Episode 450: Reflecting Back On The Business (And Life) Lessons I've Learned Along The Way

All right, welcome back to Real Estate Team Builders. Today is a big milestone for the podcast. 450 episodes and I thought we'd hang out with the guy that started it all with me back in the day. I think it was episode zero, if there ever was one. I don't even know when that was, but Matt Johnson and pursuing results and micro famous and just an awesome, awesome guy, man of God. And so we just thought we'd hang out for a little bit and chat about the journey. And I thought it'd be cool to have someone that is been in the real estate space, just knows how to build businesses and how to build influence and just talk a little bit about the good, bad, ugly of the journey of business and podcasting and all of it. So welcome, Matt.

Thanks, man. I appreciate it and honored to be here on the big milestone episode. We were joking around behind the scenes that maybe the 500th will go after Tony Robbins. So I'm sure I'll be a very small fish in what will be a very big pond of guests. But yeah, I wanted to jump on with you because you do a ton of solo episodes. So I wanted to market with something a little bit different than just having you jump on and do another solo episode because I wanted to hopefully pull some things out of you. So I just, I'm going to ask you some selfishly curious questions and see where we go with this. But just on, is there anything that really jumps out to you? Out of all the guests that you've interviewed, what is the biggest, maybe transformational story of Zero to Hero that you've heard and profiled of a guest on the show where it sticks out to you now as someone that was starting from that exact place of frustration and long hours and not a great marriage and all those things to living the exact life that you want to see people live. Is there anyone that really exemplifies that journey?

Yeah, I would say Dave Hook, who I think I've had on a couple times. And I had the just the honor of being in his life from, you know, his wife Jenny, pregnant with their first child when I met him. And he was working, I think about 80 hours a week. He owned an independent brokerage and he was, he had a small team and he was doing, I remember probably like 80, 90 transactions, but like 75 or 85 were his own production. So that the typical, you know, a buyer, agent or two, but didn't have time to coach and love on them and just running and gunning, not thinking about where he Wanted this to end up. And that's been the theme with everyone that I come into contact with. It's just like something good is going to happen one day. I just know it, you know? And so I was lucky enough to grab him on the front end of his journey. And I think he would have put in all the effort. I think he would have figured some things out. But just to be able to share with him my failures, my mistakes, like, don't do that. I've already tried it. I actually tried it three times and it didn't work all three times. And so he went from, you know, 100 to 300 transactions, which is awesome. But he did it on the right economic model, which is even more awesome. And he did it in a way where he works 90 minutes a week in that business. Now. He owns three businesses now that are all leveraged to the point where he's less than a couple hours a week in all three businesses. And, and he did it in, in, in a way where he, he grew his talent from within. His team loves the business that his, that he's built. His team loves the fact that he can step away from his business. And he took his time to build it. There wasn't this like rush for growth. Like people say, like, I've got to go from 50 to 100 deals next year. It's like, why do you have to do that? I don't know. It's just like, I have to because there's an agent in my market that does 100 homes. It's like, is that a good reason? Like, do you know, have you talked to that agent's wife?

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Have you taken their blood work? Did you see their bank accounts? Like, you know what I mean? So I just think there's a lot of facade out there. And Dave Hook is the real deal and they have three kids now. And so he's able just to do something that his dad was not able to do, which is just be completely present. I did vox with him recently and he said he's a little more than stir crazy. So we do have that gene in us that even if we figure out how to build something like a true business, we're going to go tinker with something. Hopefully we don't mess up the thing, but we're going to go do something else. So that's the first story that comes to mind.

Yeah, that's awesome. Is there anything for yourself? Just along the last few years since I've known you, I want to talk about leadership. Maybe a Little bit. What do you think is the biggest leadership challenge that you've had along the way? Whether it's in the core real estate business or in the coaching business, like trying to lead people to change their own, their own agent businesses. What's the biggest leadership challenge that comes to mind?

Yeah, so this is actually something I feel like I'm, I'm very late to the game on, you know, like I wish someone would have come alongside me and said, hey, when you hire your first assistant, you are now a leader and let me just teach you some things. So I feel like now in real estate peace school, I'm doing that for others that are earlier on in their journey because I see, you know, three $4 million businesses, $5 million real estate teams where the team owner is a dictator and it's control and it's transactional management. So my, my, my journey was like, I got so busy in my real estate business, I'm like, I need people. I'm building systems, marketing, technology, whatever it takes. I had the eye towards growth, so I was going to grow no matter what. And I viewed people, they were there to serve me, which is horrible. Like looking back on, I didn't know better at the time, so I'm not overly down, but I really hurt some people and I had to have some, some real conversations with people after the fact. You know, my style, my natural style in a high stress situation is to tell people what to do and minimize their feelings and none of those good things. But now just. And I've made a shift in the last five years incrementally. That was the biggest challenge, was just being so stressed all the time where I was in constant trigger mode. I was constantly triggered by like an agent complaining about something about a commission split or something where they have a genuine. They're a human being, right? God created them like just like he created me. And yet in those early days, I just didn't know how to deal with those relationships. And that's been some of the most painful lessons, but some of the most valuable lessons. And now just looking forward, you know, in a bigger stage now with, with exp. And Now I'm shepherding 780 agents as of this recording. I think it's going to be like 1800 to 2000 by the, you know, 13 months from now, by the end of 2022. And the massive responsibility that that is, you know, really just the heaviness of leadership, like it's a big responsibility.

Yeah, exactly. That's the thing is I think there's there's a tendency to get sucked into exactly what you got sucked into, which is to look at the business. Yes, the business is a vehicle for your lifestyle, but the people in your business and you have to treat them as people that need to be served and led. They're not just cogs in the machinery. Like it's, you know, the automation, the systems in the business, those can be the cogs in the machinery, but the people have to be led. Especially in a business like this. It's one thing if they're just full time employees and they're cranking out widgets in a machine shop, that's one thing. And even those people still need, still need to be shepherded, but especially when you're dealing with a real estate team is a really interesting, weird mix of polar opposite personalities. High D, high I or high IIS salespeople and then high SC admin people. Like you've got, you're throwing people that are on the opposite ends of the spectrum into a giant basket, mixing them all up and then throwing like the highest stress environment at them of people.

Moving and just hoping it'll be good.

Yeah, yeah. Just basically hoping it'll work out. It'll be fine.

Yeah.

So I like talking about the leadership challenge. That's always interesting. Talk a little bit about maybe something that you learned along the way. There was something interesting that you said about starting the podcast, which I think applies, and it was like a little insight into the way that your mind works that I wanted to point out for the, for the audience. So when you first started with the podcast with me, I don't know if you remember saying this, but it was something to the effect of I don't expect to be good at this for at least 100 episodes. I'm like, perfect. That's exactly how you should approach it. And obviously now you're even better than you were at the start. And you were pretty good to begin with because you'd already been talking about this stuff for four years before we launched the podcast. And I'm just curious where that comes from and where that mentality pops out in other areas. Just the willingness to like set a long timeframe, say, I'm going to do X, Y and Z for this period of time. I'm not going to expect to be great at. I'm not going to expect a ton of results immediately. I'm just going to commit to doing this for this certain timeframe and then we'll evaluate at that point and see where do we go from here. Where did that come from and where else does it pop out?

Yeah, it's something that's. That's easy to say, hard to do. So it's easy to say. And it's been proven that, you know, most people overestimate what they could do in a year, and they drastically underestimate what they could do in three to five years. And so I've made all the mistakes, everything you can make a mistake with, and I've made it multiple times in all of it. The one thing that I was good at, I was good at the numbers. So I knew I had to follow an economic model no matter what. Even if I was failing in leadership and I wasn't treating people right, I knew I had to stick to a model. And then I also knew that I was really good at seeing the future. I think part of me is programming program that way, where I just know where I'm going to be in three years. I don't exactly know how I'm going to get there, but I know generally what my life is going to look like, the hours I want to work, the. The money I want to make. And I was just really good at working backwards. So, you know, even when I first got into real estate, I didn't have any sales experience. I had never prospected before, built systems or any of that, managed people or anything. But I knew that I just had to. I had to get leads coming in, and then I had to call those leads, and then I had to set appointments and sign them as clients and then sell them a home. And so for three years, that's all I did. I literally had like one. One lead source, one script, one buyer presentation. And I just did that 44 times in my first full year, then 58 times in my second full year. And then I brought on a buyer agent. And then that third year, that's when the team sort of was. Was birthed. And I just think it's. I don't know what it is. I think I'm so drawn to the future that I will do whatever it takes today to make it happen. Like, it doesn't matter. I'll tell someone. And especially now with, with. With exp and the leverage opportunity there, I'll ask somebody, like, if you could dig ditches for 50 hours a week for the next three years, literally digging ditches, shovel backaches, every day, 50 hours a week. But at the end of it, you knew you would have 20,000 residual income that would grow from there. Would you do it? Every person's like, 100% digging ditches sounds better than selling houses right now. Right. And so, but very few people will have the time on task to get good enough at anything to be able to essentially write their own future in terms of income and hours. And so that's the whole equation. It's just like a willingness to, to stick in there and, and, and get good enough at something. You know, you, you have guys coming. I coach guys that have come out of Mike Ferry. And Mike Ferry, the one thing he just does really well. I disagree with some of the. He doesn't believe in some of the same things I do in terms of leverage and freedom from a business. But the guys that are high level fairy guys, I mean, they, they know their scripts, they can, they can make as much money as they want. Right. Because they're committed to. I coach a guy who's been tracking his numbers. He'd been in Mike ferry since like 2002 or something. He literally showed me his numbers for 19 years. Yeah, he does the same thing every morning, five days a week, same time blocks in the afternoon for listing appointments. Right. So, yeah, so I just think you have to be able to commit to getting good at one thing long enough where you could do the next thing. So I got good at working with buyers, and then I'm like, oh, crap, I got to generate some listing leads because this sucks, working with buyers. So then I got good at generating listing leads and I get really good at taking listings. And I built a system around like, this sucks too. I don't want to go in people's houses in the evenings, and three times on a Saturday, three different houses. So let me build a system and have someone replace that. And I'm like, coaching agents is hard, you know, so being the energy all the time. I'm an introvert. You're an introvert. Coaching and leading agents all day long is hard for our personality. So I'm like, okay, I can build a system. I can hire someone to do it. And then I found myself very useless in every part of my real estate team. So I just had to extract myself from all of it. And.

Oh, man.

So I just think it's. It's a commitment to, to a bigger future, you know, And I think it's, it's just, it's easy to say, like, do you have a why? My why has changed over time. Initially though, I came from no money and a jacked up childhood. My wife came from no money and a jacked up, even more jacked up childhood. And I was like, Every morning I would tell myself, you know, I'm willing to do anything today to create a life for my family that they never thought was possible, my wife included, you know, and that changed, you know, because that was very inward and selfish. And we did that pretty quickly. And then it became now I get the ability to help my agents build a life for them that they never thought was possible. I could take an agent that sold one home a year before he joined me. My first agent sold 27 homes with me the first year and he made six figures. Changed his life. He was with me for seven years. Chris Goodwin. Right. And now it becomes like, how can I lead, be a leader of leaders now? I can impact all these teams and all these agents and the ripple effects in their family and their communities. And so it's just pretty cool. Not to get all soap boxy and preachy, but it's the emotional juice is the thing that's going to get you out of bed early, get you to bed earlier so you can actually sleep enough and be on point and get up ahead of your family and do the right things to prepare yourself every day to be consistent.

Yeah, I admired that approach and it was something that always stuck with me. And I've tried to take into, into my own approach, especially to goal setting. It's one thing, you know, when you sometimes when you tap into that emotional fuel and you tap into that goal, that place that you want to be in a few years, you tend to, you tend to commit to things and you take action in such a way that you burn out quickly and you put such expectations on yourself to fix things right now in the moment that you end up burning out emotionally and two or three months later you can't keep doing the same activities. And that was what was really interesting about the way that you came in is you're like, look, I'm committing to this for a certain period of time. I know exactly what I want to do, but I know it's not going to feel amazing necessarily and I'm not going to feel super confident in this in between time until I build the skillset with time on task. Yeah, that's really what I was hoping to pull out is where that comes from and how people can learn from it. Because I think it carries over into even just very simple things like when it's time to try a new lead generation system or a prospecting tech or even just teaching a certain type of prospecting to your agents. If you're in the team leader role, like it's going to take time for those things to pay off. And you've got to have the patience to commit to it for a certain period of time and go, I know along the way I'm going to have doubts and in those times I'm going to go, no, I like this is when I evaluated, this is what I've committed to. This is the timeframe I'm giving it to see if it's going to work and then I'll evaluate it then. And I think that's something that you have that other people can learn from and hopefully step into because it'll make their life a lot less frustrating along the way. Anyway.

Yeah, so I have this like this baseline understanding now that literally everything's a scroll, whether it's news or Netflix or anything you could think of. It's going to take you off of achieving your three year vision for all the areas of like business finances for sure. Yeah. Like that's most of what we talk about as hard charging business people. But then there's like all the other stuff, your marriage, your kids, your physical body, your spiritual journey, your emotional wellbeing, any hobbies or any siblings that you need to sort of friends and those relationships. But the killer now is just social media and news and Netflix. And if you're stressed and you're constantly triggered, you're going to look to those things to sedate. And you know, I tend to eat, you know, I snack and watch tv. Those are my sort of zone out and it allows me to stay up too late and then I missed an hour in the morning. And so it just, the vicious cycle can happen and it's happening to me like in this season where there's not this big painful financial motivation. So now I have to reground to a different why, a bigger why, you know, so we're partnering with like these missionaries that like this amazing thing where it's like a ground floor missionary work and we're giving funds, we're going to be giving funds, but we can see exactly where the funds are going. So I can know, man, I can, I can help a village in Kenya. Literally my money's going right into the village and I can see it versus I'm good at stroking checks and doing it recurring but I have no idea what it does, you know, so that I think that's the emotional juice I need for this next stage.

I like it. Yeah, that's. And that's something everybody goes through. Like you said, once you get over that immediate like financial motivator, that kind of self motivates you. You've got to figure out what your next why is and that that is an interesting transition time that any leader.

Goes through and looking back on the journey. And this is a common thread too. You know, I think of the 450 episodes, probably 200 are interviews or a hundred. I mean it's over 150. So I've just had the opportunity to talk to, you know, folks that serve the industry and they've seen things that I've seen or people that have built big businesses and what they go through. Every, every one of them has surrounded themselves with some people that are, are that are attracted to a vision and they're willing to sort of honestly put up with the person. Like we're not easy to be around. My natural, like ask my, ask my wife. It's. I will come up with an idea like we should look at moving closer to our kids school. And that was on a Wednesday. I took Bold at KW when I was with KW and they had, they said, right, your three year vision of like one thing you want. I'm like, well, I want to live in this neighborhood, this kind of house in three years. That was on a Wednesday. We were, we looked at 13 houses on Saturday and it was a three year vision and I was approved for like that next week, like totally underwritten. And we put an offer on one of the houses that we've looked at on Saturday and we live in it today. My wife will tell you that story. Like in her mind she is very like linear. She said, you told me three years. I was like, three years, that sounds great. Perfect amount of time. And it was like three months. And so. And I bring up that point because for me, when I look back on my real estate team, my first hire, I ran a Craigslist at 2 in the morning. Tia Wilson responded. She lived like five houses down in a metro that has 2.4 million people and she's. And she had a license and she stepped in and took all of the administrative stuff off my plate and she helped me build systems and she was just a different, same thing. In real estate B school. The first client to ever give me money to coach them was Stacy Peterson. She reached out to me on a Friday. She had seen me at a Kinder Reese event speaking on stage. She's like, hey, could you teach me some stuff or whatever. And I'm like, call me on Monday. I'm starting a coaching company. And I actually was like legit. I was so God's hand was in all of it, for sure. We had kids the same age. She was doing about 100 deals at that time. She ended up tripling her business, you know, going down from seven days a week to five days to three to two. Then coaching for real estate B school and then coming in and helping to build the systems out in real estate B school. Same thing she did in a real estate team. She ran 222 transactions through one administrator on her real estate team. Because her mind is, I have a systems orientation to my mind, but her mind is more like actually bringing like my pastor says, like he got complimented once. Someone said, you know, pastor, you have a way of bringing the hay where the, where the, the goats, the sheep can eat it, you know, so instead of like, I tend to be in the, the high level, in the clouds.

Right, right.

But Stacy is really good at taking that and putting it out in a way where people can use it and understand it. And so I don't think real estate B school would be what it is today without a person like that, without Stacy. She's led the day to day operations before. When I had to step back for personal reasons, I went from 30 hours a week to like two hours a week in that business in like three days. And she, she took it over. So. And she does it because she sees this big impact, this big vision and she wants to so that person, along all of those successful businesses, that has been a key, a key, key theme through everyone.

Yeah, yeah. And to bring it back, I think that where, where you were initially going with that is just the, the idea that you, you were charging hard and you know, you put up a random ad on Craigslist at 2 in the morning and next thing you know you're, bam. You've got somebody in the business that takes all that stuff off and yeah, you can, you can achieve and get there a lot faster than you probably think if you take the right action.

Yeah.

Love it.

Awesome.

Cool, man. I know we're limited on time, so I appreciate it. And for anybody that's in the listening audience, just from my perspective, I love the show. Love Lars. And if you do too, make sure that you leave a rating and review on itunes. It's one of the best ways that you can help. I'll obviously share the show with other agents that you know of that would benefit because this is life changing stuff. You know, if you put this podcast in the hands of people, it's going to change their lives. So Lars, I appreciate it. Thank you so much for doing the show. I know people in the audience appreciate it. See you next time.

Awesome. And I would. I would say. I would just add on there. If you didn't end the recording yet, pick up a copy of the book. Not to plug your stuff, but for sure. Micro Famous.

Oh, my stuff.

Yeah. I mean, it's in the video. If you're watching the video. Subtle, but I would say give a quick pitch for the.

For the book, basically, if you want to be influential. So if you want to coach, lead, train, speak, write books, whatever you want to do where you're influencing and impacting other people, that's the path to get there. And you don't need a million eyeballs on you or your content. There's a way to do it with a small, focused audience that really falls in love with your stuff and with you. And that will basically lay out the path to become famously influential to the right people.

And I'll say one thing on that. So my kids, I showed them my YouTube channel recently, and so the podcast is published on YouTube. You know, you guys do all that, you produce all of it, do an awesome job. And I'm like, guys, this video had, like, like, 173 views. I'm like, guys, that's a hundred. And can you imagine 173 people looking at me and they're like, Mr. Beast dropped a video that got like, 100 million views in, like, two days, dad. And I'm like, you guys have no idea what you're talking about. I'm like, look at the freaking house you live in. Like, those 173 views. That's the whole point of Micro Famous is that it's the 173, right? People, like, people are reaching out to me now, and even more so than before, and I'm getting on the phone with people and having meaningful conversations, and it's. It doesn't take a lot of people. So, anyway, much love, brother. Thanks for all you do.

I will talk to you soon.