Building A Sustainable Real Estate Business

What would it look like for you to earn multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars per year working only 40 to 50 hours per week in real estate and not have to work evenings and weekends? So I'm going to ask you to suspend disbelief here. You know, not only is this possible, the path at this point is predictable. And my journey was not the most straightforward path to success. And I've been at this for many, many, many years. And I've built systems and procedures and processes to help you detach time and money. When I talk about sustainability, it's something that can run for a long, long time. Traditional agents and traditional methods, they're challenged because you're gonna burn out at some point, right? Working seven days a week, working 10 to 12 hour days, stepping out of date night, missing a child's, you know, sporting event, working on vacation. Those things aren't going to lead to a happy life and you're not going to be fulfilled and you're constantly going to be exhausted and ultimately you're going to resent your business. You know, if you're at the point in your journey where you know, you need a predictable path to success, stick around to the end of the video. I'm going to show you exactly what that looks like. I've created a training especially for you. If you like the video, do me a favor and hit the like button. Subscribe to the channel, turn on notifications and make sure you leave comments. Let's start with what I mean with the term sustainability and how it relates to business. So in real estate, if you were able to follow the best of the best around, you would find that what they're doing isn't sustainable. What I mean by that, they may succeed, as we say, you know, as an industry, we say what success looks like. But when you look at their, the areas of their life that are really should be more important, maybe they're not priorities, they should be more important. Their relationships with their spouse, with their children, their physical body, their emotional well being. What they're doing in their business is taking away from the other areas of their life and it leads them to burnout. And it's pretty typical. And they'll keep hitting this ceiling of growth where they can't break through. And so when I talk about sustainable growth, it's growing your real estate business. So doing more transactions but not having to put in more hours to do it. And I know it sounds like a foreign concept, perhaps maybe you think it's complete B.S. and again, I just ask you to suspend disbelief. I want to tell you a little bit about my story. And then ultimately I'm going to give you a few steps that you can take right now to get on this path. My journey started in 2007. I was newly married. End of 2006. We had Anders in November 2007. 2008, if you remember, if you were in real estate around these years, the markets were shifting and the end of the financial world as we knew it was late 2008. So I'm leaving a cozy corporate job to get into real estate. And I became that traditionally successful real estate agent instantly. I was a top producer. I had figured out to generate leads. I figured out a way to systematically generate high quality leads for low cost. And so I had all the business I could possibly handle as a solo agent. So I was working seven days a week. I expanded all the opportunity that was given to me by setting up this system the right way. All of my waking hours were taken up with work and I wasn't showing up as a good dad. I definitely wasn't being a good husband. This was like four or five times a week I would work into 2 to 3am because I had this vision of like this thing I started to build was not going to lead me to the freedom I wanted to. And so this concept of sustainability really hit me personally early on. And it was, it wasn't, like I said, it wasn't this straight path where all of a sudden, you know, I was the CEO of my business. I just broke it down step by step. What has to happen first, second, third, fourth for me to go from like going to lose my mind busy real estate agent to legitimate business business owner. And I want the same for you. So let's break down those steps. So my first challenge for you is to think about your business as a system of systems. How would you have to look at your business differently if you couldn't do everything in your business? That's the challenge I gave myself personally in those early days. So if I was setting up some kind of marketing system or a buyer lead generation system, I would set it up in a way where I didn't have to be the one to always put time into it to get it to give me the thing that I wanted, which was a high quality buyer lead. And so think about all the things you do all day long. And could you build a system or a process around it? When I was showing homes to buyers, I remember this one buyer, it was an hour and a half away from my home and they were less than $100,000. They were pre qualified, they were definitely going to buy a home. There was not a big commission check on the line. The only thing that sort of kept me in that client, honestly between you and I, it wasn't the fact that I was just a nice guy and I really wanted to serve this client and I fell in love with them. It was merely the fact that I had committed to doing the most dollar productive things I could do at the time was to be with buyers and be with sellers. And while I was doing that thing, I was building a system so I didn't have to do the thing the next time. So when I was showing homes the packets I put together, like I would have, you know, the title, the date, my picture on the bottom, and I would ask referrals on the COVID sheet, I would print out. Like I built a process around that so I knew one day I wasn't going to show homes to buyers. And there was this like step by step process that others that joined me and my vision to build this business, they had a system to follow so they can get the same results in their business and do it with less effort. And so that was the first thing that shifted to me was systems. Another example of a good system is how I could take a complete stranger on the phone in a conversation. What words would I have to say to compel them to meet with me? And then when they sat down to meet with me, what would I have to say or what would I have to present to them to get them to agree to do business with me? So your sales system, if you don't have a system and processes around, you know, securing appointments or consultations and then getting those consultations, those people to commit to do business with you, you're going to be the one doing it all the time. And that is one of the more dollar productive activities in your business. So you're going to feel like, oh crap, it's Saturday evening and this buyer just flew into town. They're unrepresented. Honey, can we not do date night? This is a $300,000 buyer, this is $10,000. I didn't sweat that because I had a system in place where someone else could do that and I could still get paid on it. So that's another example of a system. Next we have to talk about just this process of delegating so that you can elevate in your business. You know, there's so many administrative tasks that you do all day long that if you keep doing those things, you probably won't have the freedom that you're looking for and you deserve. And so just think about the last few days in your real estate business. What are the things that you've done that you could hire someone? What could I have offloaded from my plate in the last three or four days that a good administrator could have done and got the same result? So they could do the task and get the same result where they can do all of those things that I'm not the best suited to do them. So, so could I focus more of my effort on developing new relationships with buyers and sellers, following up with folks that have had conversation with, going on consultations with buyers and sellers and negotiating deals. Those are the only things you really get paid for. As a real estate agent. It's plan prospecting, lead follow up appointments and negotiating deals. 80% of your time should be spent on those four activities. And if you're spending any less than 50% on those activities, you won't have a chance to scale your business. And so you've got to really be honest with yourself about what could you get off of your plate. Do you think about your business in that way where oh crap, I'm doing half my day as administrative stuff that someone else could do? And are you thinking about your business as a business? Because it is the last thing I would say, you know, as you look to build sustainability and go from agent to owner and is a planning process, you know, just some way where you can organize every week. Do you have clear commitments around what has to happen this week for you to move your business forward? I go through a weekly commitment process. I look at what did I do great this week, what worked, what didn't work, what do I need to start doing and stop doing. Then I look at this week, the three key projects that I'm working on, what has to happen to move these projects forward. And and then I make specific commitments. I have six spots in my planner where I write down things I'm going to commit to this coming week. And then every day I have a daily process where I start in gratitude. I set the intention for the day and I do my affirmations and I pick my top three. I look back at my weekly commitments and I choose three things that have to happen today for me to move my business forward. This is the same process that you'll follow with new team members that join your world, even if it's only ever your business is one administrator and a couple buyer agents. You're doing a million GCI and you're taking home 500,000. You're working 40 hours a week. That's a legitimate business model that some of our members choose. And so are you making those commitments with your week and daily? And then are you just living up to this concept or belief that there's more to life than just slinging houses? If you're at the point in your business growth journey where you can't quite connect the dots of how do I get from where I am today, like overworked agent to you know, it's all well and good, Lars. I love what you're talking about. I just don't see the path. I can't connect those dots. I put together a 15 minute training where I go through step by step, what it looks like and how you can do it in your business. It's predictablerealestatesuccess.com or you can click on the link below. It's 15 minutes, it's action packed and it will serve you. If you like this video, hit the like button. Make sure you subscribe to the channel and turn your notifications on so you're the first to know when a video hits. And as always, leave me comments so we can go back and forth and challenge each other. We'll see you on the next video.