Why Most Agents Fail & Others Succeed – 14 Systems

What system do you have in place to stay ahead of the curve? The zeitgeist like Jason Pantana and I now 33, 34 months ago, getting on ChatGPT before it was announced to the public, having early access to understand where things are going.

Hey, welcome back to the podcast. My team has been busting my chops because I'm just not creating enough content. So I apologize to you. I am back and I promise I will be more consistent. Now today I want to talk about the difference between two real estate professionals, two entrepreneurs, two people like myself. One of them always seems to have more time, always seems to have a little more peace of mind, certainly has more of an edge, and seems to always have or earn the money they desire. On the flip side, the other person seems to always be crazy, emotional, lots of erratic behaviors, up and down, never making the money that they want, always feel burdened by time. What is the difference that makes the difference? What is the difference that makes a difference? Every time I go out and speak now, I'm talking about this and you know, I'll hear someone will say attitude, someone will say, work ethic, someone will say, you know all this stuff. And I say, hey, all of that is right. But if we looked on a macro level, if you look at like all these business books that are sitting next to me and the, the hundreds of business books I've read over my career, and I know you have too, the one thing that every one of them talks about, whether it's Sean Achor right in here talking about the happiness advantage, or this book down here all about sales and scaling your business. The bottom line is this, my friends. I don't know an entrepreneur or an agent today who doesn't want more consistent income, more time and more peace of mind. And the only way I know how to achieve that, the only way I know is, is through systems. Systems, system. But when I talk systems, people are like, this is so boring, right? Like, where's the fun of this? And I'm like, you know, at a certain point in your life, in your career, you got to just decide how much craziness you want. I would like it to be more boring. How about you? Do you want things to be a little more boring or do you like the everyday? Roll the dice. What's going to happen today? Like, am I. Is the deal going to close? Do I even know where my next sales coming from? I have no interest at this point in my career to have that level of excitement. I love the, the qu from James Clear, who Wrote the great book Atomic Habits. He said, we rarely rise to our ambitions, we always fall back to our systems. We rarely rise to our ambitions. We rarely. I hate that. I hate that. I know what he means. Like we have spurts where we elevate, where we do more, we become, you know, superhuman and better. But then we fall back to what? You fall back to the systems, the structure that you have in place, how you've always done it, etc. So today I want to talk to you about what a life or a business or a world looks like as systems over memory. Like, how do we get out of this? Like, every escrow is a new exciting escrow and every launch of listing is a new thing. And every onboarding of a client is different from the last one you onboarded. How do we turn into this like systematic approach that we do the same thing over and over again? Why? Because it works. So here's what I wrote down. 5 signs if you're listening now, that you might need to improve your systems. Number one is if you don't know where your next sale is coming from, that's a systems issue. Number two, if your income, if you're constantly going, poor, rich, poor, rich, poor, rich, it's not you, it's a systems issue. Number three, if you say to me, oh, I'm doing searches at midnight when I should be doing something else like sleeping or I just never have enough time, that's a systems issue. Number four, if you say to me, but I'm the only one that can do this, that means you haven't documented it, that means it's a systems issue. And the last one, if like the 10 year treasury adjusts and it throws you for a loop and you stop working for a day or two, that is a systems issue. So if you found yourself, I don't want to say guilty, but you know what I mean? Like if you kind of went check, check, check on a few of those, then, then look no further. To one of my great mentors, a mentor of a mentor, I should say one of my great mentors. A guy named Jay Abraham. And Jay is known today as one of the great direct response marketers of all time. He's taken a thousand, you know, different industries and helped businesses inside each one of them perform at a higher level. And what does he do? He installs systems. He installs systems for marketing, for testing, for tracking and measuring, for increasing performance, you know, and, and it could be the smallest little adjustment, but the small little adjustment to the system is the difference that Makes the difference. So, so his mentor, someone that he was able to work under and study under. If you go back into the history of business Post World War II, we defeat the Japanese and we give them one of the greatest gifts ever. His name was Dr. Edward Deming Jr. Dr. Edward Deming Jr. Deming went there and he went to Japan and he helped them rebuild. And if you actually look at the, the impact Sony and so many other Toyota that came out of Jap Japan, many of them will look back and say it was Edward Deming Jr. Who I think Henry Ford once said, this is crazy, that he was the smartest manufacturing systems mind he'd ever met. Think about that compliment coming from someone like Ford, like, that's incredible. So he famously said, a system will produce what a system will produce. Nothing more, nothing less. A system will produce what? Nothing more, nothing less. A system will produce what a system will produce. Nothing more, nothing less. So if you don't like the current system you have in place for lead generation, get a new system. If you don't like the fact that you miss opportunities because of poor follow up, that's a systems issue. If you don't like the way when you launch a listing that it doesn't sell right away, that's a systems issue. So what we want to focus on today are what are the 14 systems that you could install in your business or maybe take the time to enhance in your business to put yourself and your business in the best possible place. If you Google or you go on Perplexity or you do some search inside hi AI. Today you're going to see that if you type in Edward Deming Jr. And you type in like famous quotes, you'll see that quote, but you'll also see one that says something like, and I'm probably going to say this wrong so my team can correct me later. It's something like even a bad system outperforms a great person. Think about that. Even a bad system outperforms a great person. What do we want though? You, you being great and a great system, that's like the best of both worlds. So here's what I wrote down and you're going to see this obviously as I'm, as I'm presenting this here and I want you to kind of go through your mind one at a time and ask yourself, do I have a system for this? Yes or no? And if I have a system, when was the last time I looked to enhance or improve the system? So let's go through the 14 systems that I know all the best people are utilizing today. And of course we both know the deeper and busy, you know, busier you get, the bigger your business gets. There's going be subsets of systems inside of systems. I know it's crazy and if you're like, like me at times like a high D high, I, we're like oh God, systems and checklists. But I want it to be boring. Like I don't need this much excitement in my life when it comes to my business. I want it to be boring. And the way you do that is through systems. So let's go through one at a time. Ready? Do you have a system for managing your time? Do you have a system for managing your time? Anything from blocking your time? I do this, from this, this to that. I take this day off every time and when my phone gets forwarded to this person. Do you have a system for managing your time? Do you have date nights built in? Do you plan the entire year in advance? How many open houses you're going to do? Do you plan in advance the entire year, the vacations you're going to take, the events you're going to go to? By the way, are you coming to the success summit? I better see you at the success summit. It's all we're going to talk about is systems. By the way, if you're bored by this, you're going to hate the summit. But if you want the most reliable business on the planet, you're going to love the summit. So first one is do you have a system for managing your time? Second one is, do you have a system for managing your emotions and your mindset? Do you have a system for managing your emotions and mindset? You may say, well wait a minute Tom, like I understand like a checklist for launching a listing, but like a system for managing my emotions and mindset. I was literally just chatting with my team. We're talking about things that you can eliminate that take a lot of the emotional highs and lows out of your system. Taking other supplements, I don't know, not drinking coffee past, I don't know, nine o' clock in the morning. There's things that you can do. When was the last time you got really honest about your emotional state? What causes you to whiplash, highs and lows? And what do you do that keeps your mindset right? Like is it Fox News and CNN or is it listening to the founders podcast? I do a lot to keep my mindset right because business is already hard and I don't need self inflicted hard. You with me on this. Let's go to system number three. System number three, the one you love the most, consistent marketing and lead generation. Boy, when I talk to coaches and clients that are outliers, that are performing at such a high level today, what they say repeatedly is, hey, I went from 2 million to 11 million, like from, you know, like 2023 to 2024 and I'm pacing like 30 million in volume this year. And I'm like, what was the difference that made the difference? They're like consistent marketing and lead generation. Like I use listing leads every day. It says Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. This is what I'm supposed to do. And I do that. I created a system for how I'm market to my past clients and centers of influence, which I'm getting into the next system. I've got a system for it. It's scheduled in my day, it's automatic. I have to do it. Emails go out, marketing happens. I don't have to think. That's the key, my friend. Like you don't have to think. So again, I'm, I'm getting excited here. When was the last time you reviewed your marketing and lead generation system? How do we enhance it? How do we improve it? How do we remove the highs and lows? How do you stop doing this? I've got no pipeline, so all I'm going to do is market. And then once you have a pipeline of opportunity, you're so busy working the opportunity that you stop doing what got you there. So you're constantly going rich, poor, rich, poor. That's a systems issue number four. When was the last time you reviewed how you nurture your past clients in sphere and your high valued prospects? You know what I mean? All the people inside your phone and your CRM. When was the last time you looked at that system to look beyond perhaps the automated drip campaigns and look for personalization? Like if there was one thing I wanted to do to improve the quality of my follow up in this case with my database, the nurturing side of my database, it would be around personalization. If you listen to like one of my podcasts with Lisa Munoz, who's been on my show a couple times, she created famously this role called a Care Bear. That Care Bear is a system. This woman that's working 20 hours a week inside of her business making sure that the I don't want to screw up the number, the sub 1500 past clients that Lisa has, that they are being touched on in a personalized way on a monthly basis and that results in 60, 70, 80, 90 direct referrals every single year. So that's a system. As an example, number five is a system for prospecting, expecting. I know the actual note that I wrote was having quality conversations, but you and I both know there's the people that you know and there's the people that you don't know. The people that you know are going to produce a certain result. 5 to 6% of them are going to sell every year. You're typically getting one and losing two or three because you need to improve the other system. But on the flip side, there's the people that you don't know. Like the silver tsunamis. For example, I saw a recent stat. 6% of people above age 60 are considering making a move and that's going to result in about 53% of all the sellers in 2025. So the audacity to think that you can grow a monster, healthy business, get all the things you want from only working your database. For me, that myopic thinking is going to put you in trouble. We need to look at how do we market to other viable sources where your skill sets naturally blend in and you could be of service and help more people buy and sell real estate. All right, next one, a system for follow up and appointment setting. When was the last time you looked at your CRM? You looked at your short term, long term buyer and seller lead campaigns. You looked at how often you actually are making those calls. Is it a part of your daily discipline? Is it a part of the things you do every day to ensure that nobody ever falls between the cracks? And I don't have to tell you, in an environment like this where rate volatility, tariff confusion, you know, good news and bad news happening every day, you know, oh my goodness, home prices and everything else, all these things that are very real for the individual, not as real for you, very real for the individual buyer and seller. If you don't have a steady Eddie follow up system to book more appointments, deals fall through the crack and you lose more money than you make. Like don't shoot the messenger. Look at the system, just look at the system. Now at the end of this, I'm going to give you the ultimate prompt. So if you want to enhance all of your systems, I'm going to give you a very simple prompt and you're going to love me. All right, number seven will rapid fire here. A system for launching listings and managing sellers. Whether that is the initial launch, including pricing today, which is so important to the actual launch of the listing letting the world know it's for sale. The mega open house or super open house or whatever you want to call it. And then of course, the don't fire me report. If you don't know the don't fire me report. Jimmy Macken, Lourdes, one of my great coaches. So many people have made this famous where you're just over communicating to sellers on a weekly basis. Exactly what's happening. This many people looking at your house online, this many people are, you know, inquiring about it. We've had this many showings, we've had no offers. Etc. The don't fire me report is not the title of it. It's us saying to ourselves, we're committed to communicating with our sellers on a weekly basis to let them know exactly where they stand and the adjustments they should or could make to improve the experience. Right, so launching listings, managing sellers, a whole series of systems there. Number eight, onboarding and managing buyers. Boy, I tell you, this is one that's certainly been since the pandemic and certainly since August 17th. How important this is. The ability to onboard and manage buyer's expectation to ultimately help them make the right decisions, do what they have to do to ultimately secure the house that they want, close the escrow and become a happy customer. So when was the last time you looked at your onboarding presentation for a client? When was the last time you looked at how you show houses, how you show up when you show houses? Are you still like taking four or five MLS sheets, stapling it together and saying, here's our tour? I mean, it is 2025, right? It might be time to update the system. Number nine, managing escrows from contract to close. Right. Thank goodness for title companies and attorneys and transaction coordinators that probably do the vast majority of that work for you. So you might say it's my communication system. If I have a transaction coordinator, an outsourced solution, managing the paperwork, then what is my communication system to make sure that if something is starting to flare up, you let them know about it and that you solved the problem versus they hear about it and they call you, which we both know is bad. All right, number 10, managing your team's performance. That's a big one. Number 11, managing my tech stack, managing like all the technology I'm using, is it all working together, Is it cohesive, is it saving me time? Or do I need some zaps and, you know, using Zapier and others to make sure everything is smooth and efficient. Number 12, managing my finances and budget, which I think today is still the most popular Hector video I've ever produced. You know how the, how some people are managing their money, the better people managing their money and the very best people. If you haven't seen that video, you might want to watch that on my YouTube channel or listen to on my podcast. But if you. If you start the year with no budget and you finish the year without profit, it's your fault, right? That was a bad system. That was a bad play to run. I have been challenging people to say, what would it take for you to have a hundred thousand dollars in cash after all your home and business expenses and taxes at the end of the year? Like, how many transactions would you have to do? And again, to manage your house, to have a great life, to make sure your family's taken care of, to make sure you have all your business costs covered and you pay your taxes to save 100 grand. Because what I know to be true is it's just better to have more money in the bank. Any way you add that up, I. I've never had somebody complain to me, Tom, I promise. I just have too much money in the bank. Right. I'd like you to have that problem. That's a systems issue. Like if you get a check and it doesn't go in an LLC and suddenly the money is just inside your personal account and whatever gobbles it up, gobbles it up. That's why you don't have money at the end of the year. We need a better system now. Number 13. A system for constant and never ending improvement of my presentations. A system for constant and never ending improvement of my presentations. I have multiple coaches, from Terry Shodeen to my secret weapon. I won't say his name, he'll be mad. But my. My secret weapon. Who. I'm constantly saying, this is my presentation, this is my skills. This is what I'm looking to improve. What do you recommend? How can I be more influential? If you're not working on that, and we get paid in direct correlation to our ability to solve problems for others. If you don't know how to present, if you don't know how to handle objections, you know the difference between objection and a condition, then you're just behind the eight ball, like everything is harder. Does that make sense? It's easier when you're influential. So what's your system to always be working on your skills? And the Last one, number 14, probably the one I'm the most excited about, is what system do you have in place to stay ahead of the curve. The zeitgeist like Jason Pantana and I now 33, 34 months ago, getting on Chachi BT before it was announced to the public, having early access to understand where things are going now, whether it's keeping current matters, to understand what's the zeitgeist of the real estate market, or looking at your data every single day inside the mls, uploading it into your favorite LLM and saying what do you see? What do I need to know? What are my blind spots? What's happening with days on market, what's selling, what's hot, what's not? And asking, prompting it to look at all the data of your MLS the last 30 days to @ least understand, like where have we been and where are we going? If you don't have a system for these things, my friends, what happens is you do everything by memory. Like when I look broadly at the US real estate market because it's easier for my friend, if you're watching from somewhere around the world, it's easy because I have easier access to data. You look, last year, 965,365 agents in the MLS showed zero listings sold and closed for the year. Now in the US, whether there was 1.4 or 1.5 million agents, it was a large number. But 965,365 had.00 closings of listings that sold and closed in the MLS, I would argue those people lack systems. And then if you go to the very bottom, like the very bottom category that averaged 138 listings sold, those guys and gals had more systems. I think there's a direct correlation to success, to profitability, to time, and a peace of mind to the systems you have in place. So look no further. It's not, it's not you, it's not the market, it's not, you know, your parents, it's not, you haven't read enough books. Think about it as simple as this. A system will produce what a system will produce nothing more, nothing less. So as you think about this list, let me share with you three ways you can improve upon your systems. The number one thing I would tell you is find somebody in your business that's super organized and ask them to build or add or improve the system. I'm surrounded by all these great marketers and smart, you know, organized people, you know, directors of operations and COOs and all these people. And I say to them, what's our best system for this? What is your recommendation for that? And I let them build it. And then I personalize it. Number two, you can outsource or crowd share on Facebook or you know, Instagram or your favorite little groups and jump in and say, who's got a system for this? And like in my community, in our ecosystem, somebody goes onto one of the private Facebook pages and says, who's got a system for this? And like nine people go, here's the checklist, here's the process. This is the CRM, this is the software I use. So you're able to crowdsource to find out what everybody else is doing. And all that does is save you time, time. But the third one is you can use AI. Use your favorite AI. I love Revie. Right? I love Grok, I love them all. I love Claude. I like them all. And you could use this sample prompt. I'll read it to you. You tell the, you tell the AI. The objective is to build a step by step system for name of the task, right? Name the project, like a listing launch, onboarding buyers as an example for my real estate business. Focus on clarity, repeatability, consistency and the actions I have to, I have to take and the actions I have to take. Please keep it simple. And you hit go. And just like that, my friend, you allow the AI to start building out these systems for you. So I've given you a lot to think about. I went through this very quickly with you. Obviously there's some slides associated with this. If you're listening to me on the podcast, jump over to my YouTube channel where you'll see some of these slides. All the, all the words, if you will, written out, the prompt, etc. But I want to say this to you as we, as we mature together in business, my 35 years, your, you know, weeks, days, months, decades in this business, what I know to be true is the difference that makes a difference with someone that consistently outperforms the market. They have a better system. That's all it is. Always and forever. A system will produce what a system will produce nothing more, nothing less. So give yourself some grace as you're listening to this. Don't get overwhelmed. Pick one, two or three systems, use AI or crowdsource, outsource, etc, and let's put one of those systems into place and let's run that play for the next 30, 60, 90 days so you can really work it out and have it become a part of your ethos in your business where this is just how you do it. And once you've got that, you add another one and then you add another one and then you have another. And then, guess what? We wake up at the end of 2026. Yes, I know. That's a year and a half away. And you look back and you say, you know, I didn't change my personality. I didn't change my style. You know what I did? I finally got a little more systems added to my business. And that's why I've got an extra couple hundred thousand dollars in the bank. And my business is doing what it's doing today. So that's my wish for you. I can't wait to read your comments. You might want to share this with a buddy or two, especially if you know somebody who's very enthusiastic but never knows what day it is. And they're always super unorganized because they could probably use this, too. Thanks so much for watching, and I promise more content coming your way. See you soon. Done.