Get Your Life Back - How to Make the Shift from Agent to Owner

This is make the shift from agent to owner. Let's get the party started. We are good to go. So let's rock and roll. So my name is Lars Hedinborg. I'm the founder of Real Estate B School. I've been at the Real Estate B School gig for almost seven years now. We're a business coaching company and I've basically started building my real estate team. Back in 2009 I hired my first buyer agent. So a little over 10 years into team team building, got into real estate in 2007, realized really, really fast that it was not going to lead me to a life of freedom that I was looking for. So we're going to dive deep into just how do you profitably scale your business? And even if you don't think you want to exit production, how could you have a mindset of building something that has a life without you? So the agenda today, I'm probably going to run about 75 minutes. I say 90 just so you. No, if I get overly into it, I may keep you a little bit longer. All of it is action packed, no fluff, no gimmicks, just the stuff that is going to help you move your business forward. So we're going to cover three things on the training today. Number one is understanding the relationship between time and money. If there is one thing I figured out super early on was the fact that I could use my real estate business to make 250, 500 $1,000 an hour. And this year I've got a shot at that. And it's taken me every bit of about five years to get to 250, five years to get to 500 an hour. And I'll show you how to do the same. Number two is navigating business growth. So there are six phases of growth that you'll go through. I went through these six phases of growth. It took me about six years to go through all six phases of struggling real estate agent to full out owner working one day a week. And we'll go through that. And most team leaders fail because they don't know what's coming next. So that's where I want to serve you and help you there. And number three is committing to the journey, you know, once we make a commitment. And this is not about committing to real estate B school as much as it's committing to building something that has a life, its own life outside of you so you can get some freedom from your business. And a few sort of, I'll just call them ground rules like you are here for a reason. And I want you to just get here, just be intentional with the time we're spending and so we can make the most use of my time and your time. And then I am going to explain just some tactical stuff that is going to serve you in your business growth journey and I really want you to get it. So grab your journal, grab something to write with and use this time as this is just classroom time where you're going to learn. And so I really do want you to get these things. Then we're just going to get real. I'm going to challenge you to think about where you are in your business, what's going well, what's not going well, and I'm going to share some of the reality of what it was like building my real estate team and how that translated into the work we do for real estate B school to make it easier for our members to do this sort of thing. Then I want you to keep an open mind. I want you to get curious, you know, some of the things I'll say today will completely challenge your thinking around what's possible in your business. And make no mistake, I want you to be really clear. I want you to get clear on what you can do with some of the learnings that we go through today so that you can actually do something with it. It's hard being a business owner. Our confidence is something we need to protect. So part of what we do today is to give you confidence to take the next step in your business, whatever that looks like for you, and get going. I don't do any of this with any sort of intention other than to help you move forward faster. So the question that I want you to ask yourself right now and like every 90 days into infinity, open up a calendar appointment and write this question in it. Do I have a clear roadmap in place to build a profitable systems driven business so that I can experience true time and money freedom and live a life without regrets. So I want you to think about that and it could be a real quick answer like, yeah, I definitely don't have a roadmap in place or a clear plan or where some of you may have a plan and you may not have the bits and pieces and that's why you're here. Two parts of this. Well, three parts, four parts clear roadmap, profitable systems driven business, time and money, freedom and life without regrets. That was the motivation. This question, not in its exact form, was the motivation for me doing all of this back in the day. I'm not going to bore you with a complete life story. I will take you back to give you a little bit of context as to how I did it, why I did it, and why real estate B school even exists. This is 2007, November. It's my son Anders. He is like. I think he's like three hours old at this point. I am six months into real estate. Left a corporate job, A almost multiple with bonuses, multiple six figure corporate job to get into real estate. Everyone thought I was crazy. And I was thinking to myself, as I'm newly married in October 2006. This is November 2007. This has to work. I got into real estate to create a life for my family that they never thought was possible. And I was just had this weight of thinking this had to work. The reality of it. This is Anders. You can tell he's not a baby. He's about a year old here. End of 2008. I sold 44 homes that year and I hired a part time assistant. So I went from 27 homes in nine months in 2007 to 44 homes in 2008. And it would. It wasn't working. This was full up seven days a week. I had no margin whatsoever and I was not present ever. And I don't know what compelled my wife Julie to take these pictures. And I'm thankful for them now because it reminds me of everything I sacrificed to do this. This was our first family vacation. If I can see you virtually raising your hand, raise your hand high right now, even if you're driving, open up the window, raise your hand. And if you've ever worked on vacation, if you've ever taken time away from your family while you were on vacation, this was probably 2010. I'm trying to think back. It probably was the year that Kendall was born. 2010, April. So I think she was on this trip. So 2009, 2008, I did 44 homes. 2009, I hired my first buyer agent. We did 58 sides. I did 55 of them. Hired him late in the year 2010. We did 118 sides. And I think I hired three more agents. So me and four agents, one administrator, 118 sides. And two of those buyer agent hires were a little bit later in the year. And it wasn't working. Like I was still the main producer. Without me, nothing moved forward. The deal I was working on, this was in the mountains of. I think this was Gatlinburg. Of course, there's no reception in the cabins. You have to drive to the bottom hold your phone up. And all of that craziness. And ironically, the sale fell apart. So I didn't even earn a commission check from ruining a vacation. And I hurt my wife deeply. She still remembers this. And so, again, just the realization that it wasn't working three years in, it was taking every bit of everything I had, and I had no freedom whatsoever. I just knew that something had to give. I'll give a very abbreviated version of my true motivation in life is my dad. And in a very roundabout way. Here was a guy that he was a business owner for 33 years, and he never got out of. Like the E Myth, the entrepreneur myth, Michael Gerber, is you think you're a business owner, but you just have a job. My dad would sweep the floors. He would cut hair, he would shampoo, he would do color. He would do the books. He would order supplies. He would take out the garbage seven days a week and had nothing to show for it in the end. No asset whatsoever. I remember helping him with his taxes probably the last 10 years, and he made like, less. Less than $10,000 a year net, all in. So personally, he failed as a dad, failed as a husband. My parents got divorced when I was four. He drank. He was an active alcoholic until I was age 15. So just for a lot of different reasons, he was my motivation of how not to do it. And so I knew that I had to build this business so that I can serve my family and my team and just a greater purpose. And I. This is Kendall. Many nights would I sort of leave the three of them and just go to work from 10pm to 2am Multiple nights a week, just to build the systems that were necessary to get a little bit of leverage. And I'll say that it wasn't perfect, but it was super, super intentional. I knew where I was going. I was very clear on where I was going and why I needed to go there. And so real estate B school was born out of the fact this is 2014, our first intensive workshop. We do two a year. It was born out of the fact that it was really hard for me to do this. You know, I went from 58 in 2009 to 118 in 2010 to 178 in 2011 to 248 in 2012. That year, 2012, I had one closing of the 248, and I built it on the right financial model. It was profitable. My team was happy. Our clients were happy. They were getting better service than I was ever able to do it myself. And as a result of going from seven to five to three to one day a week, I created some margin to be able to build a business. Another business that now teaches folks how to do it on their own. So this has nothing to do with my journey. I tell you all of that because there's my motivation behind why I built the business I did and the way that I built it. The question for you, and I want you to spend a minute to think about it, what are the top three reasons you want to build a sustainable real estate team? And when I say sustainable I mean it's a business business that has a life outside of you and that's a combination of systems and people. I'll get into that in a second. I really want you to think of the top three reasons why you want to build a sustainable real estate team. I am going to share a few case studies as I do the training today. Stacy Peterson was the first coaching client for Real Estate B School in the history of Real Estate B School. So Stacy reached out to me in 2013 and she had met me at another event that I spoke at and asked me hey, could you help me? We're just, we're struggling. She was working with buyers and sellers. She had grown a small team. I think they were doing 120 sides or so seven days a week. Her kids were actually the same age as my kids. We had that connection and I remember within six months we were able to extract her from the production side of the business. So we extracted her from working with buyers and sellers and we got her to almost 300 sides in three or four years or so. Got her down to the point where she was working three days a week and she was giving two days a week to Real Estate B School to help me in this business. And today she was able to sell her business in 2016 for a seven figure valuation. Never had been done in her market. She's in a smaller market and she's full time real Estate B School. She's our chief operating officer. So it is possible this is not the large show. I just want you to know that we've done this. This is the first member of Real Estate B School and she really did it by building an amazing backstage of the business. She had one administrator and herself running the year they did 220 sides. They she only had one administrator and herself running the operations. So like just keen on systems and how to run a business from an operational standpoint. Alright, so the question is that's all well and good, Lars. I Love the fact that you were able to do this and you have cute pictures of your kids and your wife and love this story about Stacy. But the question is how? How do I get there? Is what you're asking yourself. So let's, let's go through. How do we get there? The first thing I want to go through is this relationship between time and money and really, truly understanding that relationship. Traditionally successful real estate agents, their ability to make money 100% linked to the time they put in to the business. So if you meet an agent doing 40 sides and they don't have any systems or any even like an administrator, they're working seven days a week to do that. You know, we have folks that come into our world, you know, doing 60 to 80 sides with an administrator and they're. It's just not a good situation. They are just working way too many hours. So we want to talk about increasing your income by increasing your focus. Really good book. I think this is the book Clockwork by Mike Michalowicz. He says putting your nose to the grindstone is a really easy way to cover up an unhealthy business. We think that if we can just work harder, longer, better, if we can just hold out, something good will happen one day and rarely does it ever happen. And so the cool thing about business and yeah, I just think it's cool that we all have the same hours, that time is finite, so 168 hours a week. You know, I have big goals in multiple areas of my life. I've always viewed my business and life like I've always been very holistic in terms of I didn't want to be successful in business and fail in my marriage or my physical body or any of that. So the fact that time is finite, it just levels the playing field. And I think that's really cool if you're making not so great choices with your time or you're not carving out pieces of your week or, you know, you're just not making good choices with how to make it easier in the future. What can I work on today to make it easier in the future? It's going to be a really tough road for you. Make no mistake. I truly understand that we're living in a time where it's just hard. Being a real estate agent is hard. And if you're doing it in a non leveraged, non system sort of way, it is. You don't get dismissed from your other, you know, responsibilities. Right. No one's going to dismiss you from being a parent or from being a spouse or any of that. Right. You still have to show up in those areas of your life and. And then on top of it, you're embroiled in other people's lives in the transactions you're in. And it's seven days a week, it's evenings and weekends, and it's just not going to lead to a happy life. Overall, when you consider all areas of your life, it really does lead to this feeling of frustration. You know, here I am, traditionally successful. Maybe you've hit the 40 to 50 size as a solo agent or you have a small team, you're 75 to 100 size, but you just haven't sort of figured out how to get this thing to be more business and operate on its own and less you. It leads you to believe that you're doing something wrong and you just. You bang your head against the wall and you're just beyond frustrated. Here's the thing. The struggle is real. And so most of the stuff that's taught in our industry, definitely not by the local boards, but most coaching programs, and this is not a bash on coaching programs. Most teaching out there is to help you get busier. Nobody really goes super deep on, like, how do I go from 50 to 100 to 150 to 200 sides and go from 70 hours to 60 to 50 to 40? Nobody's really having that conversation because it's really hard. And unless you've done it yourself and you built the systems, it's just a hard road. So I want to go through something that we call the Business Freedom Index. And y', all, if you're not paying attention up to this point, there will be three or four times where I'm just going to stop the presses on you and pull the car over or stop doing your email and just pay the frick attention to what I'm going to talk about right now. The Business Freedom Index is a very simple calculation that changed everything for me when I went through this exercise in 2007. In 2007, it wasn't called that. I coined the term Business freedom Index. In 2007, I read a book, Time. No BS Time Management for Entrepreneurs. I think it was Dan Kennedy. It was the second edition. There's a chapter in there where they take you through a calculation. And so essentially, I want you to do this right now. Your total dollars before you pay taxes to you, divided by the total number of hours that you work. I'm going to give you a second to do the calculation. In my mind, when I read the book. I did it as an aspirational, like, I'm like, well, I left a corporate job where I was working, you know, probably 40 to 45 hours a week. And it was a really good job. I was making 200,000 divided by 2,000 hours. I make $100 an hour. Great pay, right? In a corporate world where, you know, I wasn't managing anyone, it was, I had a great job. So I was making $100 an hour. So my business freedom index in that environment was 100. I couldn't do anything to make it go up or to move the needles. I couldn't decrease my hours. And it was hard for me to really increase my income. In real estate, let's say you're making, you know, net before tax is 250,000, but you're working, you know, 2,500 hours, 50 hours a week times 50 weeks is 2,500 hours. That's 100, right? There are a lot of agents that are. We've got a guy who is, he's got a bigger business. He does about 5 million GCI. He's working 80 hours a week. And his profit in his business is about 4 to 500. So even as a. He didn't do this journey with us, so he didn't do it the right way. We're increasing, scaling the business got him more free and disconnect time and money. So what is the number for you? That's the question. What's your number now? So if I look back on 2019, I worked probably about 1500 hours. I think I worked. Not going to go through the numbers for me personally, like I said, it took me about five years to get to 250. It took me five years, another five years to get to 500. Now I'm in between $502,000 an hour. And some of it for me is taking my extracting even more of myself from my businesses so I can work on only the highest dollar productive activities. So what is your number currently? And then what do you want it to be? What do you want it to be in the next teaching I'm going to go through, give you some context around the phases of growth and typically what we see, this understanding that you could focus on things that make you $250 an hour. What if you could make $250 an hour working 2000 hours, make $500,000? What if you can make $500 an hour working 2000 hours, you can make a million dollars, right? Or what if you could, you know, make $500,000 and work 1,000 hours in a year and you could make $500 an hour. So there's just. I want you to get comfortable with just that simple equation and I'll bring it back into play later in the training here. So another case study. I met Dave Friedman, he's out of Charleston, South Carolina in 2014, the year he did 65 transactions. He had a part time assistant at the time, and I want to say I think it was his second full year in real estate. His first full year he did 35 sides, so came off 35 sides, did 65. He was working, he's married and, and he was working every bit of 80 hours a week. And I remember him telling me I did an actual case study on our website. I remember him telling me like that year he made about $150,000 pre tax. So 150,000 divided by, I'm gonna do the math right now. 150,000 divided by, let's call it 70 hours a week. So that's 3,500 hours. Even though he took no vacation, he was making $42 an hour at 65 sides, $42 an hour. And so he didn't have the systems in place and he didn't really have any leverage through a showing agent or through a buyer agent or anything like that. He hadn't even hired his first buyer agent yet when I met him. So fast forward to, let's just Fast forward to 2019. His team, they did more than my team, which my ego's hurt a little bit because he's in our same region for Keller Williams. I think he did about 3.5 million GCI, 350 units or so. He took 15 weeks of vacation. He's taken 15 weeks each of the last four years. He's actually as I record this and this is live, it will be recorded and, and replayed. He is, he did 10 days in the Galapagos island with Haley, his wife, and then he's doing 10 days fishing trip somewhere off the coast of wherever that is. Put him in a boat and put a fishing rod in his hand and he is in heaven. And so takes a lot of vacation. Seven figure net income at this point. He launched two other businesses and he's a hard charging guy that all he really needed was a roadmap. He needed systems to install in his business so he didn't have to recreate them. And just a super humble dude when it comes to just sharing and giving back to our community. So again, he works about 1500 hours, about 30 hours a week times 40 weeks or so, about 1200 hours a year is pretty much what he's doing now. So he's at that pretty close to $1,000 an hour in terms of the business freedom index. Now I'll get into the different phases here in a minute. So let's go through navigating business growth. So when I look at, you know, 98% of agents are selling two homes or less per month real estate B school, we pick up where other coaching programs leave off. So we do really well with folks that have figured out a way to get super busy. They're doing four, five, six homes per month. They probably have a solid administrator, maybe even a little bit of leverage on buyer agent side or showing agents. And then we also, I mean we bring on new members that are doing 4 or 5 million GCI. So it's like 500,000 to 5 million is sort of our sweet spot. It's a thin slice of the real estate population. So in terms of navigating business growth, I want to start with the mission of real estate B school. It does help set some context around the six phases of growth. So the mission is to help you scale your real estate business through the use of sustainable systems and empowered people so you can make more money, enjoy more time off and experience less stress in your life. That time money stress continuum is something that we live and breathe in real estate B school all the time. Even with members, our highest levels, with folks that we're sort of introducing to real estate B school and just everyday conversations. When I'm even in mastermind groups with some of the top teams across the country, I'm talking about how much money you're making. But let's get real, how many hours you work in and how stressed are you? Because a lot of team leaders set the thing up the wrong way. They're doing more production than they did when they were small and they're not making as much money. And so we don't want that to happen. We don't want money to stay the same time to go up and stress to go up. It's not a winning equation. So I want to go through a tool that we call the business growth navigator. And there are six phases of growth that I want to talk through. First is just survival mode. This is zero to two homes per month. Ramp is where you're doing it all. This is two to six homes per month. So up to 72 homes per year scale is where you kind of start building the foundation in the ramp phase, but most of the scale phase, six to 12 homes per month, you are building systems. So you can go from 12 to 18 homes, you can make the shift from doer to leader and manager where you're empowering others. And then we talk about exiting production if that's something that you really want to do. And then we talk about ownership where you really could have the opportunity to step back in a big way in terms of the involvement in your business. It was something that I was super clear on. I definitely wanted out of production and I wanted to be a business owner and I was able to do that. So let's walk through the different phases here and I just want to comment a little bit on each of the the six phases and your ascension through the different phases of business growth. It's a function of how quickly you master systems as they relate to attract, convert, deliver and scale. Let me close my door, my dog is barking. Alright, we've got a lovely little two year old labradoodle. Alright, so the attract, convert, deliver scale is going to make a little bit more sense here when I go through it in the next bit of training. For now, I just want you to know that there, that's sort of the blueprint that we use to help folks navigate these different phases of growth. So and it really doesn't matter where you are on this journey, you may not have built it in the right way so you could be technically selling 12 to 18 homes per month, but you don't have the systems in place and all of it relies on you and you're doing most of the production. So with some clients we actually have to go back and look at what systems were you supposed to build in the ramp phase that you didn't build, what systems were you supposed to build in the scale phase and you didn't build. So we unwind it a little bit and then we can shore things up and move forward. So the start phase, this is where only 2% of the industry ever gets past this. So this is really a hustle and work hard sort of person that can really just focus on new business development consistently and that'll get you to phase two. And you know, this is where you're barely getting by unfortunately. And you talk about the ramp phase where time is a constraint and it's focusing on dollar productive activities and getting admin leverage and a little bit of help on the buyer agent side. Not necessarily a buyer agent, you can go the showing agent route. We've got to get you out of evenings. We've got to get you out of showing homes that on a Sunday afternoon when you should be spending time with your family. So that's the ramp phase. That takes you up to six transactions per month. Really, this is where you're doing it all. The scale phase is where systems must take form and the vision of the business. Not so much you as the practitioner, but the business takes on a life of its own. And cadence and accountability, the same cadence and accountability that you use to get to this point are the keys as you bring other team members on to advancing to phase four. So you're building the foundation of this business. And then in the lead phase, this is where you're doing 12 to 18 transactions per month. This is where delegation is key. This is where you're making the mental shift to CEO from producer hiring and training, even new agent onboarding. Those systems, because you're going to use them over and over and over again, are key to getting into phase five. And phase four is about empowering others. And phase five, this is where your buyer agents are really stepping up. It's likely that you've replaced yourself on the listing side with agents that were on your team already and they've already proven that they're culture fit and leadership and management are the keys here. So you're out of the production phase of this and you're spending all of your time coaching and training others and making sure the systems are running the right way and monitoring your numbers. And there's all dashboards and scorecards that we set up with you. And this is really where the true time freedom comes from. We have team leaders that are, you know, some of them are doing 25, 30 homes per month and they stay in production and they don't get the time freedom. So if you're running a business that's doing 300 transactions, but you're still doing 50, 60 transactions, I promise you, you have no shot at time freedom because you're still working deals at night and you're still working on the weekends and you have a massive business to run with a lot of overhead and more stress than even when you were a solo agent. You're probably making less money if you set it up on the wrong economic model. Some of which I won't get into on this training. I've done some other trainings on some of that. So phase six is the own phase. So this is all about know your numbers and developing others, you know, risks to failure. Here is when there are culture misfits and when you abdicate parts of the business. And not many folks will even want to sort of just step out of their business day to day and become an owner. Having the mindset of being able to do it, I think is really, really important. We'll talk about that here in a little bit. This to me, and this is just me. So not everyone even wants to get out of production, but this to me is the good life. I just, I love building businesses. I love building them in a way where they, they're not dependent on, on the owner. And so when I look at the business freedom index and I look at the different phases of growth that we just went through. So start, ramp, scale, lead, exit and own. You can. These numbers hold true for the most part. So in the start phase, you're two homes or less per month. Agents really here are making, you know, if they're making 50 grand net, even 100 grand net, but they're working, you know, way too many hours. The math just doesn't work. Same thing with ramp. You know, you've got a shot making $50 an hour, $25 to $50 an hour. There's nothing wrong with $50 an hour. Chances are in the ramp phase, even if you're selling six homes per month, there's not a lot of freedom. So we really do connect with someone that really wants to be able to have some freedom, use their business to attain some freedom. So in the scale phase, you know, it's 50 to $100 an hour. And a hundred bucks an hour is really good money. Except if you're working 4,000 hours a year to get it. 4,000 hours a year is 80 hour work week. Right? So there's no if you're making $100 an hour, you're working 2,000 hours or regular work weeks, 40 hour work weeks. There's still not like ultimate financial freedom there. So the money's decent, but your time is not your own. The systems are the thing that's going to move you up in the ascension. And in the leadership phase, you can shift from 100 bucks an hour to $250 an hour. Leverage kicks in and things are going really well. And some people won't opt in to exit production and some people won't opt in to just becoming the owner. If you do though, you've got people in the team at this point that are going to step up and you can hand over the backstage of the business to a key operator and you can hand over the front stage of the business, the day to day to probably one of your Agents that have been with the team for a while. It's not as complicated as everyone makes it out to be. This journey and in the ownership phase, this is where you've got a shot at $1,000 an hour. This is where the cadence in the structure, it has to be really tight and really tight. And we've set up scorecards at this point and dashboards where we can monitor the business without being in it every day. So for some reason, at some point, I put my real estate, when I talk about sort of time, money and stress and all the events that happen in my life against the Charlotte real estate market. So this dates back to 2007 is when I got into real estate. 2006 I married my wife. The market went to complete crap. My son was born. Julie's dad had a major tumor. It was life threatening. My dad had a stroke. In 2009, my daughter was born. I got out of production and stopped working with clients. In 2012 was my last closing launched real estate B school. My father passed away and then we're actually about a year past this, this chart here. But about 4,000 families served in the last 12 years. Only about 200 sold by me personally and over a billion dollars worth of real estate. So I was just super clear that I wasn't going to be the guy that was in production forever. I went from seven days to five days to three days to one day a week for the last seven years. My net worth was low six figures when I first got into real estate. Multiple six figures today. And that's I measure liquid net worth and total net worth. We teach that to our members. And my stress level honestly was intolerable because I just had a lot going on. I wanted to show up at home and I wanted to do all these great things in business. And it went from intolerable to high to moderate to really anymore. I don't experience a whole lot of stress. Very few things, you know, rub me the wrong way. What's funny though, when I look back on starting real estate B School in 2013, I kind of stepped right back into phase, like the start phase of the business again. So it's taken me six, seven years again to go through all six phases of growth in this business as well. So I've done it kind of in two businesses now. So it's been an awesome journey. And here's the thing, so I talk about how production you get. You can get to a point where your highest and best use of your time isn't necessarily working with Buyers and sellers. For me, that shift, I knew it had to happen. 2008, I did 44 sides. 2009, 58, I hired a buyer agent. Late in the year 2010, it was about 50, 50, I did 60 sides. The three or four agents did 60 sides. 2011, we did 178. I still did a third of those sides, but that was the year I was just like, I'm done. You know, I handed production over. Actually, I think we hired two listing partners. So I messed that part up. We teach differently than what I did back then. But in January 2012 was my last closing. One closing out of 248. And every year since, I haven't done any production. I even bought a home and sold a home in 2017. And I didn't represent myself because I don't consider myself to be a real estate agent. And so a guy in my market who was on my real estate team, Dan Jones, he I knew he had an entrepreneurial bend to him when he moved to Charlotte to take care of his mother. She was passing away. Really good example of a guy that was just super focused on building a business. He did it on his own for a couple years. So he left my team, did it on his own. I launched Real Estate B School. I said, let me just show you how to do it. He's still a current active client for us. He actually coaches for us now. He did almost 300 transactions last year, which is just super cool. He started Real Estate b school in 2016, so 17, 18, 19. So he's four years in, four full years working with Real Estate B School. When I first met him, he had four paid lead sources. And we got him down to a single paid lead source. He went from 65 to 105 to 175 to 225. And then we added back one. I think he has two paid lead sources now. So he does some outbound prospecting. But his outbound prospecting, his database, yard signs, and two paid lead sources. So five pillars marketing, pillars in his business. And he did 2.7, 2.8 million of GCI in my market, which is. I just think it's awesome. So he's just another really good example of a guy that just was focused on making the shift from agent to owner. So last part of what I want to cover here is just committing to the journey, not necessarily real Estate B school as much. Although if you're the right fit, we definitely want to have a conversation as much as the different things you need to focus on to make sure that you're going to end up somewhere that's worth ending up. So the first thing is putting your life first. In real estate B school, we go through a process like how can we organize the business in such a way where your life takes priority? And if you don't have a clear plan on how to do that, chances are, in real estate especially, I imagine. I don't think so. There are so many industries where, like your accountant, your dentist, you know, they don't work on weekends and evenings like we do. So I think it is sort of unique to real estate agents. We have to position the business to serve your life. You know, most real estate agents work to live. We want to live and then work. And the second thing here is that growth is hard. You know, if you're a fit for real estate B school, you've already crushed sort of conventional success in our industry, and that's probably not so hard for you to do. The training that you'll have to go through to adopt a new skill set, it's just different. So there'll be some growing pains. The same thing with your physical body. I did. When was it? Monday night. I did. It's called barbell strength. We have a lifetime fitness here in Charlotte, and it's a lot of legwork. All the exercises are till exhaustion, and my legs are killing me. Like, if I go to sit down, I just. It's like pain. And so that pain is me growing. And same thing in business. So number three is a franchise mindset. So this is straight up Michael Gerber, E Myth Revisited. First business book I read when I got into real estate. And the E. Myth question is, how would I think about my business differently if I had to replicate it 10,000 times? Think about that for a second. Your business, the way it's set up today, could you replicate it 10,000 times? I actually could because I go in one day a week and I have a meeting with three people, my leadership team. And if there were 10,000 of them, I'd probably have to have a few regional managers, But I could actually pull it off. I'll tell you, I don't say that as an ego statement. It was not like that when I was all in the business. So you have to think about your business from a systems perspective. And this is one of those stop the presses, stop your car, pull over, look at the screen, take notes moments. I want to go through the business freedom blueprint. So when I think about franchise mindset and always think systems, systems are the answer, the thing that's going to take us to the next level, this is the conversation. So the goal is we talk about more money, more time, less stress, right? The focus is you got to build sustainable systems and you have to empower your team members to run those systems. So that's the mission of real estate B school. We want you have more money, more time, less stress. You do it by building sustainable systems and bringing people into your world that you can empower to run those systems. There are four drivers that you need to focus on in order to do this. The first one is you need to be able to attract high quality seller, buyer and seller leads. You need to convert those leads to face to face appointments and into loyal clients. You need to be able to deliver on the services that you promised. Here's the thing, this is business one on one. This is the true for any business, that's going to be a true business that doesn't depend on the owner. In real estate, this is typically done in a way where it's the agent doing all of it. So you attract a referral. You ask your friend, hey, who do you know looking to buy or sell real estate? Oh, let me call that person. I converted them to a consultation. I had the consultation, I got a listing signed and now I have to input that I have to deliver on the signed listing. Now I take pictures, I put in mls, I write the description, I create the brochure, I'm negotiating the deal. They also have to buy. So now I'm showing them homes. But the listing isn't under contract. I get stuck and deliver. I've forgot to attract, and I'm not converting because I'm delivering. So you can only do one of these things at a time. For the most part, it's the roller coaster that we see in real estate. You have to set up a track, convert, deliver in such a way where they happen without you being involved in them. And that's the essence of kind of how we train on that. And then once you have that operating at the right way, you can talk about scaling the business. So those are the four drivers. Let me back up here a second. Each of the drivers, this is important, has three accelerators that we need to focus on to be able to do this in your business. It turns out that each of the accelerators has anywhere from three to five tools and systems. So there's a lot to work on here. For now, I just want you to understand the concept of the four drivers and the three accelerators per driver. So there's 12 accelerators overall. And these are the things that we work on and that you need to work on in order to build a business that has a life of its own. So when it comes to attract it is database marketing, listing marketing and buyer marketing. And I'm not talking about buying leads, going to Zillow or instant offer provider, paying 35% referral fees, any of that. I'm talking about generating business by becoming a world class marketer. I studied direct response marketing early in my real estate career. And so everything we do is holistic. We only spend, and I'm not sure if that's even the right word, but we only spend money, a little bit of money on radio. We're on three stations, $14,000 a month. The return on radio has been complete crap. It's gone down every year for the last four years. It was good when I started it back in 2010, but it's been a dog. I don't know who listens to the radio, I don't listen to the radio. But the only other thing we spend money on is really our database. And so we spend about 6, 7% of our total GCI on all of those sources of marketing. When we take a listing, we have a system we use to generate five commission checks from that one listing that we take. And that's a system that you have to implement to be able to do this thing the right way. So when it comes down to convert, think about being able to convert leads into face to face consultations and then into clients in a way where you're not necessarily the one that's involved in it. You know, if you've reached top producer status, you know you're selling 3, 4, 5, 6 homes per month, you know how to do, you know, have a conversation to set an appointment, how to do a buyer consultation, how to do a listing consultation. But could you plug someone in to do it and get better results than you can? That's the conversation we need to have. So it's lead management, appointment setting and consultation process and all the bits, the sales presentation, the scripts, lead management policy and protocol, the email text sequences that go out to nurture seller and buyer leads, all of that is wrapped up into convert. Then we talk about deliver. It's about client servicing, transaction coordination and critical technology tools that you must employ in the business to be able to scale client servicing without you doing all of the work. So on the listing side you have to have, even if it's just one administrator, that one administrator is going to run Triple duty. They're your marketing coordinator, your listing coordinator and your closing coordinator. But when you activate a listing, you take the listing if you're in production, but your listing coordinator does all of the work. And there's systems that we set up in the business and checklists and scripts that they follow. If you work with a buyer, you can't expect to make $500 an hour and show homes in most markets. A showing agent in my market, I'm in a major metro and it's about 25 bucks an hour for a really good showing agent. That's a core values fit. They're just not, you know, they can make 50, 50, $55,000 a year showing homes on our team, which is more than 80% of real estate agents in my market, what they make. So are you thinking about those things? And then your transaction coordination, this is where all of the goodwill you built up in the transaction falls apart because it's not designed in a way where it's a world class experience for clients. And then there's a handful of technology tools that we employ and help our members install in their business to help it to run, you know, without them being involved in it. And then when we talk about scaling the business, this is all about creating your future. So it's about a three year vision and then a one year plan and then we chunk it down into 90 days and this is where you put your life first and we're clear on the different areas of your life and where you want to end up. It's about knowing your numbers. So leading and lagging indicators. What are the critical numbers you need to know in your business? You know, in your annual plan, but then your quarterly measurables and then how do you track those numbers weekly so that you have a high degree of confidence you're going to end up where you need to end up. And we've got all those scorecards built out. And then grow your team. How do you identify, attract, hire and onboard new team members, mostly salespeople. And what's the culture and the cadence within the organization? How do you lead and manage and hold folks accountable if you've never done it? It there's systems for all of that. So it's not this guesswork that has to be employed if you're going to go down this path. And then that's where real estate B school comes in. This is sort of how we grade businesses. When we start with folks, we look at their business against this and they grade themselves 1 to 5. How strong are you in database marketing, how strong are you in listing marketing, etc. And then this is the thing that helps us get to work. Alright, so three years from now, this is what it needs to look like. One year from now, this is what we're going to accomplish. And then first 90 days, what do we need to work on? And this is when we talk about working on the business, this is it. So number four is become a warrior. And we talk about becoming a productivity warrior. Get really clear on what makes you a lot of money in real estate. So it's productive, not busy. So what does it mean to be productive? This is probably the best definition of productivity that I've ever seen. This is Dan Kennedy who passed away recently. He's a grumpy dude, so I don't follow his life principles. I really love his business principles. This definition is worth noting or even writing down. Productivity is the deliberate strategic investment of your time, talent, intelligence, energy, resources and and opportunities in a manner calculated to move you measurably closer to meaningful goals. So at the end of the day when you read this definition, you ask yourself, was I productive today? Scale of 1 to 10? We want you to achieve this through your vision and you're only going to achieve it if you're 8, 9 or 10 every day. So we've got to get the stuff off your plate that isn't production productive. And if it's, it feeds right into the time money stuff. Because most of the stuff a real estate agent does about 90% of the 12 jobs. We kind of broken the job of a real estate agent down into 12 individual positions, not even positions, but roles. And most of them get paid less than $50 an hour. Very few positions on our team that make more than $50 an hour. Our lead agents, we call them expert advisors, they make 75 to $100 an hour, really good pay and they work some pretty decent hours so they can make some good take home with no risk whatsoever. So anyway, that's just a really good definition of productivity. And the key to it all is just to stay focused, to know where you're spending your time, to stop and think on a regular basis, to just evaluate like is the thing that I'm working on right now the best use of my time. If you read the book Eat that Frog by Brian Tracy, the truth about frogs is that we all have frogs. The book talks about, you know, in order to move an area of your life forward and business in particular, and sales in particular, or recruiting or whatever you need to do to Move your business forward, you're going to have frogs to eat. And you got to eat those frogs early in the day. Eat the biggest and ugliest one first. And so for most of us, that's either new business development or recruiting or even systems work for a lot of us is just the stuff that we're not good at. All right? So number five is no shortcuts. There's no real easy way to do it. And the good thing is it's kind of like training for a marathon. I actually did a Marathon in 2015 and I was not a runner at all. I had trouble running three miles. When I started training for a marathon, I printed out a plan and I just followed that plan. I think it was a 16 week plan. And then I ran a marathon. I didn't run another one. And I think I took like a year off from running after that, but I just followed a plan. And so there's no shortcut here. You've just got to put in the miles to get this done. Big warning around chasing squirrels in our industry, I feel like more than any other industry, distractions run wild. Like there's so many things we can get distracted by that aren't going to serve this bigger vision that we have for building a business. A good example is changing CRMs. We have members that come to us and they're like, oh, Boomtown didn't work. Commissions Inc. Didn't work. Siri Interactive didn't work. I tried real estate, webmasters. It's like, what? That's all. In the last five years, you switched platforms four times. I've been on the same platform since 2008, going on 12 years with Boomtown. Are there better ones? I don't know. Boomtown works. It does everything we needed to do. And it's never the CRM. It's your lead management policy. It's your accountability, it's your. It's your tracking. It's your management of that system that's off. So avoid distractions at all costs and then focus on going really deep and not wide. I give the example of Dan Jones, who we took him from four lead sources to one lead source. He went from 65 to 105. We added back a second lead source. He went from 105 to 175. And I think he went to 225 on those same two lead sources. I think the only thing he changed to get from 225 to almost 300 was he did some outbound prospecting, expired FSBOs and circle prospecting around open houses. And so again, it's not spending a whole bunch of money. It's just going super deep and laser focused. Real quick. Funny story, Dan's in my market. He uses the same tracking system for his whole business, in particular call tracking. So we were working on our yard sign conversion, and I knew Dan had already crushed this part of his business. So I'm looking at my numbers and his numbers, same market, and I'm like, oh, crap. Even though we had more listings, so we had more calls. But when I, you know, normalized the numbers, he was converting five times better than we were converting. And he's actually in our boardroom group, so he's in a mastermind that I'm. I'm sort of a part of it, even though it's real estate b school. So we were able to deconstruct how he did that. But it was a really good example of how when a team leader is not the one taking the phone call, they sort of forget to, like, they don't have a great system in place to make sure that they're converting those leads or those leads are being treated the right way, or anyone's even tracking if the phone was picked up. A lot of teams scale, and they forget that you have to check if the phone is even answered if you're not the one answering it. And so it's all about going deep and not wide. And then point 7 here is to play the long game. I find that folks that have already achieved that level of four, five, six homes per month, or even if you're running a team, you're doing 10 to 15 homes per month. You're so in the weeds and you're so frustrated and you're so. The time, money, stress thing is so out of whack. Whack that you've lost track of this sort of bigger vision. You know, you're just so ready to do whatever you have to do to get out of, you know, the hell you built for yourself. So foundationally speaking, we talk about beginning with the end in mind. Proverbs 29:18. So I am a believer. I was saved in 2009. So I follow Jesus. I do my very best every day. And most days I fail miserably. But I do read the Bible, which is good. And in Proverbs it says, where there is no vision, the people perish. So there's different. Obviously, this is specific to a situation in the Bible. When I think about it, for me, I think about it like when I don't Have a vision of where I'm going. I sort of. I could die, you know, inside it just, you know, you sort of just. Just die. But also, if you're going to bring someone into your world and you don't have a vision of where you're going, this thing is never going to take on a life of its own. Your business doesn't have a shot at taking a life on its own. So back in 2009, I geeked out. This was going into 2010. So the year 2009, I did 58 sides. I had an administrator, and I hired my first buyer agent, I think after I finished this plan. So I didn't have a big business. But when I look at this and this is the actual plan, I was real clear about where I wanted to be. 3, 5, and 10 years in terms of what the team looked like, the number of people on the team, my active in the business, what I was working on, the number of hours, what I was doing, my charitable stuff, vacation, my liquid net worth, my total net worth. And if my. If my wife was working or not working. And then I also had just different sort of pieces of. One side was professional, one side was personal. And so it was really intentional. I can't say that it was perfect. It definitely wasn't perfect. I just laminated this plan. This was sort of my launching point to really wrapping my head around what had to happen for me to have an actual business that I wasn't attached to 80 hours a week. And I remember laminating small versions of it. I had, like, these really small versions of it, and then I did, like, bigger versions. I had 20 of these all over the place. In my office, in my car, in the shower, where I get dressed, where I brush my teeth on my nightstand. And so for me, I was just really clear on where I wanted to end up. I still do this practice. This is back in 2009. I'm always looking out three years, and I'm always looking now I have a life plan that I've got 12 areas of my life. So I don't Recommend Starting with 12 areas. There's 6 areas that we focus on initially in real estate B school, but I have 12 areas now that I have. I'm really clear about where I want to end up in the future. So I don't have regrets. I just want to avoid having regrets. I'm 46, I'm in the third quarter of my life, roughly, and I feel like, for me, I want to avoid having regrets. And my sole purpose really is to help those around me avoid having regrets. Like, I don't want you to put everything into the business because you're going to suffer in other areas of your life. And I see that happening too much in real estate. And the last point here of this third point is just to enjoy the ride. I wasn't always really great at this. As sort of future thinkers, you know, business owners, visionaries, entrepreneurs, whatever you want to call yourself, we tend to measure our progress on this future vision or this ideal that we may never achieve it yet we may have like massive progress. And so we look at, there's this gap, and this is a Dan Sullivan strategic coach concept, this gap of where we are today to where we want to be. But we have to start looking at the game. We have to start looking back at what we've achieved. And that is that practice of gratitude. Every day is the thing that we use to get there. And that is the last thing is just don't miss the good stuff. So I built this whole thing out in a way where I had free freedom to be able to do the different things that I want to do. This is in our backyard. This is my daughter. This is a big, large mouth bass in this little rinky dink pond. And now I'm just able to do the things, you know, I'm still working four days a week, so I still work Tuesdays in real estate. I work Monday, Wednesday and Thursday in the coaching business goal. This year I'm challenging myself to take a sabbatical for the entire month of June, mostly so the business can support itself and it can run without me. I love working, so that's not going to be easy. That's not as easy as you would think. But the takeaway here that I want is for you to not major in minor matters. And when you're looking at building something significant, there's going to be a lot of little stuff along the way that can get you spun out. Sort of, I call it the enemy is just having you take your picture off this future vision and not enjoy the ride and get discouraged. And so I really want to encourage you to have this attitude of gratitude. Dave Hook I met in. When did I meet him? I met him when his wife, Jenny, only no, she was pregnant. She was pregnant with their first. They have three children now. And so this is probably four or five years together. He had a small team, I think, a couple buyer agents, one solid administrator, his administrator and one of his agents, they run the operations and the sales now for his team. They did about 100 sides, the three of them with the administrator. He was working 80 hours a week straight up. He has since acquired a Keller Williams market center. He has launched at least one other business that I know of. He works probably about 45 to 50 hours a week in those, all of those businesses. He's been out of production for I want to say two, probably not quite three years. He shared with me recently, you know, he had, I think last year he had like three or four months where he had six figure profit in his real estate team. Pretty small team, about 10 team members only. So we don't really advocate in real estate B school to these monster teams. Just throw people in and it'll be great. It's never great. It's never great. So he's, he's just built an amazing business. He now has the freedom to be able to be with his kids. I think their oldest is only like 5 years old or something. So I think they're yeah, like 1, 3 and 5 or maybe even 1, 2 and 4. So he's now able to just show up in those different areas and the areas that honestly matter way more. I think he'll do about 240 sides, maybe 250 sides this year, maybe more than that. He'll do about 2.3 million GCI, really profitable. His business is like super dialed in to our model. So out of production he's making, you know, mid-30s profit before tax and you can make higher percent margin if you do all the work. So the combination of growing the business and, you know, decreasing your hours is really, that's that magic equation we were talking about with the Business Freedom Index. So the question for you as you're sitting here watching this, hopefully taking notes, hopefully like challenging yourself and wrestling with some of these questions, is how scalable is your real estate business? Now when you look at the business freedom blueprint, right, the four drivers and the 12 accelerators, you know, this goal of making more money in less time with less stress. And we talk about building sustainable systems and empowering team members. How scalable is your real estate business? You know, or a better question is, will I have any regrets if I continue to go down the path I'm on right now? So plan in place or not, Are you confident enough in your plan that you're going to end up in a spot that will leave you with more freedom to show up in the areas of your life that matter more than real estate? For some of you, I know real estate's important. I know you need to make money and all of that. So I don't minimize it as much to say, I just don't want you to have a regrets if you're not going down a path that's going to lead you to somewhere good. I love this quote by Thomas Jefferson. He says, if you want something you've never had, you must be willing to do something you've never done. I've got three questions for you. This is our last exercise here. And this is really the first step is to answer these three critical questions and to be honest with yourself. And I want you to answer these questions. It relates to time, money and stress. So when you think about where you are right now, are you happy with the amount of money you're making? Are you happy with the amount of hours you're working? And is the stress level you're experiencing manageable for you and your family? So think about that for a second. Where are you right now and are you happy with it? Second is, where do you want to be, let's say three short years from now? You know, let's say you're working 70 hours a week now. Where do you want to be three years from now? Do you want to be working 50 hours a week over 50 weeks? 20 less hours a week is 1,000 hours less a year. And even if you're working 60, if you get down to 50 in three years, that's 500 hours less a year over 10 years, that's 5,000 hours. You know, in terms of money, did you make 250 last year net before taxes? And do you want to make 500,000 in three years? And then stress? Are you level 10 stress right now? Are there physical symptoms of stress or are there relational symptoms of stress where you're not showing up as a great spouse? Where do you want to be three years from now? Right? Where do you want your stress level to be? Your emotional wellbeing? And have you ignored your spiritual life? Right. How's your walk with in your faith, are you paying attention to the areas of your life that truly matter? Your physical body? Are you taking care of your physical body? Then as you look at where you are and where you are going, ask yourself, what is holding you back? What are some of the obstacles that you have seen that blocked your progression in the areas of life that are important to you? And have you gone through this before where you've set these three or five year goals or you know, you've done a vision exercise? Did you actually achieve the vision that you set out to achieve? And if you didn't, what was holding you back and what are some of the obstacles? When I think about this whole conversation about where you are and where you want to go. Andy Mulholland, who's our lead business coach now came into real estate B school. Similar to Dave Hook. He was doing about 100 units with a small team full on seven days a week, 70 or so hours per week. He told me he was just at the point where he was done. He couldn't. I think they had two kids at the time, they have four kids now. He said, this is just not, it's not sustainable. I can't do this anymore. And you know, when you get to that point, you think about scaling back the business. You know, let's go from 100 to 50 transactions and scale this thing back. And I can manage that better. Like, dude, you built something amazing. You've done all the, all the heavy lifting. Let's get the systems in place, get you some leverage with some people. And I'm like, where do you want to be three years from now? He's like, I want to work one to two days in the business. I want to have the freedom to take an RV trip whenever I want. And I want to buy a farm in the country and pay for it cash. Don't have a mortgage on it. So almost three years to the month, Andy took a 67 day RV trip. He got down to one day a week in his real estate business. Behind the RV on the lower side of this picture is a barn on the farm. I think it was like a 27 acre farm or something like that that didn't have a mortgage on it. And just the intention around where you want to be in the future. It almost doesn't matter where you are. Three years is a lot of time. Most people underestimate where the, where they'll be in a year and they overestimate what can happen in a year, but they underestimate what's possible in three to five years. And so the encouragement here now Andy's coaching for us full time. He's off the grid as far as his real estate stuff is concerned. Just a really cool cat. Lives for his family firm in his faith and just honored to be in business with him. So the question for you is, why did you show up today? Most people go to someone, a coach or come to something like this for one of five reasons. Number one is that you have hit an impasse. There is an absolute need for a change. Sometimes there is a failure, you know, physically or Emotionally or relationally or you just can't do more. Like I can't figure this thing out. Something has to change. Number two is the fact that we are business owners. Take out real estate. The fact that we're just going into a market and deciding that we're going to make our own way, the odds are stacked against us. So to surround yourself or to get input from someone that's actually done what you're looking to do is another reason why someone would come to us. Number three, it's filling this gap between the skills and knowledge that you need to go from where you are today to where you want to go in the future. So let's say you have achieved that four or five homes for a month or 10 homes per month and it's killing you from a time and stress perspective. You need to learn something different to be able to get to your next level. So there's that gap in skills and knowledge. I talked about it before with Michael Gerber Emith. I said working on your business. Most people love the concept of that and they love when I say the word systems, they have no idea what it means. And so when I say work on your business, all we need to do in real estate B school is carve out three 90 minute time blocks a week that we will 100% fill up. You know, when you look at that business freedom blueprint with the four drivers and the 12 accelerators underneath the accelerators on the side there there are three to five tools and systems in each one of the accelerators. So there's anywhere from I think it's about 60 systems all together that we focus on implementing the right system at the right time based on that three year vision, one year plan, 90 day world. So that's what working on your business means for us. It's just get the time in your calendar and we will tell you what to do with that time. And probably the biggest reason is to help you go further faster. So they call it standing on the shoulders of giants. I've spent close to a million dollars on coaching and personal development and most of it's been outside the real estate industry. I've had a couple really good real estate coaches early on in my career and what I realized is that most of what I need to learn. I'm trying to think of the last time I had a real estate coach. We have one now, it's more of a leadership coach, probably 20, 10, 11. And then all of it's been sort of personal development and just business coaching and just Taking a lot of my background was in business acquisitions and strategy for an aerospace company and I've got an mba, Master's of Business Administration from Duke, an engineering undergrad. So I brought all this sort of business acumen. We acquired 42 businesses over a seven year period with a company called Curtis Wright. So I just brought a different perspective. And so for me now I get to be the giant, you know, standing on the shoulders of giants in terms of how I can help you get there further faster. So maybe you have heard me talk about our case studies and you want to be our next case study. The only thing I have to offer you is our pilot program. So there really is nothing to sell here. The goal of the pilot program is it's a 30 day risk free program. There's no charge whatsoever for 30 days for you to build out. We'll do a full on analysis of your business. So the Business Freedom blueprint will evaluate your business against that blueprint we'll build a three year vision, we'll build a one year plan and we'll break it down into 90 days and what to work on as it relates to the specific tools and systems that you're going to work on. And it's all about getting a clear plan to profitably and predictably scale your business. This is no bull crap, almost cursed. This is no bs. There's no gimmicks or any hype whatsoever. It's just you allowing to see what real estate B school does and to see if it's a good fit for where you are in your journey and if we can help you accelerate the different phases of growth that I went through earlier. So it's the pilot program and you've got to qualify for it. So you've got to go to REBS stands for real estate B school and the B stands for business. If you haven't figured that out, we're business coaches. Rebspilotprogram.com go to rebspilotprogram.com read through to see who is eligible for this pilot program. And it's a full on like we give you everything to position you to be able to do this and then you make a decision if you want to do it with us or not for 30 days. So there's no, no gimmick whatsoever here and we'll just have a conversation with you about your business if you fit those criteria on the page rebspilotprogram.com click on the button at the bottom. We'll take a short application. I think there's five or six questions that we ask and we'll jump onto a call and get you started in the pilot program. So that, my friends, is all that I have for you. Hopefully this has been a good use of your time and I just have a lot of love and respect for all of you just showing up and fighting the good fight. And so be good. We'll see you soon. The Masterclass series is going to be. We're going to do a different topic every time I do these, so definitely stay tuned. Definitely get on the next one and we'll see you guys there. Be good.