February 9, 2026 – Note Flipping Eddie Speed, Back Office Besties Emily LaRusch and PureThera James Garland

0:02 Jim Beach : Welcome to school for startups radio. We are so cram packed we don’t have time for the normal introduction. We’re going to go ahead and get started with our first guest right now. Her name is Emily LaRouche. She is founder of back office Betty’s. It is a virtual assistant firm for legal offices. Emily has a really interesting background. She started off in the BMX bike show industry, making millions at six years old, charging parents to have bike shows and watch their kids ride bikes around. How smart of her. She then went and worked at McDonald’s. Anyone who works at McDonald’s I love because they just learned so much. And she actually did learn to keep it as clean as a Ritz Carlton, they would say, in 2014 she started back office Betty’s, which is a, as I said, a law firm, assistant company. I’ll let her explain all of the services. Emily, welcome to the show. How you doing, Jim?

0:57 Emily LaRusch : I’m great. I love the show, and I’m so excited to be here,

1:00 Jim Beach : and I want to apologize. I we recorded a few minutes, and then it wasn’t working, and I blew it. And so Emily’s been polite and nice to try again. So Emily, I’m sorry we recorded that six hours that none of it worked. And so take two

1:13 Unknown Speaker : best, best, all right.

1:18 Jim Beach : Well, congratulations on an incredible career. Tell us about the BMX shows.

1:24 Emily LaRusch : When I look back, I realize how ridiculous this is, but it’s all about marketing, branding, labeling. And, you know, the kids and I like to make little ramps and do stunts and write our roller skates around. And I thought, I can make a production label it with a name. It’s a nice production name. And then, you know, something like street kids. And then I would charge the parents $1 a piece to watch this production, which is essentially just paying to watch your own kids play.

1:51 Jim Beach : I love it. I love it. And brilliant, brilliant. And it’s so weird. You were doing something outdoors. I thought that was illegal, so you must have been older than our our normal kids who don’t play doors anymore on bikes, definitely.

2:08 Emily LaRusch : I just told a friend today, why? Why can’t they? Why would I need a big backyard they can go outside? And she said, nobody does that anymore. They like to watch their kids keep them confined. Said, Ah, that’s all they need to get with the olden times.

2:20 Jim Beach : Yes, throw the kids out and make them come home when the lights come on.

2:24 Unknown Speaker : Yes, go play in the woods. It’s safe, I promise.

2:28 Jim Beach : All right, tell us about the back office. Betty’s what you were doing, how you saw the niche. Tell us about the story.

2:38 Emily LaRusch : So I was working as a mortgage underwriter, an extremely busy, limited amount of time for breaks and scheduling things like home services. And so I was calling around and people weren’t answering the phone, or the ones who did, one guy called me back and he said, I have a missed call from this number. And I’m thinking, Do you people not want my money? Can you at least tell me which company you are? And I thought, You know what? I am not a rocket surgeon, but I do know how to answer the phone and provide good customer service. And so I quit my job and launched a telephone answering service for anyone with a pulse and a wallet who would pay me.

3:14 Jim Beach : I love it. I love that attitude. You went cold turkey 100% quit your job and started, did you have any savings or anything? How risky was that?

3:25 Emily LaRusch : Oh, boy, you know what? I am, an entrepreneur, through and through and built the parachute on the way down. I had, I did empty out my 401 K, I took out loans. I maxed out credit cards, ended up in a personal bankruptcy several years into it, didn’t get a paycheck for two years, but I was so invested in what I was doing and so laser focused on it that I refused to quit.

3:50 Jim Beach : I love that. I love that. And thank you for sharing the bankruptcy. People you know tend to hide their failures. I’ve also had a corporate bankruptcy, so I will pull down to Emily. I bet I was in more debt than you were. I think we were in 11 million in debt.

4:09 Emily LaRusch : Oh, I just slightly lower in the, in the, you know, 80,000 range. And you know what I did, Jim, stupidly, you know, integrity is a huge thing to me. And I thought, I don’t want to have write off all this debt. I don’t want to do a chapter seven. I want to do the right thing. So I’m going to do a 13 and restructure so I can pay everyone back and do the right thing. Well, you know what, Jim That’s that. It was the dumbest thing I could have done, because I could not take out a loan or get a new car or do anything without asking dad, which is the bankruptcy court for permission, and definitely couldn’t take out business loans. So five years I was locked in and forced to bootstrap every step of the way.

4:49 Jim Beach : That was good for you, Emily, it

4:51 Emily LaRusch : actually was, in hindsight, but going through it was misery,

4:55 Jim Beach : yes, and now you’re wealthier because it and you own the business, right? Absolutely. So much better off that way? Yeah, I hate to say it, but that turned out to be better off for you.

5:06 Emily LaRusch : It did. I tell everyone, don’t, don’t look for funding. You know, bootstrap it. Grow it small. Grow it slow and small.

5:13 Jim Beach : I so agree. All right, tell us about Betty’s and the niche ification of Betty’s, the niche

5:21 Emily LaRusch : vacation I joined the Entrepreneurs Organization accelerator two years in fun fact, I was down to about $2,000 in the bank, and at the time it was 1500 for the year. And this was my Hail Mary, because the ship was going down or I was going to find a way out. I knew nothing about running a business. So I joined this accelerator, and one of the first things I saw were the people who went from, you know, surviving to wildly thriving all niched. And I learned the riches are in the niches. So I went back to my team, and I said, Who do you love working with, who really values us and pays on time and appreciates the work that we do for them. And who can we scale this company with? Because we were still in a roto VAT, carpet cleaning system one minute, and then a legal intake the next, and then maybe a chiropractor, we could not do the level of customer service I wanted with all these industries as we’ve really started to grow beyond about 50 customers. So we had to niche, and we chose my team. Happen to have a legal background. I have a legal background, and it just was a natural fit. They said the lawyers hands down. Even though I love blue collar, I was surprised. But we work with really good, heartful attorneys. So people always say, why lawyers? And I say, well, they’re not all sharks. We work with really good people who care about their clients, and those are the ones attracted to us. So that was what we niched with,

6:43 Jim Beach : very, very smart and so what services are you providing now? What does, or what’s the basket of services the Betty’s offer?

6:53 Emily LaRusch : Well, you know, talking about niching, one of the best parts of niching is you can broaden the scope of services. So we went from being a call center, a telephone answering service to asking, what else can we do to support the life and dreams of the entrepreneurial attorney? And we’ve realized we can offer fractional administrative assistance. So this is paralegals, Client Services, different administrative tasks that are needed within the law firm.

7:21 Jim Beach : All right, do you buy supplies for them? Stuff like that.

7:27 Emily LaRusch : For our call center employees, we do provide everything they need. For our virtual assistants, we’ll provide anything they need as well. But generally, they already, they’re US based. They’ve already worked in law firms. They kind of have what they need. Our VAs typically just need a computer, whereas our our laptop, whereas our receptionist need a little more gear. We also offer one of our little perks, as we’ll offer Betty’s vacation bonus. So if somebody needs a little bit of cash to get an ergonomic desk chair or something to beautify their workspace. We will offer them a little bit of money, a stipend every year for that.

8:05 Jim Beach : All right, that’s excellent to know. That’s not what I was asking, though I was referring to a friend of mine who does nothing but supplies for legal firms, and he buys their computers and desks and chairs and pencils and pens and can get enough of a discount that it’s worth the legal firm to hire him.

8:27 Emily LaRusch : Oh, that’s amazing. Oh, well, yeah, I’d love to get their name. Throw that out there.

8:31 Jim Beach : Who’s that? Randy Andy Brown does that.

8:36 Unknown Speaker : That’s fabulous. So we absolutely do not do that.

8:39 Jim Beach : Yeah, y’all might be a good match. So where do you find your employees? Where did the Betty’s come from? Are they all we hire?

8:50 Emily LaRusch : No, actually, shockingly, no, we hire, you know, any quality candidate who applies. And we do have a primary women based company, but we certainly don’t discriminate. We encourage everyone to apply. And we’re in about six or seven different states in the US and our team, we started off remote by necessity, because I didn’t have the money for an office. I always dreamed of this big, beautiful, great office, but by the time we could afford it. Everyone was so happy working from home. We’ve been remote from day one. I love it.

9:26 Jim Beach : And do you have no problem managing employees? You think they’re still getting efficient and valuable ROIs from them?

9:35 Emily LaRusch : Yes, and I track ROI so we watch like a hawk, so we make sure that we’re getting the ROA from every team member, but I would say we’re probably more integrated as a remote company than many in office companies are. We do a lot of things to build culture. Our team is connected. We have water cooler talk going on on a chat channel. We also have support from peers available on chat channel and. Support from management at all times. So we’re way more connected than you would think as a remote team.

10:05 Jim Beach : What do you do to build culture remotely?

10:10 Emily LaRusch : We do a lot of fun events, so we have one person who is a bit of a mixologist on the team, others who like to bake and cook, and so we’ll do like for the holidays. We did bake your own ugly holiday sweaters, and we did this huge thing on Zoom. We had our mixologist create a custom Betty’s drink. We all did it on Zoom. Chatted, so we’ll do things like that, or trivia. We also have an all hands company meeting, and this is something unique I did from the beginning. Jim is have you ever been to an all company meeting where it’s a snooze

10:42 Jim Beach : fest a billion times just yeah, yes, they’re terrible.

10:47 Emily LaRusch : So from day one, I’ve assigned out each slide to various team members, and I let them volunteer for them. Well, let me tell you how that drives engagement up at our all company meetings, everyone’s participating. I’ve got people, you know, at the level of a Virtual Receptionist presenting on our PNL, you know, outputs, and we kind of teach them about how to read the slide. And so it’s really engaging. It’s not one person droning on, and it certainly is not the Emily show. I get my little wrap up at the end, and that’s pretty much it cool.

11:16 Jim Beach : How often do you do that? We do those quarterly, okay? And then how often do you have team meetings that are not fund based, just work based?

11:25 Emily LaRusch : So our work based, we do a departmental level meeting at least once a week, and then we do our same page with our direct reports, depending on, you know, kind of big projects going on, it could be anywhere from bi weekly to once a month.

11:42 Jim Beach : Then how do you give individual feedback for individual people? You said you track them and have an individual ROI. They’re on the telephone exclusively.

11:52 Emily LaRusch : So for our reception side of the team, yes, they are on the phones, and they do a once a month same page with their manager. They also get ongoing they’ll get daily stats so they know every day how they’re performing. And then they’ll have, if they if we see a trend, we’re not going to wait for the month to be up for their review. We’re going to pop in and give them training and coaching. Otherwise, they review monthly, and then they’re awarded, you know, based on performance as well.

12:19 Jim Beach : All right, and how do you find new employees? Is that difficult? Or what’s your process?

12:26 Emily LaRusch : No, we actually get about 500 applicants for every one posting that we put up. I think our culture really sells. So recently, indeed, actually shut us down. They said, this looks too good to be true. We think you’re a scam, and we had to prove I’m a real company to get our indeed count turned back on. But we’re just damning.

12:47 Jim Beach : I mean, what? What did you write that sounded too good to be true, all of our employees grow wings and fly.

12:54 Emily LaRusch : I have no idea. I didn’t ever get the specifics. We don’t make employees pay to apply. I know there are some call centers out there that might have them pay, like, a screening fee or something. We don’t charge anything. So I’m like, What are we scamming? It’s a real job. It’s a real position. I think sometimes the remote stuff gets flagged.

13:12 Jim Beach : Perhaps, I can’t imagine that that’s that’s kind of just strange. I don’t know it sounds

13:18 Emily LaRusch : It was wild, and honestly, I was, you know, the first time in over a decade we’ve ever had any kind of issues. So, hey, these things happen.

13:26 Jim Beach : So how big was your organization when you went to the team and asked what niche you should go into? And then how big are y’all now,

13:35 Emily LaRusch : oh, my goodness, we were teeny, tiny. I think there were maybe 13 of us at that time, and now we it was teeny, tiny. It was at the point where I still wasn’t getting a paycheck. So for me, it was not big enough. It took two today we’re at about 100 a little over, fantastic, 100 100 and you know, it’s funny, the last time I checked, we were at 37 and I asked again, and they said we were 75 and I was like, That’s almost double. How did this happen? And now it’s 100 so we are definitely growing, but we have a saying, we don’t sacrifice culture for cash. So we want to continue to grow and support attorneys, but never to sacrifice our culture, right?

14:22 Jim Beach : And then, how do you find new clients? What is your marketing? How do you reach out to a new firm?

14:28 Emily LaRusch : Traditionally, we have been word of mouth, so a lot of online referrals. And I really love the chat homes. Dream 100 is go hang out where your your 100 dream partners would be in for us. Those partners aren’t customers. It would be referral partners, business attorney, business coaches, legal industry type things. And so we’ve created some integrations with things like Clio software, and that’s been a huge referral source for us. A very cool

15:04 Jim Beach : All right, what are your goals now? Emily, what’s next for you in the company?

15:12 Emily LaRusch : So my goals would be to double the amount of clients that we’re helping. And I like to think that we have this little butterfly effect on the world. By helping attorneys create more sanity having better families, they can employ more people in their communities that we spread our little butterfly effect of well being. And I want to do more for my employees. So this year, we increased our health care coverage to 75% we have a goal to make it 100% and so I tell the team, you know, as we grow, the more we serve, the more we we can do for our team.

15:47 Jim Beach : I love that attitude. Emily, that’s great. Yes, you know what?

15:52 Emily LaRusch : When I grew up, I used to think the man’s keeping us down. You know, the man’s got all the money. I don’t know who the man is. I guess I’m the man. Now, my dad told me. My dad told me, one day, the better I do, the more good I can do in the world. And I realized, oh, at that time, I was a receptionist, making 20,000 a year, and I donated nothing to charity. I did nothing charitable, and my dad could donate my whole year’s salary to charitable orgs. And he taught me that the better you do, the more impact you can have on the better you can do. And it completely changed my attitude.

16:24 Jim Beach : Yeah, it’s hard to give and serve others if you’re not, you know, making a salary and paying yourself first, you know, you have to help yourself first, but then you’re not giving back. There’s something wrong.

16:38 Emily LaRusch : Yeah, absolutely, it was easy for me to say, Oh, the man, should be doing it. Those rich guys, they should be doing it, but I’m poor, so they should give me more. And I realized, well, I actually have total ownership of what I can create in the world, and the impact that I can have. And entrepreneurism is a great way to create your life and the impact that you want to leave.

16:59 Jim Beach : So what are the lessons you’ve learned along the way. Emily, obviously you’ve learned to bootstrap really well. You’ve learned the niches in the riches. You’ve learned a lot of the stereotypical lessons. What else ego?

17:14 Unknown Speaker : Death? Jim, ego death, I have learned

17:19 Jim Beach : that go death. What the hell is ego Jack? It causes you to crash and burn.

17:25 Emily LaRusch : It’s a different, different kind is that you have to change who you are at different stages of the business. So one of my favorite lessons is, what got you here won’t get you there. And I’ve I’m in a transition now, where I went from being able to do every job in the business to now, I do no job in the business, but I do have a role, and I have to stay out of operations to do my role, and I’ve had to let go. So that was a phase of death. Now I’m transitioning into more of the owner’s box, and that’s a new phase of death. At first, I felt like, well, does no one need me? I’m unneeded. And so I really had to check my ego at the door and promote people who are smarter than I, who could take it further than I could, and bring people up within the company. And I had to let go of a lot, and I had to change who I was and and my ego has been attached to the things I did, rather to now it’s growing people well,

18:21 Jim Beach : ego is so hard. As an entrepreneur, you know, we take so many bashes, but yet we’re have to be proud of ourselves, and we have to toot our own horn, because no one else is going to and there’s just so many parts of the ego. And I had the man who invented diet Coca Cola, Diet Coke, the diet part of coke, was a mentor of mine for years. And you could go to his house and he would take you to the basement. He would mix a Diet Coke, or a coke or a Fanta by hand. He was the guy that actually knew the formula of coke, the quality control guy, and he taught me, you grow in your promotions and your businesses until you are the one that’s the burden, the hindrance, the problem, and a lot of ego to acknowledge that I am the problem and I’m the one that needs to change and improve and be different, and you’re totally right. Each season of the business requires a different set of skills and different things, and now all you do is you’re officially in charge of cleaning the bathrooms. Exactly.

19:35 Emily LaRusch : It’s a 10 day hour week. It’s great.

19:41 Jim Beach : Yes, oh, what else, Emily? What else do you want to talk about? What else is important to you?

19:49 Emily LaRusch : You know, probably the, the biggest thing that’s important to me is culture. So I’m kind of the culture ambassador. That’s, that’s my role is making sure we don’t lose that. And. I’ve always maintained that you can have an amazing culture no matter how much money you have. Culture doesn’t have to cost. And I knew what the culture would be of the business and how I wanted people to feel when they interacted with us and when they came to work every day before I even actually knew what type of business I was going to open. So, you know, for the School of startups, I would say, start there.

20:22 Jim Beach : Folks. Great advice. How do we find out more? Follow online, get in touch.

20:29 Emily LaRusch : You can find all things Betty’s at back office, betty.com’s and you can find me on LinkedIn under Emily LaRouche,

20:35 Jim Beach : fantastic, Emily. Thank you so much for being with us and sharing your incredible story. You’ve done it so well, absolutely by the book, and you deserve the reward. So congratulations. Well done. Thank you, sir, and we will be right back.

20:57 Jim Beach : We are back and again. Thank you so very, very much for being with us. Very excited to introduce you to my first guest today. His name is Eddie speed. He is the founder of note school. He is a discount note expert, and he will explain what a note is, but when there is debt that needs to or anyway, I’ll let him explain it. He’s been doing it for 45 years. He is the industry. Eddie speed, welcome to the show. How you doing? I’m great. How are you, sir? I am well. So let’s start off with the note. What? What is a note?

21:32 Eddie Speed : Well, a note is what everybody signs when they buy a house. You sign a note and you promise to pay the bank back, right? You promise to pay back the amount that you borrowed, plus interest. Usually it’s a monthly payment, payable over, you know, 20 or 30 years. And then you sign another document, and then you pledge your house to be collateral. If you can’t pay, you could lose your house. And so I buy real estate secured notes.

22:03 Unknown Speaker : Okay? And why I’m not. I don’t own the property, but I own a

22:09 Jim Beach : What’s that? Why is a note for sale?

22:14 Eddie Speed : Well, we target, we don’t. We don’t buy notes from the government. We don’t buy notes from like Fannie Mae or some other like FHA, we buy private loans, and we’re like a seller of a property. Would sell the property in and they run out of money. They can only carry so many mortgages before they need to go sell some of their their notes to recapitalize and start over again. Okay? And I’ve worked, I’ve specialized in working with real estate investors for the past many decades, and I’m very we’re well known in that space at kind of showing real estate investors how to use seller financing in the best way. And part of that is they create notes, and they come to Eddie, and they say, okay, Eddie, I need to sell some notes. And that’s I built a marketplace around that,

23:11 Jim Beach : all right. And so why would I invest in a note? What kind of return or what? How does the other side work?

23:22 Eddie Speed : Well, most people would compare a note to rental houses, right if you were comparing the two so, so rent houses used to be a lot more profitable than they are right now, and the reason that they’re not near as profitable, about more than half, is the profit is made today that they used to make just a few years ago, and you say, Well, what happened? Eddie, it’s called inflation. It’s the same reason that we experience it at the grocery store. Right expenses on rentals went up way more than rents went up. And so landlords are not making as near as much profit as they used to, and banks are making more profit than they used to. And so if you know, we say today that a typical comparison is that you could earn about two and a half times the net income owning a note on the same house that you rented.

24:18 Jim Beach : Okay, you How did this market develop in the you know, decades ago?

24:29 Eddie Speed : Well, I started when seller financing became really a big deal in 1980 and I was a young guy. My father in law got me started. I wasn’t even dating my wife when we, I started with him, but we, he introduced me to this business. I was 20 years old. Didn’t know anything. He had the money and the knowledge and all the wherewithal, and all I had to give was shoe leather. That’s the only thing I could give. Was just going out and going to helping him find some. Notes and but that’s when I started in 1980 with him and seller financing was a really big deal. The note business buying these notes. It does good when other things in real estate or banking don’t go near as good. No words. If things are really good, nobody needs private financing. Everybody go get a loan at the bank. If real estate’s great, nobody needs to do this. But what happens is, is the mortgage industry is way, way off the amount of loans that they make, right? Like compared to 2021 there’s only about 10% of loans last year that were made compared to 2,021%

25:42 Jim Beach : yes, sir, wow. And that’s

25:43 Eddie Speed : according to New York Federal Reserve, right? So, so the mortgage business is way off, the realtor business is way off. And so we are a business that does good because we fill a void that conventional lending doesn’t

25:56 Unknown Speaker : feel. That’s what we do.

26:00 Eddie Speed : And so it’s a really, you know, I’ve been in all my 45 years in this business. I believe the next five years are going to be the most astonishing, best five years that the industry has ever seen. Part of it is, the reason is, I look back at a young Eddie speed at 20 years old. I went to work for these guys, but we didn’t have any systems or processes or mechanisms built to go do things for, you know, people that would go out and, you know, going to flip a note for us, right? We just didn’t have things in place. Now we’ve got things in place where we can point people to an audience that’s really needs to solve a problem, like they have a pain, we can show them how we solve the problem. And, you know, then, so all of a sudden, we’ve got a real mechanism built. And to give you a sense of how much more business we’re seeing in the market last year, we did virtually three times as much business in the last six months of last year as we did in the first six months of last year. So we’re on quite a trajectory of this. And you know, once again, we’ve got now, many years in the business. And, you know, we so we could see the problem brewing, and we said we’re going to go fix the machine that is really, really able to fix this problem. And so we have a school, and we teach people how to go, you know, do this business. They can. They can, you know, earn fee income. Instead of flipping a house, you can flip a note. That’s how I started. I didn’t have any money. I was living in a 10 by 40 mobile home, but, but I’ve shown people how to go do this in a way that really kind of like we’re kind of cutting edge, not really anybody else. The industry has built the machine that we’ve built to help people with with that process, so you don’t have to go figure out everything to go, go do the business. We’ve kind of built a lot of the call it done for you mechanics, right? And then on the other hand, and then on the other hand, we help landlords, because landlords are going like, oh heck, I’m not making near the income on rentals, but the tenants still call me just as much. You know, the headaches are still there, just not the income, right? And so we help landlords with that problem. So we’re, there’s a big marketplace that we’re kind of become very focused on helping and, you know it’s, it’s everybody’s chasing houses. I’ll ask you a question. I bet you know many dozens of people that own rent houses or chase houses to go buy and resell or do whatever. How many? How many people do you know that Chase knows?

28:56 Jim Beach : Well, you’re the second Eddie off air. Before we came online, we were comparing notes with a real villain that we know in this industry, and I couldn’t remember his name. And finally, Eddie remembered the name and said it, and I my first words were, Eddie. Do you remember? Is he in jail yet? Because he’s just a real, a real scum of a guy, yeah,

29:23 Eddie Speed : unfortunately, unfortunately, in in in businesses, when there’s something that’s very profitable, there are people that get into it that shouldn’t be in the business, right? And that’s in true in every business in life, right? So I hope that gentleman gets his due and but we’ve tried to, we’ve tried to be, you know, that reliable source in the business. And I think we have been so but, yeah, see, the point is, there’s not a lot of competition in this business. It’s not like, you know, every. Find his brothers out there trying to flip a property right. And there’s way less transactions closed than there was years ago. So there’s less business to chase, but more people are chasing it. And when you look at notes, you look over there, and you’re like, wait a minute, where’s my competition? Well, there’s not really, there’s not comparatively, there’s not competition.

30:22 Jim Beach : Eddie Can we walk through a note’s life from the beginning to the absolute end? I just bought a house for $500,000 I took a $400,000 mortgage. All right, can you now walk me through what you would do in this situation, in the whole game,

30:46 Eddie Speed : yeah, so you’re, you’re paying that loan out over 30 years. You’re going to pay mainly interest on the first part of the note. So you’re going to get a little bit of your of your loan back if you owned that loan, but you’re going to primarily, just for the first 10 years, just earn interest. You know, that loan may go down 8% of what it was originally at in the first 10 years. So they’re primarily you’re making interest, so you have a long so that you’re paying good you love the house, and so you’re just making a check every month to the bank. If your water heater goes out, do you call

31:26 Jim Beach : the bank? Nope.

31:29 Unknown Speaker : If the roof needs a repair, do you call the bank?

31:33 Jim Beach : Not. Unless you need a loan to pay for the roof, yes. So, so the

31:37 Eddie Speed : point is, is, is you start looking at the trouble factor in owning a mortgage. By the way, you’re going to have, I’m going to have that loan serviced with a loan servicer. So I’m not, you’re not going to make your payment directly to me, and I’m not going to have to go send you the little forms every month, every in the year, and say how much interest you paid, and where your escrow account is and all that stuff. A loan servicer is going to do that for me, right? They’re going to wire me, you’re going to, you’re going to mail your payment the first 10 days of the month. They’re going to wire the money to me, and I’m going to have mailbox money, and I can be sitting on the beach and get that mailbox money, and, and, and I’m not a landlord, and I don’t have the headaches of a landlord, I don’t have the risk a landlord has, but I have the benefit of being the bank. And most people just can’t believe they can be that. Most people know what the bank does. They know what a mortgage company does. Most people pay a mortgage company, and they know that man, that mortgage company’s got a pretty good situation. They just never dreamed they could be that. And you know what? Until 45 years ago, I wouldn’t have dreamed it either.

32:51 Jim Beach : Back to our note, Eddie, I buy a house, remember? Let’s walk through that.

32:56 Eddie Speed : Yep. Well, once again, you’re paying. I have a first mortgage on your house, okay, so you’re not, I don’t want any.

33:07 Jim Beach : My mortgage is with my bank. US Federal Okay, so how do you get involved with us Federals loan?

33:16 Eddie Speed : Okay, first, first of all, I don’t buy institutional loans. So that scenario, we have to alter the story a little bit, because I’m not going to go buy that loan from that that’s, that’s a, you know, Fannie Mae type loan or something, and that’s not the loan I’m buying. Okay, okay, but I buy first mortgages on houses, just like a loan, like it’s on your house, okay? And and so that that mortgage company made you a loan, and the odds are almost 100% they’re going to sell that loan. You’re going to get a letter in the mail and say, your loans been sold, just like most all your listeners, Yep, I’ve had, I’ve gotten that letter in the mail like they said, they said, so that bought loans are bought and sold every day. So what we do is, like, really common. It’s the most common thing that happens to a mortgage is that it gets sold. But most people don’t ever dream that an individual could own a note. So I don’t buy certain kinds of mortgages like Fannie Mae or FHA, I don’t that’s not the kind of mortgages I buy, but 40% of the loans that are originated today are not Fannie Mae and FHA loans. So it’s pretty common for a loan not to be that kind of loan.

34:39 Jim Beach : Okay, so how does did they do the loans systematically get sold? I mean, as soon as us, Federal Bank does it, a month later, they’re going to just go ahead and sell it. They do that 12 times a year, sell off all their new loans, pretty much, okay, yeah,

34:57 Eddie Speed : that’s how mortgage bank that’s how mortgage banking works. Works. Okay? So that that marketplace is an in, you know, that’s a wall street level marketplace, you know, they’re selling them to, they’re, they’re packaging those loans up, and they end up in mortgage backed securities and all of that. That’s, that’s how, you know, a lot of the traditional mortgage business works. So I built a marketplace for private loans and and so it’s, it’s not exactly the same, but close enough that we could compare it. And then so the somebody’s going to originate a loan, and they know that, then they’re going to call Eddie speed’s company, and they’re going to buy that note. And then what I’ve done is built a marketplace. So I train people to go, either Chase notes for me to go find notes that I don’t know about yet, and I tell them some really good places to go look how to go find those loans. Or I have people that are like, just have some investable money. And they say, I want to, I don’t want to rent a house. I don’t want to, I don’t want to call me on the weekends. They’re like, I like owning a mortgage. Okay, well, you can own a mortgage and I but they’re like, Eddie, I’m not. I don’t have I don’t know where to look, and I know what I’m looking for. And so we’ve built a marketplace where we can we buy these loans, and then we have a very systematic way that we can push these loans out to people and say, Does this look like something you like? You can buy this. And so we’ve built a process to make it easier for people to go do the business. A lot of people hear the story. 1000s of people, over the years, hear the story. They want to go do it. They just don’t have all the wherewithal to go make it happen. And so we we realized, if we could do some of those things for our clients, we could then lower the barrier to entry to do it. And there’s some cool things that we teach. You know, it’s kind of like one of those things. I don’t want to go, I’m gonna, I’m gonna not go way down deep, because it wouldn’t be fair to our audience. But we can show people leveraging techniques. Like everybody that pretty much has a driver’s license, has some concept. If you own a rent house, you can go get a mortgage against your rent house, right? Yep. What’s a that’s a leveraging technique. In other words, you don’t have to put all your cash into it. You can, you can get money from somewhere else that now leverages your investment money into a rent house. Did you know you can do the same thing with a note? No, absolutely. Yes, sir. It’s done every day. And so I don’t want to get off into the mechanics of the house, right? That’s what I want to what our audience today. I want them to leave here with one clear understanding, that you can own a mortgage that is has more income and less aggravation, and what most people think of doing something in real estate, which is owning rentals, right? There’s, there’s all kind of, you know, techniques and processes that we can show people that are very common to me, like, just super common to me, but they wouldn’t be necessarily common, you know, to somebody else that doesn’t do this every day. And you know what? That’s why we built a school. We built a school to show people a path. Because, let me assure you this 20 year old, Eddie speed, 20 you know, 45 years ago, right, when I started with my father in law. Do you think I knew any of this? You know, I didn’t.

38:36 Jim Beach : 20 year olds don’t know anything.

38:41 Eddie Speed : Well, you could be right now, they know something. They’re smart. They’re just, they just don’t have, you know experience Trump’s theory is what I’ve learned. Yes, it does.

38:55 Jim Beach : So if I own the loan, do I get the monthly payments 100% Yeah, okay. And what kind of like? So if I flip a house, Eddie, I think I’m going to make, you know, I want to buy a house for 200,000 I’m going to put 50 in it, and I’m going to sell it for 300 and I’m going to make $50,000 right? That’s a comment.

39:24 Unknown Speaker : Yeah, that’s, that’s the house flipping business.

39:26 Jim Beach : Now do the same little thing for the loan. How do so? How do I flip it at the end, once I bought it, I understand that. But then how do I get rid of it and make a $50,000 profit?

39:41 Eddie Speed : Well, when you, if you, if you chose to sell or finance the house, meaning that you are not just selling the house, but you’re the bank thinking in terms of car dealership financing a car, instead of just selling the car, right? Okay, so, so you, so you’re kind of like a. Car dealership, except you’re doing this with a house. You you know that you’re seller financing it. And there are, there are techniques that I show real estate investors how to do to make some profit today, or at least break even. They could choose to make some profit today, and then they could keep a 30 year income out of the deal.

40:21 Jim Beach : Okay. And that’s what everyone wants. That’s, that’s

40:27 Eddie Speed : what they want. And once again, you know, being in this business and being around, you know, countless, countless ninja real estate investor types we’ve developed, you know, especially, and an understanding of showing these real estate investors how to do this. They’re, I’ve learned that they’re super good at finding these houses and fixing them up. They’re not so good at knowing how to do this, and that’s why they come to me. And we just, you know, Now, decades later, we’ve built quite a reputation that this is what we do and and now that, you know, the Bloom has kind of gone off of, you know, now all of a sudden, if you kind of ask people, you know, yeah, you have a house for sale, and they’re like, yeah, and how’s it going? Well, it ain’t going anything like I heard about three years ago. And the answer is, of course, it’s not right. There’s not a full mode about real estate today, like

41:26 Jim Beach : there was three years ago.

41:28 Eddie Speed : And so fear of missing out, right, right? So, so that, so that. So there’s a, you know, people are trying to figure out, like, what are they doing stuff? And so there’s different real estate cycles that we’ve just learned we can just drop in and solve a really cool problem in the business. And usually it is when we are serving a market that’s underserved, and when you look at the realtors, production is way, way, way off of where it was like. Realtors are not selling near as many houses. Loans are not being originated near like they were like. Those are reasons that we look at it and say we solve a problem in course, any in my mind, you know, I’m just an entrepreneur. I’m a specialist in what I teach, but I’m just an entrepreneur, and an entrepreneur’s whole thing in life is to go find an industry problem and solve a problem.

42:26 Jim Beach : Tell us about the note school.com. How much does that cost? How many classes, how long does it take? All that,

42:35 Eddie Speed : I would say note school is a journey. And so usually what we start out doing is we start out with some just good, really valuable, free stuff. When I say free, I don’t mean, I don’t mean, like, it’s not valuable. But most people are just most people start out with some curiosity, like, what does that look like, and how could I be that? Could I be that 20 year old Eddie speed, even though I’m 45 right? Could that? Could I do that? Could I be that situation? And so we start people down a journey, and just start, you know, it’s a continuing conversation of, kind of like, what you and I are doing today, and people kind of see, like, oh, you know what? That’s pretty cool. I didn’t know. I just didn’t know I could do that. And that’s usually where it starts. And then we’ve got, you know, as you might imagine, we’ve got and got graduate level stuff and PhD level stuff, depending on where somebody wants to go in the business.

43:33 Jim Beach : All right, that makes sense. How do we how do we get in touch? Follow you online, all that stuff, please.

43:39 Eddie Speed : So you’re going to go to note school.com and then you’re going to go, then you’re going to go to, I lost my piece of paper and I had it written, noteschool.com startup, starter. Okay, and we’ll, we’ll have some really meaningful progression that we can take. We’ll start out not, not in a way that it’s kind of like the conversation today. I mean, like, obviously, I’ve been doing it for a long time. I could answer probably most technical questions people could ask me. But that’s not what the audience needs to start. They just need to start like, hey, is this? Is this something I could do? And why would I even want to consider it? Well, if you can make more money than rentals with a lot less aggravation, that might be a good conversation to start with, all right, and, and that’s where we’ll

44:37 Jim Beach : go from there. Eddie, thank you so much for being with us. Very, interesting, great stuff, and we’d love to have you back. Thanks a lot.

44:45 Unknown Speaker : All right. Thank you, sir, and we will be right back.44:56 Jim Beach : We are back and again. Thank you so very much for being with us. A very. Excited to welcome James garland to the show. He is director of marketing for pure Thera pro RX. He has been in the nutrition industry for about 25 years. He is a certified holistic nutritionist, and in the supplement industry, the most important thing are the fillers and the formulas and the purity and pure Thera probe, can you guess what? They are? Pure. We’re going to talk about that. James, welcome to the show. How you doing?

45:28 James Garland : I’m doing great. Thanks so much for having me. How come there

45:31 Jim Beach : are so many non pure supplements out there? What’s going on in the industry that allows that bad stuff?

45:38 James Garland : I think it’s a combination of things. One, while the supplement industry is more regulated by the FDA and the government than you’d think it is, it’s not as regulated as, say, the pharmaceutical industry. The other issue that we’re looking at here is human greed. It’s simply more profitable and more desirable for unscrupulous players to formulate supplements as cheaply as possible, and that involves taking as many shortcuts as possible. And so I’ll you know, just in the interest of brevity all, I’ll leave it at that, and we can dig further into any of those that you’d like to

46:12 Jim Beach : and how is Thera pro different?

46:16 James Garland : Well, we are different because we do not like formulating a supplement as cheaply as possible is not the goal for us. Like our mission is to formulate the best possible products in the most transparent way possible with no compromises whatsoever. And so if we have to pay extra to get a get an ingredient from a country that’s doing business ethically and where there’s not as much fraud if we have to pay extra to our CO manufacturer to manufacture the supplement, because we’re not using Flow agents that make it easier on their machines. You know, we’re always going to go the extra mile. We do not take shortcuts it. You know, it does make our products, say, a little bit more expensive than our competitors, but that that’s a that’s a price that we are willing to pay to provide customers with the best, most effective formulas.

47:07 Jim Beach : Well, if I’m going to take a supplement, the last thing I want is a supplement with some filler in there, like sawdust or whatever. You know, that’s scary as hell, that there would be something that’s not supposed to be in there. So the purity, I think would be the number one concern, isn’t it?

47:23 James Garland : I certainly think so. I think efficacy is number one, and pure purity is right there with it. And you mentioned sawdust, almost like you were joking, but that’s the fact, right? And the other

47:33 Jim Beach : thing was referring to concrete. When they make concrete and they throw some sawdust in to save a little money, they can’t use sawdust in my supplements? Well, actually,

47:43 James Garland : they can, and they do. And yeah, I don’t. I don’t mean to sound sensationalist, but when you are looking at a supplement facts panel on the back of your vitamins, I encourage every you and all of your listeners to look underneath the supplement facts panel, there’s a little section it says other ingredients in that. Other ingredients, you’re going to see things, binders, fillers, flow agents and excipients. None of them are good for you. Most of them are going to be inflammatory, possibly allergenic, possibly damaging to the gut. I could go on and on, but you’re going to see sawdust, microcredit. And it won’t say that, it’ll say methylcellulose, or it’ll say something like that. But it is, in fact, sawdust, and you have to ask yourself, Okay, what industry is the sawdust coming from? What is this lumber been treated with before the sawdust went into my capsule as a filler or a flow agent? So yeah, I don’t want to talk too long about it, but I could tell you some horror stories about the fillers, like talc, titanium dioxide, carnuba wax, which is what we waxed our cars with in the 70s. I could go on and on. It’s everything’s got it in there. Well, everything, but a few good brands that avoid it, right?

48:59 Jim Beach : Where are your products manufactured? Let’s talk a little bit about that. Where in China do you do this?

49:05 James Garland : Well, we actually don’t do that’s a very unique thing about us, is we don’t do any manufacturing in China, and we also don’t get any, sorry, Philippines. No, we everything’s made in everything’s made in the USA, every single everything’s made right here in the USA.

49:23 Jim Beach : Whoa, that’s illegal, isn’t it?

49:27 James Garland : The way other brands act. You’d think it was, but yeah, everything’s made in the USA. We do. You know, we get as many American ingredients as we can. Occasionally, though, the best lab, like the best co Q 10 in the world, we think it comes from Japan. The best glutathione in the world, we think it comes from Italy.

49:47 Jim Beach : Let me guess. Let me guess where it comes from. You name it, let me guess it.

49:53 James Garland : Okay, well, you know, let’s, let’s say vitamins.

49:56 Jim Beach : I’m on your website, and it’s doing that right now. It’s. List the products and then the country I’m on the map that’s giving this away.

50:05 James Garland : So, yeah, so you’ve got the cheat code? Yeah, you’ve got the cheat code.

50:09 Jim Beach : Did a colon. Out of Spain, yeah, cool. Out of India. D i m out of Japan, Sun theta name out of Japan, yep.

50:20 James Garland : Okay, so you’ll One thing you’ll notice is that China’s not mentioned there, because we don’t get any ingredients from there, and we certainly don’t manufacture our products there.

50:29 Jim Beach : Excellent. So what are the products? What kind of health issues can we

50:36 James Garland : hope to solve? Well, you know, so many I’d say our best selling product is our methylated multivitamin. And the problem that that product seeks to solve is this, 50, roughly 4050, in some cases, 60% of American adults have a gene mutation. It’s called MTHFR. You or your listeners may have heard of it. If you’ve never heard of it, I encourage you to google it. M, th, F, r, what that means if you’ve got a mutation on that gene, snippet is that your body can’t properly methylate synthetic B vitamins, and so when you’re eating enriched bread, whether you’re an infant or a grown adult, you know, baby formula, enriched bread, fortified cereals you’re or even taking a multivitamin from Costco or your favorite store. You’re likely taking synthetic vitamin B 12 and synthetic folate. But if you’ve got this gene mutation, you can’t convert those into the organic, bio identity. You know the bioavailable forms that your body needs, and they can actually turn toxic and build up and make you feel worse all the while not improving your health. And so we created a multivitamin that has the B vitamins pre methylated. So we’re using methylated folate and methylated B 12. Some people, the people with this MTHFR gene mutation, which you know practically half of America has their lives are changed when they take those products for the first time, because they’re finally getting the B vitamins in the form their body can use.

52:08 Jim Beach : Yeah, I’m on the site. I’m looking at products that I think I might want for myself, this brain mag X, for example. And I’ve noticed this before with other supplements, and y’all are doing the same thing. It doesn’t tell me how many, how much a day I need, you know. So it says a choice of 510, 30 milligrams, but I don’t know how many milligrams I should be taking. And then the box, then the product description, doesn’t answer that either. You know, I don’t know where to start, and I wish,

52:37 James Garland : yeah, that yours my advice. My advice there is always start low and slow. So whether you’re looking at four on

52:43 Jim Beach : five, twice a day, do you take five three times five, once a day? You know, that’s the question. In other words, how long is the bottle going to last me? If it’s I want to know if it’s going to last for a month or a week. That’s what I’m going to James, does that make sense?

52:58 James Garland : It does. And the way I would address that is, I would say we include photos of our bottle directions on every listing. Whether you’re on Amazon or our Shopify site, there’s a photo that says direction. You know, it shows you the directions. It’ll tell it’ll tell you take one capsule once or twice a day that so if it says once or twice a day, what that means is take it once a day, unless you’re feeling a lot better and you really tolerate and you want to do two a day, or maybe your functional medicine doctor or your chiropractor wants you to take two a day. But if we say one time a day, that’s that’s what we mean, one time a day. So if it’s a 60 count bottle, and we say once or twice a day, it’s really a 60 day supply, unless you choose to make it a 30 day supply by taking more.

53:45 Jim Beach : Okay, I love it. James, nothing more than quality matters to me. That’s all it cares in our audience as well. How do we find out more? Get in touch. Buy us some product.

53:54 James Garland : You can find us. Your best way to find us is online, at our website. It’s www.purethera.com, P, u, r, e, T, H, E, R, A, pure thera.com We’re also on Instagram at pure Thera, or on Facebook, slash pure Thera, or on Twitter, and you go to our website and give us a call. You know, get to know us. Read our articles, sign up for our newsletter list. Yeah, we’re not hard to find. We certainly want to be transparent and available.

54:23 James Garland : So yeah, check us out. Thank you so much, James. Really appreciate you being with us pleasure. Thank you so much.

54:30 Jim Beach : We are out of time for today, but back tomorrow. Be safe. Everyone. Take care and go make a million dollars. Bye. Now you.