Kevin M.
You Don't Get the Whole Story
Don’t join Freedom Mentor unless you have cash reserves. It takes a minimum of $5K to join the program. And with that you get a binder with DVDs in it, along with a couple other manuals to guide you through the program. You also have access to coaching calls, videos and even some personalized coaching calls (depending on the amount you first invest). So, the tools are there for you to be successful in the program. IF YOU GET THE LEAD$. The leads are the HUGE ingredient in making this complicated recipe of making money work. Freedom Mentor does assist with you trying to avoid the potholes out there with their various steps you should take. However, all the instruction, encouragement and where-with-all doesn’t mean anything unless you have leads for potential sellers. And let me stress the word potential. There are MANY other companies and individuals out there fighting for the 1-2% (Phil’s numbers, not mine) of the potential sellers that will fit the criteria for Freedom Mentor’s program to work. And with the initial investment, you'll be given advice or direction on how to obtain leads, but Freedom Mentor will not drop one penny to get those leads for you. This is the genius part of their plan. They can’t lose. If you shell out hundreds or thousands of dollars every month for leads and nothing comes from it, the only person who is out is YOU. Not Phil or his company. You have to spend even more of your money to hunt for those few precious leads out there. And they are few and far between. I couldn't shell out the money every month for the leads because my finances were tight and just getting the $5K for the initial investment was almost two months of take-home pay for me at the time. Little did I know that the one caveat, the leads, is the main thing to make it all work. You can have a great car, but can’t start it without the keys. And the leads are just that. The KEY. Unfortunately, it’s going to cost you even more to get those. Which is why I said in the beginning, to make sure that you have cash reserves if you want to make this program work. Phil didn’t have to have cash on hand to get his first deals done. However, you are going to have to have plenty of it. No person living in their truck (like Phil was) would be able to be helped by Freedom Mentor today. Why? Because unlike Phil’s mentor, he won’t be a mentor to you unless you pay up. And that is not only in the form of your large initial investment, but also the monies you are going to need to obtain leads and the many other small expenses that add up to get a deal done. Freedom Mentor isn’t a scam or necessarily a rip-off, even though I lost $5K listening to Caleb Jenkins (the recruiter) and Phil. However, I wanted to let you know that there are MANY moving parts in this machine and MANY things have to line up and work out just right for a deal to finally get done. If you want to take that gamble, then that is up to you. For those who are looking to work with Christians and thinking that this is a Christian company. It isn’t. Jesus said in Matthew 22:39 that the second greatest commandment is “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” I emailed Caleb Jenkins a couple months after joining the program to see if I could get my money back. After seeing the videos and listening to a few calls, I knew this wasn’t going to work with me because I didn’t have the funds for the leads and the $200/month to stay in the program. Caleb never got back to me. He was more than willing to talk with me before I signed up, but once I signed up, then I guess he didn’t have the time to contact me back. His job was done. And speaking of no contact. You’re not allowed to talk with others in the Freedom Mentor program except at corporate functions. After being in the program for a couple months, I was wanting to get some things figured out. I thought what better way to do that, than talk to those who have already done it. I asked my coach if there were meet-ups or support groups in my area for those in the program to bounce ideas off of and give each other support. I was told by her that Phil doesn’t want people talking to each other in the program. What?! I had never been a part of an organization that didn’t encourage participants to be there for each other….until now. Seeing Freedom Mentor for what it was made me decide to leave. There are obviously people who have made money with the program. However, the percentage of those who paid thousands of dollars to get into the program and actually made their investment back or got ahead will never be known. It’s kind of like other real estate programs out there. Yes, some people have made money. However, they are few and far between. Of course, what we always see are the "winners". And because of Phil's clever use of search engines, that's all you'll see from them. Unfortunately, you have to shell out $5K to see the rest. Don't get hurt.
Response from Freedom MentorApr 9, 2021
Kevin didn't follow our instructions and therefore he didn't achieve results. And bare in mind that he struggled during a time that was absolutely PERFECT for real estate investing (thanks to low inventory levels and low interest rates) and he was in an amazing area too! It wasn't us that was the problem; it was him. Here are some responses to what he wrote above: (1) Connecting with sellers is obviously paramount to real estate investing. 1-2% of the population is millions and millions of sellers. In our business, you only need to connect with a few to make a fortune. Kevin didn't follow our specific marketing instructions and therefore he didn't connect with sellers. If there are thousands of potential opportunities in his area and he only needs to reach a few of them, it's not longer a lack of opportunity issue. It's a Kevin-not-following-instructions issue. (2) We do refer some leads, from time to time, to our Apprentices as they roll in. But we don't refer them to people like Kevin that don't follow our basic instructions. Furthermore, our main goal is to teach our people "how to fish", so to speak, rather than giving our people "a fish", because we want to show them how to be financially free, not dependent on us for sustenance. (3) We have mastered this business at a higher level than any other organization of its kind in history. This is not a "complicated recipe" or something that requires "MANY things to line up". But you do have to follow our methodology very closely. Like any financially productive endeavor, you have to do it just right or it won't work. Kevin didn't do it like we told him to do it. So to him, it was complicated. To our other Apprentices, it's just following our system and not trying to change what's already working. (4) Caleb is in our Admissions Department. He thought Kevin was going to be a good fit based on his initial interviews with Kevin. The person Kevin portrayed himself to be in the initial interviews is different from the person he really was. Caleb couldn't have predicted it. And the reason Caleb did not respond to Kevin is that Caleb is not on our mentoring team so once an Apprentice has been in our system for quite some time, all correspondence is forwarded to our mentors and the mentoring team reaches out instead of the admission team. (5) Kevin was not following our advice and therefore was not achieving results. Connecting him with another Apprentice who was successful and was closing deals, would not help that productive person. Instead, it would most likely annoy that person because if Kevin wouldn't listen to us, he wouldn't listen to another successful person either. So yes, we did not connect Kevin with any other Apprentices in our program. We have noticed over the years that new investors have this strong desire to network and meet up with other investors. It seems logical but in reality, it has many issues. First, our Apprentices are geographically spread out so that they don't compete against each other. So meeting up in person is not easily feasible in most cases anyways. Second, we as mentors have to be incredibly careful about allowing bad advice to creep in and ruin a deal. Our mentees need to get their wisdom from our mentors, not other Apprentices. Otherwise, it can be a situation of the blind leading the blind. We have learned this lesson the hard way. Third, creative real estate investing is not a networking business. If you are a social person, get your in-person interaction fix elsewhere, but not from creative real estate investing. (6) We have an extraordinary success record with our Apprentices. You can go to Freedom Mentor Reviews dot com to see hundreds and hundreds of real life examples. Meanwhile, Kevin is a rarity, but a perfect example of someone who hires a professional coach to mentor them and then doesn't listen or follow their advice and then blames the mentor for the lack of results!