How Daniel Beer Finally Built a True Business Based on Sustainable Systems

This is my 10th year in real estate, so I'm in the process of my 10th year now. What led me to working with Lars is I've noticed I knew who he was. I noticed him on different Facebook groups and threads and boards and so on. Always seemed to be giving good advice. Seemed to command a lot of respect from pretty much everybody. So that was really it. But really, I think kind of connected the dots for me is I was searching for, I don't know, that next coaching company, but I'm almost hesitant to use the word coaching. I never refer to Lars as my coach. I always call him my consultant. And I didn't want that. Typical, Just rah rah coach. I didn't need someone to teach me how to prospect. I didn't need somebody to teach me how to do real estate. I needed a business consultant that understood the real estate industry. And I didn't really know exactly where I would find that. But anyway, with a group of people, that group of agents that I talked to across the country, Buddy Blake, actually, I think he's in South Carolina. Buddy Blake, very well respected agent. He reached out to me and said, hey, maybe you should go take a look at Lars heading board. And I did. And at first I actually thought it was pricey for me, and I kind of passed. And I kept talking to Buddy, and then Buddy said, hey, listen, just like in your own business, you get what you pay for, and it's not about what you're paying, it's about the value. He took me down that road like I would take a seller down that road. And so I signed up, and it's been great and just awesome. Buddy did me a great favor.

Cool.

So you mentioned you didn't want a rah rah coach. What struggles did you have in your business that you thought Lars could address?

Team structure, compensation, running meetings, efficiencies, systems, hiring, recruiting, business issues. And we just happen to be selling real estate here, but issues that probably we could have a mastermind group with people outside the industry and discuss the same issues. So that's what I wanted to tackle. And still I'm in the process of.

Cool.

So, like, what. If you don't mind sharing, what was your GCI before that? How many deals were you doing at that time?

Well, I don't know. I think probably the best way I could share that with you would be. Last year, Team GCI for us was 930,000. And this year, we'll be right above or right below somewhere, hovering at a million four.

Great.

More importantly, really is. My work schedule is more predictable. Our team is unbelievably cohesive. Like we just real team for the first time. I love the team. It just feels a lot more sustainable a lot. It feels like a real business.

Great.

That's the biggest.

So what specifically did you implement after you started working with Lars that helped you achieve the results you just talked about?

Yeah, so we started recruiting really is one of the main things before we started recruiting, actually really started. Really got the right compensation structure in place, team agreements in place, like actually started making this thing look like a business. And then we went out to recruit and started recruiting the right who? Right. It wasn't about so much the plan. It was, let's get great people on board and then we'll figure out where we're heading. Which, funny enough, actually just this morning, that all tied together for me because I was reading Good to Great, and that's exactly what the Good to Great companies were doing in that book. Awesome book. If you haven't read it or anyone watching this, recommend it. But we added a just wonderful, awesome, awesome, awesome listing and transaction manager to the team. Who was our second administrator When I signed up with Lars, I just hired somebody that was my executive assistant. But really everything that we kind of started putting in place for that person was also with Lars help. So those two people were just unbelievably key for the business. And then we started hiring buyer agents because we really just had too many leads being assigned for very few agents. And so we started hiring buyer agents. But more importantly, again, because the truth is, we missed on at least one of those. But more importantly, we have the processes in place to continuously be hiring, to always have that bench filling up should we need to go to it. So those were really key things that we put in place. We put a lot of tracking mechanisms in place for our Isaac, for our buyer specialists, and also for our marketing. So I can tell you how many phone calls are generated from any one piece of marketing that we do. We're pretty marketing heavy in my business, so we know what pieces are pooling, which ones are not, what's generating a phone call, how much ROI we can attribute to any one particular ad spend. So we know where to pull back and where to get heavier.

Okay, do you have any stories about how this has helped you outside of your business, in your personal life or anything like that?

Yeah, for sure. My wife always says she loves Lars. She doesn't even call him.

That's awesome.

But a lot of, you know, I wasn't expecting this side of it, but a lot of the program working with him, there's always an emphasis on what does the life work balance look like, what time are you getting home? Are you present with your family? Why are you doing what you're doing? You know, on some level, of course, this is all about like building your business to being as big as it can be. But, you know, recently at the workshop we had in Charlotte, Lars said to somebody, listen, I actually don't, you know, this applied to this particular person for that particular person's situation. But part of this applies to all of us. He said, if you don't do a single another deal all of next year, you do exactly what you did this year. But you get to your family, you see your kids, you get that part of your life in order. That would be a tremendous thing. There's been a lot of self improvement. I don't know if people like that word or not, but there's been a lot of, of self assessment, self improvement, introspective thought, never losing focus of why we're doing what we're doing. And for some of us, like for myself, you know, sometimes not just not losing focus, but finding the focus.

Yeah.

Okay, so would you consider that the main difference? And I don't know if you've worked with other trainers or coaches before, but would that be the main difference between Lars and other agents, or do you have any other thoughts on how he's different?

That's an absolute difference, for sure. I've never had anyone else really hone in on that side of it. Totally clear to me how the two feed each other too. So I know that when I'm working on having a happier home and getting, being healthier and working out and opening, you know, just working on my mind, I know I'm also working on my business, but there's other differences too. Like a lot of others I always felt were kind of, you have a weekly phone call and hey, what's going on in the business this week? And then you just sort of chit chat about whatever crap happened that week and then that's it. This is. There's an actual plan that we're implementing. There's an actual business model that's being implemented. The community with the other agents that are trying to implement the plan as well is great because we're always talking about which parts of it are in place, which ones aren't, how they're working. Just like a couple days ago, I think it was Mike Pinnell, he. Excuse me, David Pinnell. He's going to hate me for saying that Mike's is broke. But David, he sent something through on the Facebook group, something like, hey, I just got my first everyday open house lead. A system I've never seen anywhere except for with Lars and stuff like that. It's just cool because the day before he said, okay, we're implementing it, the next day he reported his first lead had just come through. So it's just nice to see that happening. We're all implementing a real blueprint, like Lars calls it. And that's because it is what it is. It's a blueprint. So that's the difference for sure. He tries to discourage us from spending money on all kinds of different new shiny toys. That's a huge difference. And there's others, there's others. But that's why I call him a consultant. He's not my business or he's not my real estate coach, he's my business consultant.

Cool.

Okay, so what's next? What does success with Lars ultimately look like to you and where do you see your business headed the next couple of years?

I'm in the process of right now completing my plan, my written plan, laminated plan for 2015. But where do I see this going? I see this going to where we have predictable, sustainable revenue that runs with or without me, where people are really unbelievably happy working here on the team, where I'm using the business to fund the life that my family wants to have, where I have the option to stay in production or not, depending on just where I want to be at that time. Right now I know I want to be in production and frankly, my business needs me in that position now. But we're working on implementing the systems where that becomes optional. And I could really just be team owner or CEO or I could also take a position as listing specialist or any other position I want within the team. But I would see us with probably, I don't want a big. I don't want a team that grows very wide. So I could see us with about five high producing agents that all have real production, real just kick ass production where they are actually among the highest producers individually in our county. I see us probably with an additional ISA than what we have right now, probably one on the buy side, one on the sell side and probably adding another transaction manager or client care manager that would dedicate themselves to the buyer side exclusively and also offer other kinds of support to the buyer agent team. While we have, you know, carers in place now doing both Sides, but where we would have her or if she was moved up to a different position, have somebody else really managing everything. That's a listing. From the time we. From the time we sign a listing through contract to close, that's the basic picture of the team that I want to have as far as team structure goes from a business development standpoint. There's a lot to tackle every year. I'm needing to just choose one thing to make sure we're adding one pillar to the business because want to get stretched too thin. But there's just a lot of opportunity out there.

Right.

He always says go. What's he said go deep, not wide. And it sounds like you're going to be doing that.

Go deep, not wide. Squeeze the lemon. Yeah. Okay.

What would you say to someone on the fence about working with Lars that's maybe experiencing the same fears you did going in?

What I'd say is, even if you jumped in and got access to all of his tools, all the tracking systems, accountability systems, the team agreements, the business tracker, everything that's there, and for whatever reason, it just wasn't for you, you're walking away a big time winner. I mean, Lars is definitely on the short end of that one. He continues to operate it that way. He probably knows and has the confidence, just like we all do with our guaranteed sale and everything else that we do on the sales side in our businesses. He probably knows that once he gets somebody to experience two months worth, that he's probably keeping them. But like I said, in the worst case scenario, you're not walking away a loser. If you actually came in, captured all that material and then for whatever reason weren't to continue. So I go for that. That's a no brainer.

Great.

Okay. And then kind of along the same lines, what would you say to anyone who is actually working with Lars? What advice would you give them to be successful within his program?

People working with him now? Just. Just our focus right now because the question you just asked is actually something I struggled with for a while because there's so much you can get into and so many systems you could implement and get going on. So we had an awesome call recently with Stacy actually, and we're just focused on one module essentially from the business, from B school that Lars has. So we're fully focused on the listing system right now. And that's what I encourage you to do. Whether you're focused on the listing system, the buyer system, the accountability system, the stepping out of your business systems that he has, just go real deep make sure you're 100% implemented on one of those modules and then move on to the next one. I think that's the best advice because otherwise there's just so much there that you can get kind of lost in it. So just really figure out what would make the biggest impact in your business. For us, the buyer side of our business was fairly developed already, so we actually quickly applied the buyer accountability systems that BARS has. But other than that, that side of our business was pretty solid. I mean, that's always been very profitable area for us. And so now we're just 100% laser focused on the listing systems. If you take it one step at a time like that, your business will look 100% different a year from now. It just will. It just will. And even if you're a high producing top team now, and we did great before this too, but something's going to be different. I mean, it's going to be tighter, it's going to be better. You're going to go on better appointments, your appointments will be more qualified, your closing ratio is going to be bigger, you're going to get home earlier, your wife will like you more, your husband will, you know, be more into you. Like, your life will look different if you implement those modules one at a time.

Great.

This has been really great. If there's anything else that you could add to sum up your experience working with Lars, what would that be?

It's just fun, man. I mean, it's. I'm just thankful I found it, really. And no one's making me be here, no one's making me say this. It's great. I just don't want you guys to show this to anyone in my market.