Omer Reiner of FL Cash Home Buyers: Five Strategies I Used To Grow My Business To Reach Seven Figures In Revenue

An Interview With Doug Brown

The first strategy that enabled us to reach seven figures is focus. Focus is lacking in so many businesses today and that’s one of the causes for failure in business. On the other hand, extreme focus leads to extreme success. Real estate has so many niches and it’s very easy to get distracted and jump from one niche to the other. This happened to us in 2016. We were experiencing success in our fix and flip real estate business at that time and decided to start venturing into commercial real estate. We spent about a year in a commercial mastermind and started looking at commercial investment opportunities and spend more and more time on that. During that time, our core bread and butter business, began to suffer and deteriorate. It was lacking our attention, and at that point we didn’t have management in place to keep the business running successfully without us. So we decided to stop with the commercial investments and put our whole focus on building our fix and flip business and get it to a point where it can run successfully without our day to day involvement.

As a part of my series called “Five Strategies I Used To Grow My Business To Reach Seven Figures In Revenue”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Omer Reiner, co-founder of FL Cash Home Buyers, LLC — a real estate investing company based in Ft. Lauderdale that has been buying & selling properties in Florida since 2011. Reiner has a background in Yoga, and specializes in direct response marketing, SEO, and online branding.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

I was born in Israel and after serving in the army for 3 years, I travelled to India and Southeast Asia for about a year, and then ended up in a Yoga Ashram (a spiritual community) in Miramar, FL for a Yoga teacher’s certification course. I lived there for 6 years and immersed myself in the study of Yoga & meditation under the guidance of my spiritual teacher.

While I was living there, I was introduced to Real Estate investing by my spiritual teacher who had owned about 60 rental units in his past. The financial freedom, and time freedom that he experienced through real estate investing inspired me to get my real estate license in early 2011 and pursue this path. It was a few years after, in 2014, that I met my business partner at a Yoga class that I taught at the Ashram. We both had our own real estate companies back then and after doing a few deals together, we decided to partner up and grow the Florida Cash Home Buyers brand together.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began at your company?

In 2012, about a year after I started my first company, I sold an 8-unit property in Pompano Beach, FL to an investor. He then renovated it and held it as a rental for about 2 years. In 2014 he sold it to another investor who held it for 6 years and is now selling it back to us for about $500K more than what I sold it back in 2012! Talk about small world and real estate cycles ☺

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

Definitely. I wouldn’t be anywhere close to where I am today if it wasn’t for my spiritual teacher, Yogi Hari. While living in his Ashram for 6 years, he taught me so many valuable life lessons that forever helped me changed my life for the better. Real estate can be a very stressful business to be in. The spiritual practices that I learned in the Ashram help me maintain life-work balance, stay focused, develop determination, and keep everything in life in proportion.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

My spiritual teacher used to share a quote that his teacher, who didn’t know much English, shared with him. It was — “Thinking Good, Doing Good, Getting Good”. It’s such a simple sentence, but contains so much wisdom. It’s helped me always reflect on my thoughts and actions, knowing that those are the causes for what I experience in life. If things don’t work out and I experience some challenges, I always try to go back and reflect on my thoughts or actions that might have led to that experience, and then see what I can learn from it and work on, so that my life changes for the better.

Ok super. Thank you for all that. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. We’d love to learn a bit about your company. What is the pain point that your company is helping to address?

We’re in the business of buying properties from homeowners that need to sell quickly for various reasons. They may be facing foreclosure, relocating, need access to cash fast, etc. Some of them have a property that needs significant repairs and they just don’t have the funds or time to fix it up and sell on the open market. On the other hand, we also work with homeowners that are not in distress, but they simply don’t want to deal with the hassles & stress that come with the traditional way of selling through a Realtor, and just prefer a quick and easy cash sale.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

I think that what really puts us apart from many of our competitors is why we are in business. Yes, we’re in it to make some money, but that’s not our main goal in life and I think our customers can feel that. We regularly donate a portion of our profits to charity, and our main focus is to really make a positive impact in people’s lives and help make the world a better place. We regularly get feedback from homeowners who visit our site and tell us they decide to go with us vs. our competition because of our background story and what we stand for.

When you first started the business, what drove you, what was your primary motivation? What drives you now? Is it the same? Did it change? Can you explain what you mean?

I started the business with the desire to support my family and I financially, but also to enable me to donate a significant amount of money to charity. Since I was a child I really loved to be charitable and give to others, and I’m happy that this drive continues within me today. This is truly my motivating force, my core “why” for running this business. I’ve been blessed that my business partner shares this passion with me, and so do the members of our team. Our company’s goal is to donate $500,000 to charity by the year 2030. Since 2017, we’ve regularly donated a portion of our profits, and I’m excited that so far we’ve been able to donate about $40,000.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

We recently got in touch with “Stand For Health Freedom” and what they stand for really resonates with us. Up to now, we’ve donated to various different organizations, but moving forward we may shift our charitable efforts and focus on helping mostly this organization. We love what they are doing and feel that these days its crucial to support such a movement, as our health freedoms are being stripped away little by little.

The topic of this series is ‘Five Strategies I Used To Grow My Business To Reach Seven Figures In Revenue’. Congratulations! Seven figures is really a huge milestone. In your experience what was the most difficult part of being able to hit your first million-dollars in sales revenue?

The most challenging aspect of hitting our first $1M revenue year was to get ourselves out of the way and hire others to replace us. My business partner and I were doing everything in the business, fully involved in the day to day activities, and that wasn’t leaving us time to work “on” the business and grow it. We truly started to see growth once we started to hire out key positions in our company.

Could you share the number one sales strategy that you found helpful to help you reach this milestone?

I believe that our focus on nurturing existing leads and relentlessly following up with them has been key to our success. Many businesses don’t do this, and miss out on a lot of revenue that can be generated from these leads.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you or your team made during a sales process? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

One time we signed a contract with squatters that pretended to be the owners of a house that we wanted to buy. We took it all the way to the closing table and only at that point when the title company asked to see their ID’s in order to notarize the closing documents, their scam was revealed! Needless to say, we now ask to see an ID before signing a contract with anyone ☺

Does your company have a sales team? If yes, do you have any advice about how companies can create very high performing sales teams?

We have an inside and an outside sales team. The inside team is responsible to qualify new leads as they come in, and also follow up on existing leads. Their goal is to book appointments for the outside sales reps who make offers on the properties. For the past 5 years, we’ve had our sales teams take part in ongoing sales education in order to improve their sales skills. I think that’s key for any sales team to be successful.

Here is the main question of our interview. What are your “Five Strategies I Used To Grow My Business To Reach Seven Figures In Revenue”. Please share a story or an example for each.

The first strategy that enabled us to reach seven figures is focus. Focus is lacking in so many businesses today and that’s one of the causes for failure in business. On the other hand, extreme focus leads to extreme success. Real estate has so many niches and it’s very easy to get distracted and jump from one niche to the other. This happened to us in 2016. We were experiencing success in our fix and flip real estate business at that time and decided to start venturing into commercial real estate. We spent about a year in a commercial mastermind and started looking at commercial investment opportunities and spend more and more time on that. During that time, our core bread and butter business, began to suffer and deteriorate. It was lacking our attention, and at that point we didn’t have management in place to keep the business running successfully without us. So we decided to stop with the commercial investments and put our whole focus on building our fix and flip business and get it to a point where it can run successfully without our day to day involvement.

The second strategy is mentorship. Having a mentor is such a crucial aspect of business success. It can shorten the learning curve greatly to be taught and mentored by someone that has achieved the success you are looking to achieve. Since we started our business, we have been mentored by many successful real estate business owners. What really gave us a boost was joining a real estate mastermind. We joined “The Collective Genius” mastermind in 2015. Over 100 successful investors from all over the country were part of that group. Most of them where in a much more advanced stage of their business compared to us. At that time, my partner and I were doing pretty much everything in the business ourselves. On our first day there, on stage while we were presenting and sharing what we needed help with, we committed to hiring an outside sales agent for our business. We had reservations doing that, because that is one of the most important positions in our company. But hiring that position out, gave us the freedom and confidence to hire for other positions and slowly enabled my partner and I to step out of the day to day operations of the business and start focusing on working “on” the business and growing it to reach seven figures in revenue.

The third strategy is hiring top talent that fit well with our business culture. Through the years, we learned that it’s really the people that we hire who will determine if our business is going to be successful or not, and if we are going to enjoy coming to work every day and interacting with our team. We took several hiring trainings such as “Top Grading”, and really put an emphasis on hiring the right people. We’ve had several “bad” hires that helped bring us to that realization. In one case, we had an outside sales rep working with us who really didn’t fit our culture. He was a good salesman, but was focused too much on money and making the sale, vs. being empathic with our sellers and really caring about their situation. So after about a year we finally decided to let him go. Amazingly, the mood of the other team members improved so much the day after he was gone. I only wish we would have let him go sooner.

The fourth strategy is mastering paid marketing. Marketing is crucial to any business. The problem is that most businesses outsource marketing to agencies and that increases their cost of acquiring quality leads. If your lead cost is high, less chances you will be profitable in your business. That’s why from the time we started the business we focused on learning marketing ourselves, and to this day we continue to test, tweak, and improve on it. Through the years, we’ve been able to bring down our costs of acquiring leads and that has helped us increase revenues and profitability. Marketing is not as straightforward as it may seem. A good example of that is some direct mail we’ve tested in the past. We designed a really nice and professional looking full colored company letter, and wanted to test that against a simple “handwritten” post card. We were pretty sure that the letter would outperform the post cards, but were highly surprised when just the opposite happened. So nothing is obvious with marketing, and that’s why you always need to split test and see what works best for your business.

The fifth strategy is being charitable and focus on giving. Other than the spiritual belief that being charitable helps you create good karma and attract good things for you and your business, there are more noticeable benefits to being charitable and giving. For the past several years it’s been a focus for us to donate a portion of our profits to charity. We’ve also put a lot of emphasis on providing as much value to anyone we come in contact with as we can, regardless if we are able to do business with them or not. This strategy has helped us in several ways. For one, it aided us in attracting great people to our organization who are of the same mindset and have been great to work with. Not only that, but it’s helped us get many positive online reviews from customers, and also from people that didn’t end up being our customers. This has tremendously helped our online conversions and brand reputation.

What would you advise to another business leader who initially went through years of successive growth, but has now reached a standstill. From your experience do you have any general advice about how to boost growth or sales and “restart their engines”?

I think the best way to overcome this challenge is through learning from others who are one or more steps ahead of you. Try to associate, mastermind and be coached by business owners that have experienced next level growth from where you’re at. You’ll learn a ton from them on what you need to do in order to take your own business to the next level.

In your specific industry what methods have you found to be most effective in order to find and attract the right customers? Can you share any stories or examples?

Our best marketing channel has been our website and ranking it organically over the years. It’s provided us with consistent revenue and currently over 50% of our sales originate from the site. At this point, since we’re ranking high for many keywords that our customers type in, we hardly need to spend money on the site and the leads are almost free. What’s really helped us increase our conversions on the site was to re-write it ourselves and make sure that our content is unique, personable, and answers the objections our typical customers may have. Since we did that, we’ve gotten a lot of great feedback from customers on how our site looks and feels, and our lead flow has gone up about 150% from where it used to be at!

Based on your experience, can you share a few strategies to give your customers the best possible user experience and customer service?

Always try to provide as much value as you can, even if you cannot do business with the person that reached out to your company. We’ve found that by doing this, it’s helped us get referrals from customers, and I believe that it has also created some good karma for us ☺. But seriously, people really appreciate it if you are coming from a place of giving and truly want to provide help without asking for anything in return. Not too many businesses do this these days.

Never try to push your services onto your customers. We actually try to persuade people away from doing business with us if we feel that they can benefit more by going a different route. For example, if someone reaches out to us and wants to sell their home for full market value, the property is in great condition, and they are not in a rush to sell, we always tell them they’ll probably be better off listing it with a Realtor instead of selling it to us.

As you likely know, this HBR article demonstrates that studies have shown that retaining customers can be far more lucrative than finding new ones. Do you use any specific initiatives to limit customer attrition or customer churn? Can you share some of your advice from your experience about how to limit customer churn?

In our business, the homeowners that reach out to us are our potential customers. It’s a bit different from a typical customer in a B2B or B2C business relationship, but the principles are the same. Even though we spend thousands of dollars every month on marketing, we’ve always put an emphasis on nurturing our existing leads because we know that this is where the highest return on our time and money will come from. The money is in the follow up as many people say, and we find it very true. We use a combination of technology (automated text and email drip sequences) and live follow-up to help us maintain constant touch points with our customers.

Once we go under contract with a homeowner to purchase their home, our relationship with that customer goes to the next level and maintaining great communication is key at that point. This principle applies to all types of customers as everyone expects to be responded to on time, and be dealt with professionally and with integrity.

Wonderful. We are nearly done. Here are the final “meaty” questions of our discussion. You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

Great question! Being an entrepreneur, I see the struggle of so many business owners to maintain a work-life balance, fulfillment, good health, and peace of mind while working on building their businesses. Having experience in the field of Yoga and Meditation, I can see how beneficial having some kind of mastermind or group of business owners that get together and work on addressing those challenges by incorporating some of the practices and teachings of Yoga & Meditation.

We are very blessed that very prominent leaders read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them :-)

I would love to meet Neil Patel! I’ve been following his teachings about digital marketing for a while now and it would be awesome to actually get a chance to pick his brain in person, even if it’s just for a few minutes!

Thank you so much for this. This was very inspirational, and we wish you only continued success!