5 Things No One Tells You About Building A Real Estate Business

What are the five things you need to know if you're going to scale a leveraged real estate business? When I got into the industry, I knew that I couldn't sustain traditional methods. Traditional methods have me working instantly seven days a week. You know, I wasn't present at home. Even if I was physically there, I wasn't mentally there. You know, I was newly married in October 2006. We had Anders in November 2007. I got into real estate in March 2007, the end of the financial world as we know. It was sort of September, October 2008 with the great Recession and I knew I had to take a different approach. So the video I want to shoot today is really the five things. If I could go back in time, the five pieces of advice I would give myself to make the journey easier. You know, it took me about six years to go from, you know, my first full year in the business was 2008. So I got my first 10 months of 2007 under me. The financial crisis hit in 2008 and we sold 44 homes. I say we. It was me and a part time assistant. I went to over 400 transactions at the end of the Great recession, working just one day a week, making close to $2,500 an hour that year. Right. So how do I go from like not knowing anything about business or marketing or selling to a fully leveraged, profitable business owner position with where I had a lot of freedom and a lot of impact in my family and in the community. Make sure you stick around to the end of the video. I want to give you access to a free training, the five steps to go to a million and beyond in your real estate business. If you like this video, make sure you give me the thumbs up and subscribe to the channel and turn notifications on so you're the first to know when a new video drops. And also leave me comments. Foreign so my journey in real estate and I know you hear me talk about it a lot, but today I want to talk about it in a way where I could go back and give the. The junior Lars the just getting into the business Lars, some advice on the things I might do differently or the things that I was doing that were good, but maybe I was just sort of not really secure in what I was doing. Number one, I would say to give myself more confidence as a marketer. You know, marketing is not buying leads from Zillow in our industry. It's like, hey, who can I pay some money to get in between me and a buyer or in between me and a seller. And I call that marketing. I call that lead generation. Buying leads from Zillow or realtor.com or pay per click force registrations, that is not marketing. So I would give myself confidence to go down the path of, you know, this story, brand path, of doing a great job for your clients, showing them the path to success, being, you know, the guide for them, being the hero in our industry. It is all me, marketing. Like, look how awesome I am. Look at a picture of me and my dog. Look at, you know, this thing or that thing and that brand or image. Advertising does not lead to success. And so I would give myself more confidence as a marketer, but a marketer of the stories of our clients. Number two, I would say to hire people based on patterns and not potential. I was actually in church listening to a sermon where my pastor talked about relationship advice. And he was saying, he was talking to the ladies out there and he said, ladies, stop looking for potential in these men. Look for their patterns, right? This guy has debt, he's addicted to porn, he kicks his dog. He doesn't take care of his physical body. He watches eight football games a week. His patterns are very clear. Yet you want to marry this guy, you change him into this thing that he's not, right? And so in hiring, the same thing, like someone shows up into your world and they want to be part of, you know, your journey, your mission, your vision for your business. They don't have any pattern of success. And all of a sudden they're going to, you know, kind of unlock all this potential, like somehow magically, you're going to be the catalyst to them unlocking all this potential and now being successful. It never happens that way, right? It doesn't matter what they've done before they meet you, they can still have patterns of success. They can be right out of college and they can have a pattern of working three jobs while they got a dual degree. They were the captain of a sports team. There's leadership potential there. There's. They're going to be willing to, you know, work a full day or did it take them seven years like Tommy boy, right? You know, they're called doctors. Lots of people go to school for seven years. They're called doctors, right? It's not, you know, you need to see the pattern of a person and not their potential. Number three. The third thing I would tell myself, you know, if I can go back in time, is to not look at the growth quote unquote of others and compare myself to others. This is really easy to do. You know, I know guys that have gone from 100 transactions when I got into the business to over 1500 transactions in the same time frame where I only ever went from like 44 to 400. But when I dig into those businesses, because now I get the vantage point of having looked at the financials of those businesses, find out that they're spending $150,000 a month on mass media, they're selling a couple hundred homes themselves personally, they're working seven days a week, they're working every evening and every weekend. Their relationships, if they're not divorced, they're strained or they're single, right? Their physical bodies, they're not tending to their physical bodies, they're not, you know, taking care of their emotional well being or their faith walk. Right? So how do you measure success? Be clear on how you measure success and don't compare yourself to others. So once I got into real estate B school and I started, you know, evaluating these businesses because now we're in the business of helping people, you know, sell more homes in less time and make more money, have more impact and more freedom, you know, that's kind of the thing we do. Now I'm really able to check myself on those things and some of these businesses, you couldn't pay me enough money to sell 200 homes myself to manage, you know, 30 agents or 40 agents selling another thousand homes to have in Mass Media alone $150,000 a month of spend. Right? And just, and not even a 7 figure profit to show for it. A 7 million top line business with no profit to show for it and whole bunch of personal production on your own. Right? You couldn't pay me a million dollars to take that business. I wouldn't do it. So stop comparing yourself to others. And this is me telling myself that, but also me telling you that to stop comparing yourself to others. The fourth thing I would go back and tell myself is to chase even less squirrels than I did over time. And so a squirrel is something that comes into your business that wasn't planned. It's usually a, a piece of technology or a lead gen platform or you know, someone who's going to call, you know, sellers on your behalf and book a ton of appointments. I'll give you one specific example. It's a guy that called me up. Our plan was set for the year we were doing great. Somebody calls me up and says, hey, listen, give me $12,000 upfront. Actually it's 25, but for you I'll discount it. To $12,000. And then I'm going to take a monthly fee also, I'm going to take a referral fee on closings and I'm just going to call expired and fizzibos for you and I'm going to be able to set 30 appointments a month. I'm like, this is awesome. I've got the cash. Let me just hand it over. And it's going to be great. Man, I'd be surprised if we sold one home from all of that. I think we were like three months in and we had closed one property and they were like, it's just give it time. It's going to take 12 months for this thing to work. And I'm like, that's not what you said when you sold us. You know, so that was an example of a squirrel changing lead gen platforms. You know, I've been with a single lead gen platform for 12 years in a row, yet I have tested out a whole bunch of distractions, right? These squirrels that come in to claim to be better and faster and cheaper and you know, they're going to convert all the leads for you and people are just going to run into your business and be willing to transact, you know, just because they register on a website, like, that's a distraction. That's a squirrel. That's a shiny object that, you know, lost a little bit of momentum there. And so I've been really good at not chasing squirrels yet. I would go back and say, hey, listen, these are the 12 things that are going to happen over the next 12 years. And these are the squirrels that you would chase a little bit that I would have you not chase. If the more wise Lars could tell, the more, you know, naive Lars back in the day, the fifth thing I would tell myself is to learn how to lead better, you know, before you're put in a situation where you could hurt your team members. And I've had some not so great stories about, you know, not leading people well and thinking that, you know, my style of pushing or expecting people to keep up with my pace or to work the kind of hours that I was willing to work, you know, led to some damaged relationships and honestly burned people out around me as I was building my real estate team. You know, we get so focused on growth and we, we have such a sort of myopic view of like, this is the only thing that matters. It's getting to. Probably at the time it was getting to 300 transactions. And so when we went from, you know, 58 to 118 to 178, to 248, to 312. That four year journey, you know, I was just so focused to getting to 300 transactions that I was honestly not loving people. I was more churning the business. I was more focused on the outcome of the business than loving and leading my people. Well, and those are some tough lessons and some tough conversations with folks I had, you know, really had some deep relationships with that had to say, hey listen, you know, when did the money become more important than me or the team? And that, I mean, that hurts in your soul to hear, hear that. So for the last probably that was probably my first five or six years in the business. And since then I've just been learning how to love better, to lead better, you know, to really serve my team members. You know, there shouldn't be a thing called servant leadership. It's really the only type of leadership. And so I'd go back and just without shaming this, you know, sort of learning fast, you know, Lars, back then and failing and being willing to fail fast and pick myself up without discouraging that part of it, I would just say, you know, love your people. Don't get frustrated with them. Don't, you know, worry about the process, not the person. That's one of our company tenants now for real estate B school. And we really lean into it. Like if something isn't working in the business, it's not because we don't have awesome team members, right? It's because there's a broken process. And I wish I would have known that back in the day. So that's probably what I would say. You know, if the business is not doing well, there's a process issue and not a person issue. There may be a person issue, but you've got to make sure the process is sound before you attack the person. And I didn't do a really good job in that. So those are my five things that I would go back and tell my earlier self. It's this. The one thing that I did well consistently that I wouldn't change is that I knew I was going to build a business that had leverage. I knew I was going to build a business that served our clients without me having to do everything along the way. And it's this mindset of business ownership. If you want to go from where you are right now to building a million dollar plus real estate team where you're not grinding out transactions, you have flexibility in your schedule, go to realestatebusinessfreedom.com it's our five step training where I detail everything you need to do to build leverage in your business. To look at your marketing differently, your people differently, your time differently, everything about your business differently. So you can scale to seven figures and beyond without losing your life in any economic climate. So go to realestate business freedom.com if you like the video, give me the thumbs up. Make sure you subscribe to the channel, leave us comments and make sure you turn notifications on. We'll see in the next video.