5 Steps to Triple Your Income in the Next 12 Months While Working Less Hours

Lars Hedenborg lays out five steps for real estate agents to triple income while working less: shift from agent to business owner, fill your pipeline with cheap high-quality leads, focus time on dollar-productive activities, and build systems that scale. He uses case studies and personal stories to show how.
All right, so let's go. I want to make good use of everyone's time. We're probably going to spend about 45 to 50 minutes together, so definitely want to honor your time and I want you to treat this time as sacred as you possibly can. If you can, grab this thing here and silent it. If you're driving, do not try to look at the screen as I'm, as I'm chatting here. So I just reworked some of this off another presentation that I had done where it was, you know, five steps to, to, you know, build your real estate business to a million in, in gci. So the focus today is going to be around tripling your income. So everything I go through is with that in mind and it's going to require you doing more business, looking at where you're spending your time, leveraging, you know, activities and tasks in a way that leads you, you know, to this outcome. Right. I want to help you guys make more money, but I want to help you guys work less hours as well. And we can't ignore the fact that we are in a shift storm. So it is about more money so that you can have more freedom, so that you can have more impact. So if you're a real estate agent or team leader, you know there's another level of growth in your business. You are in the right place today. And if you're sort of sick and tired of the average whining real estate agent who is worried about the end of the world and you want to hang out with, hang around with business minded real estate professionals, you're in the right place. If you want to build a big business and systematically increase your net worth and time off. Time off. And then ultimately my superpower among all the failures. But my superpower is helping agents make the shift, even mentally, from agent to owner. So the reality of our industry, though, is that most people are not where they want to be financially. They're working evenings and weekends and they're stressed out more than anyone they know and they're missing out on the stuff that matters. All I ask of you today around this tripling of income in a short period of time, you know, working less hours. While we're going through the shift storm of a market, whatever is happening, the worst has not been seen yet. Just to know that this is possible, but it's also predictable and it's not necessarily a hard thing to do even in today's climate. And you have to trust me on that. I've been through it personally. I've been at this for a long time and it's mostly mindset, which we're going to start with that. So today we're going to cover mindset to make this mental shift to business owner and to adapt your approach in many ways. That's point number two. We of course need high quality buyer and seller leads. So we're going to talk about filling your pipeline and, and then busting the myth that, you know, your, your money, the money you take home in real estate is linked to the hours you work. And then we'll talk about how to get access to the tools and systems so you can systematically do this. So a little bit about me. I'm a father and husband, man of God, first business builder, podcast host. I love my podcast, love everything about it. Super fun. I'm on 510 episodes, which is crazy. I wrote a book called Scale or Die. If you have not read my book, Scale or Die, you can go to scaleordiebook.com and I went from a solo agent, no sales experience prior to real estate. 44 transactions in my first full year, 2008 to 453. Actually about five years later. 5,000 plus families served, hundreds of agents and team leaders that I've taken through the journey to business ownership. Multiple seven figure net worth. My residual income at this point is about $80,000 per month. I work an awesome work week. I love what I do. I'm always in my zone of genius because I'm surrounded by amazing people. I take a lot of vacation. But all that to say is, I promise if you guys saw my journey, you would see all of the mistakes. And I made all of the mistakes more times than I care to even admit. So I've made all the mistakes. And I think my attraction, for lack of a better word, the reason why, you know, folks appreciate my approach is because I'm willing to share them with you a little bit more about me. I didn't come from a silver spoon background. Parents divorced when I was super young. My father was an alcoholic, drank until I was 15. So lots of chaos, lots of uncertainty. I had student loans for a career I did not pursue. I went to school to be an engineer. I spent about 18 months in engineering and it drove me crazy. Didn't have any sales, marketing or business building experience before I got into real estate. I did have this probably unnatural, unhealthy desire to grow. And I was willing to bet on myself because of some of these things, right? Sometimes it helps to attach to some things that, you know, can emotionally drive us so this is 2007. This is, you know, my first part year in real estate. New dad only married for 15 months or so, and I'm like, man, holy cow, what did I do getting into real estate? I left a cozy corporate job, and I was instantly seven days a week. I was always on the phone. I wasn't present in anything. The pressure really came on in April 2010 when Kendall was born. Anders became a little a brother to his sister. And it really changed. And I remember saying to myself, like, this really has to work. And the good news is that it did work, right? This is the Facebook version of our family photo from a few years ago. This is the actual version. My wife actually is authoring a book where this is the COVID of the book. This was our Christmas card. You can see Kendall's probably about four, maybe Anders is six. So this is maybe seven years ago or so. And this is the reality, and this is a reality of business. This is what we want people to think about, how we have ourselves together and our businesses together and our finances together. And this. This is the reality. It's not pretty, and it's. It's just. It is what it is, right? We get through it. We figure out how to navigate. We keep our priorities front and center. That's. That's the key. And we'll be talking a little bit about that today. The question is, are you willing to take a risk and bet on yourself? With all the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that's going on right now, are you willing to take a risk and bet on yourself? That is a screenshot if I ever saw one. That is a writer downer, because we're going to get into it here. We're going to go fast and furious through these. Through these steps. And I want you to think about these steps in, like, how can I use what Lars is teaching me to triple my income? How does this apply to me? If you sold five homes last year, you know, how do we get you 10 homes, you know, but maybe reduce some expenses or 15 homes, or if you're at 25 homes, how do we get to 50, 75 homes, right? So take that mindset as we go through this. So step number one is to think like a business owner when it comes to leverage growth. This one thing I could spend 10 hours on, right? But I'm going to hit you hard with it. So the guiding principle here is that you don't have to be a business owner to think like one, but you do have to think like a business owner to become one So I don't care where you are in your journey, just making the mental shift to thinking of yourself as a business owner is all we need at this point. So first business book I read probably in my life, well, I did get my mba, so outside of getting my business degree from, from Duke, which wasn't very helpful in anything related to business. E Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. So how would you have to think about your business differently if you were to replicate it 10,000, 10,000 times? And I don't know if this is directly from the book or I actually did some work with E Myth, the organization, but this, this one principle and Ray Kroc and his, his example with McDonald's in the book changed everything for me. So I actually thought like, okay, I'm working 50, 60, 70 plus hours a week in real estate. How would I have to think about my current business differently if I were to replicate it 10,000 times? It's like I'm doing everything in the business. I'm doing all the low dollar productive tasks, all the high dollar productive tasks, right. So I couldn't possibly do it. So that was the mental shift and my motivation for building a business really. I come from entrepreneurial parents. My parents moved to the United States from Sweden. My dad has had this vision of building a business American dream, right? This business really ended up getting the best of him. The stress and having to do everything in the business, having no freedom from the business. Know I'm, I'm sure there are like, I don't fully understand addiction, but I know this business contributed to him, you know, not being present and going to the bottle as, as a way to get out of the pain of this failing business. Because he was sweeping the floors, he was ordering the shampoo, he was cutting hair, he was washing hair, he was doing hair color, taking out the trash. He was the ultimate. E Myth is the entrepreneurial myth. And I ended up being that.
Right?
Same picture as before. I was technically, you know, self employed, right. I didn't have a boss, but my time wasn't my own and I wasn't even making great money. This is a picture from my first family vacation where I was working an $850,000 short sale. Raise your hand. You don't actually have to raise your hand, but go like this and help me not feel alone. If you have worked a deal on vacation and, and you just felt heavy about it, like you were robbing your family, that was me on this. So the question I have for you, no matter where you are, right now, with respect to tripling your income, do you have any limiting beliefs when it comes to building like an actual business? You know, the year we did 453 transactions, I worked 42 days and I made almost $3,000 an hour. I designed that in my mind ahead of time so I didn't have any limiting beliefs. I knew it was possible, right? Division of labor, simple systems, virtual assistants, you know, geo arbitrage in different countries. I knew that it was possible. This is not a complicated business. It requires this mental shift and you have if you have any limiting beliefs. My clients want to work with me. Only I can show homes. I need to be the one that takes the photographs. I need to be the one that puts the listing in mls right. Those are all limiting beliefs that will hurt your chances of tripling. Quadrupling 10xing your income over the next 12, 24, 36 months. Dan Jones. I'll tell the quick story. He moved to Charlotte, North Carolina to be with his mom as she was in her final stages of life. And Dan joined my real estate team as an inside salesperson. Transitioned to an outside salesperson. Ended up leaving my real estate team to do his own thing. I started real estate b school around the same time. We connected finally. It took me about a year to convince him I can show him the way. He went from 65 transactions to 105 transactions to 175 transactions to 225 to 275. And he's between 250 and 300 per year at this point. He works less than I would say 30 hours a week. Charlotte. They just had their second. I should have to update these pictures. Charlotte. He has not missed taking her to kindergarten, taking her there and picking her up any day. I think that's what, what, what he told me. And he actually shot a YouTube video of all these pickups where he would record her just running to him. And it was about the most heartwarming thing you could imagine. But when we started working together, he did not have it together. He was not making decent money. Right. I was able to take him. I think he'll do a, a seven figure income from this business. And he doesn't work with buyers and sellers anymore. But he did every one of those 65 transactions. And we actually eliminated lead sources. He was on four paid lead sources. We took him down to one to go from 65 to 105 to 175. We, we eliminated three lead sources. So that'll blow your mind. So let's talk about shifting your mindset. So you got to think long game in the business. There are things we're going to do in the next 12 months that will impact you three to five years from now. But we're thinking long game. We're thinking past the shifting market. Begin with the end in mind. Are you building a franchise prototype? Meaning are there systems in your business? Is are buyers treated the same way? The buyer consultation process, a listing consultation process, lead follow up, your tech sequences, your email sequences. Right. Are using video marketing. Is everything systemized? It's all psychology, right? That's straight up Tony Robbins. Success in anything in life is 80% psychology or mindset. And really be careful of guarding your heart, your heart and mind. With respect to mindset. The news, social media will infiltrate you in a meaningful way that will take you 100% on off of this vision of tripling, quadrupling your income and then get emotional leverage. My emotional leverage was I did not want to be like my dad and I wanted to provide a life for my family that they couldn't possibly imagine. And I had delivered on both of those, which is pretty cool. So, all right, let's get into number two. Adapt your approach giving the changing real estate market. So here's the guiding principle. Your ability to scale your business is directly correlated. And you're not going to like to hear this if you're. You love paying for leads, but it's directly correlated to your ability to serve your clients at the highest level. We say that again. Your ability to scale your business is correlated to your ability to serve your clients at the highest level. So this is a shift storm. So when we talk about changing consumer patterns, right? Being able to pick up this thing, your cell phone in two clicks, have a stranger pick you up doordash, right? My kids are like so unbelievably spoiled, they can just go on a doordash app and they can get clean juice delivered to our house in, you know, 16 minutes. It's crazy. Tech is evolving even in our space. AI is a thing as it infiltrates every industry. Our industry is changing, right? The lawsuits on the buyer co op, that's a big deal that's going on right now. Ibuyers and just the changing business model, some of them have not been successful and some of these big players are turning out to not be successful ultimately. The biggest one right now though is, is local economies, the US economy, the global economy and what they're calling the housing recession.
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Interest rates being so low for so long, home Prices, you know, going up massively as a result of that because people are buying on payment. And now interest rates from went from like two and a half percent to like five and a half percent in a 12 month period. And prices are going to come down. People are going to sit on the sidelines, right? So this is a complete shift storm, if there ever was any. So the question you need to ask yourself before this question is like, am I mentally prepared, going back to mindset, I'm mentally prepared to absolutely crush this shift and make more money in less time. So how am I thinking about my business in terms of my ability to scale? Based solely, I would say solely on the service I provide. So what if you could only get new business from the service you provided to your existing clients?
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That is the way we want to look at it. This is a screenshot. If you're, if you're able, you want to, you want to screenshot this. This is the whole game, right? Really doesn't matter how you generate leads. There's all the ways. There's direct mail, YouTube, Facebook ads. I just talked to a ninja Facebook guy right before this call. I did Craigslist back in the day. There are still people getting Craigslist to work for sale signs, right? Email marketing, mass media, you know, sort of peer to peer referral marketing, and then telemarketing or, you know, dialing. And then the game is just like, how many conversations am I having in a day, you know, and am I applying the discipline and effort there? How many buyer or seller consultations am I, am I making appointments set? How many are actually showing up? How many are agreeing to do business with me? And then how many are, you know, getting to the closing table? And then if we do that right, and we give them this unbelievable client experience, the whole thing takes care of itself. And it's this virtuous cycle where you'll get referrals based on this one through five process, right? So you got to think about the business that way. And it's really fun. So you can see the family. That's not my family. You can see my family. Well, Anders is on the upper right, but this is a Disney cruise. The other guy in the picture is Drew, a buddy of mine. We were on a guy's trip in Lake Norman, just north of Charlotte, where I live. I live in Waxhaw. And he was telling me about spring break that they were going to be on. And I said, you have to come on this Disney cruise, right? You can't go on your spring break. You have to come on ours because we had already been on a Disney cruise and we're not cruise people per se, but we had been on three prior and they were the best experience I could never have imagined. Like we just fell in love. And not only did they join us on this Disney cruise, they took their kids, it was the wrong week. They took their kids out of school to join us on this Disney cruise and they've been on two or three cruises since.
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So you have to create an experience for people that give you money initially where they're just going to rave about what you do. And that's the self fulfilling thing. This is a little handwritten note from an American Airlines stewardess or steward, I don't know what you. Flight attendant, right, Jordan. Mr. Mrs. Hedinburg, thank you for flying with us today, for being a gold and Platinum Advantage member. Have a wonderful evening. I was like, man, never has a flight attendant ever done, done that. And sure enough, right when I, I opened up, of course you get off the, you know, you open up your phone and you check your email. How was your trip? And I hit begin the, the survey because I had just gotten this note and it was a net promoter score. They actually wanted to know how my trip was, if there was anything that could have been, could have done better. Question for you. Are you asking your clients, like on a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to refer me to my, to your friends and family? If you're not asking that question at different points of the transaction process, you're losing a golden opportunity to get better and to get more business. So you have to rethink the funnel and get clear on what makes you different. The only way we will survive. Please listen, please listen.
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If you're doing something different, please listen. Our survival, it's, it's an existential threat. If you're not providing a level of service that can command the kind of money that we're used to, get paying, that we're used to getting paid, Right. So we won't be around anymore if we're not sort of looking at the service that we provide as the way to generate new business. It's a whole different way of thinking. So the industry is changing and the question is, what will your response be? One of our members, Dave Hook, I met him when he was doing, I want to say like 80 or 90 transactions. He had an admin and one buyer agent. He was losing his mind over 80 hours a week. Fast forward. You know, when you think about rethinking the funnel. 80% of his business, I think 80% of 300 transactions are repeat and referral. So he's always focused mostly on providing this repeatable service. But a white glove, repeatable service, Some of the highest margins of any real estate team leader that I've ever coached. And he went from working 80 hours a week to working 90 minutes a week. And more than tripling the size of his business. This was over a four year period.
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But right out of the gate we took his hours down, got him out of all the activities that didn't make him a lot of money. And we'll get into some of that here in a little bit. When I met Dave, Jenny, his wife, was pregnant with their first child. I think they have four now. These pictures are a little bit old. There's a, there's another little nugget running around. Or maybe not. I could have, could have been mistaken there. But either way, none of these kids existed when we first started working together. And he knew he was going down the path of not being the dad that he wanted to be.
Right.
That was the, the key for him. So in terms of shifting your service, this is where it gets fun. Study other service industries, right? Just think of the service you provide, somebody that's going to lead to the next $10,000 that comes in your business. So if you're working with, you know, if you only have five clients in a year and you provide such unbelievable service to those five clients, each of them will bring you two more deals. So one will turn into three and right there is a tripling of income.
Right.
I'm going to line up. Every one of these steps is going to, in and of itself allow you to triple your income. So make it fun, embrace the challenge. Be willing to utilize leverage in the forms of systems and people, even if it's virtual assistants. I hired two amazing, smart young virtual assistants out of Brazil for less than $4 per hour. And all, everything we do, most of it is button clicking. So we're on Trello. We're communicating in Slack like we've dialed in our system. So I can make people in other economies productive.
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So you gotta look at that. And I would make it life or death. The service you provide is the thing that's going to keep you in business in a market where we're increasingly becoming a commodity. And track your progress by soliciting feedback from clients. You've got to do them. Net Promoter score. If you get a three from a client, it's just going to force you to get better. You cannot put your head in the sand on that and then get social proof to scale. So we'll cover that here in a little bit. But your clients saying good things about you is the thing that is going to have you do better in the future. So. And we'll get into that now with step three. Fill your pipeline with high quality, low cost leads and stop playing their game. Their game is the lead aggregators. Now there's a bunch of seller lead aggregators now, which I guess there's nothing wrong with it, but it's definitely not scalable. So here's the guiding principle. Marketing. It's one of the things I realized early on in my journey that the time I built, the time I spent building marketing systems made all the difference. But marketing is the biggest leverage point in your business and it requires letting the world know that you can serve their real estate leads like no other agent in your market. And so the question that I pose is, am I truly using marketing as leverage and building lead generation pillars that can run without me? You know, real estate B School has seven lead gen levers. Each are good for 25 to 50 plus transactions once fully implemented. Right. It takes a little bit of time to implement these most of the time. I gave the example of Dan Jones. 65 transactions, four paid lead sources, we took away three. He went up to 105 and 175. Because now we can go deep and we can actually find the good stuff, find the oil, right? So marketing is massive leverage. You have to spend hours per week with your marketing hat thinking about how can I generate high quality, low cost leads and stop being a hostage. Zillow, right? Zillow went to Flex and 35% and it's way out of economic model. A lot of these referral based companies, if you could turn them into multiple transactions, I can almost rationalize it. But someone taking 30, 35%, some of these are 40%. You're just admitting that you're not a great marketer. You're putting this person in between you and the ultimate client and it's just not the long game of business.
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It could be a near term fix, but it's not the long game. The way forward here in terms of generating low cost, high quality leads is to tell the story of the client. You had a success for you, you had a successful outcome. Make them the case study.
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If you look at real estate B school stuff, if you go on real estatebschool.com and you check out real Results, you know, all of those case studies, it's them telling their stories. Where were they before they met you? What would the process look like and where are they now? Right, so they were worried about selling their home in this shifting market. The process was amazing. The team was awesome. And now we're on the other side. We're living with our grandchildren.
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So tell their story. Social proof is everything in marketing. So the power of social proof goes back to. I went to my dentist. It was a new dentist. I switched dentists, I went to Valentine Dentistry. And you can see them. 1100 reviews there. And I was checking out and it was an awesome experience. One of those businesses that clearly focuses on client care or client experience. And when I was checking out, the lady that checked me out said, have you Left us a 5 star review yet? I'm like, I haven't. She said, did you have a five star experience today? I said, you know, I did. She says, grab your phone. And she like grabbed her phone and I grabbed my phone and she said, open a browser. I opened a browser. I did exactly what she said. She said, pull up Google and type in Valentine Dentistry. She said, hit that button there. And she's like showing me how to do it, like right in front of me. And she's like, there's the five stars. Say, say some kind words. And it was less than two minutes. Probably not more than one minute or not too much more than one minute. And I said, I said, I have two questions. You know, do you get paid a bonus for doing that and why do you think the owners are doing that? She didn't know that. I was also spending a lot of money on mass media at the time. This is probably five, six years ago. And I was getting like diminishing returns. Like every year I was on radio is less and less return. She said the owners told her that. Exactly that. That most of their best clients are seeing them online via social proof, via Google reviews before they even started focusing on it. And less and less were coming from, from TV and radio. And I was like, holy cow. And she said, yeah, I get a little bit of a bonus. You know, they give me. I don't, I don't even remember what she said, but she did. She was financially motivated to get it. So they made sure she would, she would get it. I went right back to the office and we implemented the same thing. So the question for you is, are you the best agent in your market? Like, if somebody goes online and they search for best real estate agent in Charlotte, North Carolina, you know, you can see high performance real estate advisors. I'm, I'm out of this business now since November 2020. We implemented this strategy in like November, probably three or four years later or before that rather. And so before we started this strategy we got no business from online traffic. SEO related. We now do Google local service ads. So there's another strategy on top of this. When you get the reviews, very easy to turn into more business. But regularly we're getting business after business, seller after seller based on the social proof we have on this platform. And so the question is like if I were to search, I won't call out names but if I were to know your market and say best real estate agent in Charleston, South Carolina. If you're from Charleston and you're not coming up in the first three on the free search, then you're not in the game and you've got to adjust your approach. We've got systems for that. Dave Friedman, I was probably subtly thinking about talking about Dave. He is in Charleston, South Carolina. When I first met him he was at that about 35 transactions the year before I met him and he did I think 450 transactions last year. So just a massive success story but doing it in a way where it was a systematic approach to client care. So he did lots of cool things in lead gen and lead conversion and but when it came to the consultation and everything that happened to get them to agree to do business with you and then get them under contract showing homes, you know, getting their home on the, on the market as a seller and then the contract to close and then the clients for life program after that it was all highly orchestrated so nothing was left to chance. And it just sort of builds on itself. You know, go to 60 deals, 120 deals. He 10x his income in a five year period and he went from again the typical 60, 70, 80 hours down to I think he works a couple days in this business. He owns multiple businesses at this point. But he took 30 days off the grid, no cell phone with him to go to the Galapagos Island. This was about a year ago, right? So if we build this thing the right way, it will take on a life of itself. So steps to shift your marketing is, I didn't cover it. But you have to track everything, right? There are some of you that are listening to this or watching this that are spending money on stuff and you don't know what the return is or it's not where it needs to be, right? You're getting two, three Times return on spend when you need to be getting 10 plus return on spend and go deep, not wide. We've got that same guy, Dan Jones gets a 12x return on Google pay per click. Right. I don't always recommend, you know, sort of forced buyer home search leads unless you have a system in place where you can get a 10x return. So you've got to go deep on those lead sources and then imagine you couldn't spend any money on leads. So all of your business had to come from just doing a good job and using social media strategically to tell the good news, the good job you did with that last client and then install a process for getting testimonials. We get them at the closing table. We track, you know, we want 100% of our clients giving us testimonials and we track that and then use them in your market. It's not, it's not very complicated. All right, so let's do step four. I want to keep us on track here. I think we are on track. So let's talk about this. Man. If there ever was like a, I mean, I think it's a myth, but most agents struggle to grow and scale their business, make more money because there's only so many hours in a week. So let's bust the myth that you must put in more hours to make more money. And here's the guiding principle. The income you've been making in real estate is simply the result of the choices you've made with where to spend your time. So Yes, I am 100% putting this on you. The income you've been making in real estate is simply the result of the choices you've made with where to spend your time. And the question here is, what are the most dollar productive activities in a real estate business? There are only five. I'm not going to go through the exercise where I have you guys name what they are and what you do. And there are only five. There's, it's P L and P L, A N S, plans, prospecting, lead, follow up appointments, which is the initial consultation with the buyer and seller, negotiating, you know, getting a buyer under contract or seller under contract and then building systems. That's it.
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So if, if you're doing anything besides those things, they're not worth $500, a thousand dollars an hour. And that's where we tend to not make the money that we really want to be making because we're not spending, you know, as much of our time in those dollar productive activities. So the question is With P L A N S, am I spending 80% of my time doing the most dollar productive activities? And if you're not, why?
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Where are you spending your time? I was on a call. I don't do a lot of one on one at this point. I've only got three one on one clients. I really challenged this guy. I was like, dude, you've got to be sitting at your desk if we're going to have a coaching conversation. It's too distracting with you driving. I'm worried you're going to crash. He was in the car again. And I'm like, the reason you're not making the kind of money that you want is that you're doing things that are not dollar productive traveling. And he traveled an hour to be somewhere and then an hour to be back. And it's like, you're gonna lose the game. Ultimately, there isn't. There's only a finite amount of time, 138 hours a week. You know, I'm a husband, a dad, a business owner, own two businesses. I spend time with God. I take care of my physical body. I have a sister, I have a mom. You know, I want to have fun and travel. Like all of these things I want to get done. I can't possibly do all of those things at the level I want to do them with the financial freedom and the time freedom. If I'm spending time doing things that aren't making me good money. So this one shift alone could help you triple, quadruple your income in the next 12 months. Just stop doing the things that aren't making you the kind of money that you want to make. And these are extraordinary times. I get it. I know things are busy. I know we have kids, we have spouses, we have, you know, driving kids. I've got two kids. One is in volleyball and horse one's in volleyball. They're both in club and school. Like, it is crazy, but we make time for the things we want to make time for. This simple exercise will change your life. I call it the Business Freedom Index. I learned it in 2007 and I applied it the first time in 2008. The first time I ran this calculation, which is essentially the. The money that you make pre tax after all of your business expenses divided by the hours that you work. That's what I call Business Freedom Index. It's essentially the dollar per hour that you're worth with your actual work you're putting in.
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You may think you're worth $500 an hour, but you're making $50 an hour. Why is that? When I first ran this calculation, it was $18.50. My first 10 months in the business, I wasted a lot of money. I worked a lot of hours. I was figuring things out. I sold 27 homes, but I hadn't really figured things out. But I decided then that I was going to make a half a million dollars working 2,000 hours, which is 40 hours a week. Took me about four years to get there to $250 an hour. Another two years to get to $3,000 an hour.
Right.
So this one concept and the numerator is the money you make. The denominator is the hours you put in. And if we can spend more of those hours doing the things that are most dollar productive, everything will shift for you. Stacy Peterson, the first person to give me money to coach her, tripled her business. Ended up selling it for a seven figure valuation in a market Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where that had never been done before. She went from seven days a week to two days a week in her business. Got out of production. She ended up coming over to real estate B school. She's still one of our business coaches. She ran the company for a period of time. Amazing human being. And she did it with this concept of just stepping out of the things that aren't dollar productive. Her and one admin. And she didn't do most of the work. Transacted 222 transactions in a single year with a single admin. One listing agent, I think five buyer agents. Yeah. Five buyers, one listing agent, one admin. And she was running the backstage of the company. 222 transactions.
Right.
So it is possible to dealing time and money. So in terms of shifting your productivity, think in terms of your highest and best use. Honor your work on business time blocks. You're like, wait, what's a work on business time block? Three times a week for 90 minutes. You should have in your calendar work on business. If you're in real estate b school, you 100% know what to do with this time. If you're not. This is time where you work on your business. You're, you're okay, I sold 20 homes last year. I want to sell 80 homes next year. What has to happen for me to do that? Okay, I need leverage here. I need more leads here. I need lead conversion systems. Right, that's working on your business. You're thinking about the, the new code, the new company that you're building, the next generation of the company that you're building. Calculate your Current and desired business freedom index and obsess over it. I had that first number, that 500 divided by 2,000 hours, $250 an hour. I had that everywhere on these, like colored index cards. So I was constantly reminded of where I was spending my time and if it was worth that amount of money. There will be necessary endings. Sometimes you have to stop doing certain things or end certain relations, relationships in order to step up in this way and then get on the same page with loved ones.
Right.
There will be a period of time where you need to double down, work the extra hours, but just be the open line of communication with your spouse. That makes things a whole lot easier. I told Julie, you know, I didn't leave my corporate job, multiple six figures, pretty cozy to get into real estate. Like, I didn't do that to, to make $18.50 an hour. I did it to build a business that gives us freedom as a family. Please trust me. Sorry. Please trust me. I am going to make this work. I just need a little bit of time. And then follow a simple roadmap. Sorry about that. Gosh. And then follow a simple roadmap with a proven plan. So step five is to strategically implement tools and systems to scale your business today. So here's the guiding principle. Not only is it possible to scale your business without losing your life working more hours, but it's predictable when you have a clear roadmap. So the question I have for you, based on where you are right now, your financial snapshot, your business, the amount of hours you're working, the stress you're enduring, based on all of that, how confident are you in terms of where you're going? Or another way to ask this, like, you know, have. Has what you've been doing gotten you to the point where you're really happy about your progress? You know, we have a proven six stages, right. Of business growth. 100k, 500k, a million, a million five. Like these are predictable. We've been through them. I've been through them personally. It took me six years to get through these stages. We have members going through them in three to four years. Right. This is a process that's entirely predictable. It leads to more money, more freedom, more impact. That's the bottom line of what we do. The question is, you know, who do you, who are you hanging out with? Is that the influencer group that's going to get you to where you Want to go? 95% of your success or failure in life is determined by the people you habitually associate with according to a study done by Harvard and then another study done by HSE was those who hang out with high achievers, they raise their level of performance. And if you hang out with underachievers, you lower your level of achievement.
Right?
So taking a kid as an example, if your kid falls into a group of like, you know, kids that study and they play sports, they're more likely to study and play sports and be productive. If they fall into a group of kids that are not doing the right things, they're disrespectful in the classroom, they're going to be more likely to underachieve in those areas. So same thing happens in business. And also, University of Chicago says in a study, people with multiple strong social networks have early access to valuable information, earn more money and receive more recognition. Last case studies, Cody Riddle, I met her in 2015. I just did a case study with her. 2015. She was essentially leaving the business at this point. The shift, the Great Recession had really knocked the wind out of her sales. She fallen out of love with real estate. Fast forward to last year. She did almost 2 million of GCI. She took five or six full weeks of vacation. She's only doing SOI listings. She made over $1 million in her business. So she was going from 300,000, probably taking home half that, 150,000 miserable out of the business to taking home a million, you know, with tons of vacation and normal work week, no evenings and weekends. And it came via this shift with, I remember her telling me over a three year period, she had something like five administrators like she couldn't crack the code on. But she said that the upside of that was that at the end of it, I did have a fully operational, systematic business where everything happened in the right way, right thing at the right time. Systematic systems driven business, she said. So even though I had some turnover in that position, I hadn't cracked the code on finding an operator that would stay. And now she has Linda, it's great. She's been there for like four or five years. She built the playbook to run the whole business in that time. So she had this mindset of building a system, a system of systems, which is a true business. So in order to shift your approach, choose faith over fear. This is all going to get you out of your comfort zone. But just trust that there's a path, right? People have gone before you down this path and, and think more like a business owner and less like a real estate agent. Like, would a business owner run out on a Sunday afternoon and pick up, you know, yard sign or you know, drop off a check on a Friday afternoon at an attorney's office. Right? Those aren't hard to do, right? There's no, of course you could do them, but you're not making a lot of money doing them. So think like a business owner. Growth isn't easy. So expect to have those tough days and then create the vision. Create the vision for your business and then break it down. Everything we do in real estate B school, not only in business, but in your finances and your relationships and the things that matter most to you, we break everything down into three year vision. Then we create a one year plan, 90 day world weekly and dailies. We've got our business freedom planning system. So we covered a lot, right? We covered all of these things that are geared toward every one of them. If you have this backdrop of multiplying your income while eliminating hours, I am trusting that there were some good stuff in here. So the reason I even do any of this, the reason I would spend time with all of you today, the reason I do my podcast, the reason I do real estate B school, the reason I built a massive organization exp is to simply help agents and team leaders build profitable businesses that give them freedom. Freedom comes down to sustainable systems and empower people. Not massive teams, just an empowered VA to take away some of the button clicking so that you can make more money, experience less stress and take more time off. That's the ultimate goal, is to increase your net worth systematically, but also increase your time off. So for those that want to go further, faster, I am looking for a very specific agent to take to this next level. If it's 100 to 250 or 250 to 500 or 502 million, the question is, will you be one of them? So I'm going to lay out our business foundation's case study program. Again, the motivation here is in 12, 24, 36 months for you not to recognize the income you're making, the hours you're working and the stress that you're enduring. So it is about this trifecta. I'm going to show you how to make more money. That's, that's the first piece just to prove to you that, that we can do that. But you have to have more freedom and that's freedom of time, freedom of stress, so that you can have more impact. There are areas of your life right now where you're not showing up the way that you should. And this program is going to free you up to do those. So we're a match. If you're less than 500 kgci, we have one on one coaching which is a lot more expensive. The investment levels are higher. This is for folks that are doing less than 500k, but you have this massive growth mindset. You can commit two to three hours. There's work on business time blocks. We will fill them up.
Right?
If you have three hours, that's about what we want. You need to be coachable and willing to challenge the status quo. You're tired, right? You're underpaid, overworked. You want to scale, but you're tired of giving up on your personal life. And if this is you, you'll be obsessed. So you get access to everything. There's nothing held back anything I've ever created. The latest version of all of it, all of our trainings, you get access to all of it, all of our foundational tools. Twice a week you will be coached live by Stacey Peterson. She tripled her business, she exited production, she did 222 transactions with one administrator. She sold that business for a seven figure valuation.
Right?
That's you get access to for life coaching. I do quarterly business planning four times a year. Twice a year we do a two day digital summit that you'll get access to every week. I do sales and production mastermind. And you'll get access to our online community. You get access to every tool and system, all of our drivers, all of our accelerators, all of our legion levers, all of our lead conversion systems, our buyer consultation system, our listing consultation system, all editable swipeable documents, all of our transaction coordination, client servicing, all of our trello boards. That's where we run everything. And then everything you need in terms of scaling, which is planning, growing your team and become the CFO of your business. You get all of it. And the whole point here is to learn from my mistakes. I've suffered the pain, right? I've done all the transactions. I've helped others do it. You know, you don't have to go into this thing alone. And I don't brag about my financial success, but I want you to know that I have figured some things out. And maybe I'm just a couple steps ahead of you. It only means that I've made more mistakes than you and I want you to not have to suffer from those mistakes. And really the mission is clear. So there's only two ways you can. You can align with us. If you know you're in, go for the annual plan. You'll save almost $1,000. You'll go month to month after that. If you're like not really sure this Lars guy is, is what he appears to be. I'm going to go for the month to month. There's no long current term commitment. Cancel any time with 30 days notice. And I would say that there's nothing like this out there. This is for a very particular type of agent or team leader that wants to grow and scale and do it in a way where the business has a more like you're making more money working less hours but the business takes on a life of its own at some point. So 100% results guarantee. 100%. You do the work, you will get the results. 0% money back guarantee. If you're not sure if you want to be all in, don't go for the annual plan. Just go for the month to month. If you show up, you show up on our business live business coaching. You show up for the weekly sales and production mastermind. You work on your business in those time blocks. You, you come to the quarterly business planning workshops. You come to the digital summits. You will get the results. You will succeed in this plan. So I've got bonuses. You'll get access to every past intensive workshop. All of our digital summits, every one of our weekly specialist trainings and production masterminds that we've ever done. And also a team toolbox. If you ever bring an agent onto your team we have a full training platform for them as well with lead conversion and role plays and whatnot. So this was the quote that I obsessed over in my, my heavy growth years early on in this journey. Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe it can achieve. Napoleon Hill. So good. So here's the thing. The challenge become our next case study. Go to getbusinessfoundations.com go there right now if you want to become our next case study. The motivation is helping you achieve this success, right? I've already, I heard this said at a conference recently that there are two mountains in life. The first mountain is achieving success, financial success, building a great business, you know, getting all the stuff right. The second mountain is helping others achieve at a, at a high level. That is the mountain I'm a hundred percent focused on at this point and I want you to join me. So get, go over to getbusinessfoundations.com I will see you over there. I'll see in the community. I'll see you in the live production masterminds and on the live business coaching. Much love, much respect. We're not gonna have time to check out the toolbox, but much love or much respect, and we'll talk to you guys soon be.










