Advice I Give To My Real Estate Coaching Clients
18 Feb 2021 · 10 min
Lars Hedenborg walks through how to scale a real estate business using his six-stage Business Growth Navigator. He shows how Tim Pierce grew from 30-40 deals to 150 deals and $50M in volume by shifting to an owner mindset, accepting he couldn't do everything himself, and building the company as interconnected systems.
Probably the question I get asked most as a real estate business coach is what's the best advice you would give someone looking to scale their real estate business? So real estate is absolutely a growth minded profession where we're all looking to do more transactions. The challenge is that there really aren't enough transactions to go around. When you think about real estate, there's too many agents, not enough transactions. So what advice would I give someone looking to take their unfair share of their market? Before I get into that, make sure you stick around to the end of the video. I'm going to take you through the six stages of real estate business growth. It's called our real estate Business Growth Navigator. It's a report I put together to help you really understand what it takes to go from agents or struggling agent to scaling your business and becoming a leader and manager, to eventually exiting and becoming an owner in your business. If you liked the video, make sure you give me the thumbs up. Make sure you subscribe to the channel and turn your notifications on and also leave me comments. And when I think about this, you know, what advice would I give someone looking to scale their business? I immediately think of Tim Pierce. It's a client that I worked with and I still work with where he was actually in partnership with another agent. And it was a very dysfunctional partnership. Their business was set up not the right way. They're in a market, Hilton Head, South Carolina, where it's a resort market where there are a lot of agents that think, you know, the brokerage that you align with is the thing that's going to help you be successful. And I am, for the most part, you know, the success of a real estate team real estate business, you can succeed in any brokerage. You know, different brokerages have different tools and systems that they give to their agents. For the most part, the what you put into your business, the coaching you receive, the advice that you actually employ in your business, and the tools, systems and strategies that you follow, those are the things that are going to help you be successful. And so I was able to coach Tim leaving, you know, this partnership, which it was not a good situation. They were doing a lot of transactions, I think several hundred transactions. And it was this Jerry Maguire moment where he was, you know, leaving this group of people and willing to leave everyone behind. And there was the thought that, you know, if you remember the movie Jerry Maguire with Tom Cruise, he did get like an administrator to come along and help him build this exciting new company. Right. Tim wasn't even able or willing to do that. And in hindsight, it was best that this administrator didn't make the move with Tim. So it was Tim alone, leaving this business and starting from scratch in another brokerage that didn't have a good name in his market. The first thing that I had to coach him through, and there's three things I want to go through. Number one is mindset. It's this mindset that your brokerage doesn't make you. Your partnership with this other agent, you know, surrounding yourself with agents that are on the wrong splits that are, you know, there's not enough money left over for this thing. It's just set up completely wrong. Yet there's comfort in it. And just asking Tim the question, where do you see you? Where do you see yourself three years from now? Not where do you see this business that you're currently in three years from now? When I asked him that question, it was like really clear that the situation he was in right now was not where he wanted to be. And as much pain and discomfort as it was going to take to leave this partnership, to leave the most established brokerage in their market, it was the mindset that was the number one thing. I had to coach him on many, many Voxer interactions. Voxer is an app for your phone where it's a walkie talkie, where basically you can have a conversation with somebody over time. And many times I had to give him the confidence where he, he lacked the confidence that he was doing the right thing. And so this was about three years ago he made the move and his production, he was doing about 30 to 40 transactions on his own. So he was able to take his transactions and he wanted to start and build a team. He did, I think about 50 sides that first year, 95 sides his second year. And this year he'll do 150 transactions for over $50 million worth of real estate. That's number one, is this mindset that he could absolutely do it, that there is a roadmap to do it. You just have to follow the step by step path to go from, you know, busy real estate agent, which was where he stepped into, to now scaling a team to $50 million, about $1.5 million of GCI. So that's number one is the mindset. Number two, it's this concept that you're not that important. You know, I went to a sermon here locally, my church, where the title of the sermon was you're not that important. I actually. This is going to sound horrible. I don't actually remember what the Sermon was about. But I remember when I heard him say the title and it hit me like a ton of bricks. In real estate, we like to think that we're the most important thing in our business that nobody can work with, you know, with somebody on our team other than us. Tim is living proof and all of other clients that are scaling that your clients want your standard of care and a process to get them a very specific result rather than working with you. And so now Tim has the right economic model in place where in his prior partnership he did not. He can actually give away business to his team members where they're making amazing, you know, money for the trade. Right. They don't own the relationship, but they're servicing the client. And he can still make a good margin on every client, even if he's not the one showing homes on the evenings or showing homes on the weekends. He's able to focus on the bits of the business that he's really good at that are high leverage that he can do in a regular work week. So that was number two is this concept that you're not that important. The third thing that we focused on in terms of making the shift from agent to owner is the fact that a business is a system of systems. He had a good example of how not to run a business where it's a loose collection of agents. There's no real cadence or culture. There's no achievement system or agent onboarding system or recruiting system or, you know, tracking system or database marketing system. There's. There's no sort of systems that make up the business. A business is only a business if it has systems that are made, you know, that are running in the business and people are running those systems. So now he has a couple administrators, a handful of agents. He's able to do his listing side of the business with his sphere work a regular work week because he's committed to this concept of a system of systems makes up a business. And so mindset, you're not that important. And a business is a systems, a system of systems. Those were the three things that we worked on to go from this leap of faith away from this quote unquote business with this other business partner to to becoming a really busy instantly he was working 60 to 70 hours a week. So he had to suffer a little bit of near term pain till we hired an administrator, till we hired a showing agent and then a couple buyer agents. And now we're scaling the business where next year we'll do over 200 transactions in a market where There aren't a lot of real estate teams. There aren't a lot of folks that are doing what Tim is doing in his local market. So again, check your yourself in terms of your mindset. You know, are you of the mindset that building a business is not. It's not possible for me. Right? Maybe you've never built a business before. Maybe you never built marketing systems or lead gen levers as we call them. You know, maybe you've never hired a salesperson or managed a salesperson before. Right? Where are your insecurities when it comes to the mindsets around making that shift from agent to owner? And, and then are you that important? Right. Is your ego that big where you can't envision a business that doesn't run with you in the middle of it? Check yourself on that. You know, I've sold thousands of homes in my career and only about 200 was I the agent on. I just made a commitment to running a business on the right model with a systems based sort of approach where agents can plug into the systems and they can achieve results in terms of their take home dollars, working less hours and experiencing less stress. The cool thing about doing this the right way, if you let go of your ego and you get your mindset right and you implement the right systems, is that you can bring agents into your world and they can achieve at a higher level than they could on their own. And so that is the true blessing of building this thing out the right way is that agents that you bring into your world can achieve at a very high level. So if you're the point in your journey where you just want this step by step, you want to know, hey, what's the first step, second step, third step, fourth step, fifth step? Join me in our training. It's the five steps to a million GCI and beyond. Just go to realestatebusinessfreedom.com that's realestatebusinessfreedom.com if you liked the video, give me the thumbs up. Make sure you subscribe to the channel and turn on your notifications and leave me comments. This journey exciting? It's uncomfortable. You will feel the discomfort of growing a business and growing outside of your comfort zone. And if you do it the right way, it's predictable and you can build it out where it's sustainable, where you can make more money in less time and have less stress. We'll see you in the next video.
More from Lars
The Listing Marketing Maximizer - How to Turn Your Next Listing Into 5 Commission Checks
The Listing Marketing Maximizer - How to Turn Your Next Listing Into 5 Commission Checks