Are You Sick & Tired of Selling Homes

What's up there, Business Freedom Podcast listeners, Today's episode. I'm actually going to do a pre. A pre episode to next. The next episode we're going to air is a case study I did with Cody Riddle out of Phoenix, Arizona. She has been with Real Estate B School, I think for about four years. And I'm titling this podcast episode, are youe Sick and Tired of Selling Houses? And so the reason I'm titling it that is because our very best members come to Real Estate B School with actually, they come in two camps. The one camp are folks that just know they want to build a business. They really don't love working with buyers and sellers. They do love the business side of real estate and building a real estate team and learning how to build systems. And you know, they just, they know they want to go that path, but they really don't have a great, a great, you know, roadmap. And so they come into our world and we sort of give them that roadmap. The other camp are folks that remembered like back in the day, they loved real estate and they loved it so much that they did a really great job for their clients. And they got busier and busier and busier and, and as a result of getting busier, they increased transactions and their business became their life. And they went from working 50 hours a week, selling 20 to 25 homes a year, to working 70 plus hours a week, selling 40 to 50 homes a year. So it really was a seven day a week, 10, 12 hours a day type occupation. And that is a typical, traditionally conventionally successful, top producing real estate agent in our industry. And that is, you know, less than probably 1% of our industry will make it to the point where they're doing, you know, really good business. And so are you sick and tired of selling houses? I'm gonna start with my. A little bit of a backdrop of my journey. Then I want to talk about Cody Riddle and what struck me as not odd. It just struck me because I realized that a lot of folks really do love, you know, love the, just the act of helping a buyer and a seller and the thrill, the hunt and going on listing appointments and winning. And you know, they just get to the point where it takes over their life and they're just miserable. And so for me, it happened pretty quick. Like my first nine months, it was back in 2007, April or March, I think. March 5th, I think was actually my last day in my corporate job. And so probably for nine, close to 10 months of that year, I was full on real estate. I sold 27 homes going into 2008. I built a pretty decent pipeline. This is before the market turned or anyone knew that it was turning. And I sold 44 homes with a part time assistant. And that was the year I realized that I can't do this. It has overtaken everything for me. It only took a year and a half in the business to realize that there was no freedom in being a top producing agent. No freedom whatsoever. And I worked for a guy that owned a brokerage. He's a broker owner that was heavy in production and he worked eight days a week, 20 hours a day. It was ridiculous. Super stressed, multiple locations, ton of overhead, just not a life or a business that I wanted. So I really didn't have this great model of something that I wanted to build. I just knew that coming from the corporate world, there was a way to do things where the business, you know, most businesses don't rely on the owner all that much. Small businesses, yeah, of course they do. But I came from a corporate environment where the owners were stockholders and the stockholders as owners didn't come into the business and you know, they didn't, you know, work every day. They didn't do my job, they didn't do our chairman's job. They didn't, you know, they didn't get their hands dirty in the business. So I knew it was possible to build this thing, a real estate team, in such a way where it didn't revolve around the owner. And that was me. And so for me it was out of necessity. I was married in 2006. We had our first child in 2007, a couple miscarriages. In 2010, we had our second child. So in that 2008, 9, 10, 11 timeframe, the market was shifting dramatically, just like everything was hitting the fan. And. And I was a new dad, I was a new husband, and I was just trying to figure things out. So for me, systems and people were the leverage and marketing, three leverage points that I needed to build something that gave me some sustainability, some breathing room. I went from 58 transactions in 2009 to 118 in 2010 to 178 in 2011. And my last closing was January 2012. And that year we did 248 transactions and I did one. So 247 were done by the team. I had two listing agents, four or five buyer agents, two admin, and I was running the. I was, at that time I was sales manager and I was, I guess I Had an operations manager. But the next step for me was to raise up a sales manager and an operations manager. And then I went from five days to three days to do it, two days to one day. So you probably heard me tell that story. That's why I kind of went through it quickly. And the reason why I tell it is I was so clear that I just wanted to own a business. And I loved building a business through systems and people that provided a service that was unlike any other service, that you could get anywhere from any other real estate agent. And that continues to this day to be the thing that we built. And so for me, it was to be a business owner. But what I realized in talking to Cody Riddle again out of Phoenix, Arizona, she came into our world, our world. She was about $250,000 to 300,000 GCI. She had sort of stalled out there. This was after the market had kind of gone down. Her production suffered severely during that time. She didn't have any lead generation systems or marketing systems that could sort of carry increase her production during that time. But she came to us after her business had recovered somewhat and she was doing 250 to 300,000 GCI. But she was burnt out. She's miserable. And I'm going to make you listen to the episode. It's probably our best case study yet. She was sick and tired of selling houses. And normally when someone's sick and tired of selling houses, I just assume that they want to get out of production. They want to build this thing where it's completely leveraged. They want they can go into leading and managing people and even just to owning, having an ownership position in the business or consulting to the business. Build it like a true business where it operates without you. And that's just my baseline assumption. And it's not true. There are so many top producing agents that even have an assistant or maybe a buyer agent or two. They've just fallen out of love with real estate because it got the best of them. It was just unmanageable. There are no systems that are sort of helping the business, you know, run more sustainably. And that was true of Cody. And she got to the point where even at 300,000 GCI, which in her market is probably about 30 transactions, that's generally a six to seven day a week. You always have contracts pending. You are always showing homes because you're working with buyers, you're working with sellers. You know, you're doing everything in the business. She hadn't even hired an administrator yet. And so the punchline is that she now this year she'll do about 1.2 million. She is completely smitten with the business and so she has fallen back in love with the business and just head over heels in love with the business because she gets to do what she wants to do now in the business. And she doesn't have like a really big team. I think it's two buyer agents, a couple administrators and she still does the listings of the team. The punch line again, I'll make you listen to the whole episode and I promise you it's going to be worth it. She really unpacks what took her from 300,000 and miserable to 1.2 million and in love with the business. The thing that struck me most about hearing her talk is that, you know, without systems, everything, it's like pushing a boulder uphill. Everything you do, you know, there, there, there's no, you know, recreating the wheel every time you do something. So she tells a story about, you know, it took her, she finally has a world class administrator executive assistant. It took her seven hires and each one of those hires built out a part of her business operating system. And she tells it really great and I didn't teach it to her, so I don't take credit for it. But you know, the leverage that she needed came through a person that helped her build systems. Even though it's multiple people and with those systems and an empowered person to help run everything, you know, you can sell way more real estate than you're selling today and have a way better life. She has way more income, way more time off and way lower stress. You hear me talk a lot about time, money and stress in real estate, B school, that is the ultimate equalizer. You know, if I can talk to someone that's in real estate and talk to them about the number of hours they're working, the money they're getting out and the stress they're enduring. That's the equation that we got to work with to make sure that the time is manageable, the money's really, really good, and you are enduring a reasonable level of stress. You're not burning yourself out and you're not having, you know, health implications of the stress that your, your business generates. We don't want that to have to happen. We want to have you, you know, a very long term career in real estate. So really this is just a teaser to listen to the next week. I also just wanted to mention that, you know, if you're at the point where you're just sick and tired of selling houses. You're already sort of top of your game as far as what traditional success looks like. You really don't know where to take it. You know, you've gotten to 3 to 500,000 GCI or maybe 500 to a million GCI and you're kind of stalled out. Maybe you have an administrator, buyer, agent or two and you just don't have the time, money, freedom that you thought you could have and you're stressed all the freaking time. That is where we come in. There's no sell whatsoever. It's a simple conversation about your business. If you're a fit for real Estate B school, we'll put you into our pilot program and that's where you get a look at real Estate B school for 30 days to make sure that you're a really great fit for what we offer. And then we talk about what a long, longer term relationship would look like. And that's all I've got for you. So just getting 2020 rolling with some momentum, with a couple case studies and my sort of perspective about what made these real estate B school members successful and, and what struck me as interesting about their testimonies there, you know, talking about real estate B school and what impacted them the most. So again, if that's you, you need help with your next step, you just don't know where to go. Go to realestatebschool.com and we'll see you over there.