Ep 296 | RMG Agent Podcast Interview with Brian Gubernick

The No Days Off Podcast is part of the Win Make Give Podcast Network.

What's up, No Days Off Nation? This is Caitlin with the No Days Off Podcast, and we are so glad you are tuning in today. Today we're going to do something a bit different, and we think you're really going to love it. Brian recently did an interview with his good friend Reed Moore on the RMG Agent Podcast. and we are going to air part of this interview today for you. Let's roll the clip and we hope you enjoy.

Why should somebody listen to you?

Oh man, why should they listen to me? I've been at it. You know, I know you've, you've, you're talking to some great, great, uh, uh, agents, producers, business people. Uh, I've been at it and I've been in this industry since 2005. Started actively selling in 2007, so became a sales agent in 2007. I've got a solid 16, 17 years of experience, and I don't want this to be all about failure, but I've definitely fallen on my face a few times, scraped my knees a bit, but battled back, and I think in terms of value that I could possibly provide or insight that I could provide, every time I've had to battle back or come back from something, there's strategy or evaluation of options or partnerships to consider consider, and I think like in terms of my experience, my journey, because it is very much a journey, I've had different chapters as well, like with respect to not just the experience, but who I had to become. Yeah. Right? In order to kind of get to the next level. So I hope to share, you know, some of that experience, those insights today. I love it.

That's the heartbeat of the Mastery Series really is this idea of battling back, right? You've done this long enough that you couldn't just do something and be embarrassed about it and hide it and then keep succeeding. That just doesn't work that way over time. So what are, what are maybe a couple of defining or pivotal moments that you had in the real estate industry?

Yeah, my career, like, I, and I'm going to go kind of hard at this because I want to make sure that everyone listening, a lot of agents I know are listening to this podcast. Some have, some are brand new to the industry, some have some years of experience or growing their career. I'm going to go hard at this particular topic and you'll see why here in a moment. My first, I would say most defining moment overall in my career, I started in 2007 in the sales game.

Rough year.

Well, I mean, if you want to pick like the perfect time to start a real estate career, you choose Phoenix. Sure. You know, 2007. And that's when I launched. And for those that don't know what I'm talking about, the market was collapsing at that time, like truly collapsing. The real estate market was, was in a bad spot.

The worst market in the worst place in the country, maybe.

Exactly. And '07, '08, '09, '10, like those years, they were really hard years. It wasn't that hard for me. And I share that not because I thought, I think I was good by any stretch of the imagination. I was so naive and blind. Like I'd love to sit here and say, Reed, I was so strategic during these years and I made this move and I made that move. No, in hindsight, when I look back at it, I didn't know anything. Like, I didn't have a previous experience. I just thought that that was the way the game was played. I watched so many agents at that time, like, that were experienced, that kind of buried their head in the sand and said, I hope this market changes, and they crossed their fingers. I didn't even have an opportunity to do that 'cause I didn't know what anything different looked like. So the fact that I was blind, or even naive, to what a great market might look like was a blessing for me. It's so goofy and silly to say that, but I think even now, you know, whenever there's stress or whenever there's challenge, the fact that you've had a good experience or great experience or you know what a great market looks like actually doesn't work in your favor. But being naive or at least coming from a blank slate, if you will, was a real benefit for me. Now, when I looked around the industry at that time, sure, I got my butt kicked. I was investing in real estate prior to that, which really means like, in Phoenix, when you don't know what you wanna do with your life, you become a real estate investor. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] And so that's really what I was doing, riding that market up, like I was making a couple bucks, things were going well, then one day they weren't. And of course it wasn't one day, I just failed to look at the lead metrics and all of that. But where I'm going with this is that I had to fall down and then dust myself off. Like the market collapsed, I fell, I had to dust myself off. I'll tell you what, the fact that it was only a 24 to 48-hour dust-off period for me, was again, in hindsight, I'm like, wow, that, that was, I didn't realize at the moment, I thought it was like terrible. 2 days, I'm like down in the dumps, man. People went 2, 3, 4, 5 years. Wow. Like that. And you had, I think, I mean, I think a lot of us that kind of grew up in the industry at that same time, the difference between maybe the success that we ended up having and some of those that didn't was our ability to just get back on the horse. In a couple days, like felt bad for a couple, but that was it.

Yeah.

And we were onto the next. Yep. That's an amazing skill or ability to, I think, build that resiliency.

How would you teach or coach to that if it did, if it, you know, you come from an ath, you know, a pretty successful athletic background. How would you teach somebody how to do that? How would you teach your kids how to do that?

You know, I, that's a really good question. How would I teach someone or specifically teach my kids? You know, a mentor of ours, has taught us the best way to go get experience when you just simply can't make it happen is to go back and read about the experiences of others. In other words, go study the success that's been had before you. You know, the whole success leaves clues, that sort of thing. And I would say, I don't know, I haven't studied many people that have been successful in life or in business that didn't have an insane degree of resiliency and persistence. Right, so I think the first place where my mind goes is, who are you studying, right, in terms of success? Who's your prophets? If you go back and look at the course, over the course of their career, what steps have they taken? I will guarantee you that the vast majority of them did not sulk in their, they got back on the horse, right? Whereas others, maybe those that didn't have that same degree of success, maybe moved at a slower pace or, They weren't as decisive. So I start there. I think study who is where you're at, where you wanna be.

Yeah.

And see how their career went. For my kids, you know, I try my best to put books in their hands. Now I say try my best, like the books do go in their hands, whether they get opened or not.

Right, right.

Is a different conversation. But I will listen to things in the car as though it's for me, but really it's me being manipulative in that I want them to hear these stories of trials and tribulations and triumph. I think it's where we gotta go. We gotta go and study those. I love it.

So you're scratching and clawing, you don't know any better, and so you're moving forward, and what was the next real big defining moment in your career?

Yeah, so I had built out a model at that time early in my career. I was focusing on distressed sales, right? Short sales, foreclosures, that sort of thing. I had a very niche-based business. My takeaway again when looking back at that, I would love to say I was super strategic around it, but I kind of fell into it and just went really hard at that niche. Being a specialist, having specific knowledge, I leveraged the heck out of that. In other words, I didn't show up saying I was an agent that was capable of doing all these different things for you. I said, here is my area of expertise. I've mastered this particular segment of the market. There's nobody better at it than me. And so when you ask the question like, what was the next big thing? I look back and I realize like, hey, I've got this niche that I'm focused on. There are few in the country doing it at the level I'm doing it. I'm going to go all in, put all of my eggs in that particular basket. And that realization led to me then taking my team to other states and focusing on that niche. Now, That's distressed. Like, in today's environment, you know, I think agents today could do a very similar thing. Like, become the neighborhood expert.

Yeah.

Not the jack of all trades, but the person that understands the neighborhood at a higher level. And I'm talking about restaurants and community events and neighbors and who does what. Be that person. Be the mayor of your neighborhood. Or maybe it's expired listings.

Right.

Like, I would eventually, like, as— I'm sorry to bounce around, but just where my head's going on this. Like, later in my career when the distressed market was over, we started focusing on expireds. And I would teach my agents to call and say, hey, a lot of agents work in luxury. A lot of agents are neighborhood specialists. Our team specializes in helping people sell their home when the home didn't sell the first time around. We are specialists in helping homes sell that didn't sell the first time. And the idea here was, and again, a lot of our training was around this, how do you become that expert? So I think specific knowledge is a— and niche, uh, was the next discovery for me that allowed me to kind of go even harder at my business, which is why I expanded it, uh, to a handful of states and, and continue to exploit that particular segment of the market. I love it.