John Corcoran 11:30
she What did the data come from? Was it from continuing to pay your team?
Kevin Tacher 11:34
Yeah, I was paying trying to do cash advance on my credit card just to pay the fees. I mean, I wrote about in the book, it’s a little bit longer of a story that we don’t really have too much time for. But I had for three other partners and myself. So it was four of us. They didn’t want to contribute to the business, I wanted to continue fighting, we leased an office space personally guaranteed an office space. So that was about almost 385,000 of the three quarters of a million. Because whoever thought the money would stop, you know, we were basically printing money back then, you know, the interest rates were low deals were high. And I mean, we had a huge office space with with granite floors. And I mean, it was it was unbelievable what we were doing. And it literally overnight, just shut down. They basically walked away. And I was left here is the guy, I’m like, I personally guarantee the lease, I told the landlord, like I’ll pay my share, whatever I can do, like I’m not going to walk out on you. I paid my assistant on my credit card never bounced the check. And I just fought and fought and fight and fight in told the market eventually turned around. One of those opportunities was obviously moving into that real estate brokerage, which helped helped me survive, because then I went from three deals back up to 20 or 30 deals, and I was able to build it back up to where we are today.
John Corcoran 12:47
Amazing. There must have been moments in time where you just, you know, looked at that staggering amount of debt and just thought it’s just gonna be so much easier to just walk away and give up on it.
Kevin Tacher 13:00
Yeah, I mean, but you know, here’s the problem, I am not calling off a college education, I basically went right from high school right into work. And I didn’t really know anything different. I didn’t know what to do. So, you know, it was either maybe I can go work for a supermarket or, you know, I’m not really into sales, I don’t really like sales. So, you know, I just knew entrepreneurship was in my blood. And I said, I just have to figure it out. And I just put my head down, I networked as best as I could build as many relationships. And people saw that and I survived. And people valued what I did during those times, and continued to send me business. So eventually, we built it back up.
John Corcoran 13:40
You’ve taken a really interesting approach to marketing your business. You’ve written a number of books, but a number of them are about really networking and business development, and you use those books to drive the title business. I’m kind of fascinated by business owners that write books on different topics, and then stitch those two together. So can you talk about how they relate to one another?
Kevin Tacher 14:05
Yeah, I always tell people, my business card is better than yours. My competitors, because my business card is really a story, my business card, the rest of your business book was great. It’s a business card that talks about how it was three quarters of a million dollars in debt and built a business based on networking. And I teach real estate professionals how they can do the same thing on how they can recession proof their business. Who would have thought when the book came out in 2019, we were going to be going into a global pandemic, right. So I have to be used for the next market crash. But the reality is it was useful for the pandemic. And I just taught people like everything that I talked about in the book is exactly what happened during the pandemic and we survived we had one horrible, horrible month but we were okay because we saved enough money. And I talked about building relationships and I talked about networking the right way, like don’t go into a chamber event and just get A bunch of business cards, I teach them how to farm, their network and a treat their relationships, right? So we just take a unique approach, because most title companies are putting seminars on why we’re the best title company or you know what, why we can teach you how to write a better contract. And I do all that anyway, that’s just what I do in business. But I teach you so much more, I teach you truly how to thrive during the uncertain economic times. And now we don’t know what we’re going into. I just launched my most recent book, Operation leadership, which again, is more geared towards the entrepreneur. And again, teaches them just strategies on how to become more successful, how to recession proof your business, treat your employees, right, and come out ahead. Because we don’t know what what’s coming next.
John Corcoran 15:45
Yeah. You mentioned that you had one horrible month after COVID hit, I’m assuming this is this was around March 2020. We’re after COVID hit. There must have been a moment in time for you where you’re like, oh, no, not this again, having lived through Oh, eight. What was that experience like for you? Or did you feel like, well, okay, this is a different type of crisis than I’m used to before. But I feel prepared for what was your emotional state, like back then
Kevin Tacher 16:16
you said the P word. Which is, which is what I wrote about in the book, just preparing, right? So I wasn’t three quarters of a million dollars in debt, when the crisis hit, I have no debt. I own the building that my office is in. So I’ve always said that worst case, if the crisis is so bad, I’d have to obviously let employees go, we’d have to scale back. And you know, we can operate on on 15 or 20 deals when we were doing 100 deals. But that month, we wound up doing 34 deals. And I was like, wow, this is scary. I don’t know how long I can hold on for. And then obviously, the government did the PPP loan, I help from laying people off. So I said, Listen, as long as we get that I’m not going to lay anybody off, you want to go on unemployment, that’s what the money is going to be used for. And we did that. And you know, almost to a textbook of what they said, was going to happen with COVID. And with the PPP money and with being on lockdown, it happened for us, we basically got it, it gave us just enough until the market started ticking back up again, deals started picking up the mayor and the governor allowed real estate agents to start working again, where originally they stopped them. So it just happened like the timing was absolutely perfect. We laid nobody off during those times. And what we wrote about in the book, and what we try and teach others to do is exactly what happened. So I was actually kind of happy of the way things turned out.
John Corcoran 17:39
Yeah. Tell us about some of the work that you’ve done uncovering fraud. I know, even as we record this and September 2022, you’ve got a story that’s going to be on the news tonight about a situation that you uncovered. But is this just something that kind of you devote a portion of your time to finding crimes that are uncovered? Put in your words, what do you do,
Kevin Tacher 18:05
I think it’s the difference of being an entrepreneur versus a business owner working in your business versus working on your business. So I really strategize and fight to work on my business to basically uncover things like this and, and change the way the industry is going. Change the things that we can do in order to save people’s homes. So my famous story, which I was on Fox News for was a lady who was a victim of wire fraud, basically, at a title company, she got an email to wire her entire life savings for as the down payment on our house. And not to find out about four days later, that title company never got the money and basically told her, you wired it to the wrong place wasn’t our fault, your fault, nobody would help her. So I basically set up a GoFundMe with her, we run the news, we raised half the money, we were able to recover half the money and we successfully closed on our own. And that’s what I’m about. I’m really about serving the client serving the client’s needs where most people aren’t there about getting the deal done. And I get these bulletins every single day of people that are in my industry that are just victims of fraud and victims of fraud and victims of fraud. And here we’re not the victim. We’re the ones solving it for the victims. And tonight story is fantastic. It’s an elderly couple that whose identity was stolen, someone tried to sell five very, very expensive industrial locks in Miami. We saved it we literally stopped it the day of closing. So they could have lost their entire life savings may never even known they lost it or had to hire a lot of attorneys to fight to get it back. And here we stopped it. So you know we’re proud of the work we’re doing here. And I don’t know many people in my industry that take the time to truly serve the needs of the client which I put to the success of my business.
John Corcoran 19:49
So explain to me how it works. So you hear about it sounds like you subscribe to something or you hear about you know, kind of questionable situations or where people transferred money. On a or maybe a phishing scheme or something like that? And then what do you do you dispatch your team to look into him. And how does it work? Exactly.
Kevin Tacher 20:08
Yeah, I mean, we train with internal rules and stuff that we have in our office to sniff out things like this. So whether it’s going to be fake IDs, people refusing to get on the phone with us refusing to meet with our notary. So we have signs that that we look for, and listen for in a transaction to say, hey, you know, something, just Something doesn’t smell right. Something, something just doesn’t look right. Or maybe this ID from a Chinese passport just doesn’t something just doesn’t look right. So we research it more, as opposed to just accepting it in clothes. A good friend of mine actually wired $200,000 To buy a lot the other day he called me. And he found out the next day that it was fraudulent. And it was because they allowed the seller to use their own notary, which was fake. So one of the rules we have, there’s no your own notary, you either use our notary, or we won’t close the deal, because we just don’t feel comfortable. And so we have a lot of measures in place, but we’re also doing a large volume. So you know, we’re one of the larger title companies in Florida. So the volume that we’re doing, where we’re seeing it more and more, so we probably stopped two or three fraud cases, every single month, and I’ve had the FBI here. I’ve done sting operations in my office. We’ve done some pretty extensive fraud work,
John Corcoran 21:18
who wouldn’t want to hear about the sting operations in your office? Okay, how’d that unfold?
Kevin Tacher 21:23
Yeah, so it was they were, they were going to do a story like To Catch A Predator, we had a guy who was claiming to be an owner of a property we knew he wasn’t, we actually knew the real owner of the property. And the news was going to do and as soon as the FBI heard the news was going to do it. They sent six teams over. And they staged a closing, they made me go into the closing room, which why I don’t really do the closings, they made me go into closing. My wife
John Corcoran 21:46
is much more dramatic when you’re there. I mean, I think
Kevin Tacher 21:49
dramatic, right? So the guy was a convicted bank robber, and assaulted a police officer. So he was a violent criminal, he did prison and got out on 10 years probation and decided to start doing these white collar crimes and
John Corcoran 22:03
wait, so hold on, hold on. We got a little nervous going in there. You got
Kevin Tacher 22:09
nervous to this day thinking about it. And I’ll never forget, I’m sitting in court with the guy and he’s like, when I get out in 10 years, if I do good business, will you will you can reconsider doing business with me. I’m like he said, he sent it to me because I was in court with him. Because even the judge had no clue how to reverse what he did. They called me into the courtroom next to this guy. And I’m like, listen, guy, I told you to leave, you wouldn’t leave. I asked you three times to leave you wouldn’t. So I finally had to call the authorities and, and it’s actually on the news they had they use my cameras because my surveillance was better than theirs. And they had six teams they were guys with, with rifles and guns literally behind the conference room wall, another one in the back of my office and four teams outside. And as soon as he signed everything He left with his briefcase, and they took them down.
John Corcoran 22:58
Man, what a crazy day at the office that must have Yeah, that was
Kevin Tacher 23:01
yeah, they they that was it’s interesting. But you know, it’s led to a whole business for me. I’ve gotten national awards for it. I’ve been on all the news outlets. They call me when they want expert, you know, interviewers on on real estate fraud and things that are going on. So we’ve just become a trusted partner, which obviously builds the credibility of a business.
John Corcoran 23:23
Yeah, absolutely. Political story that not your typical day in a title office,
Kevin Tacher 23:28
not your typical fight tonight. It’s the same thing. It’s like, it’s pretty cool. When when we did a post on social media, me and Superman outfit, saying, you know, superhero title closer. And listen, it’s we have fun with it. We have fun with changing lives and, and making an impact. Because here’s these people they cry, when when we call them firstly, scamming them, but then, you know, when they start crying and get emotional, because you’ve saved them from losing their entire life saving.
John Corcoran 23:58
That’s interesting. I mean, sometimes it can seem almost like there’s so much fraud out there that there’s nothing you can do about it seems like every day I see some posts on social media about watch for this scam, watch for that scam. And it doesn’t mean you’re not vigilant, but it just seems like there’s a lot out there. And it seems like it could take a lot of energy to follow up and and try and squash each one that’s out there. So I guess maybe the lesson in that is just actually going that extra mile and trying to help if you sniff something out, maybe reported to the authorities or whatever so that the appropriate authorities can handle it is the right move.
Kevin Tacher 24:37
Yeah, I mean, I know I think people will either ignore it and close it and not realize it or they just let it go and they just move on to the next deal and they don’t actually try and change the industry. Right they try and ignore it as opposed to changing it. And the guy that we actually uncovered with the with the big sting operation to title companies before me came up after the fact that They saw it on the news. And they’re like, this guy tried to sell this same thing with us. And I’m like, Well, why did you tell him? They said go away? I said, Why don’t you report them? Why do you allow this stuff to happen? So that’s the problem is they don’t care enough to make change in the industry where we do.
John Corcoran 25:16
Yeah, yeah. Kevin, this has been really interesting. Let me wrap up with the question that I always like asking, I’m a big fan of gratitude. I’m big fan of expressing gratitude to those around you. But especially, you know, I think people naturally gravitate to their friends, to their family to their team, that’s fine. But I especially like expressing gratitude to those who have helped you on your journey. So your peers, your contemporaries, people, maybe you consider them a mentor. You mentioned that real estate broker that whose office you work, you’re in? Who would you acknowledge?
Kevin Tacher 25:51
Yeah, I mean, it’s actually a great story, I actually keep a painting right in my office, which I’ll show you here. So I have a painting basically, it’s my inspiration, gratitude painting. So basically, you see me sitting in the center, and then you have these five people that have all changed my life. So this is the on this side is the mortgage, the real estate broker you’re talking about. But these are the five people that have just absolutely impacted my life. They’re their real estate investors, their clients, I had my one friend, David, he came to me and he said, you need to do the investor business. I said, No, I don’t. He’s will, I’m going to teach you and to this day, we’re best friends. And he taught me the entire business, another friend of mine, we opened a real estate investment club together. And to this day, I speak there on there every single month, the real estate broker, my wife as well, you know, she was a business coach. And basically, I wound up that she always laughs about it, I married my coach. So So you know, you have to find people in your life that that you’d love to give gratitude for. So we developed a little painting, and if you’ve ever had someone who has a painting, like
John Corcoran 26:52
they’ll never know, that’s the first year I’ve been asking that question for years. Yeah,
Kevin Tacher 26:56
yeah, it’s pretty cool. I mean, that’s, that’s our gratitude painting sitting around the closing table. And, you know, they all signed it. And it’s just making an impact, we did a big event where we gave it one to each of them. So I had five paintings made, and I gave one to each of them,
John Corcoran 27:10
our office, and so cool, all about relationships,
Kevin Tacher 27:13
and I truly believe you, the more people you serve, the better you’re going to be, the better your business is going to be. And the more you’ll, you’ll thrive.
John Corcoran 27:22
What was their reaction? Like when you had that event? Was it a surprise to them that you’re gonna bring out this painting?
Kevin Tacher 27:28
Yeah, it was a surprise. And it was not easy to get them all at the same event, it was very, very difficult to do. But you know, these are all people that I talked to all the time, you know, these are the people I always say, you should have five people in your phone that you can basically call and they’ll answer no matter what they’re doing. And they may say, Hey, can I call you right back? I’m just in the middle of something. But these are five people that if my phone rings, I’m going to answer it. And I’ll be like, hey, if I have to call you back, no problem. You know, I’ll call you right back everything, okay? So, you know, I tell people, you need to have your board of directors, and that’s my board of directors, and they totally changed my life. And I’ve impacted me. And I’ve said it takes five years to for anyone to truly thrive and be successful in business. And I’m at 20 years coming up next July, July 7 of next year of 2023. So I think I’m doing something right. And my relationships matter. And I just continue building them and making an impact and, and like doing this podcast, I just hop on things like this and teach others the things that I’ve learned, you know, it’s not like I I made all this up myself. I’ve learned from others. And I’m just passing on that gratitude to, to the people listening here and my clients and you know, I think your clients Yeah,
John Corcoran 28:37
Kevin, this has been great. Where can people go to learn more about you connect with you? Maybe ask a question. They have question.
Kevin Tacher 28:43
Yeah, you can Google Kevin Tacher online, you can go to titlerate.com. Just right on, there’s all my contact information, reach out to me on social media. just mentioned the podcasts. I’m always happy to talk to anybody about business about entrepreneurship, success, or even gratitude, because it’s all about giving givers gain, as they say in BNI, which again, another organization, life so
John Corcoran 29:05
I’ll try it. I interviewed Dr. Meisner years ago. Great guy.
Kevin Tacher 29:08
You wrote the foreword. He wrote the foreword on my personal. Very cool, great guy. Cool, Kevin, thanks so much. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.
Outro 29:15
Thank you for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast with John Corcoran. Find out more at smartbusinessrevolution.com. And while you’re there, sign up for our email list and join the revolution. And be listening for the next episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast.