What Is The Warrior Group?

Intro
Hi, my name is Rod Khleif, and I’m the host of “The Lifetime Cashflow Through Real Estate Investing” podcast. And every week, I interview Multifamily Rock Stars and we talk about how they build incredible wealth for themselves and their families through multifamily properties. So hit the “Like” and “Subscribe” buttons to get notified every Monday when a new episode comes out. Let’s get to it.

Mark
Hey, guys. Welcome back to Multifamily Rock Stars. This is a little bit of an unusual interview and the fact that Rod isn’t doing the interview here. I am. I’m obviously Mark. I run the Massive Action Team for Rod here. And Rod is the one being interviewed today. The reason we’re doing this is a question I get so often. People listen to the podcast, they love it, and they hear people having success in the Warrior program. And I get asked all the time, Rod, what is the Warrior Program? What’s it about? How can it help me? And this is kind of what this podcast is today. It’s really for the people that have been thinking about joining a community you know, so they don’t have to build the business on their own or maybe getting a mentor and skipping the trial and error part. Or maybe they just like you. They like you, they like your story and they just need a little bit more info on maybe how you can help them before they reach out to my team. And so that’s the point of the podcast here today.

Rod
All right, well, let’s have some fun.

Mark
Yeah. Well, you know, we always start with the story. You’re asking them. I want to start same with you, Rod. Why did you create the Warrior program? Why do you mentor people? You’re obviously financially well off. Why do you still do this today?

Rod
Well, it’s funny. You know, you want to make God laugh, you tell him your plans, right? So I started my podcast because many of you know my story. I lost $50 million in 2008 and ’09. And I just wanted to share my story really about the fact that you know, it was my single-family that caused me to crash and burn. My multifamily did just fine through the crash. If I hadn’t cross-collateralized my multifamily with packages of houses, I’d still own those apartment complexes. So I wanted to get that message out there that if you’re going to buy and hold real estate, for God’s sakes, do multifamily, don’t do single-family. You know, look at me as a poster child for that. And, you know, early on in the podcast– you know, that was the main reason. But then the secondary reason is I knew I was going to get back into real estate and I hate asking for money. And I thought, you know what, it’ll be a great vehicle for me to talk about deals if I find one and raise equity for deals. And so early on the podcast, I used to say, if you listen to early episodes, I say I’ll never sell you anything. I just want to add value. And that was the truth at the time. I’d really never planned to. And then you know, I hit a million downloads. I’m like, all right, buddy, you probably got to do something with this. So I wrote my number one best-selling book, “How to Create Lifetime Cashflow Through Multifamily Properties”. Because, you know, what I was doing was I was taking free phone calls from my listeners, and they were always asking me, do you have a course? Do you have a book? Do you have something that I can move forward? Because I would do these free 30-minute phone calls, and I had hundreds of them. I’m not exaggerating. I said, just call me. I mean, let’s have a call. I’ll help you in any way that I can. It doesn’t matter what the topic is. And I really enjoyed them. And they kept asking me for stuff. And so I’m like, finally, you know, I wrote this book and I gave away 20,000 copies of this book. I still give this book away for free. You can go to “RodsLinks.com” and get it for free. Just pay for the shipping. It’s like six, seven bucks or something. But finally, it got to the point where I really needed to do something. And now I lie. I’m a liar because I sell everything. You know, I’ve got courses, coaching, and everything else, but I never planned to. That’s the thing. I really just wanted to add value. And that’s still how we operate our company. We try to add absolutely as much value as we possibly can. And so I started taking– I created a course, and I can humbly say it’s the best multifamily course out there, bar none. If anybody wants to argue with me, I’d love to have that debate, but it’s fantastic. It’s extraordinary. And at first, I didn’t do coaching, but then I decided to go ahead and start doing some coaching. And it was just me. And then, you know, I brought in super successful operators to do the coaching. And now, you know, pretty much most of our coaches are Warriors, and our coaches are not professional coaches. They are people that own hundreds or thousands of units. And, you know, many of them can only take one, two, three students. And we facilitate that. And, you know, it’s just turned into this incredible ecosystem. I think right now, our students own upwards of 170,000 units that we know of. We’re doing a count and we’re over 160,000. I really think we’ll exceed 170. You know, it’s very, very exciting. And, you know, people, when they talk about the program, the biggest thing they talk about is the community.

Mark
It’s funny, you mentioned the free calls you used to do. Every once in a while, I’ll get somebody on the phone who says, oh, yeah, I did one of those free calls with Rod, six years ago, and I never did anything with it.

Rod
No kidding. That’s funny.

Mark
Every once in a while. Yeah, it’s pretty rare.

Rod
That’s awesome.

Mark
Now you’re obviously just under six years later, that many doors. Most of them that I see in the group, obviously, are done between Warriors. I think there’s just a trust level there. But why do you think so many Warriors do work together on deals instead of going outside the network?

Rod
Sure. No, good question. Actually, you know, you’ve heard me say it– if you listen to this podcast at all, you’ve heard me say this is a team sport. It’s absolutely a team sport. Yeah, it’s not something you do on your own. You don’t buy 1, 2, 3, 10, 20, 30, 40 million dollars properties on your own for the most part. It’s done with other people, with partners. And, you know, that community breeds that interaction. We, in fact– you know, it’s interesting. We discovered, I don’t know, three and a half, four years ago, that our most successful Warriors, by far, are the ones that are the most connected in the Warrior community. So we started doing things to help facilitate those connections. You know, when you join, you’ll get a list of all the Warriors in the state that you live in, and then you can connect with them in our closed Facebook group and have lunch and dinner and people post all the time when they meet each other online. It’s just an incredibly supportive environment in that regard. And then, you know, we also have breakouts after our Q&A calls every other week where you can speed date and randomly meet Warriors. And then, you know, we have our Warrior-only events. And this is all stuff we did over the years that we added as we started seeing that this was really helping, you know because these connections inside the community are just absolutely freaking critical. And so we have our Warrior-only events. We’ve got one coming up in November in Phoenix. Up to this point, I was doing them all in Sarasota because I’m like, I buy you fly. But I’ve decided to do some for the West Coast peeps. So we’re doing one in Phoenix in November.

Mark
Thank you.

Rod
You’re welcome.

Mark
Yes.

Rod
And of course, you know, our coaching students are able to come to our events for free. The boot camps, we’ve got our big boot camp coming up in September. It should be about 1,000 people there. And there’ll be several hundred Warriors there as well. And so, you know, again, we do everything to facilitate those connections because we’ve discovered that it really is about what you– sorry, it really is about who you know, not what you know in this business. You know, yes, the course is important, the training is important, the boot camp is important. But what’s more important is who you know, the connections you make. Because, you know, most people get into this business by aligning with someone that’s already done it and, you know, called a sponsor. That’s the technical term for it. Somebody that’s got some doors, that maybe has some experience, that possibly has the net worth and liquidity requirements that a person needs to buy a property. And of course, we’ve got dozens and dozens and dozens of those in our Warrior community. So it makes it so much easier for somebody to get started, you know, to connect with a group.

Mark
So this is a perfect segue because another maybe top five questions I get all the time because most Warriors– maybe one or– outside of one or 2%, almost all the Warriors that joined have not done any multifamily experience. The question I get is, okay, I’m coming into this group potentially, all these people have all this experience, etc. How do I add value to team up with these people and do my first deal, why would these people want to work with me? What do you see?

Rod
Yeah. No, that’s actually a great question, and we get it a lot like you said. And really, I would say the top two ways to get enamored by a team is to either bring a deal or to raise money and bring money. Those are the top two for sure. But there are other things you can do as well. If you are super analytical and you’re great at underwriting, that is a huge plus for a team. And of course, our students all get our incredible underwriting platform, our spreadsheet that we use to underwrite deals. It’s just extraordinary. One of my team members on my personal acquisition team built it, Craig, and he’s phenomenal. You know, so if you underwrite deals, that’s a value add as well. And I’ve got super introverted Warriors that are very successful that you know, were very, very tentative and introverted, but great at underwriting. They now have literally thousands of units because they connected with other people and added value and boom, they’re off to the races. And then, you know, there’s also the asset management piece. It’s the project management, maybe construction experience, project management experience, management experience in general, because you buy these assets and you don’t throw your hands up and say, my work here is done. You’re going to manage that thing. You’re going to manage the property management companies for several years. And that’s a big piece. And so if you’ve got some experience there, you can bring that to a team. So there are lots of different hats that a person can wear. Of course, the number one is bringing money and bringing deals, but, you know, we teach you how to do all of that.

Mark
Now, that’s the technical side. Obviously, there is a personality and mindset side to this, which is super, super important. My two cents, I think that’s a big part of why people work with each other in the group as well because they’re very like-minded.

Rod
Sure.

Mark
How would you describe the culture of the group, the community? You know, what’s the mindset? And how do you protect that at this point?

Rod
Well, if you ever go to my website and go to the Warrior Win page, you will see tons of testimonials and interviews that we’ve had here on Rockstar’s episodes, and everybody raves about the community. And honestly, part of my job now is not just to, you know, bring more Warriors in, surely, but it’s really to protect what we’ve got. And, you know, we don’t allow any big egos in there because it’s become such a supportive environment. I mean, it’s extraordinary, candidly. You know, when somebody posts a deal that they’ve closed on, which is almost daily now, everybody jumps in and they get tons of congratulations. If somebody needs help with something, they post a question and within minutes there are people responding. I mean, it’s like that analogy, a rising tide lifts all ships. Okay? And that’s really what it is. Everybody is elevated inside the group because it’s so supportive and helpful. And I’ll tell you, the culture is very giving. Literally about a week ago, which I’m about to post in the Warrior group myself because he would never do it. But we’ve got a gentleman in the group that’s very successful and he has been building schools in India. And he sent me pictures of what he’s built and I’m going to post it and put him on the spot. So I remember at our Denver boot camp, we did what’s called a Hall of Fame for our Warriors. And we just picked ten exemplary Warriors. And it wasn’t based on how many doors they had. It was just based on a lot of things like, you know, do they help other people in the group? Certainly some success with how many units they have. And we picked ten. And, you know, we did a PowerPoint for each one of them. We asked them some questions and we discovered that every single one of them does something charitable. You know, like building schools in India, like, you know, sexual trafficking, raising funds for that, veterans’ homelessness, veteran suicide, just some really important causes. And every one of them did something. And it was just extraordinary to see that. I remember pointing that out to the 900 or 1,000 people there. I’m like, hey, that’s what we call a clue, guys. And that’s really the environment we’ve created is people helping each other succeed. You know, it’s so important that you are in a group of people that aren’t going to negate your dreams and or make fun of you or try to hold you back out of their own fear or their own limiting beliefs. So you need to be in a group– if you’re not going to join the Warriors, that’s fine. But you need to be in a group of people that will support you, praise you, validate you, push you, hold you accountable. And that’s what this group is, because you know, there are so many naysayers out there that will, out of their fear, like I said, they’ll destroy your dreams if you allow them. Your environment is so freaking important. You know, a lot of people default to a group of people that they went to school with for their peers, the people they, you know, work with. And sometimes those aren’t the best people. And sometimes it’s family as well. So you got to be really careful who you allow to influence you. And that’s what makes a group like this so extraordinary. Now, this one is off the chain extraordinary. But, you know, again, you could absolutely do this on your own as well. But you’ve got to get in a group like that where everybody’s rowing in the same direction. They want the same thing. They’re going to be encouraged by your success rather than feel rejected or humiliated or embarrassed or, you know, just negate it because of their own crap going on in their heads.

Mark
And by the way, that’s a part of the group. You know, I’ve been a part of coaching programs, and there are other real estate coaching programs out there. They’re all going to teach you multifamily. You say this all the time, right?

Rod
Right.

Mark
There is no magical secret sauce to it. But part of what we do is that high-performance coaching.

Rod
Well, you guys all know I’m into mindset and psychology. My God, I spent 20 years following Tony Robbins around the planet, worked with him for a while. And that’s my whole shtick because 80 to 90% of your success is mindset and psychology. So I became a certified high-performance coach several years ago because I wanted to add that component to my coaching program because, to me, it’s more important than the technical knowledge, frankly. Okay? And in that high-performance part, we go through things like your courage to take action because obviously there are more zeros on these deals. Your ability to influence people because this business is a team sport, you got to influence. And even things like your productivity, your ability to systemize this and actually turn it into a business so you’re not killing yourself. But even soft skills like your relationships with your children, with your spouse, you know, your mission and purpose in life, stuff that’s bigger than the real estate, but also foundational to the real estate because it affects everything. And so we have these high performances– you know, I’ve got a certified high-performance coach that’s a freaking rock star that helps me with this. But we have our high-performance coaching calls and they’re awesome. People rave about them. And so every month there’s those, in addition to, of course, all the other real estate– you know, the multitude of real estate coaching calls that we have. But that’s a big piece of, I believe, why our students are so freaking successful is because we push that content that’s so absolutely critical to success, that looking in the mirror, focusing on becoming, in my case, say, a better father, a better husband, a better entrepreneur, a better business person, but really, frankly, a better human being. And so that’s the stuff we do there. And I think it’s just incredibly powerful. One other thing I want to mention is every single one of my Warriors has my cell number. I talk to Warriors every single day. I’m very accessible. I take this very, very seriously. I take my Warrior’s success very seriously. And I only have one phone. Okay? It’s got two numbers on it because I had to get a second number with Hurricane Ian because I didn’t have any signal here. But I only have one phone and every Warrior has my number. So, you know, it’s not like some guru thing where I’m up on some white you know, throne somewhere. I take this very seriously and I take the success and honestly, the protection of my Warriors very, very seriously.

Mark
Now, to get into the details a little bit more. There are some people I know–I’ve been this person before that I know you always talk about text “crush”, “72345”. You’re interested in applying for the Warrior program. Maybe that’s in the back of someone’s mind, but they’re a little nervous, they’re a little scared, they’re not quite ready to take that step. You know, they’re a little bit more information gatherers. What are some of the other, I guess, pieces of the Warrior group that you can kind of give away, just some little golden nuggets here [inaudible]

Rod
Sure. Well, I’ll tell you, there’s, of course– it’s a lot. But let me simplify it. We partner you with a coach, and we don’t have professional coaches like everybody else does. Our coaches are operators. They’re people that have done, in most cases, more than 1,000 units. In some cases, 600, or 700 units. But they’re all freaking rock stars. And they can all only take maybe one to four students a piece because they’re just doing this because they want to give back. Okay? And that’s really the bottom line. And they’re extraordinary. We have about 30 coaches or so. And so, you know, you’re paired with a coach, an awesome coach. Of course, there are a lot of other coaching calls as well, group calls and things like that. I won’t get into too much detail there, but there’s a ton, I mean, more than you can handle. Okay? And then, you know, you get put into our entire– and of course, the high-performance calls, like we just said, those coaching calls, and those are very intimate, those. And then, you know, you get put into our entire community. You get access to, you know, literally over 1,000 people around the country. We have people in literally every city in the country. And then you get all– of course– so that group is just incredible. We’ve talked about that. It’s just extraordinary, the group itself. But then you get all the tools and tons of tools and resources, everything you could possibly– more than you can imagine. Let me just put it that way. You get all of that. And of course, you get a complete action plan, so you know what to do. Step one, step two, step three. You know, it’s just extraordinary. The program itself is extraordinary, which is why the results are so extraordinary. And I’ll tell you, I’m so freaking proud of it. I have to tell you, besides my kids and my wife, I don’t think I’m more proud of anything, which is you know, what we’ve accomplished with this Warrior program and continue to accomplish.

Mark
And before this call, you mentioned a couple of things that have really, really changed people’s lives specifically. Obviously, there are lots of people retiring, quitting high-paying jobs, but you touched on a couple of things. Could you share a couple of success stories so people can connect the dots here of how real estate actually gets them to their goals?

Rod
Yeah. So I could certainly talk about the extraordinary students that have thousands and thousands of units retired from very high-paying jobs because their income has just eclipsed their W-2 income. But you know what I think I’d rather talk about is the ones that didn’t have a lot that succeeded, the ones that you know, didn’t have a lot of money, didn’t have you know, big connections, lived in small towns, single moms. Let’s talk about single moms, okay? My mom was effectively a single mom for a long time. So we’ve got single moms that have literally now you know, over 1,000 units there. They’ve retired from jobs– I mean, I can think of four or five off the top of my head. That is something I’m super proud of because you know, they have it much harder than somebody that’s got support, got other income coming in, don’t have kids to deal with. I’m thinking Mandy, I’m thinking Esther, I’m thinking Alice. I mean, I’m just thinking of all these women that are single moms that are just freaking killing it. That’s something I’m super proud of. And the fact that we’re able to create that– I mean, we’ve got a Women’s Warriors group. We’ve got all these little– that’s another thing that’s kind of cool. Inside the group, we’ve got all these little groups like a women’s group. We’ve got underwriting groups, accountability groups, masterminds.

Mark
Money-raising groups.

Rod
Money-raising groups. We got meetups all over the country. Warriors having meetups literally all over the country. Somebody just posted today in Baltimore. That part is, I think, the most exciting. It’s just the group dynamic and all of the kind ripple effects. You know, the ripple effect that’s happening inside the group is just extraordinary.

Mark
And I’d say that, too, working with so many students, talking with so many of them. That’s one of the most common things I hear is the students and the success stories, they’re just regular people with jobs, a lot of them with kids. It’s not multi, multi-millionaires. I mean, don’t get me wrong, there are some of those in the group as well but, yeah.

Rod
Almost every one of them did it on the side, literally, almost every single one of them. Hype– very involved, W-2 jobs, consuming W-2 jobs, spouses, kids, and they still just achieved extraordinary success on the side, doing this on the side. So, you know, if you’re thinking you can’t do it, that’s an excuse. I love you, but that’s an excuse.

Mark
Yeah. Last thing for you here, Rod, how do you measure that success when you’re working with a Warrior? What are some of the key indicators you look at?

Rod
That’s a great question, actually. And because every Warrior is different, I’ll tell you, I think the greatest barometer of success for me is when somebody gets their first deal, because, you know, there’s that law of the first deal. It’s the scariest, it’s the most stressful, it takes the longest. And then, you know, what I see is once they get one, it’s like the next thing I know, they have two, three, four. It’s like, what the heck just happened here? And I love it because you know when they get their first deal, they become what we call a Warrior of the Sword. They get this cool, real sword in the mail that says Warrior on it. It’s really very, very cool. And I think that’s my biggest measure of success because we’ve got so many– I mean, we’ve sent out so many of those dang swords that you can’t even imagine. And so, you know, I’m going to measure it that way because, I mean, yes, certainly the count globally and all the units that Warriors have bought is extraordinary. I mean, just mind-blowing, frankly. But I think on an individual basis, to get that first deal, I know they’re off to the races because then they realize that you know, it’s really not as scary as they thought it was, that it’s absolutely doable, that the mist goes away, the intimidation goes away. It’s really, to me, that’s a big measure because that’s the biggest hurdle is to get them into their first deal because, after that, I know they’re off to the races.

Mark
Couldn’t agree more. Right? They end up stacking up so many more. Well, I want to end this just real quick. Obviously, you mentioned this so often, you know, people that genuinely connect with all these things that you’re saying, you can text the word “crush” to “72345”. And one thing I do want to say that you don’t mention ever, I think, is that you know, there are a lot of real estate coaching programs out there that say, “Hey, if you’re a fit and we’re a fit” and they kind of use that as a sales tactic. The way that we have it set up, I am the only one that can enroll Warriors into the program. My team, the three guys that work below me that are all real estate investors, by the way, they cannot enroll anybody in the Warrior program. And so genuinely, if you reach out to us and, you know, the coaching, mentoring, it’s really not the right thing. My team will leave you in a better spot. They’ll help you get clear on some real estate items. They will send you off completely on your way to go do this on your own. And genuinely, you don’t even have to explore anything. You’re not going to be sold if it’s something you genuinely don’t want. And so it’s something we genuinely have the process set up to do so that nobody is pressured into doing anything unless we can really, really help them. And so if you have some fear of like, hey, this may be the right thing, but I don’t want to be sold, just know that it’s set up in the way that you won’t even speak to me about it if it’s something that is really not the right thing for you.

Rod
And I will say we have turned some people down. If I hear ego or narcissism, they’re out. But it’s not common. Okay? I’m just going to say that. So that’s the biggest thing that I’m doing is just protecting the group, you know. Yeah. So again, text “crush”, if you’re interested to “72345”, it’s extraordinary. It truly is extraordinary. People rave about it. And, you know, I hope you’ll check it out.

Mark
Yeah, I hope we’ve added some value in a little bit of a different way. Anything else you want to add, Rod?

Rod
No, I think that’s it, buddy. That was really informative.

Mark
All right. Well, I look forward to hearing from some of you listeners out there.

Rod
Take care, guys.

Outro
So one other quick thing. We encounter so many people that are frankly frustrated. They’re looking in the mirror and they’re frustrated that they haven’t been able to escape the rat race. They haven’t been able to build cash flow to the point where they’re able to have financial and time freedom with their families. And maybe they see other people buying real estate and creating incredible cash flow and they think well, it’s just scary. You know, buying apartments is intimidating. And I get it. See, that’s why we created our Warrior Mentorship Program. They’re our coaching students, and they’ve had extraordinary results. My students, I’ve been teaching about five years and they own upwards of 140,000 units now that we know of. Right? And we feel like it’s just getting going. Now, we’re looking to grow this group and really take it to the next level. And honestly believe that the greatest transfer of wealth could be upon us right now with this current economic environment. Everything’s going on sale. So we’re looking for people who want to follow a proven framework, really like a blueprint or a map, literally, step by step and then they’re able to leverage our systems and our incredible network to raise money and equity. To find deals and close those deals and build partnerships, really nationwide. So if you’re interested in finding out more about how you can become more in our incredible network and take advantage of the unbelievable opportunities that are upon us, you can apply to my warrior mentorship program by texting the word “CRUSH” to “72345” or you can go to “MentorWithRod.com”. And what we’ll do is we’ll set up a call so you can check us out and we can check you out and see if it’s a fit. Now, again, you can go to “MentorWithRod.com” or text the word “CRUSH” to “72345” to apply and we will speak soon.