Balancing Family Life While Selling Hundred Of Homes Per Year

Do you think it's possible to sell hundreds of homes per year and still have a life? You know, there's definitely more to life than real estate. And in our industry it seems, you know, the more agents and team leaders I talk to, the majority of their waking hours are spent in their real estate business. Like either in the business, on the business, thinking about the business, stressing about the business. And so in today's video I want to start to have a conversation around like how do we not sacrifice things that are more important than our business, more important than real estate, you know, and start to put those things ahead of our business? You know, the journey is not an easy one and I'm not going to pretend that I, I didn't fail a ton of times along the way. Going from just like busy, you know, misprioritized real estate agent, like chicken with my head cut off back in those early days to a more graceful way to go about doing my business. It's the blood and guts approach that is revered in our industry to what I like better is a business built on elegance and ease. And so I want to dig in with that to you today. If you are at the point where you can't make sense of time and money and this stress equation, all these things I talk about, you just want to go a little bit deeper and get pushed by me and coached by me and trained by me. Stick around to the end of the video. I have a time freedom challenge where we can spend 21 days together. If you like the video, please hit the like button. Subscribe, subscribe to the channel. Make sure you turn on notifications so you'll be the first to know about videos when they hit and leave comments so we can go back and forth and you can, you know, say you're doing a great job or I don't agree with what you're saying. Either way, I love the dialogue with you. And so let's dig into this concept of balance and how do we put, you know, our family or things that are really should be more important than business. How do we begin to prioritize those things over our real estate business? When I look back on, you know, my journey and really all of our members journey, you know, people come into real estate B school, they're typically working all, all sorts of crazy hours. So definitely seven days a week most evenings and if they're not working, they're working. So they're on their phone, they're texting, they're working deals when they shouldn't be. They're just their priorities are misaligned. And there's this saying that I love. It's priorities are what we do. Everything else is just talk. So if you're a father. So my case, I was pretty early on in my journey in business. I became a father and I was a husband. And my priorities, my said priorities, my spoken priorities were that I wanted to be a great husband and I wanted to be a great father. And if you looked at what was actually happening, because I was a traditionally successful real estate agent, my first full year in the business, I sold 44 homes. That's like easily in the top 1%. The challenge was I was working all the time, I was stressed out, and my priority was my business. And we fool ourselves into thinking that, hey, if I could just figure this out, if I could just sell this next home, if I could. It never really happens and families are ruined and physical health suffers. Emotional well being isn't where it could be in the traditional models of real estate. And so the challenge for me back in those days and the challenge I give to you is to look at where are your priorities? Where are you spending your time? Where are you distracted? Are you present with your family? Or are you thinking about business? Or are you on your phone?

Right.

Your family doesn't want you to sell another home. I. Yep. I just talked to your family. I confirmed it. They could give a crap if you sell another home, and so they just want more of you. And a lot of times we rationalize and we'll actually defend the fact that we're doing real estate to create a life for them. That was my mantra back in the early day. It was like, I'm building a life for my family that they never thought was possible. Yet I hit this tipping point where I was so out of alignment with what I said I wanted, with what I was actually doing, that I had to call BS on myself and I had to have a real come to Jesus conversation with myself that this simply wasn't working. You know, I look at pictures now and apparently I was always on the phone back then, where I'm holding Anders, feeding him a bottle with one hand and I'm on the phone with the other. Or I'm at the zoo. This is true story. I'm at the zoo and I have to leave Anders and Julie, you know, they're playing with the giraffes and I'm working a deal next to the lions. What decisions? Where have you misstepped, you know, to put your business over your family? You know, really tough conversation to have. There's no way to make this like a super exciting conversation. It's just an awareness, like if you want to do something better with your life in terms of like the impact that you can have in your family and in your community and in friendships and in your church, how can you do that if you're just so wrapped up in real estate? So I want to dig into the steps that the sort of step by step process that you can go through to maybe get out of what you're doing right now and the approach you're taking and to kind of get into a better place. So there's a few things to consider. You know, if you want to sell more homes in less time, that's the thing that's going to get you freedom. You know, on average, in my first, you know, year two in real estate, I was working probably 70 hours a week. So 50 weeks a year, 3500 hours. I made like 14 bucks an hour. Literally my first year in real estate, I probably only made 30, $35 an hour. My second year in real estate, I didn't really figure out where to spend my time to make more money, you know, and I was doing all the things of a busy real estate agent, most of which were administrative. So it's this thing I call the 90 Day World. If you look at where you are today and let's say you're taking a long term view of your business, you know, I remember back in the day when I started this process and living in the 90 day world, I was thinking I had 20 years of business in me. So I was, Yeah, I was 35 years old at the time and I was like, I'm going to work hard, push hard, drive hard until I'm 55. It's 20 years. In 20 years at the time, there's four quarters per year, I'm like, I've got 80 quarters, you know, 80 quarters to play this game of business and what needs to happen in this next quarter of 80 quarters so I can move closer to owning a business that gives me freedom. And it's like a slight shift that allowed me to think about my business differently, but also to get out of the daily grind, the thing that was so stressful and just allow me to think about my business a little bit differently. And it also allowed me to look back and I still run the same process. Today I have less than 20 years, have about eight years that I still want to push hard. And eight years is eight times four is three, 32 quarters. So I've got 32 of the 80 left, right? So I'm more than halfway through this journey and now I can look back on the 48 quarters and say, man, look at all the things I learned, look at all the things I accomplished, look at all the systems I put in place. And you know, I'm midway through this game of business and how can I use all of that experience as fuel to charge these next eight years, these next 32 quarters? So, so think about your existence in 90 days at a time. I use just seasonal or calendar quarters. So January, February, March, April, May, June, July, July, August, September, October, November, December.

Right.

There's four quarters in a year and I have just fallen into this cadence and now I just love it. I know when a quarter's ending because I probably have lost focus about what I was working on. I've finished up some projects, you know, I've accomplished my goals and now a new quarter's coming in. So that's the first thing is to think of your business as a series of 90 day worlds of these little games you get to play, or let's call them battles that you get to fight. Now, battles are negative. Let's call it games. You know, we're games that, you know, lead up to, you know, four games in a season and then each year is a season and you want to lead to this championship.

Right?

So how do you view your business that way? That's number one, I'd say. The second thing is to be honest about where you're spending your time and once you figure out where you're spending your time, to put a process into place where you could stop doing the things that aren't, on the one hand you don't even enjoy, on another hand, you're not even good at. On another hand, if you had three hands, they don't pay very well, so you don't like them, you're not good at them, and they don't pay very well. Typically, folks that can build an amazing business, they're really good at being with people and they're really sort of in the future visionary types and they're not great at administrative tasks. A traditionally successful real estate agent and most team leaders even spend the majority of their time doing just administrative stuff. And they don't have a process in place to delegate tasks or even roles and outcomes so that they can elevate in their business. So you need to live in this 90 day world and look at the things you're doing every 90 days. Like what could I get off of my plate so I can replace those hours. Either give those hours back to my family or replace those hours with more impactful things in my business. You know, building a recruiting system, onboarding new agents, you know, bringing a new agent into your world, that's a six figure payday. You know, just in terms of the value you're going to provide to them, they're going to take home and be part of something amazing. They're going to get paid more money in less time being part of your world, and you're going to get paid. If they get paid six figures, 100,000, you're going to get paid 150,000. And so very rarely do we set up a system to identify talent, onboard them into our world, and then help them be successful. And so that's just an example of where you could spend your time if you weren't doing all the things that you know are really low dollar productive, that you suck at and you hate doing. And so that's just being honest with yourself about that. And I would say the last thing is, you know, as you're looking to balance family with your business and this sort of just tug and war, you know, that we play all the time, is just to take a little bit of time every week to have a clarity break. This is just 60 minutes, 60 to 90 minutes where you're sitting, no technology, and you're probably just writing in a journal what's working and what's not working in all the areas of life that matter to you. So business is one of. You know, I've got 12 areas at this point. Each of my children are their own area. My spouse is a separate area, My sister is a separate, my mom is separate. I've got my finances, my emotional well being, my spiritual walk, my physical body. And my business is one of the 12. So when I talk about balance and family, like business is only one of the 12 things that matter to me. And when I sit down for my clarity breaks, I'm looking at each of those different areas that I predetermined are important to me. What happened, you know, this last week, what worked, what didn't work, work. What could I commit to this coming week?

Right.

What can I commit to? Start doing or stop doing in any given area and just think about it and just sit quietly and just think about where you are, where you want to go and just make that a habit. Put that in your calendar. Every week, 90 minutes I'm at a coffee shop or I'm, you know, in a Part of the house where I can't get distracted by technology or the dog or your family. Just take that quiet time. It will, that's a thousand x return for that hour, will save you a thousand hours of heartache and it'll be worth the investment. So I really encourage you there. You know, when I think about someone that's in our world, the first person to ever be a client of real estate B school is Stacy Peterson. And she was as just had a heart of achievement, yet she was so wrapped up in doing everything herself. In her business, she had no freedom whatsoever. She was working with buyers, sellers, she was, she had agents and administrators on her team. She was working the backstage of the business and the front stage of the business. She's a mom, so she was being a mom, she was being a wife and all the responsibilities unfairly. I see all of these kick ass, you know, business women that have to still, you know, do the laundry and you know, cook meals and take care of the kids. And that was true of her and it wasn't, it didn't have any balance in it. And so when I think about her journey, within six months of meeting Stacy, we were able to get her out of buyer and seller production. So she didn't have this attraction to working with buyers and sellers. She wanted her buyers and sellers to get an amazing experience. She didn't feel like she had to be the one to do it. So she felt better served to build systems in her business and she knew the systems would lead to the freedom and the balance that she was after. Fast forward, you know, three years or so, she tripled the size of her business. She went from working 60 to 70 hours a week, stressed all the time, not showing up as a great mom or a great wife.

Right.

Physically, she was not taking care of herself. Emotionally, you know, in her quiet time with God kind of, that was all sort of out of whack. Within a few years we were able to shift things for her where she could focus on what mattered most. And so just look at where you are in your journey. You know, it's, maybe it doesn't involve getting out of production or, you know, you have a vision of what a business could be and you don't want a big team, but this could be like a part time administrator and a showing agent. You could be making 250 grand clear, working 2,500 hours a year, make 100 bucks an hour. You know, you could 5x your income per hour if you just slow down and look at where you are. In terms of the priorities where you're out of balance with family and the things that matter to you most. If you're at the point in your business growth journey where you know, you know you want more freedom and you just don't know how to get there, spend 21 days with me. It's our Time Freedom Challenge. Go to thetimefreedomchallenge.com or click on the link below. I will coach and train you and hold you accountable for 21 days, and we'll take an honest look at where you're spending your time and where you can trade out low dollar productive activities for high dollar productive activities and start to have balance in your life. If you like the video, hit the like button, subscribe to the channel, turn on notifications, and as always, leave me comments. We will see you in the next video.