5 Must Do's to Crush The Pending Shift Storm | Lab Coat Agents Training

Nice.

I like that. I've never been there.

Yeah, it's. It's a nice city. I can't. I moved here from New Jersey when I was 28.

Sounds like a. Like a good move, man.

Yeah, it was. It's awesome. I mean, you could live affordably here, and it's still a small, big city.

Nice. Well, we're live inside of the Facebook group, everyone. Thanks for joining us. We're going to be talking about the five must do things in this shifting market, this evolving market, this pivoting market, whatever market this is, these are the five things we need to be doing. For those of you who don't know, Lars, he's a friend of mine. Lars has a great history. He's a. He's a pro. But I want him to tell us all of the things he's doing right now, because he moves fast. Lars, what the hell are you doing now, man?

What.

What's the coolest thing you're doing right now?

The coolest thing I'm doing right now? Well, I just got back from Honduras. I went on a mission trip, and then I went to Roatan, which is an island off Honduras, and we went scuba diving. And so I've got the kind of calendar now where I've got a little bit of flexibility to, you know, you kind of move from money to freedom, you know, so you make money, you get some time, and now you can really sort of focus on impacting. And. And so that's some of the cool stuff now. Just spending time with my kids that are a little bit older, 12 and 14, and just seeing them slip away. My wife took a picture of them on the front porch, you know, first day of school today. She has a picture of them when they went to, you know, kindergarten in preschool, and we're still taking the same pictures. So, yeah, so it's. It's. It's a busy time. Couple businesses that keep me busy, and the kids and a wife and all that good stuff.

Nice, man. I love that. Well, thanks for doing this. We appreciate you. The market is doing whatever it's doing. We need to change. We need to evolve as agents. Tell me, where do we start? Because you could probably go, and you told me you could probably go hours on each one of these five things.

But where do we start? Yeah, I'm gonna spend, like, two quick minutes on a little bit of my backstory just to lend a little bit of credibility to. To the conversation. I had some quiet time this morning. I, you know, I do a magic time. 5, 15 to like 7:15 every morning. And I spent about an hour just thinking about this time today. And you know, when I got into real estate, it was three months before my market shifted. You know, so I'm in Charlotte, North Carolina, looking back. So maybe at the end of 2008, 2009, I look back and inventory just went from like almost no inventory in March 2007 when I got into real estate, to June is when it just shot straight through the roof. And then everybody knows what happens with, with the Great Recession. So I left a cozy corpor separate job and got into real estate. Hadn't sold anything before, hadn't built any businesses, had never been a marketer or anything like that. But I had a lot on the line. You know, I had gotten married in 2006. We had our first kid in November 2007. And so I was, I was going to figure it out, figured out how to generate leads. Very simple script. I was the one thing guy before Gary wrote the book. One thing where I just needed to do one thing long enough where I didn't have to do it anymore. And that was kind of my, my path. But my first full year sold 44 homes and then 58 and then leverage and systems and you know, showing agents and administrators and, and that sort of thing to, to build a business that, you know, ran outside of my, my own efforts. And that was kind of my journey. 5,000 plus families served in that business, you know, got exited that business in November 2020. But the context of this conversation, it's going to leave some of you a little bit like, oh, I just want the Legion lever or I want to know how to generate leads or. But I promise you, if you pay attention to these five things, it will give you the foundation to be able to get through anything in your life. And of course we'll talk about business as well. But a lot of these things translate into any area of life that you want to be successful in. So, yeah, so if you want to get after it, I've got, like I said, I've got a ton to cover.

Let's start, let's start with the one you think is the most important. Mark Rader, who's a friend, a business partner of mine, just jumped in to co host this with me.

Lars, how are we doing? Hey, Lars. Doing great. Yeah. So I would say the, the thing that when I, when I look back on my journey, you know, successfully, you know, building a business in a challenging time, when in my market we went from 15,000 agents to 5,000 agents. So a lot of folks were exiting. There was all the bleeding headlines and end of the world and a lot of the same stuff we're seeing today. A lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt was. I had a really clear vision. So that's the number one must do for as you're consuming this right now is to have a clear vision of where you're going to be, you know, three years from now. Every year I come up with a very, very clear three year vision in my business, in my marriage, relationship with my kids, my physical body, my relationship with God, you know, all of the areas of life that, that are meaningful to me. Proverbs 29:18. It's, it's a book that I, I read. I, I have faith in something bigger than, than me where there is no vision that people perish. And so regardless of what you believe, it's, it's a, it's a really interesting thing. You know anyone and what's the book? The guy that was in Nazi concentration of Viktor Frankl Meaning of man Search for meaning. Yeah. So the reason in the book, the reason he's able to sort of make it through is that he just has a vision for, you know, for life outside of that situation. So you know, what's your three year vision? Just ask yourself, where do I want to be three years from now? My business. And we break that down into one year and then 90 days and, and I'm working on my three year vision every day because I've just had the ability to break it down through your vision. One year plan. 90 days at a time. I do weekly commitments. These are three things I'm going to get done this week and then I chunk those down into every day. I have three things that I do every day and so but you've got to attach them to, to do the crappy stuff today which is gonna, this, this shifting market is going to require some crappy stuff. You've got to be, you've got to attach it to the future otherwise people don't do it. Generally people aren't willing to do things that maybe aren't fun or you know, maybe you used to get away with 10 meaningful contacts a day with would be buyers and sellers. And maybe the next year it's going to have to be 30 to 40 a day. The only reason you could do 30 to 40 is because you've attached it to being one of the agents that are still standing in the next 12, 24, 36 months. I'll share. I'm not going to bring it up right now actually I'm going to share it real quick if my, if my screen share works. It does. All right, so let me, let me share my screen real quick. I just want to show it and I'll share it in the group here as well. This was my first business plan back in late 2009. So I wrote this before I launched my team the the front side of it. And I OCD on this thing. So I don't expect any of that from, from any of you. But I was real clear like so this is my, my, my plan for 2010 was, you know, I'm going to, this is what's going to happen. I was very clear on, on what that looked like. But what I want to share with you is, you know, I broke everything down into three, you know, three years, one year quarterly, that sort of thing. But I read this, I had 20 of these printed, these business plans, double sided, laminated, printed everywhere. And this quote was meaningful to me. What the mind of man can conceive and believe it can achieve. Now I just want to sell a lot of homes like it's not rocket science what we're doing, you know. But I was very growth oriented so that was the whole front. And I'll share it with you guys. But here's every day I read this, my wake up thought, you know, God gave me an awesome, another awesome day in which I will use to move towards achieving all my goals, realizing all my dreams. I will positively impact the lives of everyone I touch today. And then why am I doing this? You know, and this was meaningful to me. And I'll just one part. I want my children, my wife and all my family to have total freedom of choice to do what we want to do. I came from a really challenging upbringing, you know, didn't have anything growing up divorced and alcoholic dad and that sort of stuff. My wife had a super challenging upbringing and we both sort of made something of ourselves. But I just wanted us to be able to live a life that we never thought was possible. That was my first meaningful lie that allowed me to kind of get out of my own way and, and do the things that that had to be done in order to, to kind of achieve those things. So that's number one. I'm going to keep hustling along. I think what goes along with vision is you must take care of your mindset. And it's an easy one to say. Who doesn't know that's listening right now? That mindset's important, but the question is Are you actually doing something to improve your mindset and strengthen your mindset on a daily basis? It's really easy. I've fallen prey to it a little bit recently. To go in the rabbit hole of, you know, the negativity in the news and the political drama and World War iii, and is a nuclear weapon gonna land on my house? Like, it's really easy in these times to spin out into those sort of mindsets, but you really have to pay attention to. To your world versus the world. So if you think about your world, it's your spouse, it's your children, you know, it's your team members. You have a real estate team, your buyers and sellers. You know, it's your physical body, your spiritual health. You know, your world is really, really narrow, and the world is really, really, really big. I had one of our members ask me one time, you know, he said, lars, how do you get so much done? Well, how do you. How did he say it? He said, how do you get so much done when there's so much going on in the world? Or something like that? But. But I remember the way he said it was. He said, in the world. Like, it was. It was recently that he said it, like, so much stuff going on in the world. How do you succeed in business with all this stuff going on? And I was like, man, my world doesn't include Russia and Ukraine. It doesn't mean I don't have a heart for what's going on there. It doesn't include, you know, the stock market. It doesn't include, like, all of the things, right, inflation or, you know, that sort of thing. And I remember back in the day, as I was scaling my business, you know, we went from 58 transactions to 118 to 178. And those were the hardest great recession years, 2008, 9, 10. And I remember the thing I would tell myself every day is, nobody can tell me that I can't sell a house today. And to me, that was really liberating. It's like I could literally go out today and make $10,000. That was like the average commission check back then. And so the question I would have for the group is like, do you believe, as agents are sort of freaking out here? I think there's going to be a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt. I think that's going to get the better part of many agents. But do you believe you can scale your business while other agents, you know, kind of leave the industry or maybe don't show up every day? I'll probably put some resources in the, like some books that I recommend. There's a really good one that was written recently by Benjamin Hardy. But it's, I think it's. Dan Sullivan is the main author. Author. It's the gap in the game. Really, really good concept. I coached with Dan Sullivan for four years and in his top mastermind, he's. He only coaches entrepreneurs and it's this concept of, you know, looking, if you're always looking toward, you know, this ideal that maybe can't be achieved where you're comparing yourself to others. So you're always like never getting where you want to get to and it leads to a constant state of discontentment versus just counting like where you've come from. And it's, you know, it's a little bit of progress every day you're going to feel like you're building momentum versus, you know, I'm never going to catch that person or look at that person selling a thousand homes. I'm only selling, you know, or whatever you're comparing yourself to. So let's take care of your mindset. You guys have any thoughts on any of that? Any questions? Tristan remark. You're muted.

Oh, Tristan, hear me?

You mean we're in agreement with you. We're just taking notes here.

Yeah. Awesome. So I'll just keep rolling then. The, the third, you know, must do to crush, to not only crush the shift but also to, to show up in your, most importantly in, in your home. You know, so if a lot of, a lot of you have spouses and you have kids is to take care of your physical body. And this is something that is really. I don't know if I want to go PC on this one or not. I think in real estate, I think we've allowed ourselves just to sort of take a pass on taking care of our physical bodies because real estate gets in the way or we're working a deal and it's the first thing that hits us in the morning is a negotiation leftover from the night before or, but it has to be non negotiable that you take care of your physical body so that you're actually accelerating through anything, any chaos or any bad market that could happen. You know, if you're not eating well, you're not getting four to five workouts a week, you're not drinking, you know, at least two liters, maybe four liters, and you're not getting at least seven hours of sleep, you know, you're not going to be able to, you know, kick ass during the day. And then still have the physical energy to, to be able to show up and be useful and present in, in your home. You know, the, the risk in real estate is that you give most of it to real estate and there's nothing left over for your, your spouse and your kids. And if you're lucky, you'll stay close to the family and close to your spouse. But more often than not, I mean, you're drifting and it typically doesn't, doesn't end very well. A relationship can't end well if you're not sort of tending to it.

So on that point, Lars, I was talking to a friend of mine. He's, his name's Justin, he's an nh he trains the NHL on, on mind and body and spirit. And he was saying like, if, if you're not there for your mind and if you're not there physically, how are you showing up for your family? Are you showing up 50%, 60% of what you should be showing up as? And to me, when he started putting it in percentages, it's like, damn, you're right. I am only showing up at times. 70%. I'm not, I'm not even present sometimes.

Right.

I need to switch that. Right. So just being aware of that really puts you in, in, in current state. So you know where you're at and you, you do better mentally, physically and spiritually.

Yeah. And I don't know if this is going to help anyone, but as you were saying that this, this came to my mind where, I don't know. So I've been married for 16, let me think, 2006. So this year, 16 years. And for the first like seven or eight years, it was very much tit for tat where I was going to meet my wife. 50, 50 in my mind. And it didn't work out very well because I was maybe taking inventory of like, man, I just worked a full day and you know, and whatever crap we get going on in our heads. But I, I don't know where I heard it, but it was like, oh, it was an Andy Stanley podcast about leadership. And he said, what would a world class blank do? So he was using like, okay, in any situation, what would a world class leader do? If you slow down and ask yourself that question, you'll always get the answer right. And he said, you can also ask it like, what would a world class husband do? A world class husband would show up at 6:30 or 6 whenever they're done with work and they would be on point, they would have taken care of themselves during the day and gotten an appropriate amount of sleep the night before so they can engage at a high level for the four or five hours that matter the most, you know, and I didn't always do that. I was eating poorly and I, you know, I would stay up late working on the business and you know, and that sort of thing. But, but that time matters more than anything else. And the thing I tell myself now is that my goal is to give 100% to my wife and my kids 100% of the time. And I fail all the time with that standard. But you know, I was just seven days with a group of guys in Honduras and then we had fun afterwards, scuba diving and stuff. I gave zero percent, you know what I mean? So like I gave zero percent to the family during that time. So now I'm back in it. I got up early this morning, even though I got home super late. I got my workout in and I'm going to be on point tonight and right back at it. So, and I think I mentioned with your health, sleep, water, fitness and diet and start small. If you struggle, if you struggle, if you're like sitting there and you haven't worked out in forever, you're 100 pounds overweight and this is just the thing you've just not taken care of. Just start out with like, I'm just going to drink two liters of water a day for 30 days and get that one habit, stack that one habit and then say I'm going to walk a mile, you know, five days a week for the next 30 days and then stack that habit. Right? And just kind of keep stacking the habits. My fourth one, because we've only got about nine minutes left here, is you must be productive. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna share a, what I call a productivity pack with some of the tools that I'm going to go through here in a second. So don't worry about fully understanding it. What, what I share in the group will make sense. There's nothing to sell. It's, it's literally just to give. It's a video explaining these three tools. But the, the reason why most people don't make the kind of money that they want to make working a reasonable amount of hours, and this goes for anyone, is that they're spending time on things that generally are low dollar activities, you know, so if, if I follow 90% of real estate agents around for a week or two and I looked at where they spent their time most of the time, more than 80% of the time they're doing administrative activities like a busy agent is in the car, they're going to the attorney to drop off a check, they're putting a yard sign out, they're grabbing a lockbox, they're dropping off brochures, they're entering a listing in mls. They're think of like in a major metro market that I'm in, we could hire out courier type activities for like 10 to 12 bucks an hour. And good administrative help is 18 to 20 bucks an hour. Maybe 25 if you get like really somebody that can play the game and, and handle client care as well. But the point is, unless you want to make 25 bucks an hour, which if you're working say 40 hour work weeks is 2000 hours a year at 25 bucks an hour, that's 50 grand. If you want to make 50 grand, then you should keep doing all the administrative stuff in your business. If you want to make 250 take home or 500,000 take home. I drew a line in the sand early on in real estate saying that I was going to make $500,000 take home net and I wanted to work 40 hours a week. So it was 500,000 divided by 2,000 hours a year. So the average pay is 250 an hour. That's what I decided I was gonna, I was gonna make. And then it became super clear. I can't put listing and buyer packets together. I can't show homes to buyers, I can't enter listings into mls. I can never go to an inspection. I can never like all the things you can get someone super qualified. Even though the task is critically important, you can get someone super qualified to do that thing. And that's just a mindset shift that is like at some point you have to start thinking like an owner if you want to make serious money in real estate. Because you will lose your mind, you know, you, you'll lose your calendar if you're only going to do it, you know, via, via brute force. It's some stat. Like only 15% of agents have an admin or something like that. And 85% of what an agent does is administrative in nature. So it's like double stacked against you. So this productivity pack that I'll share, it goes through an exercise called passion versus pay. So there are things you do that you really love doing, high passion that are low pay. Like showing homes to buyers is like, I love it. It's just the best thing I get to, you know, be out with my clients and. But the reality is you can hire someone to show homes for you for 25 bucks an hour. You know, so that's the disconnect is that people aren't willing to look at their time and be honest with themselves about where they're spending their time. And then we have an exercise we call a 14 day time study where we actually take an inventory of our time. Highly recommended. It's probably one of the more painful things you'll do is to actually be honest with yourself about where you're spending your time. But I'll share that in the group here as well. It's our 14 day time study and you just kind of cat, you just kind of document your time and catalog it and summarize it and you'll be surprised how much of your time is spent on business administrative, personal administrative, and then also on media, you know, on news or social media or watching Netflix and those kinds of things. I get, I guess. Yeah, go ahead.

What's the thing, what's the. I'm really interested in that. What does that look like exactly? Do they, do they do like an hour by hour type thing or how does that, how does that work?

Yeah, let me, let me pull it up here real quick and I could just show it. Oh, I haven't actually pulled up here. All right, let me. Yeah, so this is, this really. If, if I had the, the game that I, I decided to play in business early on and I didn't do it perfectly, actually only maybe one or two years in the last 15 have I actually achieved it. But I wanted to make a million, I want to make a seven figure take home net income and I wanted to work a thousand hours a year or 20 hours a week. So obviously I didn't start out that way. I netted 37,000 my first year in real estate. So clearly I was nowhere near those numbers. But I had the mindset. I adopted that mindset. Like everything I was going to do is $1,000 an hour. And these are the main tools that I use to get there. So that's the ideal week. There's a video that explains all this stuff, so I'm not going to go through it. But here's the time study where essentially you just print this thing out and you wake up and you just document where you're spending your time. At the end of every day you code it in the type column against one of these. You know, you're working on your business. In the business you're doing business admin, you're doing self care, quality family time you're in media or you're doing personal admin and you're just, just honest with yourself about this. And then you've got 90 days to sort of clean this up with this passion versus pay. You put these two sheets next to each other. You kind of put all your tasks into one of the four quadrants. And then anything low pay, whether you're passionate about it or not, if you want to make more money in less time with less stress, you've got to delegate everything that's below the line, that's not making you the kind of money that you want to make. And that's really all that I've done over the last 10 years or so to, to make more money in less time and have more impact. So it's been a, been a pretty cool process. But I'll share that in the group as well. So you guys have access to it. I love that, dude.

Thank you.

That's awesome. Thank you.

Yeah. Now I'll say the last thing and I've just, I feel like I've hogged the whole thing. We haven't even had a conversation. But I'm going to share a link to like the ideal week. There definitely is like an ideal week where like if you're not time blocked, new business development lead, follow up. You know, office, office work. When you take appointments, you get to decide when you take appointments. You put all your family commitments, your date nights, you know, all the stuff, the non negotiables you put in your calendar first and then you, you work against that rather than just like, oh, are you free on Thursday night? No, I'm not free on Thursday night. We have Friday at 3:00pm we could meet or Thursday at, you know, 4:00pm But I'm, I have an appointment Thursday at 7:00pm unfortunately they don't need to know it's an appointment with your family. You know, people are willing to take time off, you know, to get their hair done, but they're not willing to take time off to meet with an agent. And we've done some cool stuff with Virtual, Virtual as well. And then just real quick, three resources. Then I want to get to some questions. Atomic Habits by James Clear is like really, really awesome book. Compound Effect by Darren Hardy. I read that in the early days. And Willpower doesn't Work by Benjamin Hardy. Those are three, three resources that are exceptional. Yeah, so I, I hog the whole time, but that was good, man.

We have a question here from Anita. When you hire someone to show homes, do you pay them additionally if that home Closes escrow.

Yeah. So there's like, different ways that. That we. We coach to this. The. The main thing is the year I sold 66 homes, I sold 33 buyers, but I showed very few homes. I paid 25 bucks an hour plus $250 when it was actually an agent on my team, but they just acted as a showing agent. So it ended up being like roughly 10 hours of showings and two. So it's $250 for showings and $250 bonus. So $500 on a $8,000 commission check. And I only had a couple hours in the deal, you know, so the first move shouldn't be to hire a buyer agent. It should be to hire a showing agent. That works out really well. And there's a ton of agents that are happy to do hourly work right now.

That's very true, man.

You're so right.

All right, let's see.

Put.

You're going to put up the link here or in the Facebook group? Where are you going to put up that link?

It probably, I'm assuming all these guys, well, if you're on here live, you should go join lab code agents. You know, so I'll put it in the Facebook group, but you've got to go into lab code agents to get it. Just to just. I mean, everyone's in lab coat agents. But it's probably one of the best Facebook groups in that that, you know, that you should be in any way. But I'll post it in there under this. Under this thread. And I'm going to share. I can actually share my Google calendar, ideal week schedule. I'll share it in there as well, along with the productivity pack. And. And if you guys have any questions, you know, as you're getting into any of the tools, I'll share my 2010 business plan as well. The one that I brought up. It has some, like, really personal stuff in there. So don't. Don't tease me too much. I think I, like, commented on my goals, my intimacy goals with my wife in that plan. So I guess a little crap sometimes from some people.

That's funny. That's okay, man. It's part of. It's part of being real.

Yeah, for sure. So any other. Cindy says you're right. The business does not lend itself towards me. Yeah, it doesn't. But. But I would say to Cindy's comment, you know, I've found that it's. It's the standards. Like, if we compare ourselves to any other profession, like the best lawyer, the best doctor, you know, you can't text them on a Friday night. Like, you can't text your attorney on a Friday night and be like, hey, attorney, like, I want to talk about the work we're doing right now and all weekend long. And I get that real estate's a little different, but it's really not. I mean, if you set the standard with your clients to say, hey, Tristan, it's going to be awesome working with you, you know, if. If it's really hitting the fan and something blows up, you know, on a Friday night or Saturday or Sunday, we can deal with it. But lenders don't work on the weekends. Attorneys don't work on the weekends, you know, so there's no answers we can get anyway. So most of those things will just hold off until Monday, you know, and nobody is going to fight you on that if you set the expectation in advance. That's worked really well, even for agents on our teams.

Nice, man. I love that. Any other questions? We've got. I'm only monitoring the. The webinar here, not the Facebook group. So, Mark, anything good to go? All right, Lars, where do people get a hold of you if they want more of you?

I would just say real estate. B school. B as in business. So realestate. B school dot com. There's a bunch of free resources. Just hit the resources tab. You can get a bunch of resources. There's a podcast link on there as well, and case studies and whatnot. We just launched a new program. Details are in there as well.

I love it, man. Lots of great information and we went through it pretty quick. So anything you need from Lars, reach out to him. He's going to post that amazing document inside of the group. Watch out for it. I'll pin it to the top. Lars as well.

Awesome. Yeah, I'll be in there. It should have been. Oh, number five. Anita was. Yeah, it was your calendar. So the must do is like having an actual calendar where I. I live by my calendar. Like, it tells me when I need to end my day. It tells me when I need to go on a date night. It tells me when I need to work out, when I need to read the Bible, you know, when I need to do my weekly planning and all stuff. Everything is in. Is in my calendar. I use Google Calendar, so I'll actually share a link. You can, if you're a Google Calendar user. It'll open up in Google Calendar and it should work out for you.

Perfect. Lars, thank you so much, man.

Awesome, guys. Yeah, I feel like Tristan, Mark, maybe we should get together another time where we actually have a conversation and not just me preaching the whole time.

I took some great notes, so thank you for that. I appreciate that.

Awesome. Guys, we'll talk soon. All right? Be good.