Using Meetups to Grow Your Business – Interview with Adam Adams | 414

Could creating a meetup group cause massive growth in your business?

Adam A. Adams, also known in the real estate community as Triple-A, has educated thousands of investors through real estate conferences, radio & podcast interviews, his coaching program, and his thriving Meetup group.

Adam hosts the Creative Real Estate Podcast, a podcast listened to around the world, with hundreds of thousands of downloads. His efforts to educate and inspire other investors have earned him the prestigious title “Master Investor” by Think Realty magazine and he is also a three-time Hall of Fame winner from RE Mentor for his successes in multifamily syndications.

In 2005, Adam took the plunge into part-time real estate investing, but it quickly became his full-time passion!

Today Adam is partnered in 7 multifamily syndications with approximately 1,400 doors valued slightly over $100 million. His company, BlueSpruce Holdings, focuses on finding and managing apartment communities to allow passive investors diversification, cash flow, tax benefits, and freedom of time.

Adam’s primary role in the company is to attract capital, successfully raising millions of dollars from private investors. He continues to grow his company’s brand as one of the top syndication teams in the United States.

Chris Miles (00:00):
Well, hello, my fellow Ripplers! This is Chris Miles. Your Cash Flow Expert and Anti-Financial Advisor. We want to welcome you out guys for a wonderful show. A show that’s for you and about you. Those of you that work so freaking hard for your money, and you’re now ready for your money to start working harder for you. Today! You want that freedom. That cash flow. That prosperity. Right now! Not 30 or 40 bazillion years from now, but right now. So you can have that life of freedom to be able to do what you love. To be with those you love. Whenever the heck you want to do it. But it’s so much more than just having a life of luxury, right? It’s so much more than just, you know, having great cash flow and being financially free. But it’s about having that life of legacy. Being that Rippler. Where you create a ripple effect to the lives of those around you. And guys, I appreciate it so much for allowing me to create a ripple effect through you guys.

Chris Miles (00:56):
Cause you guys have been awesome. I love hearing how much you guys are bingeing lately, and you’ve been sharing it with other people and everything else. I love watching those numbers grow. So I appreciate it so much that you guys are a part of this movement. Allowing this ripple effect to go through so many lives, if not thousands, the hundreds of thousands. So thank you so much guys.

Chris Miles (01:13):
As a reminder, you can check out our website, MoneyRipples.Com There you can go and see all of the good stuff. You know, everything from, you know, blogs from a couple of years ago that I occasionally write. Do even our little ebook called Beyond Rice & Beans, Seven Secrets to Free Up Cash Today. Which you can see there now. So check it out! Alright!

Chris Miles (01:33):
So today I want to bring on a special guest because this is the guy that, I’ve been on his show as well. But man, he had a reputation that proceeded himself and it finally had the opportunity to have him on our show. I can’t believe I didn’t, I’ve taken it, taken me this long to even get him on here. So this guy is Adam Adams. Some of you guys might know if you’re in the real estate community already. He’s also known as Triple A, right? He’s educated thousands of investors to real estate conferences, podcasts and radio interviews, coaching programs, his meetup groups and everything. Right? He’s also the creative real estate podcast that I ever suggest you guys go check out. His let’s do around the world has hundreds of thousands downloads as well. His effort to educate and inspire other investors had earned him the prestigious title of Master Investor by Think Realty Magazine. And he’s also a three-time hall of fame winner of RE Mentor for his success in multifamily syndication’s. Meetup.com has also recognized him as one of the top six meetup organizers in the world in 2018 guys. Which is going to be part of our topic today. He took the plunge and decided to go part time real estate investing, but it quickly became a full time passion for him. Today he’s partnering in seven multifamily syndications with approximately 1400 doors valued at slightly over a hundred million dollars. His company, BlueSpruce Holdings, focused on finding and managing apartment communities to allow passive investor diversification, cash flow, tax benefits, and freedom of time. So guys, this is huge! So excited to have Adam on. So Adam, welcome to our show!

Adam Adams (03:01):
Thank you so much for having me. And as you said, I’ve had you on our show a couple of times. So we really like and respect what you’re doing, Chris.

Chris Miles (03:09):
Yeah, absolutely man. So, give us a little background, like why’d you even go the real estate route in the first place?

Adam Adams (03:14):
I went real estate because of my family. I grew up doing real estate. So it seemed like a normal thing. So I had one of those unique childhoods where a lot of people grow up and real estate seems like a far off thing. I was almost pushing it away because it was so close. My dad was always saying, you’re going to do this. You’re going to do this. You got to save 10%. You got to invest 10%. And so it was actually in college when he first purchased my first real estate for me, then his CPA told him that he, I had to buy it back from him or else he was going to pay a lot in taxes. So yeah, fun stuff. When you’re a college student and barely making your books to have to pay for real estate. But with the cool thing is I made a 12000% return on my money within two years.

Adam Adams (04:03):
And so in 2007, two years later after selling that I had more money in the bank than I had ever made in an entire year before that. And so I was thinking to myself, well, I’m going to have to figure out how to really make this real estate thing work for me. I was going to school for music education. I’m a musician. Been writing music since I was very young. And it was that time when I decided that I’m probably not going to be a teacher because this was a whole years of teacher salary already. So I decided that that was what I was going to focus on. So I bought my first, my first triplex, I lived in it house hacked. Made some money in it. Managed some other properties. Made somebody a couple of million bucks fast. And it was like, I couldn’t get away from it. I couldn’t get away from it. So fast forward, 15 years. And now I have over a thousand apartments that I’m partnered in and loving every minute of it.

Chris Miles (05:06):
I love it, man! Man. So what, so tell us, like, obviously you’ve got a huge reputation for, like, you know, social media. You got this reputation for marketing. I mean, you even got asked to speak at the meetup conference, right? You made a global conference there as one of the top six speakers there, right? Like what they, how’d you even go the marketing route, like, was that just stumbled on by accident or is that just something that you just seem to master really naturally?

Adam Adams (05:31):
That’s a really good question. I feel like it was essential for me to learn it because when I was getting started in real estate, you know, and when I was starting to raise equity, I felt as though I was being drowned out completely by a lot of other noise and some of it was loud, you know, Grant Cardone is loud. And he’s drowning out a lot of the people that want to be in real estate or marketing or branding. And I felt that it was just necessary to figure out how I could start standing out. And I stumbled across some of it by accident. Like with the meetups that you mentioned, I was brand new to Colorado. I had just moved here to Colorado five years ago. And when I got here, I didn’t really know anyone.

Adam Adams (06:31):
I felt brand new and I felt like someone told me your network is your net worth. And so with the marketing and branding, I remember thinking, I’ve got to figure out how to grow a network in a new place. And it was actually my mother in law who said that meetup was a place that you could kind of grow your brand and get to know people in a new place. So I just started to meetup. I literally just, you know, I don’t suggest this to other people ready, fire aim. I always say ready, aim, fire, take the time to really figure it out. Yeah. And especially now that I can help other people do the same thing. I want them to skip their learning curve, but I just, I jumped into it. And the marketing I learned over time because in the beginning I only had a couple of people showing up.

Adam Adams (07:25):
And the only way on meetups that I could have more people come to the group is if I spent extra time in the back. In, what is it in the background. Actually marketing the meetup. And I did things like take pictures while I was there. Write stories about people that attend, because I felt like if, if other people that were going through the same thing knew that there was people like them attending my meetup, that would help them think, Oh, I should come to this meetup too. That guy had my problem. And now he’s successful. So I just started marketing, branding and throwing this out in, like you said, a couple years later, meetup HQ flew me out to speak to 150 of their top people. And that was a lot of fun. So in short I stumbled across it. Yes. I learned the hard way. Yes. And then I realized that if you don’t take the time to market and brand who you are and what you’re doing, people are just going to go to the other people that they’re hearing marketing brand, who they are and what they’re doing.

Chris Miles (08:35):
Well, that’s kind of, I was going to ask you is like, whether someone’s in a real estate investor or if they are a business owner, right? I know cause we’ve got different people on this show. You know, why do they feel so important that they do brand themselves or market themselves and have this kind of influence?

Adam Adams (08:49):
Yeah. Well, if they are a real estate investor and they’re looking for deals, it’s the main thing that is brought my company deals. And so here you go, this is the best way to sum it up. People do business with people that they know like and trust, right? And we all know that. And if 10 people know you, what’s the most amount of people that could ever like you or trust you? The max. So if you want to build a funnel, people are talking a lot about funnels these days. So a lot of people think it’s just a website. A funnel is a lot more than a website. A website is a piece, a small piece of a funnel. But if you want people to know you so that they can like you so that they can trust you so that they can invest passively in your deal or give you the next deal that they find where you need to close it or just do business with you. Then you got to have a lot of people knowing you. And to do that, you have to, I call it the four pillars just to brief it out.

Adam Adams (09:53):
You got to have some type of thought leadership. There’s five different thought leadership platforms we could talk about. You got to have some type of live event where you’re meeting people in person and getting to know them. You gotta do something on your social media, where people, when they search for you, they literally can find you because these days, if they don’t see you on LinkedIn or Facebook within the first five minutes of searching, they immediately go to the next person. So you gotta be active. And then the fourth one is your, I call it a Lead Magnet, which is some type of giveaway that helps your perfect person, that either will invest in your deal or do business with you to be able to convert from knowing you into starting to trust you. Right? So those are my four pillars and they’re really, really important. You got to do all four of them and the meetups, the live events, I’ve raised $4.2 million for our apartments for my real estate deals have come. I can count exactly that amount of money just from the meetups. We’ve had a few million from the podcast too, but it’s interesting how effective the meetup groups have been.

Chris Miles (11:09):
It’s interesting too, because I know a lot of, especially real estate investors out there will think the meetup groups are like a complete waste of time. They’re like, Oh, don’t even go to those things. There’s just a bunch of wannabe investors there. Nobody really of good value. And you’re completely flipping that upside down and say, no, absolutely. It’s one of the best places to be, right?

Adam Adams (11:29):
Yeah. Well, but you’re right. There’s a ton of people that say, don’t go to meetups. And I actually think, I’m going to be honest. Most of them are correct. Don’t go to meetups! Going to meetups is completely different than hosting meetups.

Chris Miles (11:46):
Interesting.

Adam Adams (11:47):
When you, let’s just pretend like you’re new, you have money and you’re going to a meetup. You see 30 people, 30 different people. You’ve got a leader or maybe two leaders and 28 other people besides yourself. Yeah. The first person you’re going to decide to know like, and trust the first person is probably going to be who? Not one of the 28.

Chris Miles (12:12):
Right.

Adam Adams (12:13):
It’d be one of the leaders, at least the leader or two. So when you’re hosting these events, you get the deals before anyone else in the room. Cause people are able to see your track record. When you come to a place like you don’t know anyone else’s track record, but these people that are established, they’ve been running the meetup for a little while. You tend to trust them. You tend to believe that they can close. And so if you’re asking, should I attend meetups? Yeah. Maybe not. Maybe not attend. But if you’re asking, if you should host a meetup, like run it, be the organizer. You’re going to get massive, massive value. I look at our group, it’s a, it was a lunch club. I mean, it’s still a lunch club, but now we, it’s corona virus. And we don’t have lunch during lunch club cause we’re a virtual, but we started out just meeting at lunch and I never imagined how many people would be able to come to one of these. But we got up, up to a hundred plus every single week, 176 at the top. And those people are rarely doing as many deals with each other as they are doing deals with me. That’s why I’ve been able to raise 4.2 that I can solidly say came directly from as a result of my lunch club. So yeah, let’s just differentiate this in our minds. There is a complete difference. You can either attend or you can host and you’ll get the value when you host a meetup.

Chris Miles (13:44):
And that sounds like a lot of work. Do you think it’s like a massive amount of work? Do you think it would be simplified?

Adam Adams (13:49):
It’s in general, a lot of work and a lot of people say it’s a lot of work, but because you asked that question, I can share really good tool that has helped me to be able to simplify it. So in 2018, the same year that meetup HQ flew me out to speak. That year I hosted over 220 meetups, 220, like it was four or five or six every single week. And it was a part time job for my assistant and a part time job for me. So there was a lot of work to host 220, but what we found, what we learned halfway through that year is how to really solidly make it easy on us.

Adam Adams (14:36):
So here’s the tip trick and strategy. Grab some type of Excel spreadsheet and you’re going to have the horizontals and the verticals at the same time. Right. And so what you’ll, what you want to do is first you’re going to book, you’re going to block out your calendar. Let’s just pretend like you’re not going to go 200. Let’s just do, let’s just pretend like you’re going to do 52 and you can do 12 if you want, but let’s just pretend you’re going to do 52. Every single week, always on Thursday or something like that. What you’ll do is you’ll actually start writing out the dates. Thursday, January 5th, Thursday, January 12th. And you just keep going. And so now you’ve blocked out the dates. The second part you do is you block out the venue. So you figure out, you start thinking ahead of time, what venues will I want to be at this year?

Adam Adams (15:29):
So if you pick, if you have four venues, you’ll call all of them. And you’ll say I have 13 different places that I need to come and visit you this year. And I want to block all of them out all at one time. And you’ll call the second one and block the other 13. The third one blocked the other 13. The next step you’ll do is you’ll start writing out the topics that you’re going to want. Now I mentioned that I kind of go to four different events. I kind of, I do that on purpose. So, so I’m in the Denver area. So a quarter of what I do is it near Boulder. There’s a lot of money in Boulder. A quarter of what I do is in another area, another and another, some of it is downtown Denver because I get the biggest amount of people to come to Denver.

Adam Adams (16:19):
And so I’ll kind of go all over, but I’ll call that ahead of time. And so step, I think we’re in step two. All we’re doing is writing out the topics. So if I’m going to be in Boulder, I want my topics to be around. How do you invest in notes? Or how do you become a safe, private money lender? Because I want to attract people that have a lot of capital from Boulder to come out of the woodworks and say, this is for me because the, in Boulder, the billionaires are now currently kicking out the millionaires. That’s kind of what’s going on in Boulder. So, so that’s what we’ll do there. And then we’ll do other things in, in like Denver. We’ll do a lot of fix and flip workshops in Denver and et cetera. Now that I’ve have all 52 topics figured out, which actually is easier than you think.

Adam Adams (17:14):
When you allow yourself 10 minutes to brain dump, you can get all 52 out. Well, that’s what we do. And then once you’ve done that, then you select your speakers. Before they ever know. You’ve already got the date, the time, the topic. All figured out and you call your, and now you figure out the speakers. And then what I’m going to do is I’m going to call Chris Miles and I’m going to say, Chris, I have on July 3rd, I’ve got 52 events I’m hosting next year. And I’ve got an opening on July 3rd. And it’s specifically for somebody who understands how to utilize a thing called a personal bank on yourself. How do you do infinite banking? And I have two or three people in mind, but you’re really my favorite, Chris. And I wondered, do you think you could come on July 3rd to present this?

Adam Adams (18:07):
Or should I call one of the other experts? Well, every single time you give that pitch, Chris Miles or whoever you’re talking to is like, no, no, no, no, don’t do it. I’ll figure out how to get there on July 3rd. And so, you’ve solved a lot of time and attention and it’s all out ready for you. And the second tip with this way to fill these out, you put them into meetup and you publish them, but there’s a separate term for an actually announcing it to the list. So if you do 52 of these, you’ll actually publish all of them in just one day. You’ll easily be able to do that. But when you announce them, you announce them just a couple of weeks before. You’ll announce every week you just click announce. That’s all you gotta do. So your life is much easier later on. You create all the image cards ahead of time. So in about a week or two on the big end, if you’re doing 52 of these next year. In about a week or two, you’re done everything else is now on autopilot, except for you clicking that announce button once a week. That’s all you have to do.

Chris Miles (19:26):
That’s a really useful system. I like that. So I see. Cause that’s the big thing is always like, Oh, how do you come up with those topics? Or how do you come up with this or get the speakers? Like you said, but that’s, I mean, that’s like you said, you could have that all done by, well, if you do, at the end of the year, you can have it done before the beginning of the year even starts. Or even by first, you know, first of the new year. Right?

Adam Adams (19:45):
Yeah. And it’s super important to really point this out because if somebody’s all, there’s going to be a few people listening. They’re like, I’ve already started a meetup. It was a lot of work. I couldn’t keep up with it. It’s because they’re always behind the eight ball. They’re always trying. Like every week they’re like, crap. I got to do all this stuff. But if you do it in the beginning, you’re always in front. You’re always ahead of schedule. So if there’s a listener, who’s thinking about doing a meetup, it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to do 52! 52 works for me. I do. I like the weekly, but if you’re listening and you just want to do 12, you could be done with this in a day. You could be completely finished with everything in one day. And then it’s just clicking the announced button once a month. That’s it.

Chris Miles (20:31):
I love it! Now let me ask you like what, so why were you asked to speak of that conference? I mean, obviously like you get meet up. You do a great job, but what were the, you know, you mentioned there’s four things that they said was a big reason why they picked you over so many other speakers. What was that?

Adam Adams (20:46):
Oh, so here I was. At the sixth floor of meetup is where all of the nerdy engineers are. And for some reason I’m intrigued by nerdy engineers. I love hearing people that really think about things like into detail about things. And so I had this awesome conversation. It was me, the I’m, I am kind of nerdy, but I’m not really an engineer brain. My dad was, but here I was sitting there with about 10 other engineers. We were in a circle and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, I just, I gulped and I was afraid to ask this question, but I did anyway. I just go, Hey guys, I don’t know how to ask this. But like, there was a few people that didn’t get on stage and they have a lot more members than I do. I only had 1300 members in my meetup group. And there was some people that had like 20,000 members and you didn’t ask them to speak.

Adam Adams (21:48):
So like, what was the whole thing? What gives? Why me? And they said, here’s the main things. Number one, Consistency. And so if you don’t know when you’re going to meet again, if you do this sporadically, it actually hits the meetup algorithm. And it ranks you lower. So fewer people see that you even have a meetup. And so, because you had the whole year planned out ahead of time, we knew that you’re being consistent. We can see that you’ve never, ever, ever, ever canceled a meetup. And your meetup attendees know what to expect. So this turns your meetup group into one of the only meetup groups in the country. At least, I don’t know how many there are in the world, but we were the only one in Colorado. And one of three in the whole country, two of them actually are in New York city, by the way, which is where the meetup HQ is.

Adam Adams (22:50):
We were one of three they’re called super groups. It’s called a super group, which comes from that consistency. The second thing that they said was that the, I have the same members continue to come back over and over and over again. I actually have a sales pitch that I use during every meetup that I share with my attendees. I call it a sales pitch, you know, jokingly. But it it’s the words that I use every single time that allowed me to have people keep coming back and back and back. So when we were doing, let’s say we’re meeting weekly. Okay. And I say to the people, Hey, we’re going to be in Boulder every single Thursday, just so you know. And there’s a lot of great meetups out there. And I encourage you to go to some of them, for sure, because you’re going to be able to meet more people.

Adam Adams (23:44):
But if you want to meet people that you actually do deals with, I looked up some psychology and it says, it takes about six to 15. This is the normal range for you to meet somebody in person before you start trusting them enough to actually do deals with them. And so that’s why I meet, I have this group meet every single week because when you go to one of those other groups and if you go one month and then you try to go the next month, and then you’re like, I still haven’t even done a deal with somebody. And so you start falling off. And so like, that’s what happens a lot and I want to solve that problem. So that’s why I do it this way. And that’s why a lot of the people that come here you’ll see them coming every single week because they want to start doing deals with each other.

Adam Adams (24:37):
So that was my sales pitch. That was how I shared with them, that it was important that they came every week and they did. And they showed me some stats. It’s been a couple of years obviously, but they showed me some stats. And I was one of the top in the whole world on having the same people show up time and time again. Let me think of who, what was the third one. The third one that they shared with me is that, Oh, my Ratings and Reviews. And I was number two in the whole world with the most amount of ratings and reviews we had over 600, five star ratings and no four stars or lower. And they said that that was a big deal. Well, the trick is we were meeting pretty frequently. We meet a lot. And so if one person a day does this, I mean, we’re done in a couple of years, but I used to ask for it when I was asking for it.

Adam Adams (25:35):
I had no idea that this was part of meetups algorithm. I had no idea that I was going to be sitting with 10 engineers at the sixth floor of meetup learning that I was doing it right. But I just said, Hey, it’s what I would say to my people is at the end of the event, I would say, Hey guys, there’s going to be an email that comes out to you. It’s going to ask how you liked it. Just be honest, let them know, you know, if it was one star or five star, just, just be honest. If you feel like you really got value today, that’s all I would say at the end, I would just say, there’s going to be an email. Just be honest. It doesn’t matter if it’s a one or a five star. And I just kept getting a ton of five stars.

Adam Adams (26:13):
Like the same people would be able to rate the meetup multiple times because they don’t rate the meetup itself. They rate the event. And so we had a lot of them. And so we had a huge amount of five star ratings. I think that’s enough. I can’t remember the fourth one right now, but if you are consistent and you ask for reviews and whatever, let them know, keep coming. You’re going to hit into meetups algorithms. So it’s not, now, it’s no longer just you promoting it. Now it’s meetup promoting it.

Chris Miles (26:54):
And eventually that’s not much different than any other thing. Whether it’s be like social media, you know, or whatever it might be. It’s kind of the same thing, isn’t it?

Adam Adams (27:01):
Yeah, exactly.

Chris Miles (27:02):
It’s about that engagement and that consistency, you know, and not giving up. That’s, I love it, man. That’s some really useful stuff. Like I know we can go on for hours on marketing because really it’s, it can take hours literally to learn and master some of those things. But man, I mean just taking some of these nuggets and whatever, however you apply, whether you apply it to meetups, real estate or even with your own business, this is a, I think this is just gold right now. It’s a huge gold mine. So Adam, I appreciate that so much.

Adam Adams (27:31):
Thank you for having me.

Chris Miles (27:32):
You bet. Hey, if they want to follow you and get to know your stuff better, what would you recommend?

Adam Adams (27:38):
RaisingMoneyCoach.Com. Great place to find me. RaisingMoneyCoach.com.

Chris Miles (27:43):
RaisingMoneyCoach.com Awesome! We’ll put that in the show notes for everybody to check out. Adam it’s extremely valuable and I know, I follow you as well. So I know your stuff is great. I see you as an influencer in my life. So everybody else, I recommend you follow Adam Triple A. Triple A Adams as well. So Hey Adam, I appreciate your time and appreciate your value.

Adam Adams (28:03):
Thank you!

Chris Miles (28:04):
And everybody else. Thank you so much for joining us today. Again, it’s about action. The action you take is what creates the results in your life. It’s one thing to be a listener of this show. But it’s another thing to be the doer of the word too. So guys go out and do it. Make it a wonderful and prosperous week. We’ll see you later.