A real estate agent breaks down return on time versus return on investment, introducing the Business Freedom Index to help you measure which activities actually pay off. The metric shows whether you're spending hours on follow-up and pipeline work that moves the needle, or burning time on activities that don't.
You know, if you're not where you want to be in terms of your financial snapshot, your net worth or your residual income, or you're working out of bounds, meaning you're working too many hours right now in your real estate business, or maybe the money's good, but you're working too many hours and you're stressed out and there's collateral damage for that stress, right? When I'm stressed, I tend to overeat, I tend to numb out in front of the tv. We have all these ways that we sedate ourselves when we're not working a normal amount of hours. And traditional success in our industry most often, I mean like 99% of the time, if you're crushing it in real estate, you're probably not crushing it in terms of the hours you work, the stress you endure, and the areas of your life that matter more like taking care of our physical bodies or being present with your spouse or your children, or being close to your creator or having hobbies and enjoying the ride. Right. We forget these things and many of us don't have a lot of money to show for our efforts. So let's unpack this. Return on time versus return on investment. So you can either. The cool thing about real estate in one sense, and Curtis covered this, you can put time into your business and as a result of putting time in, you can get commission checks out. So you, you could, for a very small investment, you can use a tool like Red X and you can basically have conversations with, you know, expired or fizbos and do a good job of keeping a follow up system and you know, text and video drips and like all the follow up sequences to get them to move through the pipeline. Right? Real estate is a pipeline. Only 10% of the folks that you talk to are probably ready to transact in the next three months. And so you could do that, right? That's return on time or you can buy your way. And he talked about like, you know, a lot of the bigger agents are spending a lot of money on mass media or billboards or you know, and these newer agents, look at these agents that are, you know, 10 years in the business and, and they're, they're thinking that they can just buy their way to success and that conversation and that the whole return on time versus return on investment brings up a bigger conversation. And it's something that we gave a name to at Real Estate B school. This is probably three, four years ago and it's the business Freedom Index. And I want to spend the rest of my time explaining what that metric is and how to use it to help you decide where you need to focus your time so you can have a maximum return on your time.
