The votes – OK, the “likes” – are in, and we’ve compiled a list of your favorite Armando Montelongo quotes, as posted on the Facebook fan page during the first three months of the year.
Here’s the list, with photos from the VIP Bus Tour as posted on Flickr.
What’s your favorite? If yours isn’t on here, tell us yours in the comments section at the bottom of the page:
A student from the Armando Montelongo VIP Bus Tour in March confesses that she was ready to start a new life and a new career after 25 years of hard work as a nurse.
She and her son went through what she calls a “life-changing event,” and they plan to get started as soon as possible.
For people of all ages, the sound of an ice cream truck rolling through the neighborhood brings back very specific and pleasant memories of childhood summers.
For Raul Mateos, it means something completely different. At the lowest point of his life, it stood for failure.
“When the ice cream truck would pass through, and I didn’t have a dollar to buy my son an ice cream, that was really tough,” he recalls. “Other kids are running over there and I see my son, and I have to tell him ‘no’ . . . “
He holds up his forefinger and thumb, an inch apart.
“. . . as a man I felt literally that big.”
Just over two years ago, Mateos (on the right in the photo) and his childhood friend and business partner, Mark Perez (left), were out of work. Their plans to buy and sell houses were floundering. They had lost cars to the repo man, their homes to the banks. They were Southern California statistics of the Great Recession.
Mateos and his family moved in with his parents, jammed into one room.
Perez’s situation was the same. “If it hadn’t been for my in-laws,” he says, “we would have been homeless.”
In their desperation, they saw an infomercial for the Armando Montelongo Live Event, the introduction to the house flipping system. They went, and the positive atmosphere absolutely stunned them. They soon were ready for the biggest step, the VIP Bus Tour, which is a three-day seminar in which students learn from Armando and his team, absorb the complete house-flipping process and see properties for sale.
“We knew we had to get on that bus tour to be successful,” Perez says. “Raul and I were flat broke. We were living on, like, $5 a month, just struggling with wife and kids. It was extremely stressful. We knew we had to do it.”
The deal
They didn’t have anywhere near the money they needed. So they approached two investors, people Mateos knew from a former job. Perez and Mateos explained their plan to learn from the man they considered the “No. 1 house flipping expert in the world,” and they offered to pay back all the money – plus the profits from their first three house flips.
The investors agreed.
In April 2010, Perez and Mateos went to the bus tour, with its high energy and long days of intense, hands-on training.
“I’m naturally shy…it was really uncomfortable for me,” Perez says. “But I remember telling myself, ‘Well, we just spent this amount of money, and whatever we had been doing hadn’t been working.’”
They both, as they put it, submitted themselves to the process. “We wouldn’t even take restroom breaks, because we didn’t want to miss a word,” Perez says with a laugh.
At the end of the bus tour, they went home and went to work.
The schedule
They started working what Armando calls “millionaire hours,” waking at 5:30 a.m. every day, looking for properties and networking and making contacts, often until 2 a.m. or later.
“When people tell me they submitted 20 or 30 offers, that’s nothing,” Mateos says. “At the beginning, our goal was to submit 20 offers – a day. I was going through ink, paper, toner, everything, very fast.”
The original funding for their first flip fell through at the last minute, but they used contacts from the bus tour to find a private investor. The money arrived with 20 minutes to spare, and RMP Investments, Mateos’ and Perez’s company, was up and running.
They repaid the loan for the bus tour. They turned over the profits from their first three deals. They kept working.
“We worked those crazy hours for the first six months,” Perez says. “Networking, talking to people, just basically doing everything that Armando told us to do.
“We listened to every word he told us and followed the steps. You do that and you can’t fail.”
Giving back
Today, multiple house flips later, they no longer are working 20-hour days. They have established a system, with project managers and contractors and investors. They are back in their own houses, Perez in Riverside, Calif., and Mateos in Haceinda Heights.
“Our lives have done a 180 from where we were two years ago – flat broke, lost everything, moving in with our parents and in-laws – to now having our own homes, cars again, financial stability,” Perez says. “It’s just amazing, being able to be part of a great family and create some amazing friendships.”
The business partners, who are 32, are producing videos of their projects and posting them on YouTube, mainly as a way to inspire future students. (Click above to see one of their recent videos; click here to visit their YouTube channel.)
They also have stayed in contact with Armando’s company, to the point of serving as bus tour leaders. Every six weeks, they share their unique experiences with a bus full of students – teaching the system, offering suggestions, providing leadership.
Russell Cable, who was on their bus in December, says he was impressed by their work ethic and their dedication to the system.
“One of the best parts was when we actually got to see a house they had rehabbed,” he says. “They walked everyone through it and explained in detail why they did this or did that.”
Loren Lavine, who was on their bus in January, says they were “inspirational and motivating.”
“They are living proof that it doesn’t matter what your background is, you can make Armando’s system work for you,” she says.
Their background never is far away. When all the leaders are introduced at every bus tour, their story is resurrected: A photo of a Southern California ice cream truck is projected onto the giant screens behind them.
Are you ready to make the kind of change that Mark and Raul made? Visit ArmandoLive.com to get started. And feel free to share this post and/or leave your thoughts below:
A student from the March 2012 Armando Montelongo VIP Bus Tour speaks from the heart about his experiences during the weekend.
A self-described “oyster,” he came away inspired by the positive energy and plans to spread it wherever he goes, even after starting out with a less-than-positive opinion of Armando. He says the training made an “effective change” in his outlook:
Check the playlist of all 27 “thank you” videos from the March Bus Tour:
Visual highlights of the inaugural Armando Montelongo VIP Bus Tour of 2012, via a slide show. (Click on the image to see it in Flickr, complete with captions.)
The votes – OK, the “likes” – are in, and we’ve compiled a list of your favorite Armando Montelongo quotes, as posted on the Facebook fan page during the first three months of the year.
