5 Tips for Scaling Your Real Estate Business in 2021

So what are the most impactful moves you can make to scale your real estate business in any economic climate, no matter where you are in your journey? You know, just because other agents can't figure out how to scale their business, it doesn't mean that you can't figure out how to do it. When I got into real estate, it was 2007. I didn't have any background in business building or marketing or sales whatsoever.

Right.

I left a cozy corporate job and, and unbeknownst to me, I was 12 months away from the biggest financial disaster crisis that our country has ever seen. The Great Recession started in about 2008 and in our market it went all the way to 2012. I sold 44 homes that year.

Right.

My first full year in real estate. I just put my head down and got some stuff done in 2012 when, when the Great Recession lifted, we sold 248 homes. I sold one of those homes. So I fully built out a business. I6X'ed the amount of homes I sold as a business, but I wasn't willing to sell all of them myself. So it's this concept of leverage that I thought through. So as you think through the moves that you can make, stick around to the end of the video. I want to give you access to a training I just put together. It's the five steps you need to take in specific order to be able to take your business from where you are today to over a million in gci. So stick around for that. If you like these videos, give me the thumbs up and also subscribe to the channel and make sure you turn notifications on and leave me comments. So let's talk about the most impactful moves you can make to scale your real estate business. Number one is to honestly assess where you are in your journey. A lot of times we're not willing to look at the obvious, you know, and take an honest assessment of where we're at. And this is personally as well as professionally. One of the first tools we use in real estate B school is what we call a strategic business assessment where we are going to look at the six areas of your business and this is your ability to attract high quality leads, to convert those leads to consultations and clients. Your ability to service or deliver on the promises you make in sales, you're planning, your tracking and your ability to grow your team.

Right.

So we look at and assess in a very detailed way in a scale of one to five, three questions for each of those six drivers so we know exactly what we're dealing with and your ability to be honest with yourself about where you are is critical. And it's probably the most important move you can make to be able to go from where you are to where you want to go. Second, same thing with your personal life, right? There's these areas of our personal life, our physical body, our spiritual life, you know, our finances, our relationships with our spouse or our children, our emotional well being, you know, our fitness level, taking care of our bodies, right? There's all these things that we want to say, one day I'll get to, you know, that stuff. One day I'll spend more time with my spouse, or I'll invest in my children, or I'll put God first, right? We want to say one day I'll get there, but that day may never come and you'll be forced to sort of live life with regrets. And that's not what we want for our members. So that's. Number one, is to just honestly assess where you're at. Number two, in terms of a big move you could make is to shift your mindset, right? Shift your mindset to think that you have to do all the things in your business. If you're struggling to sell two homes a month, three homes a month, or you're working 80 hours a week to sell 20 homes a month. We have members selling 50 homes per month, working 30 hours a week, 600 plus units. Now I've got one guy that I helped for three years. He's working five hours a week in his business, Kirby Skurat out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. He'll sell 650 homes this year, working five hours a week in that business. And so when you think about where you're at in your journey, is it simply a mindset issue? You know, how can I go from grinding it out as a real estate agent?

Right?

Doing the jobs of a real estate agent, the 12 jobs, most of which are administrative in nature, how can I go from that to, you know, true business owner, where I am the rainmaker, I'm the person that is coaching and leading and holding people accountable and pushing everyone to a higher standard, you know, so. And that's all mindset. It doesn't have to happen overnight. But right now, the most impactful move you can make is to think about where your mindset is in terms of growth. Do you think it's only possible to be just a real estate agent? There's nothing wrong with being a real estate agent, right? But if you want to scale your income, you want to, you know, scale your Freedom. You want to scale your impact in the world. It's unlike you're going to do it, you know, stressed out all the time, working seven days a week, showing homes on evenings and weekends. You're not gonna be able to show up in any other area of your life that matters if you're constantly doing that. So that's the second thing. The third big move you could make this year is to honestly look at where you're spending your money.

Right?

We've had a pretty good run in terms of our housing market, of our economy. Even with some of the challenges we've had here with recent world events, we're still doing pretty well when it comes to, you know, what I think is going to be a challenging time in the future. You've been kicking the can as a country on our economy and our debt, and I'm not smart enough to even talk through all of that. I just know there's probably going to come a time where things are going to slow down. And your ability to know where you're spending your money and to make sure it's returning as much as possible is critical. You know, most agents don't track anything in their business, and that's a recipe for disaster. So as you think about a move you can make is to get smart on where you're spending your money and to hold those dollars accountable. The fourth thing, big move you can make is to look at where you're spending your time. We call these time studies and decide if you're spending your time on things that are not getting you paid what you want to get paid. Come up with a plan to either build a system, use a piece of technology, or hire someone to do those things for you. You're in real estate, there's plenty of licensed agents around that would do administrative tasks all day long.

Right.

And a lot of times we get caught up in, well, I can't afford to hire somebody. I want to make more money, but I can't afford to hire somebody. Let's take the example of an agent working 60 hours a week. And let's take a busy agent selling three homes per month, 36 homes per year, let's say 400,000, top line that 60 hours a week. I know if they don't have an administrator, a hundred percent guaranteed that, conservatively two thirds. But let's just say a half, a half of the 60 hours that Agent is doing work that they could hire, train somebody else, create a system, train somebody else, and offload 30 hours a week, which is 1500 hours a year. Let's say those 1500 hours are going to cost you $20 an hour, that's $30,000. You now have 30 hours a week to work on stuff that gets you paid 5 to 10 to 20 times more than those $20 an hour tasks. And so when you think about leverage, you know, getting off of your plate. And we have a process that we every, every quarter, every 90 days, we do a delegate to elevate. We look at where we're spending our time and we basically put it on a matrix with high passion, high pay, low passion, high pay, high passion, low pay and low passion, low pay. And we're able to just honestly look at where we're spending our time, put them into each of those four quadrants. And the high passion, high pay things, you keep those all day long. The low passion, high pay things, for now, you are going to keep them. Anything that is low pay, I don't care if it's high passion or not. Not when it comes to your business, right? If you are passionate about crocheting and it doesn't make you any money, but it calms your nerves and it's a great sort of stress reliever, you can do that in your business working on a website or SEO where it's just high passion, but there's no proven outcome. And you can hire someone to do it for 50 bucks an hour and you want to make 250 bucks an hour or you can get a VA to do some of those things.

Right?

That's how we have to honestly look at our time. You know, this journey of, you know, making the big moves that actually matter. Do not confuse this with being distracted by shiny objects and chasing squirrels. That is sort of in our industry, the things that kill momentum the most is, you know, just getting distracted. So the last thing I think I'm on point number five is to be able to use a planning system. The biggest move you can make to set yourself up for success is to have a planning system whereby you look out into the future. Like you just look out in your business and your personal life. Three years out, you break that three year vision down into a one year plan. Right? Specifically, what are we going to do this year, personally and professionally? You break that one year plan down into 90 days at a time, down into monthly goals, down to weekly commitments. Our business freedom planning system allows our members to do that for us. If you don't have access to that system, you've got to figure out a way to be able to do that in your own business. And so it's not the easiest journey. I'd argue that the roadmap is proven at this point and it's a repeatable process. And so when I think about someone who's gone down this path, it's a good friend of mine, John Mikish, who, who actually lives in Bozeman, Montana. When I met him, he was grinding it out with his wife, Jen. They live just 30 miles north of my market, which is Charlotte, North Carolina. They now live like thousands of miles away from their core market, running their business like a true business. And they made all of these moves so they wanted to live their life, you know, to be free from their location, to have freedom of time and money. And they made every one of these moves to, to be able to triple their business from about 20 million to almost 80 million, quadruple the size of their business and to run it on the right economic model with the tracking, with the planning right, and make all the right moves in their business so that they can live a life of their choosing and not to have their clients dictate when they work and when they don't work. So I mentioned the free training I put together. It's 45 minutes of my best stuff. It's five steps where you can go from where you are now to over over a million dollars in GCI running a leveraged business. And even if you're over a million dollars, there are going to be things that you're going to learn where you may not have the freedom that you desire, even if you're over a million dollars in your real estate business. So go to realestatebusinessfreedom.com that's realestatebusinessfreedom.com if you like the video, give me the thumbs up. Make sure you subscribe to the channel and turn on your notifications and leave me comments as well. We'll see you in the next video.

Sam.