Are You Dedicating Too Much Time to Your Real Estate Business?
2 Feb 2021 · 7 min
Lars Hedenborg argues real estate agents often work 70-80 hour weeks without the payoff. His client Dave Hook cut his hours to 30-35 weekly while tripling transactions to 250 by building systems instead of doing everything himself. The shift from technician to entrepreneur changes the math entirely.
Questions this episode answers
realestatebusinessgrowth.com
Just under about 100 transactions.
About 70 to 80 hours per week.
About 250 transactions last year.
About 30 to 35 hours per week.
Are you feeling stuck in your real estate business? You know, are you working way too many hours? You're stressed out all the time, and at the end of the year you're wondering, like, where is the money? Like, you're not moving yourself forward financially, right? You're not achieving your financial goals. You know, the question is, is it possible to sell hundreds of homes per year, working a regular work week so that you can have the balance between achieving things in your life that really matter, the things outside of real estate and still achieve at a high level financially and in your business and scale a business that gives you more time, more money, more freedom, more impact in your family and in your community. Make sure you stick around to the end of this video. I want to give you access to a report I put together that details the six stages of business growth. And if you like the video, make sure you give me the thumbs up. Subscribe to the channel and you if make sure you turn notifications on so you're the first to know about a new video when it hits and make sure you leave comments as well. One of the first books I read when I got into real estate was E. Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. In the book, Michael Gerber challenges the readers to think about their business a little differently. And so the E. Myth question, as I remember it, it might not be exact. It's how would you have to think about your business differently if you were to replicate it 10,000 times and just let that sink in for a second. As a real estate agent, no matter where you are in your journey, how would you have to think about your business differently if you were to open up 10,000 of them across the country or across the world? That question, I never forgot that question that hit me so hard and it was so impactful and it changed everything in my real estate business and the way that I looked at my real estate business. And so a member of ours that I've been working with for over five years now, I remember when I first met Dave Hook in central Pennsylvania. He, I think Jenny was pregnant with their first child. They now have three children. I think they're all under five years old. And at the time he was working 70 to 80 hours a week. He was doing just under about 100 transactions or so. He had an administrative assistant, I think one buyer showing agent at the time. And he was losing his mind. It wasn't worth it. The trade was not worth it. Where he wanted to be a great dad. And this was sort of coming, you know, Jenny was pregnant so he was going to be a dad, and he wasn't positioned to have the margin and the time to be able to do so. And so when I think about e myth, he was living the E myth. E myth is the entrepreneurial myth. It's this thought that, like, hey, we're a real estate agent, so we're in business for ourself and now we have all this freedom and we're entrepreneurs. It's a myth because you're a slave to your business. That's like 99% of real estate agents. It's an entrepreneurial myth. And so in the book, he challenges us to give more time to the personalities that allow for growth and freedom in our business. So the three personalities inside every entrepreneur. Number one, it's the technician. It's the person doing the work. Like you're constantly doing it, doing it, doing it. This is most real estate agent. Then there's the manager. This is the person that builds systems and has people run those systems. Then number three, there's the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur thinks about the vision of the business. Where are we headed? They view business as a return on investment. So if I put in this amount of effort or if I invest this amount of dollars or I bring these people to run these systems, what could it look like? How do we compete in the market?
Right.
So the entrepreneur is thinking sort of bigger picture systems and how you move things around the managers in the day to day building systems, having people run the systems. The technician is doing the work. They're showing homes, they're entering listings into mls. They're kind of in the grind of real estate. So as you look at where you are in your business, where are you spending most of your time? Are you spending any time building systems? Are you spending any time thinking about the future, planning and casting vision?
Right.
Or you just buried in the technical work of the business in the technician. So fast forward just a few years, Dave was able to build his business. Last year he did about 250 transactions. He works about 30 to 35 hours a week in this business. I'm actually working with Dave right now to go down to two days a week in this business. So he has a 2.2 to $2.4 million real estate business that's set up on the right economic model. He's been out of production for a few years now. And it's systems based. So everything in his business is systems based. He is like the systems master as far as I'm concerned. He's building one system at a time. But his mindset around systems is that, hey, if I build this system the right way, the growth or the leverage, he's either going to grow his business or he's going to buy time back or he's going to make things easier for those that are in his world.
Right?
So now he's able to coach his team and make sure the systems are running versus, you know, grinding out transactions and doing the technical work. So about, I'd say about 50 to 60% of his time is spent in that business as the entrepreneur thinking big, big picture. Maybe 20 to 30% is as the manager helping his team members with systems and maybe holding them accountable to those systems. And very little, I don't even know what percentage is left, but 10% or so in the actual technical work of the business. Very rarely is he brought into the technical work of the business. And so think yourself the mindset shift. Question is, how would you think about your business differently if you're to replicate it 10,000 times, you couldn't go on 10,000 consultations at the same time, right? So your sales systems have to be built out. Maybe there's a virtual process that can get the same conversion rate. We've worked on that and it's worked out really well. We get the same conversion without having a salesperson present our buyer services or our seller services.
Right.
So how could you run rethink your sales process? Same thing with marketing. We have lead gen levers in our business that produce at least 50 transactions per lead gen lever. And we're not being, we're not buying, you know, forced buyer registrations from Zillow or we're not doing pay per click. We've cut out all that stuff, right? Our social proof is the engine in our business. That's our most dominant lead gen lever. So what are you doing in your business to have the success that you want and scale without scaling your hours and losing your mind. If you want to know the step by step, the stage by stage process, the mindsets, the questions, the tools, how the team looks for all six stages of business growth, go to realestate business growth.com that's realestatebusinessgrowth.com or you can click on the link here in the description for this video. If you like the video, give me the thumbs up. Subscribe to the channel and make sure you turn notifications on and also leave comments so we can go back and forth on the content here. We'll see the next video.
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