How Reduction can be the Key to Expansion

Welcome back Business Freedom podcast listeners. We are going to chat about something that is near and dear to my heart. And this is called how to Simplify to Multiply. Extremely counterintuitive. And I see this a lot with entrepreneurial minded real estate team leaders. So not every real estate team leader is an entrepreneur. Terms of a true entrepreneur is someone that wants to build something that has a life of its own. Sometimes to sell it or sometimes to, you know, to basically just cash flow it. They're usually looking out for return on investment of their time and their money. And so I had the pleasure of interviewing one of our members, Maurice Robichaud out of Nashua, New Hampshire and this inspired this podcast episode. So I'm going to air his case study the next podcast episode. So you definitely don't want to miss this. There are some things that we didn't get a chance to go over on that podcast episode or that case study that I want to make sure I really drill down. And there are three things that I learned that were really helpful to MO as he built went from a solo agent with an administrator, an outsourced transaction coordinator. 40 to 45 transactions about three plus three to four years ago, before Real Estate B school. He's been with Real Estate B school for about three years. This year he'll do over 180 transaction. He's still in production, but he'll do 180 plus transactions. Has more time freedom, more money freedom and a whole lot less stress now that everything isn't relying on him. And so the three big takeaways were just hiring the right people and not too many people. So I Learned. So at 183 I think is what he was going to end the year at 183 transactions. He only had one full time administrator on payroll. So one person on payroll, outsourced bookkeeper, outsourced transaction coordinator. They have shared office space at 1475amonth. He only has seven, eight agents on his team and he only has less than a handful of paid lead sources. And he has some referral lead sources, keeps it really, really simple. And I think it's that simplicity that's allowed him to scale the business over 4x growth in less than four years. And his technology that he's used, he's had a lot of painful lessons in the area of technology. I'll get to that in a second. He's working on implementing Trello, which will be the backbone of his business. He uses the same business tracking system that we use at Real Estate B School he has a single platform, he's been down the road of using every platform, multiple platforms, developing his own platform, to doing all of that crazy stuff. So the three lessons and my three takeaways in having a conversation with him and knowing about his journey through real estate B school Number one is hiring the right people. Number two is chasing shiny objects and number three is bad coaching. And so obviously the last one, it's his words, not mine and it plays in super well into obviously being in real estate B school and being completely biased about who is a good fit for real estate B school. And if you're at the point in your journey where you just don't know where to go, your top dog in your market and there's nowhere to go and time isn't your own and traditional success sucks, that's where we come into play. But more about that later. So let me get into hiring the right people. So his takeaway and what I learned from moving when I was doing his case study is hiring in the right order versus the wrong order. I think he hired an inside salesperson before he hired a full time administrator or something around that hire People want to think that you can just outsource, you know, inside sales or you know, a certain, you know, that you just throw bodies at something and it's going to make the business run smoother. It rarely does. And he made a comment about hiring too many administrators too fast and getting every last bit out of each person before hiring someone else. And he talked about culture misfits and hiring the right people that are culture fits, meaning they fit your core values. A lot of painful lessons learned in hiring the right people. I just think it's Super Interesting that 183 transactions, one full time administrator, still outsource transaction coordinator. So he's probably at some point here in the near term future going to bring in transaction coordination because it probably will be cheaper. But this person comes to team meetings and they act like a team player even though they're outsourced. Alright, so that's kind of number one. Number two is chasing shiny objects. And this my friends, is just, is just awesome. And he's happy to share this because it's going to help a lot of people. He wasted well over $25,000 on SEO search engine optimization. He went down the infusionsoft rabbit hole that another coaching company got him involved in and they pulled out pretty quick and left everyone hanging. This was going to change his business, right? This was the promise made by this other coaching business. He was close to 20,000 in on Infusionsoft at the recommendation of another coaching company. He was going to build a better website than Commissions Inc. Or boomtown using WordPress. He was 32,000 in on that. Junked it after 8 months with hardly any leads to recoup the cost. And then he went down the path with real estate webmasters, $26,000 in trashed it because they just, they charge you over and over and over and over again. Again he ran his own Google AdWords and Facebook. Everything else. He lets his webs, his Commissions Inc. Do that for him now. And just generally being a squirrel, signing up for every thing possible instead of just following one path. And that kind of leads me into the last comment here is about bad coaches. You know, it really depends on what you want to build and where you see your business going. Get clear on that first and then find the person, the coaching company that provides that thing. We provide such a narrow MO is like the perfect example. And if you missed, well actually next week I'm going to do a case study on Cody Riddle and same, same, same story. You know, more than 4x growth in their business, they have more time for themselves, less stress, more money, all the good stuff that you can achieve if you follow a very specific path. The comment that MO made which was, you know, I thought was, was interesting, he said, you know, being a squirrel, signing up for every event possible, following all the different personalities and coaches out there instead of following one approach or one person and just bad coaching in general that try to recreate the wheel look like they are teaching you something and they're really not teaching you a new thing or a different approach. And one thing that we pride ourselves on, and this is of course a plug for real estate B school, is that we only teach a very singular thing. We teach you to grow your business through two sources of leverage, sustainable systems and empower people. And you can go from 40 transactions like Mo did to 180 plus transactions to have more time, more money. He's probably working 50% less and he's making probably 100% more than he was when he started with real estate B school. And his stress is way lower than it's ever been. And it's because there's a very specific path you have to follow if you're going to go from top producing agent to business owner to lead, manage and hold people accountable. And part of managing is the systems, creating systems and having people follow those systems. And part of leading is casting vision and inspiring others to sort of lead you know, come with you along the, along that ride to achieving the vision, doing that. Those things are way different than selling houses. And so they're just two different worlds. And if you're not aligned with a coaching approach or a coaching, a blueprint or a roadmap that helps you go from one world and one way of thinking and one approach to an entirely different way of thinking, thinking, different approach, different mindsets involved. To be a business owner versus a top producing agent, it's just two totally different worlds. And there are others that teach the getting really busy at the, at real estate, there are coaching companies that teach that stuff. We have that as part of our program. It's not what we focus on, it's to help you build the systems and hire folks and get agents to come on your team in a very tight knit, high culture, cadence, structure driven sort of thing. So you can provide an amazing value to your clients, buyers and sellers, and also an amazing value to agents that join your team and doing it on the right economic model so that you can have something to show for all of it at the end of the day. So I wish I could go over this whole thing with you. Basically just another comment on keeping it simple, staying away from shiny objects. You know, focus on daily accountability with your agents, not weekly accountability. He modeled all of our marketing materials, basically just swiped all them. Those are exclusive to real estate B school members. Focus on tracking. Oh, this is beauty right here. He made a comment about just because you're slow at implementing doesn't mean you're not successful. And that one, my friends, is there are so many guys out there that are so fast and furious to get after growth and growing for growth's sake. And they only measure growth by the number of transactions or by the number of homes you sell. Yeah, of course that's part of it. But how about growth in the number of systems, foundational systems that you have, you know, you built in a year or the number of hours you were able to take away, you know, from the business, you know, number of date nights you had that year, number of times you worked out, if you took care of your physical, emotional and spiritual health. Like there are so many ways that we can measure success and we just don't really do that all that much. And so I just thought it was a really cool chance to, to chat with somebody that had really good results. Going from top producing agent to really huge strides to becoming a true business owner and still has lots of stuff to work on his business. No business is ever perfect to me, it was just this simplifying the business to multiply it. It's counterintuitive. Your lead sources, the number of people you have on your team, the technologies you use, the people that you follow, the people that you model your business after spending more time with fewer agents to get them up and running and successful, you know, versus hiring, you know, 40 agents, hoping that they each sell 10 homes a month, and losing your shirt in the process because there's so many inefficiencies in that model. And that's straight up the model that a pretty big coaching company teaches. And it just, it doesn't work. If you want to make money and you want to have a sustainable business, there's just too many leaks to. You have 40 agents that are just moderately successful. You're never going to monetize that business because those coaches tell you to go out and spend a whole bunch of money on Zillow or realtor.com and those lead sources are proving to be, you know, the opposite of profitable, and they're not sustainable. So you don't want to go down that path. All right, my friends, if you're at the point in your journey, you know, you've heard me say it before, you know, I ran some numbers or I heard this stat where only 2% of licensed agents in our country will sell more than 25 homes a year. And, you know, we pick off, we pick up, you know, at about that point where like, even, even higher than that, probably 40 to 50 homes is our minimum where you've already achieved traditional success. You just don't know what to do with it because you're working all the fricking time. And then we also work with teams onboarded. We onboarded a new team that'll do about 5 million of volume of GCI this year that they had troubles with tracking and their economic model was off and their cadence and accountability and their books were not really where they should be. So it doesn't matter if you're 500,000 GCI or you're 5 million GCI, if you're at the point in your journey where you just need someone to come in. From a business coaching perspective, where you need help building systems, you know, whether it's to recruit people, to have your agents be consistently successful, to onboard new agents, your whole back office, your client servicing, you know, your database marketing, your listing marketing, your buyer marketing, your lead conversion, your consultation processes and appointment setting, stuff like all of it needs to be systemized if you want to actually be a business owner. So if that's you and this stuff sort of piques your interest and you already blown away, you know, all the agents in your market and it's just not worth, you know, what you built is really not all that enjoyable. Maybe the money is good, but the time is not your, not your own. And you're stressed all the time. Just go to realestatebschool.com we'll have a conversation about your business. There will never be a hard sell into our world. In fact, our first 30 days are completely free. If you qualify, if you're a good fit. It's what we call our pilot program. There's more details on the website. Realestatebeachschool.com we will see you.