Kevin Yoder built his real estate business solo for nine years, then struggled as a new team owner until coach Lars taught him systems thinking in 2014. Lars introduced tools like equity evaluation for pricing and a business tracker for ROI, shifting Kevin from doing deals to building something that worked without him.
As I analyze my path in real estate, looking back at the beginning, I started in 2002 and I have like really like three segments and it started in 2002. The first segment was about say 2002 to 2011. So a nine year segment. So we'll call that segment one. And that was me just being a sole proprietor doing everything on my own without a big vision for what this could look like without thinking about it as a business. Segment two started in 2011 when I started my team and it was the moment where I had a breakthrough from hitting a level of achievement that I was no longer happy with. And I started a team and I did things the wrong way. I hired bad people and weren't good cultural matches and made all the mistakes that a first time team owner might make. And that was segment two. So 2011 to 2014 and then meeting Lars somewhere in the tail end of 2014 has given me new insight into stage three. And that's where I am today. Mostly systems and structure and a vision for what the business will look like in 3 and 5 and 10 years. This concept of working on the business rather than in the business was foreign to me and now it's very much a part of my, my fabric and my day and my weeks and my months carving out a plan for the, for the future of my business and how it will. It'll run very much without me. I mean it's not going to be dependent upon me, but it'll be a franchise prototype and one that will thrive and be successful and serve the needs of our clients and my team members, families for years to come. And I'm not going to be there pushing the buttons, pulling the levers. The biggest impact, I can't say that I would. Okay. One that I wish I would have implemented sooner would be the equity evaluation. And that's just the tool that really pulls together the market analysis of a property. And the reason why is because I use it as a key differentiator in my business. Most agents just do like a cma but this allows me. I do an in office listing presentation but it allows me to put it put together the pricing in such a way that is is easy to explain, it's irrefutable. It positions me as an expert and prior to that I was not able to do any of those three things. So that's invaluable. The equity evaluation tool. The other one is clearly the business tracker. Just having that tool to be able to track the business and knowing what our ROI is and how we're looking at cash flow and just metrics that I never had before and pulled it all together in one place. Absolutely. That's probably the biggest one. It's kind of focused on, on one thing, you know, like this is leadership. Whereas I feel like a lot of the other ones, if you go to a, you know, Keller Williams event or other companies, you'll be in breakout sessions and different topics and pulling from different strategies and it's a lot of great content and all with great, very good intent. But then the real estate practitioner that needs to take that back to their business. It's challenging to go back to the business without having made any real action items at the event. This allows us to think things through, giving us time to actually put down on paper what we're going to do next and when we're going to do it and why we need to do it. And it's more focused, it's more intentional. I get a lot more out of it. Yeah, so that's a huge one. Like just being in a group of like minded entrepreneurs and many of them who are big thinkers, you know, and that pulls me up because being around this group makes me want to do more than I'm doing now and be better version of myself. And that's a big thing. And I can only hope that at some level I'm doing the same for someone else that's perhaps looking to get to the level I am.
