NOW

From Sports to Social Media Savvy: Justin Freishtat's Entrepreneurial Journey

• Courtney Twiss • Episode 45

Share episode

Curious about how to seamlessly transition from sports to entrepreneurship and come out on top? Justin Freishtat takes us through his dynamic journey, from dominating the sports arena to building and selling Heartland Foods, and later, mastering the art of social media branding during the pandemic. Alongside Kearns Marketing, Justin refined his approach by learning from younger generations, showcasing that humility can be a powerful tool for success. Join us as Justin shares his strategy of embracing new challenges and constantly pushing the envelope to achieve greater heights.

Eager to understand how major influencers like Cardi B and Khloe Kardashian can supercharge your brand? We discuss strategies that boost brand credibility by leveraging collaborations with big names and explain the role of vanity metrics in gaining visibility. Discover how personalized engagement, through video messages and strategic DMs, helps in building genuine connections and trust with potential clients. Our conversation reveals the operational aspects of content creation, involving partners and editors, which ensure that your follower count matches your engagement, all while maximizing your brand's presence on platforms like Instagram.

Want to grasp the secrets behind wealth-building through real estate and social media? We'll guide you through strategies such as living in properties to benefit from lower primary residence rates and then renting them out. Networking is key, and we delve into how attending investment groups and utilizing social media can create valuable business connections. For realtors facing challenges, we provide insights into mastering brand marketing strategies by focusing on authentic interaction over spamming tactics. Listen in to uncover effective brand-building techniques that prioritize proactive collaboration and genuine engagement.

Follow Justin on:
Instagram: @justinfreishtat

Follow us:
www.instagram.com/allthingstwiss
www.instagram.com/askthegeneral
https://www.youtube.com/@nowpodcastforreal

Looking to expand your business? Sign up to receive more information on our FREE virtual mastermind.
Sign up here: https://forms.gle/PZ3iEQs1dEDzkyQU8

Speaker 1:

She didn't know that I had hired your company, though, and so she's like it was like a really basic real. She sends like a text like, look guys, we got like $30,000, whatever. Yeah, so I'm like, oh, about that. Welcome to Now. Making Moves in Real Estate, episode 45. Our guest today spent the first decade of his professional career building Heartland Foods, which was acquired by a private equity firm in early 2022 after the company generated just near $87 million in gross revenue. Now he helps individuals and businesses start and build their brands on social media which is how I met him Monetize and drive revenue. As VP of sales at Kearns Marketing, he's also the sales director for Dr Rewire, helping business owners rewire their brains for financial success and abundance, which we are all about that. As an investor and hedge fund manager, he has a diversified portfolio with positions in multifamily and single family projects, late state pre-IPO private equity and oil and gas projects. So please help us. Welcome Justin Freshdatt to the show and I said that correctly, right.

Speaker 2:

Hey, you know, at this point I'm not even really sure how to pronounce it myself, so let's just go with that.

Speaker 1:

Okay, cool Sounded good. Yeah, nice to see you again Welcome.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, happy to be here. I'm excited to dive into this thing.

Speaker 1:

Let's do it. Tell our listeners all about justin man, where should we start?

Speaker 2:

how far back should we go?

Speaker 2:

well, you were born, you're east coast guy yeah, I was born in washington dc, the armpit of america, and um grew up all around the Beltway area, so just north of DC, and Maryland that's where I grew up Played hockey. It's all I wanted to do was go play in the NHL and then that dream eventually died in college. But you know, you learn a lot from sports and I guess what I learned about myself in that transition was is I needed a new game to play? Right, I was never going to be a guy that could just sit at a desk or, you know, work for a fixed rate salary. So it would. The natural transition was all right.

Speaker 2:

I got to figure out how to find a game in the business world, which for me at first was just knocking doors, direct sales which if you haven't done that and you want to build some thick skin, I recommend everybody do some door-to-door sales, because if you can survive that, you can survive anything in the business world.

Speaker 2:

I feel like it only gets easier from getting homeowners cursing you out and slamming doors in your face, things like that. So that's kind of how it all started. And then I just got obsessed with that game and then I think the biggest thing from there is once you get excellent, you need to kind of understand that you're topping out. I think most people. They want to get to that place and then they want to be the cool guy in that pond that's at the top of the game, when in reality, the more times you can abandon that to a new game and keep leveling up and keep being the smallest person in the game is how you end up playing big games. So that's kind of what's happened since then speaking of big games before.

Speaker 1:

I meant to say in the intro or right now, um, that you are going to offer a special offer to our listeners, um, for your savvy services, at the conclusion of our show. So I won't give up what that is, I just want to put people on the hook to listen, because I've only been using your introductory services for a short period of time and so far I'm very happy. So I want everybody to stay tuned and so tell our listeners what it is that you're doing on social media programs.

Speaker 2:

The social media thing started for me. I'm going to say, around the pandemic, it was kind of. You know, I saw all these kids on social media that were 10 years younger than me making millions of dollars from their phones. I'm like there's something to this, right, because I'm 37. So we didn't really have social media for the first business that we built. So I kind of had the real world experience of everything from call centers to direct mail, running Facebook ads, google, seo. I've done all the traditional stuff and I was kind of late to the social media game. In my opinion, which changes over time, you always feel like you're late when you show up to something. So I started a Facebook group for all of our clients at Heartland Foods. That's how it kind of started. I would go live in there. I was terrible on camera, I was horrible, but for whatever reason, I did it anyways and then it turned into okay. Now I got to build an Instagram and I did it all for organic food, health and wellness had nothing to do with how my brands transitioned over time. So the biggest lesson for social media is everybody wants to start it after they've done the thing. It's the opposite you want to start it when you haven't done anything and let everybody see the journey you go through on the way to that thing.

Speaker 2:

So when we eventually sold that business which came out of nowhere, by the way the pandemic hit. We were in organic food delivery. It was the perfect industry. Business blew up. We were able to sell it to a private equity firm. So overnight I had to reinvent myself and I had started building this brand already. So I was like, okay, I got to really dive in on this and whatever I do next, I want to use this thing. So I hired the guys who I'm now partnered with at Kearns Marketing to build my brand, so I'll give them all the credit. I've learned everything about branding and social media from these guys and they're literally seven, eight years younger than me, and it's kind of a weird dynamic when you get to the age where you can listen to younger people, which has been great. So I think just having no ego, looking at who's actually killing it and just listening, the amount of people that push back on me when I tell them how to win, that have done nothing, is just mind-blowing to me. So that's the lesson from that.

Speaker 2:

But I took it and then said, okay, I'm going to have a health coaching company. It was the natural next step from organic food that did pretty well on social media. But then I'm looking at the capital world. I've been investing privately in projects for a long time and I wanted to get involved in that because I saw how big the margins are and, when the numbers get bigger, how lucrative it is, and so I started raising capital for hedge funds and real estate syndications, whatever I could partner with to leverage my brand to raise money, and that turned out to over 10 million raised in the first year doing it, and I never spent a dollar on ads. I did it all through guerrilla marketing on social media. So it can absolutely be done if you need to be realistic with yourself on where you are in the food chain. If you got 10, 20, 30 grand a month to spend on ads, cool, let's do that. If you don't, this is the way to do it. You got to do a grassroots brand, build and monetize through DM outreach.

Speaker 1:

I was telling you about the DM outreach, which we do ish right, talk about that, the DM outreach.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it can be used for tons of different things, right? So when I'm raising capital, the way you would think you would send DMs is let's find doctors, lawyers, rich people and send them DMs accredited investors right, that's not what I did, Because, taking somebody cold from a social media DM to hey, it's 100, I leverage other people's stages, people that have invested millions of dollars into their brands, their podcasts, and bring in warm networks through long form content. So I just did mass DMs to every podcast in the country that had anything to do with real estate, crypto trading, infinite banking, life insurance. If it was about money, I wanted to be there because that's where the people I wanted to monetize were, and by doing that, it also allows you to network with the top people in your space, and then it's. What else can we do together?

Speaker 2:

Speak on my stage, come to my event, do my podcast. Right, and before I knew it, I had so much content all over the internet and people watching my long form leveraging other people's stages that I had so much content all over the internet and people watching my long form leveraging other people's stages that I had enough inbound leads coming through my Instagram to raise all that capital so impressive, wow, yeah, I mean in a year.

Speaker 2:

You did that in one year in 11 months and I'd never done it before oh my gosh right.

Speaker 2:

So then we're like, okay, that's cool, right, when we raise money for late stage private equity. Right last year we did rounds on spacex, flexport. These are some of the best investments in the world, but that that money goes in. You raise the money and now you got to wait for IPO. So we're looking at two, three, four, five years until a liquidity event where we can actually get paid on it. They're monster paychecks, but that doesn't help you with your cash flow.

Speaker 2:

So we needed something else to use the social media to get paid today. And that's why we're like all right, we've been doing this successfully. Nobody else is doing this model. So on January 1st of 24, this year, we launched the social media marketing company and, organically, again, no ads. We've done over a million in sales this year and that's our vast money engine. So this strategy works. We've done it for tons of different industries. I'll give you another example. Right, like roofers, we've got roofers and they wait for storms. Right, because the insurance companies will pay for the roofs. So it's like a free roof, so we wait. Big hurricane comes through Florida or through Texas and those clients. Now we're going to mass DM zip codes where there's damage from their big brands. These guys cleaning up hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars in a couple month period through Instagram.

Speaker 1:

Wow, so with your company it sounds like there's different levels of services. What are some different things that you do?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, there's people who spend $500 a month with us and there's people who spend $100 grand a year, right? So it really depends. Back to the food chain thing like where are we starting from? Do you have a big business or are you just getting started? So most people that we work with are in that solopreneur ish phase where a big ad spend budget just isn't isn't there.

Speaker 2:

So step one is building the brand. How do we do that? We need to get a big following. The vanity metrics matter. I don't care what anybody says. You can argue I'm not gonna argue with you about this stuff. Like people are like I'm just going to post for the next 10 years and hopefully it works. Like you're going to lose to the people who know how to do this. It just doesn't matter anymore. Everyone's on the platform, the saturation is is, restoration is there and Meta wants you to spend money with them. So if you're not going to put a ton of money behind that boost button like good luck going viral unless you get really lucky and you're the hot tuba girl of this month, right, it's just not going to happen. So how do we fix that? Right?

Speaker 2:

So we're going to leverage other big brands. Last month we did a collaboration with Cardi B. This month we're doing one with Khloe Kardashian. She one with Khloe Kardashian. She's going to put up a post. It's going to have a bunch of YSL bags, louis Vuitton, and it's going to say hey, one of my followers is going to win all this.

Speaker 2:

All you have to do to be entered, to win is go follow this list of accounts, right? Those are accounts that are paid spots that we steal the following essentially from that brand. So anybody who goes into a campaign like that is going to get 50 to 100,000 followers over a two to three week period after she makes that post. So that's how we leverage it. We do smaller campaigns with mid-tier influencers every month. That'll get 10 to 20,000 followers. But you can build a brand like that overnight, right? It doesn't mean you're going to make money with it. It doesn't mean you're going to monetize those followers. That's not the reason to do it. You want the brand credibility. So then we can go to targeted DMs and pull the right avatar into your brand and when they land on your page, you are the industry answer because of how big your brand is built.

Speaker 1:

Okay, that makes sense, because when you were first saying that I'm like, yeah, but they're not, maybe not the followers that you want, you know your avatar and then you just explain. That's how we now me Right.

Speaker 2:

And then you're the perfect example, right? My VAs are sending out 30 to 50 DMS a day. They're looking all over Instagram for people who are paying for a blue check, 10,000 followers or less low engagement, and they are creating content, they're investing in their brand and they don't have results. So I'm the answer to that, right? So all we have to do with the client is say, okay, who's the person you help, how do we find them? Right? And we pull them into a big brand.

Speaker 1:

Video message.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, Taking the time to do a selfie. All the difference in the world. Nobody does that right. There's look there, and I know that everybody listening to this you probably get 20 DMS a week at least of people trying to sell you likes, comments, followers, all this stuff. Why do people do business with us? Because we're not slinging bots in your face like these people are, and I'm not trying to sell you in the first message. I'm actually trying to establish a relationship. I follow you first. I like your stuff, I comment on it, I go through the stories. I make sure I'm supporting these people before they do business with me.

Speaker 1:

How many people are working with you in your business, like if someone signs up, are they working with you directly?

Speaker 2:

Are they working with a team? How does that work? Yeah, so, regardless of the package you sign up for, you come into the mastermind group on WhatsApp. We do a coaching call live on Zoom once a week on Tuesdays, so anybody can show up to that, ask questions. Uh, we have a different topic every week. Uh, we basically just give away the social media game for free and then say you know, do it on your own or, if the time is more valuable, hire us to do it. We're not. We're not gatekeeping anything. We want to see everybody win. And, um, what was the original question?

Speaker 1:

Uh, if they're working with you, or how many people are on your team that your clients are.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, so they work directly with the person that brings them in. It's either going to be me, sergio or cody. Those are um are. We're the three partners in this business. But um, it depends what the service is. We have over 20 editors on staff. So if, if we're doing your content creation, we use mondaycom for deliverables, you'll see all your reels getting uploaded in there and then you give feedback if you want it to be re-edited or any tweaks.

Speaker 2:

If you're working with the following and the engagement, it's automatically attached to your page. So the second you post a reel, it's API dropped into our groups and you'll see a ton of activity flooded to your posts in the first 15 minutes. So the idea with that is cool. We got a big following number, but if the engagement doesn't match it, everybody thinks it's fake.

Speaker 2:

So we need to have congruency on the brand and the way we do that is we have thousands of people in these different groups that have different jobs, so one of them is the second you post. They're going to go to your content. They're going to watch it all the way through because Instagram's algorithms looking at watch time. They're going to like it, they're going to comment something relevant, they're going to hit the share button and then you're going to watch your stuff go through the explore pages, through the algorithm, much more efficiently than it would have if you post it so you can look at the results. You can talk to any of our clients. Your stuff's going to catch traction when you kind of, you know throw a ton of engagement at it in the first 15, 20 minutes.

Speaker 1:

Well, I've seen it online so it's, and it's only been I don't know how, and I know when we first talked it wasn't like. The package I signed up isn't necessarily designed to drive following, it's the engagement so, which is working, and some interested to learn about that next package on driving followers? That was where you did a clap, basically yeah Well, that one is pretty expensive, so I don't know that. I think there's something in between.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, the big tier celebrities are going to be expensive. They're anywhere from five to 10 grand to get into those campaigns, but you'll get 50 to 100,000 followers. So if you divide that down, it's like a thousand bucks for every 10K. Is, you know, a little bit more expensive than our normal campaigns, but the quality is much better. Right, we can do mid-tier influencers. Um, you know, those are 500 bucks to get 10 000 followers, so it's not not crazy expensive.

Speaker 2:

It's about and I and I want to be clear about something strategy wise it's not about how many followers you have. It's about making your online brand match the player you are in the real world. If I had 5 million followers, it would be kind of silly. I'm not that famous, right. So I, I look at, okay, who are the players in my space? Who's doing a hundred million in sales? Like that's to me for what I do. I think I'm around 100,000 follower, 200,000 follower guy, right, you got to figure out what that is for you and that's the. You know the number, the metric you want to achieve, and then you pull back from those campaigns and that's why we do everything month to month or quarter to quarter, with no contracts. Because we need to change your package depending on what the brand needs at any given time.

Speaker 1:

Because we need to change your package depending on what the brand needs at any given time, which I like. That too, yeah, not like a year contract or a six-month contract or quarterly, or you know.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, my opinion is, if you have the results, you'll get the retention you don't need a contract.

Speaker 1:

That's a breath of fresh air. All of it was a breath of fresh air. That's why it worked. I was like, oh, why not? Why not give this? I'm not locked in, it's not crazy expensive. I got to meet you.

Speaker 1:

We hit it off, not just from the social media thing, but also your investing side. You know what I mean. We had conversations around that. So you're I'm like, well, there's just, like you said, we're hit up with a lot. Like I got your messages and totally blew you off. I was like you know another spam or whatever, because there's so many out there it's hard to know which ones are legit, that really do what they say they're going to do or going to move the needle for you on what you're trying to achieve with your own goals. So it's nice to have someone that's already been vetting you. Here you go everyone listening, michelle's been using them. It's working. Also, I just see the value in like. I want to know more. Like. I touched on our podcast. Like we want to grow our podcast. We haven't even had a conversation on like. How can you help us do that Right?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, some of the biggest podcasts in the world that you know charge five to 10 grand some 20, 30, 50,000 to go on them have built their brands this way Right. So for and this is for for people who want to go on podcasts think about it this way If you invest 10, 20 grand in your brand, now all of a sudden you're being invited onto the podcast where normally it costs $20,000. A lot of building a brand is the access it gets you with people, but also the money you won't have to spend to get in those rooms, to get on those stages wow, yep, mind blown a little bit here.

Speaker 1:

Can we circle back around a little bit on a different note with your investment side? Right, because obviously we, we both invest and a lot of our listeners are realtors. Tell us a little bit more about that yeah.

Speaker 2:

So I started investing first in single family homes. That was you, you know, my wife and I. We were broke. The first thing we did we had negative net worth. She's going to school, I'm knocking doors.

Speaker 2:

Our first thing was we got to get the first property so naturally, and I think it's a great strategy for anybody who doesn't really want to be an investor but wants to have investments. Buy whatever you can afford, go live in it for a year. It's going to be on a primary residence rate, right. Investor rates are going to be higher. So you live in it for a year. You save up all the cash you can. You eat peanut butter and jelly, like this is all stuff we did, right, like drive a 20 year old car, like, if you have the vision, make those sacrifices early and then you buy the second one, you move out, you rent that one out right, that that's what we did to get our first few properties. You let time take care of it. Those properties are worth double what we paid for them 10, 10 years ago, right, and then it was okay.

Speaker 2:

I want to graduate to bigger units. I'm not, you know that savvy. I don't want to be an operator in multifamily. So it was okay. Who can I meet and partner with? That's doing bigger deals. That's how I got involved in syndications and you just keep putting the inputs work on your primary business. Now you got all this extra cash. Then you make the investment right, which then turned into okay oil and gas deals. Like going to all these investment groups, I would spend five, 10 grand to be in a room for a weekend to meet all the people that are now my partners in business. If anybody sends me a message of like I give you this much money, what do I get? I'm like you already lost. The best investments I've made were on blind faith where I had no clue what was going to happen. You've got to be okay with losing a lot to get the home run. So that's not your mentality. Like just go get a W2. Don't even go into this game because you're going to lose a whole lot more than you're going to win.

Speaker 1:

So why don't you tell our listeners what, um, what you're going to offer them? Um, if you know the special that you sent me, you, you give it up yeah, so 20 off any marketing service at kern's marketing.

Speaker 2:

So, um, whatever the first thing you do with us, we'll, we'll shave 20 off. That's my piece. So I'll give you a free month and, uh, and, if you want, um with dr rewire, um, the program that I have with him is about sales, driving revenue. Between the two of us. We have over $150 million in sales and we teach it and we have a weekly call. It's a one-year program, a bunch of modules. It's a great mastermind that there's a strategy session. It's 45 minutes. So, whether you sign up or you don't, I'll give you a free strategy session for that. So, at the very least, you know, we, I can, uh, you know, give you 45 minutes of my time I love that.

Speaker 1:

That's great, all right well, how do our listeners find you?

Speaker 2:

instagram. You know what's so crazy.

Speaker 2:

I literally I deleted my website, don't even want it anymore just funneling all through your instagram yeah, when I meet people in person like leverage your brand the first thing I I say is hey, what's your instagram? Like if they try to give me a business card, I'm like cool, but what's your instagram like? Business cards go to die somewhere. You'll forget. You'll never even know you met that person. You get their contact. It goes to die in your You'll forget. You'll never even know you met that person. You get their contact. It goes to die in your contacts. But if we can follow each other on social media, you're going to see me every day.

Speaker 1:

You know, I realized that on like second to last day at a conference I was at. I'm like, oh my gosh, I do my digital business card, but still a business card. And finally I'm like, what am I doing here? Scan, but still a business card. And finally I'm like, what am I doing here? Scan this. Go to my instagram page. I wish I had thought of it, yeah, like five days earlier.

Speaker 2:

Yeah yeah, yeah, I mean it's look, it's a game changer for your in-person networking, especially after you build the brand. You just casually say, hey, let's follow each other. And they see your brand like watch it, their eyes light up. Next thing it's like they're just locked in right like how do I learn more from you? How do I do business? What can we work on? It's instant credibility, like you need that when you meet people wow.

Speaker 1:

yeah, well, it's so great I know I'm gonna take advantage of your 20 off steel. Yeah, so justin sold all right. Well, thank you, justin, with such for hopping on I I appreciate it and I'm looking forward to continuing to build my brand, our brand, and help our listeners. In fact, we just had a call with an agent in Texas and he was like I need help on social media and I was like listen to our podcast, yep. So I think it's a common thing with realtors. A lot of realtors hate doing their social.

Speaker 2:

So they need. Well, that's the number one industry that um needs it. That is resistant to it, doesn't want to listen to me, thinks they know everything and they put no effort into you know, into into their pages. They just I'm just gonna say like I'm not even like hiding where it's. It's literally the hardest conversations I have are with realtors. Right, because they're doing a real world thing. They don't want to put effort in this online thing. They don't know the power of it because they haven't done it yet. But if you can build the biggest brand in your community, you're gonna crush it when you think people, when they're looking at realtors, don't go look at your social media, like you're losing business to the person who has a bigger brand than you.

Speaker 1:

I promise but they could believe that even bigger than that, though, like.

Speaker 2:

These are some of the capabilities, like once you have the brand built like we, we can scrape following lists, we can mass dm zip codes. We can make you dominant.

Speaker 1:

Every single person in your area will know who you are well, I don't know if we should actually share this um episode. Maybe we just keep all these gold nuggets for us I'm just kidding.

Speaker 2:

It's okay, because the reality of people is there's one out of a thousand that will actually do something with it.

Speaker 1:

Right. Well, and they think, oh, I'm just going to make a little Canva template here and pop that on and I'm good Like. No, you're not.

Speaker 2:

No, actually what it is is you're spamming. Yeah, Like all you do is post on social media and you're not being social with other people. You're spamming the platform.

Speaker 1:

Good way to look at it. Yeah, all right. Well, thank you, justin. We appreciate it and more to come in our relationship working together. I'm super excited and we'll talk to you later. Yeah, thank you, justin.

Speaker 2:

My pleasure.