Do More if You Want to Make Less | The Surprising Truth About Becoming a Wealthy Real Estate Agent

What's up? Real estate business builders. Lars Hedinborg here, the founder of Real Estate B School. And today I want to teach you how to make less money doing more things. Had a conversation recently with a coaching member and we were unpacking his business life and he was explaining to me all the things he's doing. He has personal production, so he's selling homes, he's running a real estate team, he's building a brokerage within a brokerage, he's flipping homes on the side. And he has two businesses that are sort of affiliated services related to his, his real estate businesses, his sales businesses. And I asked him, I said, so, so in the last 12 months, how much money did you bring home? And I was waiting for him, like, this guy is crushing it. And I've seen this guy on social media and just like what he's like just hustling and grinding and like just making it happen. He said $200,000. And there's nothing wrong with $200,000. $200,000. For some people in the real estate industry, $200,000 would be like an immense blessing. This guy's running six different businesses and, you know, and he's generating $200,000. So this is just pure insanity. And so I want to bring that story back to, you know, something that may be a little bit more relevant to you. You may be listening and say, you know, you know, Lars, I am not in six different businesses. I'm in real estate sales. It's my only business. So let's bring that concept of doing too many things and not having the financial results to show for all the efforts. This is really common in real estate and I'm going to use my own journey in real estate sales as an example. So you can really kind of, this can hit home for you. So for me, in the early days, I don't know necessarily what it was, why I was so focused, but it was one lead source, one script and one activity. So the lead source at the time, and it still works, we got away from it a little bit, but it was home search leads. So a buyer is searching for homes that little pop up, same as most buyer search engine portals, right? The forced registration. And so they would opt in, I would call them within, you know, less than 60 seconds. And if they weren't ready to go, I would put them in my follow up system and you know, building systems around lead nurture and texting and emailing and voicemail drops and all the things. Right, that was sort of the lead source one Script. If I had a script off with anyone, I would go back to this one script. I used it all the time. I would obsess over it. I turned it into a dialogue ultimately and I embodied it and I could riff off of it. But I'm not a natural salesperson. So it was one script and then one activity. The activity was sitting still long enough to generate enough new business where money was never going to be the issue, right? So 12 to 15 hours a week I was laser focused on what I call new business development. This is the activity of talking to buyers and sellers about their moving plans. Like you're looking to buy, you registered on my website, or you know, you responded to this thing, or you know, all of my marketing was attraction based marketing. But there still was, you know, phone calls required and lead follow up and those activities and so sitting still long enough on a regular basis to be able to, you know, generate enough opportunity where you had so much business that you could hardly keep up with it all. My first 10 months in the business that the market hadn't quite shifted yet. In 2007 I did 27 transactions in 10 months. I was the top agent in a very small brokerage, about 20 agents. And I don't say that to brag, I just say it that it was so simple what I was doing that I think anyone can do it, yet very, very few agents do it. My first full year in real estate was when the market was shifting dramatically. The Great recession started in 2008. I sold 44 transactions. 58 in 2009. By the end of 2009, I had generated between 1.1 and $1.2 million of gross commission income. Now I made all the mistakes that you could possibly make, but it was very simple. One lead source, one script, one activity. And I just focused on like my mornings. Well, not every morning. Right now I teach mornings now you can really get it all done before noon. Back then I was like Tuesday night, Thursday night, couple three time blocks during the mornings. Monday, Wednesday, Friday and then, and then I had time block on Saturday. So that's how it played out for me. I wouldn't recommend it. I would just do it every morning, Monday through Friday and just guard your mornings and just negotiate with your spouse. Do what you need to do to be able to sit at your computer at 8 o', clock not wondering who to call. You're actually in the activity of having conversations, meaningful conversations, a two way conversation with a decision making adult. And you need to have as many of those as possible every day, five days a week. So that money will never be an issue. You'll have different problems. You get so busy that you're like, oh my gosh, I can't show homes evenings and weekends anymore. I can't keep up with the, you know, entering listings into the MLS or you know, surely me taking the pictures or designing the brochures. Those are all the problems that I ran into that ultimately I hired a licensed administrator part time. Quickly she went full time. I had to hire a buyer agent that also was a showing agent for me. They that was late 2009 and that's kind of when the leverage income part of my journey started. But that's not the point or the moral of the story. The moral of the story is that you need to just slow down a little bit and really recognize if you're not making the kind of money that you want, you're doing too many things. You're doing all these things that don't lead you any closer to meaningful goals that you're setting in the area of your real estate business or in, in any area of your life. Right? Take the health, the physical body example. If you're not physically fit and you don't have energy just to kick butt all day long and then show up in your home and still have be like, be energetic and vital and be ready to play dad or mom and then be the spouse, the husband and wife after that. If you don't have an immense amount of energy, it's likely that you're not consistent with your eating routines or your hydration routines or your workout routines. None of this is rocket science. This is super simple stuff, right? But it's not always the easiest to do, right? There's always things that we can distract ourselves with and some of them we rationalize, like well intentioned. You have an active buyer like in a negotiation that didn't finish last night and your time block for new business development comes up on your calendar and you're in that deal, you know, you're in the part of the transaction that doesn't really. This is counterintuitive, but it doesn't make you as much money as the new business development activities because that's consistent. The consistency, the persistency around that core new business development activity is what's going to win the day, right? Always and forever, right? It's going to win the day. You will have to figure out systems around client care and those sorts of things. And when it hits the fan, like how do you pivot and focus on the things that you've committed to versus the things that are maybe more urgent but maybe not as important for the long term growth prospects of your business. So when you unpack what it looks like in terms of a funnel, we have this visual, it's called the game we are playing in real estate. And it starts with leads on one side and then it goes to meaningful conversations is the first step. Then it goes to appointments set, appointments met and new clients signed. So those three or four things, that's the whole game. That's where the whole game is won. Focusing on those core activities, you know, you're putting some marketing systems in place, some attraction based marketing systems in place, then you can apply the discipline to have the meaningful conversations and block everything else out. Don't get distracted, don't do all the things, just do the one thing. Then you're actually setting consultations. You're actually meeting with would be buyer and seller clients. You're saying the right things and you have a sales process in place so that you can get them to commit to use you as their agent. That's the whole game. Most real estate agents are busy, you know, driving around town running business errands and personal errands and most of that is in the client care part of the transaction. And the mental switch that I want you to make, which is my passion and why this is called real estate business builders and why I started a business school. Real estate B school is a business school for real estate agents is because the game is won. Not in showing homes, not in talking to even a buyer that has an offer for your listing. I mean technically getting offers is a good thing, right? Negotiating is one of the high dollar productive activities. But not if you pass up every day consistently on the engine of your business, which is new business development. Okay, so that is a very roundabout way of telling you that doing less makes you more money. Focusing on the things that matter, the things that you know will generate new business. Focusing on those things, building marketing systems, we call them lead gen levers. In real estate B school we've got six or seven lead gen levers that are solid proven, that are each good for 25 plus transactions per year once you implement them. You have to be working on generating leads, making those calls and then putting up, putting them in your follow up systems and then meeting with buyers and sellers and getting them to commit to use you as their agent. If that's not your obsession, then you're really not in the game of real estate and you probably want to reach out for a conversation. We do these simple calls called Growth Assessment calls. You can go to Rebs Real Estate B School R E B S Growth assessment dot com. We'll have a quick ten minute conversation about where you are in your business, where you want to be in the future, and what's holding you back. We'll talk about 12 months from now, where you want to be 36 months from now, and if we can help you get there, we'll talk about it. But this is not a sales call. So go to rebsgrowthassessment.com and we'll see you on the other side.