6 Stages Of Growth For Real Estate Businesses

Are you struggling to sort of take your business to the next level? A generic statement. What I mean by it, though, is that there are six distinct stages of growth that you'll experience as you go from struggling real estate agent making less than 100,000 in gross commission income to, you know, completely free business owner built on the right economic model and, you know, a life filled with joy and passion where you're able to serve your team, you know, making more than 3 million in gross commission income and a profitable model. Right. What does that journey look like? What do each of those stages look like? That is what I'm going to go through on today's video. And before I do it, I want you to stick around to the end. I'm going to give you a free report that spends 16 pages detailing every strategic question you need to ask yourself at each stage, every tool and system you'll need to employ, what your team structure looks like, the amount of money you're making, the hours you're putting in. You know, it's a comprehensive guide for each of these different stages. So stay tuned for that. If you like the video, give me the thumbs up. Also, subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications and leave comments below. Okay. I'm going to use my business growth journey as the example here. Not so much because I like to talk about myself. I just know my journey really well. I know where I failed, I know where I did really well. And I can help you along these different stages. You know, I started in real estate back in 2007. Didn't have business building experience. I hadn't sold anything before. I'd never figured out marketing for anything before. Right. I had just an awareness that my corporate job was not going to lead me to where I wanted to be financially. So I embarked on this journey to become a real estate agent. Unbeknownst to me, I was getting into a world that would suck up every waking hour. I got married just a few months before I got into real estate. So I made a commitment to my wife, Julie, to show up, you know, in good times and bad times, as a husband first, right? And then we have our first child in November 2007, just about eight, nine months after I got into real estate. Now I made a commitment to this bride of mine, Julie, and our firstborn child, Anders. I'm going to be a great dad, right? I didn't have a great dad growing up, and here I am. And he wasn't a good husband and wasn't a good model for any of that I. But I've made these two commitments and now I'm in real estate, not really realizing that I was instantly going to be working seven days a week, stressed out of my mind. So I began the six stage journey out of necessity because being a good dad and a good husband was more important to me than selling a ton of homes. And so for me, the first stage, even the second stage, those happened pretty quick. I was able to scale my top line, yet I scaled my hours, unfortunately. So those two stages are the start and the ramp stage. So start and ramp takes you through 500,000 GCI where it's pretty much I do it. It all rested on me. I was grinding seven days a week. I was generating leads, I was calling those leads, I was doing lead nurture systems, I was setting appointments, I was doing all the appointments, I was doing all the showings of homes, I was doing all the listings, you know, the client care stuff. I was doing everything that you need to do to get someone from a lead generated to a happy client. And there were many times where there wasn't a happy client at the end because I wasn't good at all those things. On two occasions, hopefully this doesn't have you feel really horrible about following me and me being your mentor on these videos. Two separate occasions, I came into the attorney's office for a closing and I had no idea who my client was. I was running and gunning, not really paying attention to the, the severity of these relationships and these transactions. Like a chicken with my head cut off, where I was blinded to the fact that there was, you know, somebody's financial. The biggest financial transaction that most people do in their life is their home. And I was so disconnected because I was so spread thin. So I didn't know what was coming because I was failing into each of these stages, you know, so when you get through start and you get through ramp, you get into build. That's the third stage of this ascension where if you're going to keep building, you have to make sure that you have systems locked down. You have to make sure that you have administrative support. You have to have an eye toward, hey, I can't do all this production. I can't show homes on the evenings and the weekend. So I've got to get leverage, right? We go from build into lead, right? Lead is where we are leading people. We're managing, the systems are built. We're bringing people in our world a million to a million five. We have an eye toward exiting production if we want to, but we're mostly building out the leadership and management skills so that we can hold our expenses and our team accountable and we can build a profitable and sustainable real estate business from there. Those two stages. So let me, let me go back. I do it is, you know, where it start and ramp build and lead is we do it. So I'm gonna bring an administrator on, I'm gonna bring some agents on, we're gonna build systems, we're gonna go shoulder to shoulder. We're gonna show up every day, generate new business, get that business to come into the office or to meet them, you know, somewhere and present our services, get them to sign, provide the thing we promised, get paid, get them to say good things because we did such a great job and repeat the process. That's we do it when we shift into, they do it. That's stage five and stage six of this journey. That's where we could exit production and we can choose to take an owner seat in the business. And if you set everything up properly to get to the point where you have the option to exit production at a million and a half gci, most teams are not set up properly to do this. So we'll have teams come in at 5 million GCI and we've got to unravel a bunch of things because they've set the whole business up incorrectly from a value based commission splits from us spending too much on marketing, their people aren't held accountable. So they're spending 25% of their GCI on people where it should be 12%. Like the whole thing is out of whack. So assuming we've done all the right things to get to the point where we have the option to exit, it's simply tapping a couple people on the shoulder in the business to lead operations, to lead sales, and then making sure we have culturally fit, so culture fit salespeople that can take over your buyer production and your listing production. And typically when you get to that stage, you're only working on listings at that point. And then to make the shift from exiting production to owner, it's mostly mindset. It's this mindset of, hey, could this thing operate without me? Right? Like, what if I had to leave the business for a year and it had to run without me? Could it. Or, you know, could I go down to one day a week? And I made that decision early on in my journey 2013, you know, I made the decision to go down to one day a week and I did that for, you know, every, every week since. And so when you think about your business and those six stages. You know, I worked more hours when it was just I do it versus they do it, you know, and I made $18 an hour when I first got into real estate. And the year we did 400 transactions in 2014, I worked 42 days and made close to $2,500 an hour. Somewhere between 23 and $2,500 an hour in that business that year. And it's because I was willing to do the work, to figure out how to do the thing, build a system around the thing, and then get somebody to run the thing. And that thing could be anything in the business, could be marketing, could be sales. It could be client servicing buyers and sellers, planning and tracking, you know, onboarding new agents, attracting talent to the team. All of those systems can be built and you can empower someone to run at least 80% of the system. So when you think about where you are in your journey, you know, that's why I put together the real estate business growth navigator. So go to realestate business growth.com that's realestate business growth.com. and if you like these videos, give me the thumbs up and subscribe to the channel and turn your notifications on so you're the first to know when a new video hits. Leave comments below. So don't get overwhelmed by thinking you have to go from stage one, you know, to stage six, you know, overnight, you know, we built all the processes, all the systems. And you can start out by grabbing the real estate business growth navigator@realestatebusinessgrowth.com we'll see you in the next video.