Sarah Larbi: Hey, welcome back to another episode, and I'm here with Alfonso today. I'm Sarah Larbi. You are listening to the REITE Club podcast. Today's guest is James Burchill. I actually met James a couple years ago when he asked me to be on his show, the Smart Car Coffee Confidential, and it was a ton of fun.
Then we kept connecting and talking and he gave me the great idea. Starting a course where I can share the information, put that on my website, and it's done really so far. It's, and as they say most millionaires have multiple sources of income. It's an additional source of income on top of the real estate, on top of the cash flow and all that good stuff.
James Burchill and essentially opened up my eyes to what is possible in order to make things run without needing to be physically in any specific location at any one time.
Alfonso Salemi: Yeah I'm super excited for this podcast. Really good info. And yeah, what do we say? Let's get right to the show.
Sarah Larbi: Let's do it. James Burchill, welcome to the show. How are you?
James Burchill: I'm good. Thanks for having me on the show.
Sarah Larbi: I'm excited to talk to you. I think the first time we met, I think it was when we were doing the Smarts Car Confidential and we've stayed in touch and you've helped me grow. A lot as well through some online courses. But before we do that, before we talk a lot about how you help others in the community.
Maybe just give us a bit of a background on how you got to where you are today. And not so much from a real estate perspective, but from the ability to create passive income and live life on your terms.
James Burchill: It really happened by chance as well as by design. Initially I got the sort of first taste of this when I was a small boy somewhere around seven or eight years old. One of my uncles let me loose on a computer. It was an Apple two, one of the original Apple, two computers.
Sarah Larbi: I taught myself to program and I sold some software and I got paid royalties and I thought, this is cool. And then I got paid and again, I thought I like this. And about a couple years after that I was living in Africa and I'd always been a writer as well as a writer of software. So I might I'm always expressing myself in some way, and I pitched a newspaper back in England when I was living in Sudan.
I was living in Sudan in 1981,1982, I think I was 12 or 13 years old. And, I pitched the newspaper this idea of a column from a kind of a little expatriate white kid living in a country, and they went, yes, and they took it. So they started paying me to write this column. Now that wasn't quite the same, but this recurring income coming from what was essentially easy work for me, I thought, is this fun? By the time I got into my career in my late teens, early twenties, I was teaching tech businesses as well as solving it.
I kept getting paid royalties for these things I was creating. And most of the time I was doing it for other clients. And the day dawned on me why aren't I when I do this for myself, as well. And I slowly but surely start, you're playing around with it. And back then, of course this concept of online courses, that was a joke.
Some of my early courses were actually, and this is gonna really date myself, distance learning. You'd have an envelope filled with cassettes and paper and you'd send it to people and then they'd send it back, and then you'd mark it and you'd go through. It was laborious, but it was the beginning of it all, and I really loved teaching stuff.
I love figuring out problems and teaching them, but I hate marking. So those few times that I actually got dragged into the university world as a professor for a few years as much as I loved it I didn't like the marking, so I stopped doing the actual. In class stuff and I kept it all online and that's a roundabout way of how it fell into it.
Alfonso Salemi: That's, approximately the early eighties to mid eighties. You're writing this column and I'm sure everybody, this is what we're doing right now is content. You're creating content for this newspaper, right? From your angle, from your point of view and back, I guess in those eighties beyond that, we can go through the technology and interaction of human beings.
That was the voice that was your platform, right? That newspaper. That they were some somewhat, or some people looked to them for information, for reliable sources of news and you were providing that from your perspective, your point of view. And then fast forward now, what's that 40 years later? So you were writing when you were two or three years old. That's incredible.
James Burchill: Nearly, it was 12, 13. So software was around seven or eight when I started. It's been about 35 years actually.
Alfonso Salemi: Fast forward that now you're not gonna be mailing cassette tapes, right? Because now you don't want to be doing that, these days. So what have you evolved into? What are some of the things that you're doing? Sarah mentioned that you helped her create the online courses for her and her students. Yeah, what does it look like today? And, writing for a newspaper is probably not profitable because they don't exist anymore.
James Burchill: Not in a traditional sense. You know what's interesting? I guess just to put a pin in that last idea about writing for that newspaper. I think, evidently I was young, I was 12, right? What the heck did I know about the world? But the thing that obviously had some interest for them, and this relates to everything we do now, is it was a perspective, it was a unique angle. Just content for the sake of content is a yawn fest.
You have to have a point. You either have to be interested in yourself, or the information has to be interesting in and of itself, or when we're taking courses, it has to solve a problem. There needs to be some transitional or transformation that is clearly articulated. So anyway, to cycle back to that question, the way it looks differently today is unlike when I was teaching in university, I had a captive audience, right? The students old and young would have to sit in the room and would have to listen to me and go through all the material, and they didn't really have a lot of say in it.
When you're selling courses and when you're selling training nobody really wants, nobody wants to be taught. Nobody wants to attend class. Nobody wants what you are selling. What they is is the solution. Basically they want the pill that makes the problem go away. They want the transformation. So the thing that's different today about what it was back then when I was learning how to teach, when I was learning how to create, you learn how to distill it down.
You learn to find the shortest path from the pain to the solution. And I focused my efforts these days on trying to find. This is gonna sound a little mercenary, but I keep trying to find painful problems that people are actually trying to solve. There's no point finding a problem if nobody actually acknowledges that there is a problem.
If everyone's walking around asleep, you can see the problem, but nobody's woken up to it yet. Pointless if they've woken up to it, but they aren't looking for it pointless. They need to be aware, actively seeking solutions and have the wherewithal and the resources and the money and the rich.
To be able to get what they want and consume it. And when you are creating courses, your job is to make it as efficient as possible. Because this idea that we take courses and we want to sit there on the couch for 15 hours languishing over pages and pages of kill me. Now, if I could create courses where you could literally look on the screen and it flashed a whole bunch of colored squares, like a big QR code and it downloaded all the information like that, I'd be a millionaire.
Because nobody wants the training. They simply want the solution, the transformation. So really where we're at now, I'm always trying to find the shortest path from Problem paying to solution and trying to get that information into the hands of the individuals is as efficiently and as painlessly as possible.
Sarah Larbi: Absolutely. You know it, for me anyways, it was partly a game changer cuz I was able to work with you to create something now that I've pre-recorded and it's like a way to not have to take that time every time and exchange it. And so it became a game changer to be able to help many more people in a sense where they take the course, they do it on their own time, and then your time is freed up.
I do wanna bring you this back because you know what, this is, that this is definitely a little bit different than our typical real estate investing podcast. But this is important because it's still a lifestyle change and it doesn't have to be a real estate course that you guys do. It could be anything that you're good at, but it is a lifestyle and a change.
Are you able to maybe share? It could be your students, it could be your, that you work with for these courses, or it could be yourself, what are some of the maybe lifestyle style changes that you've seen being able to create some of that, whether it's again, I know you you like to travel quite a bit in regular times. When you can. How has that changed your life or the lives of the students by being able to do some of these things?
James Burchill: That's actually, it's a great question and it's, I dunno about you guys, but ever since I was little, every once in a while I would sit down. Everyone tends to do something like this around New Year's Eve, but coming to, towards the end of the year, I'd sit down and I'd grab a pen, usually a sharpie and a bunch of three by five index cards.
Usually playing ones I don't like lines, and I would start to dump out ideas about the things that I valued, I, I valued, and I look back over the years and there were a handful of words that kept coming up and one word that kept coming up was freedom. And I thought what does that mean to me?
Because a lot of people, they say things like, I don't have to work or I don't have to do this. I love working, I love doing things that provide value, but I don't necessarily love having to always work for money. So for me, at some point it was. Freedom for me would be the ability to choose to do or do not.
It would be for me to wake up in the morning and stay in bed and go, do I wanna get up today or do I wanna stay in bed, like binge watch Netflix or something? Or do I wanna do anything? In other words, would it begin to afford me, was this ability to go. What do I want to do now? I'm not absolutely loaded to the gills.
It's not like I've got Scrooge or I've got money piled all over the place. But that's the other thing that's interesting. When you look at everybody and you ask them like, what do you want? And they say, oh, I wanna be rich, or I wanna be wealthy. And you go what does that look like to you?
There was a point when I was younger and married, my family was still small. My buddies all said I had this millionaire lifestyle. I was making a stupid amount of money. I had the big house, the cars, the whole thing. And then that all blew up as what, as life often does in certain circumstances.
I was faced with an opportunity to reevaluate what mattered to me. And I realized that the kinds of things I wanted to do and the freedom that I wanted didn't require a seven figure income, and didn't require that much cash. And the reality is somewhere around, the low six figures is usually enough to give most people the kind of freedom of lifestyle choices that they want.
You can't go and buy an island. You can pretty much decide, I don't wanna do anything today, or I want to go and hang out with my friends normally. And that was really for me, what it was mostly about was it took away the pressure to always have to, and it became want to.
Alfonso Salemi: That's so important. We talk so much about that freedom aspect of real estate and others. I know there's a lot of people in our community that are experts in their own right and they want real estate just to add to their portfolio so that they can work less or pay for children's college or start something for themselves.
That's what I think it really is. And yeah, maybe you can't buy the island, but you can frequent there quite often, right? And hang out and have some drinks. Why would you wanna own it? Just go check it over.
James Burchill: The world is huge. Yeah, exactly. Why would you always wanna keep going to the same place over and over? Even if you went to three or four different places. See, that was the other thing I thought. I like working. I like doing what I do. My work is play. I thought, again, under normal circumstances, the game plan is, and that's what I've been doing for the last few years before Covid was, I'd take off in February cause February's cold in Canada.
Go somewhere warm for the month and then, a couple more times throughout the year, take another couple of nice, comfortable, longish holidays, two to four weeks, and then the rest of the time, making new things, helping people. And by the way, that's the other thing.
When something is creating money for you and you are off the time for money, treadmill, that little hamster wheel, which is exhausting. We all know it and it's not that we don't ever have to get back on it. I do from time to time, but when you're able to step away from that kind of, time trading, dollar for, per minute or whatever, you're able to start doing other things and you're able to, the universe is funny.
When you stop looking at the ground and you start looking up and you start breathing and you start reacting and stop reacting, and you start responding, the universe tends to put things in front of you that you could never have taken advantage of when you were busy. Now you're able to sit there and go.
If I could try, that would look like fun. I can invest my time cause I've got it now. I'm not having to sell my time to make money. I've now got all this free time. What do I wanna do? And you start to nourish your soul and start to do other things. You can start to donate your time and help other people.
You can do charitable work. If you've got surplus money or you create another revenue stream, that throws off another 500 or a thousand dollars a month? You could send that to charity. I've done so many different things. I've got a couple of charities that I'm particularly interested in roles around food, mostly because I think everybody should have food. You know when, and then you can start doing things. You can become very disruptive when you break that time for money thing. I did that with my networking.
Alfonso Salemi: Okay. So listen I'm listening to you speak, James. And you know what? You have me sold. That was one of the questions I wanted to ask you today, right? Should I consider, or should I think about creating an online course of some sort?
I'm listening to you about this lifestyle for sure. Few, four or five weeks, every couple months, okay? . So where do I start? How do I choose what I should teach about? And I'm not just saying me, I'm talking about any of our listeners. Where do you pick up the pieces and say, okay, yeah, this sounds great. I wanna record this stuff. It sounds complicated. Who is it for? What do I need? Like where, what? Give us the first little steps or what you would.
James Burchill: I'm fortunate in that I spent an entire career being thrown in the deep end of some of the most complicated and complex systems on the planet. We're talking government through to military, through to power, power station, project management stuff. You go into those and they kick you off the deep end and you're in there. Sometimes there's no manuals. There's no instructions, and you're just like swimming or you're going down.
You eventually get through all this chaos and you come out the other side. And one of the things I found is, I have this very odd skill of being able to take in huge amounts of disparate confusing information. And now I wish I could tell you how I do it, but usually I go to sleep and then when I wake up, there's a certain sort of, oh, that's what I, you start to put it all together.
Anyway, that's just the way my brain works. Point being, I've found that there are repeating patterns. And one of the things that you want to be looking for. So to answer a couple of these questions, you wanna look at what you are like. How do you spend your free time?
If you're gonna start this particular exercise, the easiest way I usually say to people is when you're supposed to be working and you're not, where are you spending your time? What do you gravitate towards? Now if you gravitate towards gaming and playing, watching Netflix and eating, cheeseburgers on the couch.
That's a bit of a stretch to find a profitable course there. But there is one in there somewhere. I absolutely guarantee it. That's the other thing about the way the world tends to work. There's an equal amount of opportunity, even in the biggest pile of steaming. It doesn't matter. Everything is balanced. Dunno why the university.
Sarah Larbi: Great analogy by the way.
James Burchill: Truly there. It's like my grandfather used to say it to me when I was a little boy and he used to say where there's muck, there's brass. Now that was an Englishman and Muck rubbish. Brass was a slang term for money. So where there's mess, when there's chaos, there's money, which is actually the king of the North star for my business.
When I was younger, I would actively look for the most broken, messed up, dirtiest, screwed up environments in a business environment. Because here's the thing, if you go into an environment where you find a problem, and this applies to courses by the way, if you find a problem that is almost perfect, and you're looking to polish it a little bit.
The impact you're going to have is hardly noticeable and you're gonna have to really move heaven and earth to make a difference. Whereas if you found somebody with a hair on fire and you threw a bucket of cold water over them, you've solved their problem and they would probably think you were a hero for it.
The difference is that what you wanna look for is an environment where you can actually affect change with very little effort, whereas, and you also don't need to have a PhD in whatever it. Look at what you like to do. Look at where you spend your time. Now look at your career and look at the things where you spend your time and go look for problems.
Now, you probably are aware of some of the problems you might have to spend some time digging, but what you wanna look for are painful problems. You don't wanna look for intellectual problems. You wanna look for the kind of problem that has an emotional sting to it. Have emotional attachment. Cause if you try and solve a problem that is purely academic, sales is emotional, right?
If you're trying to solve anything that's not an emotional problem. You're gonna have a hell of a time selling it. So what you do is you look at what do I like to do? What do I know about, where are the problems? And then you look for the intersection. And then a couple of other things is, are there solutions in this area?
Are people already looking to solve this problem? Are there products fixing this problem, they don't have to be the same. if there's a book, then a course could be created. If there was a course, then a book could be created. If there's a podcast about it, then you can probably guarantee that people are interested in solving the problem.
Look around if you find a gap and there's nothing, you do not run around going, I'm brilliant. I have found the holy grail. No, I absolutely guarantee other people have found it before you. They tested it, but it didn't work. Save yourself the heartache. The arrogance. And I have to say, I felt for that one a few times myself early on, I'm like, oh, I know I'm a genius.
I found an opportunity. No, I did not. Best thing I ever created was this really cool, this cool intro product very early on. It was called How to Survive and Thrive Without a Job. I think I might have told you the story. It was a hugely wanted massive amount of demand for the people.
Didn't have a job and they had to choose between food and shelter and Maslow's Pyramid needs, buying an info product to help them was not really top of their food chain at the time. That kind of, that was a mistake I made early on. So you learn hopefully from other people's mistakes. And that's really what, that's what you look for. You look for the intersection. And the tools.
Sarah Larbi: You've got 10 tons of great ideas. And I do wanna go into the tools and I think that was where I was gonna ask you the next question is more into the how, right? You got this great idea, you tested that you, there is some demand or some pain somewhere that you can make something better. And you've got your topic. What's the next step after that you would recommend somebody do?
James Burchill: I put my hands up for a reason. You got 10 fingers. Bear that way.
Sarah Larbi: For those people that are listening only, yes. 10 I guess that means 10 things to do.
James Burchill: Yes. So one of the things about creating anything is, and you learn this when you're developing software, you learn this when you're trying to solve problems for clients. Success lies in boundaries.
Success lies in limits. If you do not put a limit on something, it has a tendency to keep going and going. Otherwise known in the development world of scope creep and you will never finish or succeed because you just won't. There's no end in sight. So what you've got to do is you have to start with the end.
In other words, you need to know that there's a limit on this. So one of the things I teach, Is that I'm not gonna teach you how to create a magnum opus. I'm not gonna teach you how to create this massive life work. I'm gonna teach you how to create what I call a short course, a course that's usually a couple of hours long.
I tie this back to the simple theory that nobody wants your course, they want the answer. Okay. How long could they tolerate going through your material without losing their focus or their attention? I call this my gluteus Maximus rule, which relates to the big muscle in which you sit. It's your butt, and if your butt cannot tolerate it, your brain will kick it out.
This is why classes in school are 45 minutes to 90 minutes in length. This is why the movie. Are usually a couple of hours long. That's why people started to complain about the Lord of the Rings because it broke the gluteus Maximus rule. You sit through it maybe you wouldn't. You'd hit pause. Then you'd go for a stroll and come back.
Three hours is a bit too much, at least in one sitting. So I tend to focus on 90 minutes to 120 minutes. In other words, a couple hours. So there's that. The other thing that you need to bear in mind is that, and they've done these studies, Teaching like you learned in university or school, you have got to erase that idea because most people think that's how teaching works.
That's not the same when you're dealing with adults, they're only really interested in an efficient consumption of the information to get to the transformation. That means that when you look at how fast people's attention wanes, you need to pair that in mind. So if you're thinking of creating video-based courses, the data shows that somewhere around seven minutes attention starts to drift and it falls off the cliff at around 10 minutes.
Unless you are absolutely a genius at holding people's attention, and that's not to say you can't, you need to be thinking 10 minutes is the threshold of something. If you're going to teach for a video and you wanna be thinking about 10 minutes, if your video needs to be 20 or 30 minutes, break it up.
Okay, chunk it. Now, the reason I put my fingers up in my ear and said 10, is because my entrepreneur approach and my approach for creating courses is I look at that and I go to 10 nonfiction books that tend to have 10 chapters. There's a reason for that. We have all of these things chopped up into 10. It's usually enough for you to digest a significant amount of information and fix some problems.
Now, if you think. That your course has broken up into 10 video lectures. You know those might be grouped into modules or whatever. That's just logical grouping. But if you think of 10 videos, each video is about 10 minutes long. You're looking at a hundred minutes. That's just shy of two hours, that's consumable.
It's also creatable. And the other thing that I also try to tell people when they start to go, but that's what do I talk about? How do I create this? What tools do I use? I say, look, if you've got a fairly new smartphone, you have more than enough to create. In fact, I tested this a while back, a few years back, so we're talking, actually, I did this with an old iPhone six.
Not even a sexy new one. This is an iPhone six. I actually thought to myself, let's see if I can create an entire course just using an iPhone and nothing else. Yeah, it's doable. It's not necessarily the best or the best, but it's sold. So it's not about the technology, it's about the information, the transformation.
When you're looking at creating these videos, you want to be looking at the questions and answers that you would be going to go through to solve that problem. And people say what do I teach? And I say look, if you understand what the problem is, I absolutely guarantee you know what the questions are.
Usually it'll be like, for instance let's use the whole idea of how do I create an online course? I get asked things like, how long should my course be? I will just explain that. So that was one episode, that's one lecture. And they say, what technology do I need to use? I say you need to use something that you can do at least.
Very high definition, which is 720. But you really need 10-80 and the neuro phones can do that. What's one of the questions that I get asked is what kind of tricks and tips with cameras and video? And I say, really the trick is keep the camera still put yourself more or less in the center.
You could sit off to the left to the right, but keep yourself roughly in the center. And the trick to good video is good audio. Make sure you've got enough light. But more than anything, make sure you've got good audio. People will tolerate it. Grainy film, but if they can't hear you, then you lose them.
The secret to good video is good audio. People say how long do my lessons need to be? Explain that drop offs are around seven minutes, so keep it around 10. The next question is how much content is that in a 10 minute video. If you're speaking at a typical North American speech rate, which is about 150 words a minute, you're looking at approximately thousand to 1500 words.
That's about two to three pages of a single page. No, it's single or double. I don't know. It's not a lot. And if you are trying to talk about answering some problem, then 10 minutes goes by really fast, so you're not gonna have a hard time filling it up. By the way, the reason I say 10 is because what you do is actually a dozen, you have your 10 lessons, and then you have your intro and your outro, and that gives you 12.
If you actually look at that, you're just under 12. You're just under two hours at that point. And that's breaking it apart, don't overthink it. Some of the other things I suggest people do, and this is how you could really speed up course creation, cause people think I need to have it all figured out.
I say, no, you don't. You just need to know. Answer the question. Film you answering the question, just answer them all and then you can put it together in post-production. Some of the tricks never make reference to another episode or lesson in the lesson you are filming. Don't ever say, and in the next episode we're toast.
Because if you ever decide to add another episode in or take one out or change it, you can't. So we make everything standalone. By the way, that also comes in very handy for when you want to market it because then you can sprinkle the pixie dust and use those individual videos. It's completely standalone social media and so on and so forth. So there's a few things.
Alfonso Salemi: This is fantastic information. Incredible knowledge that you're sharing. I've been YouTubing obviously what we've engaged in. We've talked a little bit as well too, creating this stuff. Sarah has walked through it and just like anything, if you want to learn about something, you have to learn from someone that has typically walked that path, right?
That has done that, made the mistakes, learn that, wrote articles that, at a young age, creating that conduct, creating that information, and making it relevant. I love how you distill it and put it down to solving the problem and much. You know why we co-host these podcasts and have these podcasts is to help people find solutions, For whatever those issues are mostly around real estate, how to find money, how to find deals, how to buy lines, all that kind of stuff.
That's good people to work with your team. And it's through experience in these conversations. Yeah, I guess what for those people that's. That, that are ready to take that step, that are ready to go. Is there some practice, everybody talks about, practicing learning, in a skill, environment, but there is that point where you just have to do it right. You just, you have to take that step. So what's that point that takeoff point where someone that's on the Teeter daughter right now and taking that stuff for you.
James Burchill: I would say to someone, there's all these little, all these sayings you get kicked around when those, that, what's it, they say, those that can't do teach. Oh, that one really annoys me. When the student's ready, the teacher appears and all these other things, those are fine. But ultimately I would say just try and teach a single thing. Forget worrying about how to put a whole course together. Forget about any of that stuff initially.
Just try and teach one simple thing, try and solve some small problem and try and do it on video, and then give it to the person that had the problem and see if you can actually get a point. You're, get across your point. Because teaching when you're not in the room with a person, Is different because you have no feedback, there's no energy transference cause anyone that says there's no energy transference obviously hasn't taught live cause when you're standing in a room with real people, you can feel it.
When you are teaching to a little green.in the center of my screen out there and that's all you can see and maybe your own face on the camera. A, you feel foolish. And B, it sucks a lot of the energy out. You gotta just do that a couple of times and you have to just accept the fact that no one else is gonna see it unless you choose to share it.
You should see some of my earlier footage somewhere around the world. There's some footage from when I was 17 cause I actually did have some training back in the day and I was filmed on real cameras. Oh, it was bad. Really bad.
Sarah Larbi: Funny how that happens. Cause sometimes I even go back to like, when I started my, where should I Invest podcast. At the very beginning I didn't even use Zoom or anything from a video format. And I just used my cell phone and I had this thing on my, anyways, it was horrible. The sound and stuff like that. I don't even know if they're still posted, but it is cringeworthy and probably in three or four or five more years.
These podcasts today will be even more so improved with a new technology in the sound that will be, it's always about continuing to improve. Now, I do have one question before we go into the next part of our podcast, which is our lightning round. But I'm just curious about the pandemic and people not being able to get together in large groups anymore. Have you seen any more or less demand for online courses? Or what do you think the opportunity is or may not be?
James Burchill: First of all. The online education sphere or the information publishing sphere was always a growth and a booming industry. And I remember when I said, in every opportunity in every pile of steaming poop, there's an opportunity. This was exact, the perfect example of it, the demand for online education, the la the demand for distance learning.
The demand for people. Stuck at home now suddenly have to be their own chief cook and bottle washer. Now suddenly, they have this demand put upon them that they now need to know how to do all these other things. They now need to know how to install Zoom, or they now need to know how to do this and how do I get my printer working? Or how do I, there's all of these, how do I, and those aren't necessarily huge problems. But think about it. How much time do you spend? On any solution. As a rule, you start by Googling, you start hunting around, you can easily blow off 20 minutes, half an hour. Your chances are you'll find a few and then you're gonna research and dig into them.
Even if you find three or four or five things you're gonna do, there goes an hour, maybe two. And at the end of it, there's this thing, which is brilliant, actually works in all our favors. You've got this nagging little thing in a pit, your stomach going, but I'm not qualified to choose which was the best one.
How do I know? I think it's that one. I've done all my reading, I've looked at all the reviews, but, and even though you might be 80%, 90% right, there's still this little voice in the back of your head that goes, but what if you're wrong? You've wasted all that time. And the thing that stops most of us from taking any action.
Those of you that can get past this are going to be leaps and bounds ahead. So the thing that stops most of us is not that we are worried that we've made a wrong choice, cause we can get past that. The thing that stops most of us is we worry about looking stupid in front of our friends. If you can sit on a bar, I used to call it the bar stool test.
Not that we can do that right now, but if you can sit on a bar stool after work. And turned around to one of your buddies, one of your girlfriends, and they said, they asked you a question, you turned around and went I did this. And if you can say it without feeling like a total tool or an idiot or a fool, then you're on good ground.
That's what most people worry about. So yeah, you're right. You know it's fascinating, but the opportunities are massive right now. And again, you don't need to be creating huge courses. If you can solve someone's problem in 15 seconds flat, They're not gonna pay you for the 15 seconds. They're gonna pay you for the problem to go away. By the way, so the
Alfonso Salemi: I love that. And just a quick point, talking about researching and trying to find things. I would've paid somebody like a large sum of money in the last few weeks if they could have figured out how to get my DSLR camera to work as a webcam.
I've gone down the rabbit hole on YouTube and Best and all that stuff, and you're right like that. I'm like, where can I find that information? And there's a lot of it out there and I'm definitely not qualified to do it myself. So those are some of the things that you can get into. But I think we are ready for the next part of the podcast, and we're gonna get into the lightning round.
Sarah Larbi: Awesome. So James, we're gonna ask you a series of four questions. Every guest gets the same ones. You're gonna give us the first answer that comes to mind within 30 seconds or less. Are you ready?
James Burchill: I will be brief.
Sarah Larbi: All right. Question number one. What is the best advice that you have ever received from somebody else or at a networking event?
James Burchill: The best advice, stop talking.
Sarah Larbi: Alright.
Alfonso Salemi: Use the ears and melting proportion. I love it. Okay. Alright. Question number two. What is your favorite resource for investing or looking into businesses? You work a lot with a lot of different businesses, but what are some of the things that you keep up to date or resource, like a book training things that you do, someone that you reach out to for resource information.
James Burchill: I actually use an aggregator that pulls in all the headlines off the new off the news sources. I don't have to look in a single point. I just pull it all together. And then I have it clustered by by topic. So tech, business, finance, and I basically irk all the headlines in.
Sarah Larbi: All right. Very cool.
Alfonso Salemi: What's that called? Because that sounds awesome.
James Burchill: There's a whole bunch of 'em out there. Google News is one of them, but there's a, I can't think off the top of my head some of the names, but even when you just go onto, say, Actually most of the search engines they'll aggregate. You can go into their news section and you can identify topics. Then they just reach across and pull 'em all together, and then they just shuttle them out in front of you.
Plus you can get it through rss, you can get it through email. I also use Google alerts, so I look for topics of interest. And then I get daily on the minute and weekly summaries and it all gets pulled together for me, and I just sit down on Fridays.
Sarah Larbi: That's cool. There is an app I use that pulls a lot of investment in real estate stuff for me. It's called Flipboard.
James Burchill: Yes. I used to use that.
Sarah Larbi: Yes. It's like my go-to place to find articles. All right. Next question. Question number three. James, what is the one attribute in your opinion that has made you most successful?
James Burchill: Adaptability. Probably, or, yeah. So I've been referred to as tenacious. So I would say stubborn adaptability. I refuse to give up.
Alfonso Salemi: Love it. That is a great trait to have. Sometimes, the blessing, it can be the curse as well too, in good balance yeah, that definitely works. Alright, so let's wrap up the lightning round. Last question on a typical Sunday morning, what are you up to? What are you getting up to on a Sunday morning?
James Burchill: See now I'm gonna look pathetic. So on a typical Sunday morning, I get up around 5:30 coffee. I usually sit down and I know this isn't necessarily the most productive way to start your day, but I actually enjoy reading through my email and my social media.
Then once that's done, usually within half an hour, 45 minutes, cause I try and keep that's a rabbit hole. You don't wanna go down cause it sucks the energy out. So I'm usually very focused on what I look for and then I close it and then on a Sunday, I'll either be writing or painting digital art or creating, I'm either creating a new product or shooting some footage or for complete fun.
I recently got back into digital art. I actually trained as a digital artist when I was in college, and I came out and offered a job as a programmer. So I put down all my painting equipment and I went and became a coder. So it's nice to go full circle.
Sarah Larbi: Very cool. Learn lots. Every time we talk to you, we learn so much more about what you've been doing. It's very cool. James, where can our REITE club community reach out and find out more if they want to learn about the courses or just ask you questions directly?
James Burchill: The best place to start with my own website, jamesburchill.com everything you want to find about me is there. You can get to all my other websites, you can get to my courses, you can check out my social media. It all comes off that point. So go there to start and you can get hold of me there too.
Alfonso Salemi: This has been a fantastic conversation, James. So much information, so much value, and I really appreciate your time. Any last words of advice that you wanna share with the REITE Club Community?
James Burchill: Yes. Don't think if you wanted to, if you wanted to create an information product, you don't have to be thinking, an entire course. You can create a nugget. Remember, if you could solve, like your question about how to connect the DSLR camera, that is a problem worthy of a solution.
You can create what I call a little micro training, and don't think that you have to put this whole thing together and be very clever, quite literally, if you had the video that gave you the answer. You could ask 10 bucks, 20 bucks, 50 bucks, somebody pay you for it. And they don't have to get clever. Use Gum Road.
That's a simple solution, right? There's a company there that you can easily create very inoffensive and very simple solutions and then of course it's teachable and all the other bigger guys. But Gum Road is great. Plus it's free to start, so you can publish anything.
Do you have a spreadsheet that allows you to keep things on track, like a checklist? Checklists are hugely valuable. Like one single piece of paper. You think that's not worth anything? Are you kidding me? It took a lifetime to get to that. I've got loads that I've created that people have paid me for over the years.
It doesn't have to be big. It just has to be valuable and solve a problem. So yeah, I'd say start looking around. Look at what you take for granted. Cause' usually what you do without thinking is the stuff that other people would pay you.
Sarah Larbi: Absolutely. James, thank you so much for being on the show. It was a pleasure having you on. And thank you for all the help that you've given me personally as well to my pleasure. Being able to create these courses was another step in removing myself from putting in so much time on a weekly or a daily basis to try to make things more repeatable and expandable. So thank you so much as well from a personal standpoint and from the REITE club because you've helped us a lot there too. So it was a pleasure having you on.
James Burchill: Thank you very much. And thank you Alfonso for your wonderful questions. Cause without, without kind of pointing me in the right direction, I can just wander around
Alfonso Salemi: Wow. Another great conversation, great chat with James. And just so much information. That he's been at it for 40 years. He was writing articles when he was a teenager, creating content, sending cassette tapes, a really fun combo and a lot of information and knowledge to back that up. What was maybe one of your takeaways, sir, I know you've known James for a little while, but what was a takeaway that you took from today's convo?
Sarah Larbi: I think it's a great way to have additional sources of income, and it doesn't have to be real estate specific. I know this is a real estate investing podcast, but maybe there's something good. That they are able to share or something that there's a problem or a need somewhere. And it could be, it literally could be any topic or any discussion. And I think, there's a course in every single person out there that has maybe a knack or an affinity towards something.
What's fun, what do you enjoy doing? And I think just courses could be created on pretty much any topic, any subject. And they're really fun too. And so I think it's just a great way to add additional streams of income as opportunities, not necessarily just real estate related. What about you?
Alfonso Salemi: I loved it. I love the whole conversation talking about getting. Different people's perspective, how long can we sit on our butts before we gotta get up and move around and shut it off? All that kind of stuff. But I really liked when he said, where there's muck, there's brass, and I'm gonna dad or a family member that had said that, where there's problems, there's money, right?
The bigger the problem you solve, the more money you get. And that's a great perspective to have at it. And how many times guys, have you clicked on YouTube looking to do this or do that? Or how do I here's a challenge? Put that in the comments or put it on the REITE club community.
When you go onto Google and you put, how do I, don't fill it in, what comes up on your Google? If you wanna share it, you can share it. If you don't want to, it's cool too. But what comes up on your how do I on the Google browser and put that on the REITE club community. We definitely have the forums.
All the information on there you can find. Maybe you're listening to this podcast, right in the REITE club community. We have the player right on there, available every episode. We're getting close to 200 by the end of this year. This is so great. And yeah guys, thank you so much for supporting the REITE Club, being part of the community, and checking in. And Sarah, until next time.
Sarah Larbi: Come grow with us.
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