't even know I had an agency. I just happened to get a phone call one day and

Aviva (34:00)
you

Ed Winslow (34:02)
This woman calls me up and says, starts asking me questions because she found something that I had written online. And I ended up with a 12 location radiology company in Southern New Jersey. And we implemented this model, built, worked with them for about eight years until I lost the client because they were bought for 450 million. And it was due to what we had done for them. I mean,

I mean, I made money, but I didn't make what they made, but it was the marketing, the exposure online. And what we did was we just followed this model and we just built it up every time. And that's how it works. There is no one hit wonder with this stuff. You you've got to, you got to have your plan and you stick with it and you got to be patient. You know, you got to don't try and think you're going to become a zillionaire overnight.

Aviva (34:37)
Hmm.

Ed Winslow (34:57)
doesn't happen that way you build this build it a step at a time.

Aviva (35:00)
I could just pick your brain all day, but...

Ed Winslow (35:02)
I could talk about this all day because it's,

this model, you know, the thing that's interesting about this is that you don't have to go after a big market. You can go after a small market time. can go like in a single town and just draw a circle around where you are and just start to go after it and just stay with that and just dominate a small market instead of trying to go wide and go deep.

Aviva (35:16)
Hmm.

Hmm.

Ed Winslow (35:27)
And you are going to get to know everybody in your market You're going to develop the relationships with people that are just so deep like you're you know, like you're a partner with them And what that does is it just like that opens up so many doors You know, you're going to find things that maybe outside Of your little market, you know, I I use I I created this little course and I talk about

Aviva (35:49)
Yeah.

Ed Winslow (35:52)
going after, I talk about the difference between being a tomato gardener or being a tomato farmer. If you try and become a tomato farmer, you need a big farm, you need equipment, you need people, you need knowledge to be able to grow those tomatoes.

But if you start to focus and that's not gonna work if you're just starting out or what you're not gonna be able to be a farmer. But if you focus on a small area and say, you know what, I'm gonna plant my little patch for tomatoes. I'm gonna start to grow my tomatoes. I'm gonna learn how much water, how much sun, how to trim prune the tomato plants, how much fertilizer they need.

And what's going happen is year after year, those tomatoes are going to get bigger. They're going to produce more off that vine. They're going to get richer. And once you've got that model and it's your, you're crushing it on your tomato, your little tomato garden, you can open up another one next door and you can teach somebody else how to do that. And you can start to build tomato gardens and you can become a tomato farmer, but you can't start first. If you try and go after too much, I think that's where people

Aviva (37:03)
Hmm.

Ed Winslow (37:16)
I think that's where people fail in the business is they try and go after too much. They're all over the place. They're like, okay, I'm going over here today and I'm going over there tomorrow. You know, they're just, they're just lost. They don't know where to go. They don't know what to do. The most important thing that, cause I've seen it. I've done it. I've seen, I've seen what works. I've made mistakes, but I don't think there's anybody better to look at than Bob Knakal. I built out his whole website, all his websites. I do all his SEO and everything.

Aviva (37:19)
Hm.

Ed Winslow (37:46)
And I built out his whole strategy for him. And if you go to bobknakal.com it's all right there. It's laid out. You can see exactly what the formula

Aviva (37:55)
Wow. Ed, well, I'm excited to go to bobknakal.com and see what it looks like. Ed, what is your commercial real estate secret to share with the listeners today?

Ed Winslow (38:12)
My secret identify that market is number one. This is really simple. Identify your market number one. Number two are your are what I call your case studies which are market reports and success stories. And number three is to keep on stacking. That's it. That's all you got to do.

You keep doing that over and over and over and over and over and that's it. That's the secret.

Aviva (38:46)
Proof stacking. Can everybody go buy it right now on Amazon? Is it? Okay.

Ed Winslow (38:50)
It's on Amazon. Yeah, you can go on

Amazon. You can do a search for you can do a search for proof stacking. And you can there's a bunch of information on my website, one page case studies.com. You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm around. I'm pretty easy to find.

Aviva (39:10)
Ed, I'm so glad that Nina connected us. The internet is vast, but amazing people like Nina, I say this selfishly with the podcast. I thought I was making a podcast to make content, and I just am taken aback by how much I've learned just talking to people like you and...

Ed Winslow (39:13)
Thank you.

Aviva (39:37)
The more you give, the more you get.

Ed Winslow (39:38)
It's me, it's,

meeting people and networking and, you know, the thing is is that you really got to build a brand and how do you build a brand? you build it with this model? Because that's how people are going to remember you.

And that's the thing. It's like, Gary Vaynerchuk, he said, you know, he's a big marketer. said, you know, every business needs to build a brand. When you build a brand, there is no selling. The clients come to you.

Aviva (40:07)
That's how the warehouse hotline was founded.

Ed Winslow (40:10)
Right, but i'm going to take it another step further when you're when you're stacking the proof There is no selling the clients come to you because the way to build a brand is with proof Because that's what that your message becomes crystal clear people remember you but if you're all over the place You're fuzzy people don't understand. They're confused. They don't even think about you. But if you are very defined You will succeed

Aviva (40:40)
Ed, this has been a pleasure. You know, I had Gary on Commercial Real Estate Secrets. He was episode number 55. I have to send it to you. Yes. Yes. So that was a fun one. But I,

Ed Winslow (40:50)
really? ⁓ that's amazing. Amazing. that's...

Yeah, that's.

Aviva (41:00)
You

know, I'll plug my shows for another day. But, and Bob was episode 100. So just, yeah, very, very fortunate.

Ed Winslow (41:07)
Wow, wow. Well, he

probably said a lot of the same things that I'll bet you he said a lot of the same things that I did. I don't know. I'd love to hear what he...

Aviva (41:16)
Yeah,

Bob's the best. You know, he's a good he's just humble and hard working. No, no BS.

Ed Winslow (41:24)
But you know what,

if you look at Bob, I tell you, he has the amazing ability to do the same thing over and over and over and over. And, if you listen to Alex Hermosy, you know, what does he say? I saw him on an interview and this wealthy guy said to him, like, what's the key to the first hundred thousand? He said, do one thing and do it over and over and over until you get to that first hundred grand.

And he's the guy said, well, okay, what do I do? What do you do when you get to a hundred thousand? How do you get to a million? He said, do the same thing that got you to a hundred. Just do more of it. mean, you know, pick a, you know, what, what he's saying is pick a direction. And he said, you know, he'll say that the reason why most businesses fail is because they deviate. And if I can take one more, one more little tip for everybody here.

Aviva (42:03)
you

Yeah.

Ed Winslow (42:22)
And I'll tell you a really, really quick story about Jim Ventura, who worked, grew up with Bob and was the second salesman after me, who came to work at Massey Knakal Realty, who now is a partner at a huge triple net lease company. When he started with Massey Knakal he created his little territory and he started making his calls. Two months in, he had called everybody in his territory. didn't get one lead. He went back to Bob, Bob, what do I do? I didn't get one lead.

Bob said start again Two months later. It comes back to bob bob. It's been two four months now. I haven't gotten one lead in this area What do I do bob said do it again? And then he started to get some leads And then he started to get some exclusive listings and then He started to sell some buildings And then he's so busy. He can't keep up but it took him a while but that any business is going to be like that so even

Aviva (43:06)
You

Ed Winslow (43:22)
Even as good as Bob Knakal is if you took him from New York City and said, okay, Bob, we're going to move you out to LA. it's going to take him time even though he's from New York and he's got this tremendous skill. It's going to take him time to get up and going with all the skillset that he's got. going to take him time to build a business in LA. New crowd, new market, stay with one market.

Aviva (43:48)
Hmm.

Ed Winslow (43:49)
Do what you like, find a market that you love.

And just, doesn't matter what it is, whether you're selling apartment buildings or strip centers or industrial buildings or golf, mini golf courses or triple net lease buildings. I mean, if you're doing, I I work with a guy named Joe Serfin in Northern Virginia. He's, he's doing a tremendous business selling early education buildings in Virginia. Like he's doing it. He's crushing it. He has become the guy for early education buildings in

Aviva (44:15)
Wow.

Ed Winslow (44:22)
Virginia there's like a thousand of these buildings and you know the turnover every year is like two percent And he's getting a very very high percentage of those buildings and they're all like five million dollar buildings I don't know. He's probably selling ten of them a year plus he does other things but Pick one niche Pick a geographic area. Don't go after too much. I think that's about as simple as that

Aviva (44:26)
Wow.

Ed, this has been fantastic. I think you brought a ton of value here and I really, really appreciate your time and knowledge today.

Ed Winslow (44:56)
I'm glad to hear I'm happy to tell a story anytime. It's sort of the same story over and over, but you know what? You have to hear it. think people have to hear the story a lot because it's very easy to deviate because you're going to run into those rough patches all the time. And you got to stay focused. That's the key to success in this business.

Aviva (45:09)
Yeah.

It's the long game. None of us are here because we're playing the short game.

Ed Winslow (45:28)
wish it was easier. I wish

it was quicker. But you know, listen, I see it just when running Facebook ads, to little mini courses that I sell for $33. You know, nobody buys off the ad. I got to get them in my funnel. I got to get them in the funnel and then I've got to send email after email after email. Sometimes it takes a year or two. I've seen people go to my checkout.

Five six seven times over two years and then back off on a thirty seven dollar product And then and then they buy So you have to understand the funnel you have to understand that consumer and the life of it and the only way it works again I'm like repeating myself. can I can show you a million different ways You just got to stay in front of the same people. You've got to build that audience. You got to look at it like a sales funnel You treat them as your clients Eventually, they're going to come around

Aviva (46:27)
love it. Well, thank you, Ed. I really, really appreciate your time. Everybody listening, go grab the book, Proof Stacking by Ed Winslow on your favorite book platform, Amazon. And for everybody listening, we'll see you next week.