How Chris Upham's Business Reached Over 30% Profitability

So I started with real estate in 2002, actually, when the military was sending me to graduate school. By the time I came out of graduate school, I had to go back working full time in the military and ultimately came out full time with my real estate business. In about 2006 or so, 2006, I came back full time to our real estate business. And by 2009, my business had tripled. And I was at a big national firm at the time. And the president of Coldwell Banker brought in a video crew and did this interview with me to ask what I did to have that success. Truthfully, that was. And they ended up airing that on a national seminar. But truthfully, that was probably one of the worst things that could have ever happened for me because it made me feel like I knew what I was doing. And truthfully, it caused me to not be open to looking outside to learn from others. And that probably set me behind several years in the development of my real estate business until I came to the point where actually I really realized that there was a lot of people out there much smarter than me, and that could really help me accelerate the development and growth of my business. So a few years ago, I was able to start coaching with some excellent coaches. And it was through that experience that I had met Lars. He and I were sitting side by side together at the front and center at a real estate conference. And that was the year that he had been named. He got the King Kong Award for having grown his business from 10 million to 28 million to 45 million to 60 million. And I was sitting right there next to Lars, and he was kind of the legend. Had the opportunity to talk with him a little bit, and I would be asking him some questions. And he really kind of. This was a number of years ago at this point. I remember asking him, hey, should I hire X, Y, or Z person? And he said, well, you know, here's the model. You should follow this. And then when I was asking him about such and such a tactic, he said, well, have you been doing this? I said, well, no, I haven't, and I'm an engineer and I overthink things and all this sort of thing. He just looked at me and said, I'm an engineer, too. He said, you're making excuses. Just do it. That was my first experience with Lars, where he really is just about taking action, being simple, just doing the things that it takes to be successful. So subsequently, Lars and I ended up both in the same Mastermind program, and I got to once again get to Know him better as a friend I got to see, learn about his business and about his success and not only came to admire him just as a person, as a father, as a businessman, came to really admire him for how he had studied from the greats all around the world in order to put him in the best himself in the best position for success. So earlier this year, I joined Lars for the real estate B school that he was putting on, where he really just outlined all the systems and tracking and modules that you need to have in a business to be successful. And. And it was really helpful for me to be able to see that. But really the way that I came around to calling Lars about coaching me specifically was I was once again at another training event and I was sitting next to a guy that Seth Campbell had told me, hey, you've got to get to know this guy, John Muhlste. And so I sat down next to John at the front row of this training thing, and the whole week John's sitting there looking at his Lars Hedinburg Business Tracker dashboard. And I was asking John about his business and he said, yeah, you know, I too have known Lars a number of years. He said, last October, I started coaching with Lars. He showed me a number of these systems that I needed to implement in my business. He said I spent October to December implementing those in my business. And he said then starting January that he. That he basically stepped out of his business to be able to have his team interacting with the clients. And since then, his net profits have doubled even with him out of production. And this whole thing was very compelling and extremely interesting to me to be able to see how Lars had really impacted John's business with systems and processes in order to be able to help John's business grow and be more successful, as well as to be able to have a dashboard where you can track the whole thing. So I gave Lars a call, and it was a really outstanding experience to be able to go through the consultation and determine what areas my business needed help with. The first things that we did when I started coaching with Lars was number one, we cut expenses. For me, probably my number one single biggest problem I've had in my business for a number of years is, is that I spend way too much. And I think it's common for a lot of people. But I think I had the worst case of it ever to where my profitability was like zero or negative practically most of the time, and I wasn't paying myself. So that was the very first order of business, was to go through and see what we could cut. And now within a couple of months, my profitability was up at 30% and sometimes even greater. And so that's a huge win for me. And now paying myself, the business is profitable. And that's something that's been huge for me, for my family. My wife was happy about that too. The next thing was that I realized that for the last number of years, I've really been searching for that next silver bullet or the system that you can buy that will turn you into an overnight real estate success. And. But one of the things that I came to realization of, especially as I was starting to work with Lars, is that I had forgotten about the most important system in my business, which is how to cultivate my repeat and referral business from past clients in sphere of influence. There's coaches in football that talk about focusing on the fundamentals. Having a system in place to capture repeat and referral business from past clients in sphere of influence is a fundamental in real estate. And I'd been neglecting it. I don't even know how I've been neglecting it. It is the highest return on investment, lowest cost, highest conversion rate thing you can possibly do. And so Lars helped me to be able to design a system and implement it in order to be doing that. Already within a couple of months of implementing that, I'm seeing people that are calling me up asking for business that I wasn't spending monthly dollars trying to get them, but mostly just because I was working on being in a connected relationship with people, probably if I had to wrap up. How I see Lars and his philosophy and his coaching program is that he's number one, focused on doing the fundamentals really well and to manage expenses, have a profitable business, and to have a lifestyle that's worth living, really where it's important to Lars to be able to focus on his family and to not just be a workaholic. And these are all things that I admire and that I want to have in my own business and that he's helping me to have. Lars makes it really simple. He's got all of the systems that you need to have, whether it's on the buyer side, the listing side, the business systems and tracking side, in order to be able to have a select team that's running profitably. And so he has essentially all these systems in place that we can take, and he assists us with implementing them in our business. As I've implemented buyer's agents on my team, it's really improved my own personal quality of life. Instead of chasing around nights and weekends with buyers all over the whole region. I have a team that's able to be meeting with these people and it's really improved my quality of life. Especially my sons have been born. So that my business is able to be done generally during business hours, nine to five weekdays. You know, certainly I'm needing to monitor things here and there, but I'm not taking time away from my wife and from my kids on the nights and weekends. And that's huge. I had nearly probably burnt out my wife and our marriage the way that I did real estate before. Now I'm able to have a much more balanced life and that, that's really amazing. I'm able to spend time with my kids in the morning, take them to school, get them ready, pick them up from school, make dinner from the family. I recognize that that time that I have with those kids, there's only a short period of time in the evening that I get to be with them. And now I know that I don't have to be chasing around answering phone calls, dealing with contracts that can wait. And I've got a capable team, staff and agents that are able to help with it. So the things that I'm working on implementing is my business tracker. And I tell you what, I've never seen anything quite like this. This dashboard gives you a comprehensive view of your business from all of the business that you've got. Written pending and breaking it down by agent. Probably the thing that I like the most about it is the 90 day cash flow forecast aspect of it. Where we've got, I mean, I've had master's level courses in accounting. I've gone to my accountant every month for the last number of years of my business. But I've never really had a good picture as to what my profitability is, Especially looking forward into future months. But with Lars business tracker dashboard, we get the expenses programmed out and then as we plug in pending contracts and it starts showing you what your profitability is in the coming months so that you really have an idea as to what's going on, that's huge for me. The other things that it ends up having is a return on investment tracker because as we're putting in contracts and we're assigning them to specific lead sources, the business tracker is doing the job for me of calculating the return on investment, the conversion rates and everything. But all of these are concepts that obviously we know about. And certainly we could probably sit down and number crunch and calculate, but the business tracker does it for you. Automatically other things I'm working to implement is some of the buyer agent systems. A concept that I learned from Lars is the concept of super productive agents. On LARS team, the vast majority of his agents are doing 30, 40 deals a year. Some might be doing 40, 50, 60 deals a year, which is a big difference from what perhaps we've seen before where somebody might be doing 5, 10, 15. So Lars has really kind of challenged me to help me see how I can have those super productive agents on my team specifically all the way down from the hiring processes, what types of people to hire, the onboarding process, what process will take people through, how we hold them accountable and how we track and measure things to ultimately also really have a self managed team where it doesn't require as much of my constant micromanagement to ensure that it's running smoothly and being super productive. We're also implementing LARS listing systems. My business historically has been buyer based and I have not historically had a listings based business. But as we're moving forward, we're implementing LARS listing systems with the goal of creating a listing based business where the listings really drive our business. And as we know, that's critical to your success in real estate. The way that I've seen that LARS coaching has been different than other programs I've experienced in the past is that like I mentioned, it really is focusing on the fundamentals of ensuring that I have the fundamental systems in place and that they're operating smoothly, efficiently and profitably. I think that, truth be told, I've probably spent over the last seven, eight years most all the money I've made in real estate on the next shiny object, or as we might call squirrel or anything else like that. Lars is. Lars hates squirrels. He hates shiny objects. He knows that just by focusing on the fundamentals that you can have a profitable business that is extremely successful with super productive agents. So for me it's been huge just to be able to focus on the things that I probably heard about and learned when I very first got into real estate, but just had neglected to implement. Success for me is a seventh level team that is operating profitably on its own without my direct day to day involvement. Not that I'm looking to be out of my own real estate business today or in the near future, but it gives me the opportunity to also take on other new opportunities, whether it's in business or serving the community or that sort of thing. So I have goals in terms of the number of transactions and actually truthfully much of our business plan for the next three years is based upon the philanthropy goals that I have. I have a certain number in my mind that I'd like to be able to give to charitable causes each month, and it's a huge number. So right now, my business plan that I'm working on with Lars is all built on me being able to give back to the community in the way that I'd like to and to help me get my business to the level and the production and profitability that needs to be, to be able to do what's in my heart of giving back to the community. One of the things that I've noticed about Lars, he's studied, like I mentioned, with a lot of the greats from around the world, some of them being with Anthony Robbins, Tony Robbins and Brendon Burchard. Some of these guys, they really are talking about how people can get to their absolute best, top peak performance to be able to excel on the highest levels personally. And in many of those cases, what say, Tony Robbins has found is that much of that has to start with from something deep on the inside of us almost. For example, it touches on an emotional, deep, heartfelt level. And Lars has learned the importance of that. So, for example, at our most recent Mastermind session where we got together with Lars, he took us through a two day session that really was in areas of professional improvement and areas of personal improvement, helping us to develop our business plan and action steps, but taking us through what ultimately was a process of getting in touch with the deep core reasons that would help us to drive that change in our business that we needed to have. And that's. That's huge. I really appreciate. He ultimately just really cares for him. Lars just ultimately wants to see people's lives changed, of seeing them be able to have the type of life that they can and should have, and that he's been able to experience and the financial freedom and the time freedom. And so he's just working with us to be able to help us achieve that in our own life. And I appreciate that. I know that he cares for me personally and for my family, and that means a lot to me.