Mike Jacka has been investing and working in the real estate industry for more than 25 years and has experience in all aspects of single family residential real estate. Starting out as a handyman, then getting his real estate license in 1992 to becoming a real estate broker and ultimately starting and running one of the largest and most successful REIA’s (Real Estate Investors Associations) in the country.

Mike has bought and sold hundreds of properties all over the country and in Canada as well as represented several hundred people over the years with a real estate license.

As an investor, Mike has been a landlord, rehabber, wholesaler and a private lender. Currently Mike specializes in structuring creative seller financing deals including Subject To, Lease Options, Contract for Deeds and Wrap Around Mortgages.

I am a recovering perfectionist. I do relapse from time to time and spend way too much time trying to make something perfect. In my early years as an entrepreneur, I used to take all kinds of handy man work. I would put all my effort into it, so much so that I usually over did things. But because of that attention to detail and wanting to do it right, I would get a lot of referral work which was great and something we all strive for, right? I mean, what better compliment than to get a job from a referral from a happy and satisfied customer. It was great, I didn’t have to do any marketing or chase work one summer and because I overheard one customer tell her neighbor that she should also talk to me about painting her wooden fence rather than hire someone else because I was a perfectionist, I felt great and wanted to keep up the great work to have another satisfied customer. I also didn’t want to disappoint the neighbor who referred me, so I became even more of a perfectionist.

I have built systems for all aspects of my business. The systems don’t need to be perfect, they just need to be easy to use and easy to learn so that once you have learned enough about something yourself, you can replace your efforts with a system, or hire someone to do what you were doing. For example, I create the PROS System (Professional REIA Operating System). REIA stands for Real Estate Investors Association, which I built after the market crash of 2008.

Before the market crash, I had 5 different business, each with 1 full-time employee to run the systems of all but one. The REIA didn’t really have a system yet, it was just something we started doing. Each employee from the other business also put in time working for the REIA. So, they were really part-time employees for the business that they ran and all were part-time employees for the REIA. When the market crashed in 2008 I had to close down all the business except for the REIA. I then had to do the hardest thing in my life, layoff all my employees because I simply couldn’t pay them. I was going to close the REIA as well because there was no way 1 person could run the REIA and it was losing money every month anyways.

The problem with shutting down the REIA was that the members keep showing up. You see we had become each other’s support group at this point and it helped us all whether the perfect storm that took so many other REIA’s and investors down all over the country. That’s when I realized that I needed to keep the REIA going and I was bound and determined to do it. I had ideas pre-2008 on how to systemize many of the daily tasks involved in running the REIA, but never took the time to do anything about it because at that time there was no need to do it and everything was working so why mess with it.

I began building a web-based application to manage everything, or at least as much as possible and now we have a much larger organization than we did pre-2008 and it runs smoother and more efficiently than ever before with only one person devoting only half their time to the administrative aspects of the REIA. Because of the success of the PROS system we now have several REIA’s from all over the country using the PROS System.

We have also been working on building systems for the members of the REIA’s to help their members become more successful as well. We have implemented and are continually improving a system that takes newbies with no experience through the process of getting an accurate repair budget, to running comps, negotiating with the sellers, analyzing the deals and even generating the letter of intent for them to make the offers. Since implementing the members property analyzer tools system, we have seen a huge gain in the number of members that are experiencing success faster than ever before. This has become my calling to help everyone use systems to learn faster, to do more with less effort, and become more successful that ever before.