A True Entrepreneur Doesn’t Need a Pep Rally

Full transcript

Lightly edited for readability. Watch the full interview above.

Introduction: two Southern boys and a book called Don't Look Me Up

Michael Burt: Hey guys, Coach Michael Burt, the Super Coach, every week coming into your life really to do three things: multiply your life, your money and your business. I love spending time with talent. I love reaching up. I love spending time with people who are interesting. And today I've got Scott Lumley here.

Michael Burt: I've been a fan of his online and he didn't know it. He was watching my stuff, I was watching his stuff, and one of these days I said, let's get the country boys — the Southern accent boys — together. We were talking before the show. We're going to talk about a lot of things, mainly what it takes to be a real entrepreneur. And you've already had a ton of statements for me, so the title of this is going to be: A True Entrepreneur Doesn't Need a Pep Rally.

Michael Burt: You've bought real estate — a large real estate portfolio. You've built companies. And you've got a book out called Don't Look Me Up, which is a fascinating title, by the way. Where did that come from?

Scott Lumley: Thank you. It was kind of interesting how it all came about. Everybody kept looking me up. And I'd say, well, you need the rest of the story. And I just didn't have time to tell everybody the rest of the story. So I thought, I've got an idea — why don't you just not look me up.

Scott Lumley: Ultimately I ended up writing a book about it. And I'll be honest with you: when I wrote the book, I thought it was going to be a book about how smart I was. Then I realized at the end of the book that I wasn't very smart. It turned out to be a book about hope, and a book about triumph, and honestly probably suicide prevention too — I'd like to think some of that's in there.

Scott Lumley: When I started writing, I didn't realize all the stories I had and all the trials and tribulations I'd come from. You try to push that stuff out of your head because you're looking to be successful and you don't want to think about those things. But those are what define your future in some cases — and I didn't want those to define mine in totality. That's how it started.

Where Scott is today: Resolve Commercial and ResolveSuite

Michael Burt: When I think about this concept of an entrepreneur, I've always defined it as a person who takes lower-level resources to higher levels of productivity. So tell the people watching where you are today, and then we're going to backtrack — because I think the good stuff's in the past, and then you package it up and sell it in the future.

Scott Lumley: I currently have a company called Resolve Commercial, which is a real estate portfolio company. Resolve Commercial stemmed off of a process I did about seven years ago when I was beating the streets, walking and buying properties at the clerk's house right after the recession.

Scott Lumley: I started seeing that a lot of people weren't crossing their T's and dotting their I's. It kind of blew my mind. There are ten states that have never had a tax sale — no tax sale system at all. That was very intriguing to me. It just didn't make any sense that every single person in that county paid their taxes.

Scott Lumley: So I started buying some small homes, building equity, and ultimately moved into my commercial portfolio, which now consists of a lot of larger projects. I started a construction company — and yeah, I've always been a little bit of a control freak. I think most entrepreneurs are. Owning the construction company gave me the ability to not only buy and develop, but to build, hold it in the portfolio, and lease it out. I brought it all into one package.

Scott Lumley: For about five years I kind of left behind the original process of how I bought those buildings. Then my 18-year-old son got his real estate license and was going to become a realtor. And I said, hold up — let's look back at that system I built seven years ago. So we developed it into software called ResolveSuite. It's an incredible product.

Michael Burt: And ResolveSuite does what, specifically?

Scott Lumley: I'd like to take credit for inventing this whole system, but I really didn't. What the software does is it takes a process that used to take four or five months and lets you do it in three or four days. It has an algorithm that goes and looks at all the county clerks and brings in properties that are in distress — pre-tax sale or post-tax sale. Then it allows you to contact the original owners, navigate through their problems, and hear their stories.

Scott Lumley: And there have been some crazy stories. Sad ones. Really sad ones. I'll give you an example. I had one lady who lost her house. She'd filed a Chapter 13. Most people aren't lawyers — they don't understand the chapters of bankruptcy, much less what a 13 means. They just know they're supposed to make their monthly payments, and when they stop, they get a letter that says you've been dismissed. That does not mean discharged. But they just move out, thinking they've lost their home.

Scott Lumley: She still owned that home. Five years go by, no taxes are paid, the trustee's dismissed it, he doesn't care anymore — but that house is still sitting there. Our system picks it up. We reconnect with the lady, we navigate through a deal, and we either put her back in her home or rent the home back to her.

Where there's problems, there's profits

Michael Burt: Let me stop here, because a lot of people have ideas. You saw a need in the market. I wrote this down: how do you make a fortune off other people half-assing something? You uncovered that they're only halfway doing this, and there's an opportunity for a system to come in, capture the information and speed it up.

Scott Lumley: That's exactly right. It finds the imperfections. I tell everybody: where there's problems, there's profits. If you can find a problem and you can solve it, it's profitable.

Scott Lumley: A lot of times people see a problem and they walk away from it. I think because of my adversity, I was so used to adversity that I was automatically ready for a fight. So when ResolveSuite came along, I was ready to advocate — ready to fight for somebody — because I was tired of getting hit myself.

Michael Burt: But you don't write code. You're not a programmer.

Scott Lumley: That's correct.

Michael Burt: So you saw the vision, and this is where a lot of people get hung up. You saw the need, but to go capture that need you had to create software. Where did you go to do that?

Scott Lumley: There's nothing in my life that's not interesting — it happened in a weird way. I have a dear friend named Trevor in Las Vegas. You know how you have brothers who aren't maternal brothers, but they're brothers, and you can start to say something and they already know what you're going to say?

Scott Lumley: We were having a conversation one night. I was thinking about doing a 506(c) for some of my bigger properties. For people who don't know what that is — when crowdfunding became legal, it gave you the chance to raise capital on buildings and let unsophisticated investors get involved. That's where I started, because I had all this high-equity property and I wanted to raise more capital, have some fun money.

Scott Lumley: And then, as I was talking to him, I started telling him about that process from seven years before, and about my son, who was 18 and wanted to follow in his dad's footsteps. I didn't want that. My footsteps were not fun to follow.

Scott Lumley: So I told him the concept. And literally three days after a two-hour conversation, he came back with a schematic drawing of exactly how it would work. Then we spent about a year on it — I'd get home at four or five in the afternoon and we'd work until two or three in the morning. My wife about divorced me over it. FaceTime, video chats, Skype, everything else we could use. I was telling one of the guys outside a minute ago, we started at something like version 0.001. We're on version 11 now.

Write down the problems

Michael Burt: One of the things I started doing — I got this from Jay Samit, who wrote Disrupt You!, and you're really a disrupter in some ways — he said every day you wake up, write down problems you encounter that may or may not have a solution. So every day I write down X number of problems I encounter that I don't think have a current solution. Because that's where the money is. And then I ask: which problem do I want to tackle?

Michael Burt: The other day we had this nice pool, and the problem was snakes and frogs. I thought, how could a person create something that keeps those things away from your outdoor property? I don't know if there's a solution. But if you start writing those problems down every day, you start saying, I don't want to tackle that problem, I don't want to tackle that problem — but that is a problem I want to tackle.

Scott Lumley: Well, a famous man once said — I think it was Henry Ford — when they asked him all these questions he couldn't answer, he said, I've got people to tackle those problems for me.

Michael Burt: That's right. What problems do I want to tackle with my experience level, and what problems do I push off on somebody who has experience in that area?

The war room and the assembly line

Michael Burt: So ResolveSuite is out there finding properties as we speak. Can people license it?

Scott Lumley: They can. We've got two different programs. We've got a membership-based program — you can go to ResolveSuite.com and look at it. And we have a new product, an affiliate model, where we're basically licensing. You have what we call a war room, where you have a team of people trained in a specific job in the process, and the software allows them to only work in that specific job. It becomes like an assembly line for the paperwork.

Michael Burt: And they find the properties, purchase the properties at very low amounts, turn around and sell them at high profits?

Scott Lumley: Sometimes. It depends. A lot of times we find people are in situations. I'll give you another example. A little lady, almost 90 years old, very witty, still living in her home, full of energy. Her husband had always taken care of everything for her and she had no idea what property taxes were. So we gave her a life estate to live in the property rent-free, and ultimately we ended up with the property. She lives five years, she lives ten years — the system's done something bigger than ourselves.

Scott Lumley: And obviously there are a lot of people who don't deserve to be back in their houses. In those cases, we'll sell the houses.

Running away at eleven

Michael Burt: Let's go all the way back to where a lot of this adversity came from. Running away from home at 11 years old. What prompted that?

Scott Lumley: Abusive stepfather, mother — this was the early '70s. Women didn't have the opportunities they do today. It's come a long way, and I'm sure it has a long way to go. But in that particular case, my mother was a waitress, a little bit promiscuous, I guess, is a good word to use. Not a lot of resources at her disposal.

Scott Lumley: I just couldn't take it anymore. I had a brother two years younger than me and one six years younger, and I ended up being the father figure at the age of eight, nine, ten years old. The pressure just got to me. So — and I don't want to give too much of my book away — I got on a Greyhound bus in Memphis, Tennessee and ended up in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Michael Burt: At 11 years old.

Scott Lumley: Eleven years old. Nobody with me. My mother had once been married to a man — I won't mention his name, he's dead now — and I knew he was from Oklahoma, I knew what town he was in. Unfortunately, when I got there, I found out he'd remarried somebody else and they didn't want me around.

Scott Lumley: So I ended up living with a preacher. Well, he called himself a preacher — I don't really think he was. Some abuse happened. I just kept fighting through it. Finally I got to be 15, 16 years old, was a good athlete, strong, powerful kind of guy. You can't tell it now, but back then — that's when things changed. And I got away.

What that season taught him: knowing when to walk away

Michael Burt: What's the biggest thing you use today that you learned during that period? I grew up in a home that wasn't abusive toward me but was abusive toward my mother. People ask me where my ambition comes from, where my fight comes from, where my resolve comes from, and it's hard to say where it came from — you just know you've got it. What did you take out of that season that still serves you?

Scott Lumley: Honestly, the first thing that comes to mind is this: I think the most important part of anything you do in life is knowing when to get out of it. Knowing when to cash your chips in and walk away.

Scott Lumley: A lot of entrepreneurs just don't know. They get involved in something and they're so convinced of their idea, so convinced that they're right, that they end up failing miserably. They don't know when to cut bait and run. What I took out of my situation is that there are times when you just turn and walk away. Sometimes the best deals you'll ever do are the deals you don't do.

Michael Burt: There's a fine line between being too convinced that you're right, and having the fortitude to see an idea through to its conclusion. That's hard for people. When should I walk away and when should I stick it out? I may be one step away from a breakthrough. One person away from a breakthrough.

Scott Lumley: It could be. But at what point has it affected you so badly that there's no recovering from it? I've had it happen in my life a couple of times. There was a point where I was offered hundreds of millions of dollars for one of my companies. I should have taken it. But my ego and my arrogance said, no, I'm two deals away from being worth a billion dollars.

Michael Burt: And what would you have cashed out personally?

Scott Lumley: After taxes, probably about 60 percent of it. It would have been a lot. That would have retired me for life — if you can retire a guy like me. I don't know that's possible. I think we just go till we die. I think that's just the way it is.

The janitor at a Christian school

Michael Burt: Walk me through what happens when you graduate high school.

Scott Lumley: Let me back up one year. I finally reconnected with my real father at 16 years old and ended up coming back to Tennessee after the abuse and everything in Oklahoma. I was about 17. I went to McGavock High School for about three weeks — big culture shock, plaid shirt kid from Oklahoma. They had a 5A state championship-caliber baseball team, and I fit in fine as far as the team went. I started at shortstop day one. Three weeks later Coach Brown came to me and said, you need to change schools — you're gonna get killed here.

Scott Lumley: So I went to a Christian academy, and I was actually the janitor of the school. Dr. Gary Coker was very instrumental in my life. He said, look, I know you don't have any money, but we want you here — it was their first year to have a baseball team. So in order to pay your tuition, you can be the janitor of the school.

Scott Lumley: So I worked as the janitor. And simultaneously I started a landscaping company on the side, mowing grass after school and after baseball games. And here's what I learned: if you work it, it's going to grow. I don't care what you're doing. If you're working hard at it, it's going to grow. I ended up selling that company.

Scott Lumley: I tell people all the time, I graduated with a 4.0 — and there were 26 in my class. You figure it out. But Dr. Coker gave me the chance to work and go to school, or I probably wouldn't have graduated high school. I didn't make it in college very long, that's for sure. I wasn't cut out for college. I needed to make money. I didn't have the privileges, the support systems. Back in '85, '86, there were scholarships or you paid for it.

Hoagie Huts, office furniture, and the first crash

Michael Burt: So out of necessity you started really being an entrepreneur, creating businesses, making money. What was the first big business you got involved in?

Scott Lumley: The first business I got involved in was a garden center at the age of 12 — that was with the preacher. That kind of gave me the entrepreneurial spirit. Ultimately I opened the landscaping company, and I sold it for a little bit of money. At 18, 19 years old, $100,000 was a lot of money.

Scott Lumley: I took that money and invested in a little company called Hoagie Hut. I took sandwich shops and put them inside Exxon stations. I ended up selling to Subway when Subway came to Tennessee, when they crossed the Mississippi River. I probably should have held on to that one.

Scott Lumley: Then I had a company called Triple N Sales. It was an incredible company for many, many years — selling and leasing office furniture and office equipment into high-rise buildings all over the world. Here's the deep story: a lot of companies can't afford to go in and outfit a complete office, especially a ten-story building. So they lease it, because it's a 100 percent write-off. If you buy the furniture, you depreciate it over a seven-year period. So it's always advantageous to do leasing, especially if you can get a lease that doesn't have a high residual.

Scott Lumley: But there wasn't a lot of furniture being sold in high-rise buildings after 2001. That company came crashing down pretty quickly. That was my first real super, super adversity in business. I was stuck in bankruptcy for five or six years over that company, because we had so many contracts with government agencies.

Scott Lumley: That's when I met a guy named Steven Leftwich. He started mentoring me, taught me a lot of bankruptcy law, taught me a lot of business law. And that proved to be very valuable later on when I started a company called Electronic Depot.

Electronic Depot: the number one seller on eBay

Scott Lumley: Toward the end of the furniture business, we started buying furniture liquidation loads from the manufacturers. We'd get a piece that had a little scratch on it — well, they all had scratches on them by the time we delivered anyway. And I thought, man, there's something to this. I'm buying a tractor-trailer load of furniture for 20 grand and I've got 80,000 dollars' worth of furniture in it, and I'm leasing it out and making a lot of money.

Scott Lumley: So I decided liquidation was something I really wanted to move into. And we wrote software — back to my roots. I'm a very dangerous software writer. I usually mess it up and somebody has to fix it.

Scott Lumley: Electronic Depot just — I mean, it was at that time in the economy where everything was blossoming. All the big retailers were going crazy. Best Buy, Circuit City, all of them had tractor-trailer loads of returns they were shipping into liquidation companies. I got the contract from Circuit City and I was getting 50, 60 loads a week. And we were turning a lot of it out on eBay. We were the number one seller on eBay for several years.

Michael Burt: How'd you get the Circuit City contract?

Scott Lumley: Friend of a friend. Networking. Because we were selling so much on eBay, that word of mouth got around, and next thing I know I met a guy named Steve Stolberg and he hooked me up with Circuit City.

Michael Burt: Why were people coming to you? Discounted product?

Scott Lumley: Heavily discounted. And gaming was booming. We had Xboxes, PS3s, Nintendo Wiis, all at discounted prices. Let's be honest — most middle-class families can't afford all these games for their kids. And everybody wants one. Nobody wants to disappoint their kids.

When you think the money will never end

Michael Burt: So what happened?

Scott Lumley: I think it's a typical stereotypical mistake for an entrepreneur. Guys get the money and they think it's never going to end. So many guys get in business, they start making money — especially big money — and they think, I've got this.

Michael Burt: What's big money for the listener out there watching? What does that mean?

Scott Lumley: Electronic Depot was doing 10 to 15 million a year across 14 locations. And our margins were usually somewhere in the 40 percentile, sometimes even 50, 60 percent. So it was heavy profits. It was a big business, and it was a boom for about ten years. There are still companies out there today doing it and killing it.

Scott Lumley: But in my situation, I thought the money would never end, and I started living the life of a guy who thought the money would never end. Next thing I looked up, it ended. It just stopped. 2008 happened, and it was a mess.

Scott Lumley: And when you let other people run your company, there are things happening inside your company that you're not even aware of — but you're accountable for them.

Michael Burt: Which is where the concept of Don't Look Me Up comes from.

Scott Lumley: That's exactly right. And this is a lesson for everybody out there: if you think it won't happen to you, you are sadly, sadly mistaken. It's impossible for any entrepreneur to see everything that's happening. So the integrity of the people you hire is really, really important. But how do you judge integrity until after you've seen bad integrity? When you have hundreds of employees, how do you weigh that out? You use human resources — but they're human too.

Scott Lumley: It comes down to this: I just wasn't paying attention to what I needed to be paying attention to, and that ultimately created the ultimate problem. Two FBI agents showed up on my front door and said, hey Scott, tell us about this. And quite honestly, I didn't know what they were talking about. As time went along I realized what they were talking about. We had shut our doors and closed our company in the 2008 recession, and some product probably didn't get delivered. It could have been a daisy chain of people. But those people worked for me. I held my hand up and said, this is my responsibility.

Scott Lumley: Obviously I didn't do everything in that process right. And the last thing I wanted was somebody under my leadership — a secretary, an accountant — getting in trouble for something I was ultimately responsible for making sure didn't happen.

Michael Burt: The lesson for people watching is that as it was growing at big scale, you took your eye off the ball.

Scott Lumley: Absolutely. I'll tell you a funny one. I actually had employees who put credit cards in my name — or put me on their card as a secondary cardholder. I didn't know it was there, because I hardly ever pulled my credit bureau. Now we've got things to monitor that, but at the time I never did. They ran up 50, a hundred thousand dollars, and I found out a year later, when the credit card companies started coming after me. They'd changed the phone number, changed the home address. All kinds of things happen. That's why it's so important to make sure the people around you have good integrity.

Way past broke

Michael Burt: So that business gets knocked out. Do you have money put aside? Are you broke?

Scott Lumley: We were way past broke. We were sitting there going, how are we going to pay the attorneys? Luckily I go back to that 30-year friendship with Steven Leftwich. He stepped in and started the bankruptcy process for me around 2009, 2010.

Scott Lumley: And then I kind of stumbled on this. I thought, I'm starting to make a little money here, and I really don't want to file bankruptcy again. I'd been through bankruptcy so much from the previous one, and I was in it for so long, I could have been a bankruptcy attorney at that stage. When you walk in and the judges say hi to you, you know you've been there too long.

Scott Lumley: So I saw these opportunities, and I started using the concept behind ResolveSuite to purchase real estate. I ultimately made enough money to go back and get dismissed out of my bankruptcy and pay my debts back. In 2011 I had it not just discharged — I had it dismissed. And I went back and paid the debts back.

Michael Burt: So you thought, I'm free and clear, everything's good.

Scott Lumley: Right. And then in 2014, that's when the two guys showed up and said, well, you missed one.

Michael Burt: Was there intent, or was there not intent?

Scott Lumley: Read my book, Don't Look Me Up, and make your own decision. You'll get the whole picture. But unfortunately we have this thing called Google. And I think if everybody got a dislocated finger every hundredth time they typed something into Google, the world would be a better place. Listen — if it's on there, it's absolutely accurate, right? A lot of cases, it's just not the complete truth.

Scott Lumley: That's where Don't Look Me Up came from. Now I've got twelve, twenty thousand followers on Facebook. So I guess the next book is, I Guess You Looked Me Up.

The preacher who walked out — and the deal Scott turned down

Michael Burt: Do you feel compelled to tell people up front — hey, if you're going to look me up, here's what you're going to see?

Scott Lumley: I almost have to. I've got to tell you a story. I had a friend — no names — who was a preacher, go figure. He was doing a big deal with me, and obviously he had not Googled me. We'd had five, six, seven meetings, and he finally came out to the house on a Sunday afternoon with his wife. Great conversation. We walked back to where I store my collector cars, and I really liked him — really cool dude.

Scott Lumley: I said, look, before you get into a deal this size with me, I need to tell you about what happened in the past. So I told him. And he literally stood up, walked out of the building, got his wife, got in his car and drove off. Didn't say a word. I thought, well, I guess that deal's over with.

Scott Lumley: A couple of hours went by and I'm thinking, this is a crazy circus. I've never seen anybody react that way. At least say, hey, I'm sorry, I can't do this. But he just walked off. Then the phone rings — three, four times. I didn't answer, I was too aggravated. Finally something told me to answer. He says, "Scott, don't hang up. We want to do the deal with you. We don't want you to back out. We're not going to back out."

Scott Lumley: And I said, look — I'm not interested in doing the deal with you. Because if your resolve is so little today, how can I have faith in your resolve on a big monster deal? When something really tragic happens, it affects you, it affects my life, it affects yours. How do I know you're going to have the resolve to stay in here with me when the time's right? So I turned his project down.

Scott Lumley: He said, do me a favor, put on a suit, drive one of your fancy cars, come to an event with me tonight. I said no. My wife said, let's go. So we went, sat down with him, and he introduced me to some really cool people. That kind of made up for it. But I still didn't do the project.

Michael Burt: What kind of deal are we talking about?

Scott Lumley: That particular one was a condo project in Mount Juliet, Tennessee — 32 condos at $354,000 apiece, right behind a building that I own. He owned the land, and I contracted with him to do the construction. I carried it through the development process, got it approved and ready, and he bought it from me.

"I resolve problems"

Michael Burt: So the whole story comes full circle — you named everything Resolve. If somebody comes to me and says, "I like that Scott Lumley guy from your show, what exactly does he do?" — what do I tell them?

Scott Lumley: I resolve problems. That's what I am. A problem solver. I've had problems my entire life. I've had adversity my entire life. I've had to look for ways to solve problems.

Scott Lumley: Resolve Financial was resolving problems — going in and helping people, and helping myself, figure out how to navigate through whatever problem they had in business. I still do a lot of consulting. I'll go in, evaluate a situation, and determine what I think they need to change to be more profitable. That's Resolve Financial.

Scott Lumley: Resolve Capital raises the money — it's a PPM, a private placement memorandum, a fund we use to purchase the homes that ResolveSuite finds. And Resolve Commercial is my portfolio company — strip centers, restaurants, and the two oldest buildings in Mount Juliet, Tennessee. I'm kind of proud of those two. One was built in 1908 — the old bank and the old post office. We went in and renovated them totally. We've got gun ranges and some other things in the buildings.

Michael Burt: Is that typically done with partners or on your own?

Scott Lumley: I had partners until 2014. Then they all decided they didn't want to be partners with me anymore. Which is okay — it actually worked out to my benefit. When all this happened, not only did I lose my partners, I lost all my banking too. All the banks bailed on me. So I was scrambling with millions and millions of dollars to keep this together. And we did. I didn't lose a single property. As a matter of fact, it went the other direction — I ended up compounding it. Which showed me I didn't have to have a partner. In the beginning, when you're getting into these big deals, you think you need a partner. But you don't.

Who you take counsel from

Michael Burt: I was a high school basketball coach for a decade — women's basketball. We took a place that never won and turned it into a dominant place; it's now won six championships in the last eight years. People asked how I did it, so I wrote books about it, which led to speaking and coaching and training, and I started building a coaching business.

Michael Burt: And once we began to generate revenue and I had excess cash, I started getting all kinds of counsel about what to do with that money. But they didn't counsel me before I had it.

Scott Lumley: And will they crash your funeral? Probably not. So I don't know that I'd be listening to them.

Michael Burt: That's the criteria: did you counsel me before I had it, and will you be crying at my funeral?

Scott Lumley: That is my criteria. I know it's terrible to say it that way, but it's truthful. People who are not willing to be there through the entire thing are not people you want to surround yourself with.

Something bigger than making money

Scott Lumley: I've been in a lot of businesses. I've had a lot of successes and I've had a lot of failures, and I've extracted something out of every one of them. Everything good I ever extracted, and every problem I ever had, went into ResolveSuite.

Scott Lumley: I could take that software tonight and sell it for hundreds of millions of dollars to a Warren Buffett — to a big boy. But I wouldn't have succeeded at anything except making money. And although we're all here to make money — we do these shows because we want to make money — there is a bigger thing. And the bigger thing than making money is watching other people make it.

Scott Lumley: We've got one guy who's made $1.6 million in four months. I saw him before I came here. He hugged me and said, you're like a father figure to me. To watch these young entrepreneurs mold their lives — we had one kid, hair down to here, and in six weeks he made $31,000 in profit. He went and cut his hair off. Started dressing nice. Not that that's the most important thing, but it shows it's transforming him. Seeing these people grow is far more important to me.

Michael Burt: Do you have to have a background and skill set to do it?

Scott Lumley: Absolutely not. I'll give you a testimony — I've got it on my phone. I took a lady and a man from Canada who had never been in real estate in their lives. I worked with them for three days inside our workshop — we actually took the workshop into my war room and they worked beside my employees, and we mentored them. Three days. They went back to Canada, and the day after they got back they called me — they'd got four deals. Nine days, they navigated through four deals.

Scott Lumley: And these are not untypical stories. These are typical. I've got one guy, 65 years old, a barber. He worked three days inside our system, and on his fourth day he made a little over $100,000.

Scott Lumley: It sounds like fabricated, silly numbers. I wouldn't believe it if I were on the outside listening to this either. That's why you need to come look. Come see it for yourself. You can go to ResolveSuite.com and read about it, but you really need to come sit down in the war room and see what's happening in there to truly get a grasp of it.

Base hits, not home runs

Michael Burt: Too many times in the South we're brought up to think a certain way. Here's what I found out running a business: I can't expand, I can't grow, I can't market, I can't hire more people, I can't help more people without money. That's why I push our sales team so hard to sell — because without that, we can't open more greatness factories, we can't hire more people. As an entrepreneur ten years into this business, I'm now more interested than ever in making easy, lucrative and fun money versus hard money.

Scott Lumley: "Can't" is not a word I ever say. If people took the word "can't" out of their vocabulary, they'd find they could do a lot more. You should always do what you can do, and then build upon it.

Scott Lumley: Don't try to do like I did. I went out there trying to slap home runs for the first 40 years of my life. Every once in a while I'd hit one — but it didn't do any good, because I had 55 strikeouts leading up to it. So now I just take base hits.

Michael Burt: That's good, man. It's been a fascinating interview. Thank you for coming to the greatness factory. I'm excited about coming to check out the war room.

Scott Lumley: I'm looking forward to having you on my show.

Michael Burt: We may not get four million views on this, but we're going to try to get as many as we can.

Scott Lumley: Well, it only takes one good one.

Michael Burt: Thank you, Scott. I appreciate it. This has been Michael Burt, the Super Coach. If you're not spending time with fascinating people — I wrote the book Person of Interest, and it's really about people who live fascinating lives, go to fascinating places, hang around fascinating people, and get fascinating results. If you're not spending time on a regular basis with those people, you need to be.

Michael Burt: Scott Lumley — check him out. ResolveSuite.com. He's got a lot of cool things going on, and you really need to give this guy a look. The first time I talked to him on the phone, after watching his stuff, I came back to my staff and said, this is an interesting cat, I want to spend some time with this guy. And I don't say that about everybody. This guy right here is the real deal. Thank you guys, have a great day.