How to Achieve True Freedom in Your Business Part 2

All right, so welcome back to the podcast. This is part two of how to achieve true freedom in your business. I'm Lars Hedinborg, Founder Real Estate B School, co founder of High Performance Real Estate Advisors. I've been in the real estate business for just over 13 years, since 2007 and we launched Real Estate B School in 2013. And we are just at the point in this planning process, this business freedom planning process as we call it. It's our proprietary planning system that our members use. We're at the point where we just kind of evaluated our business, we restated our annual goals, we talked about every quarter is a new start. I want to say one thing on the quarterly pulse here is that until this moment in time, everything you've done up till now, simply research and development for everything going forward. So every quarter that you move into, it's just another crack at moving your business forward to where you want to go. I mentioned three 193 year vision, one year plan, 90 day world. The three year vision is a critical part of how we set our members up for success. Then we chunk it down into one year plan and then we force them to live in this 90 day world. And don't be too hard on yourself as you enter a new quarter. Right? You have multiple shots at this. Let's say for me I'm 46 as of this recording. I'm probably going to be in business for another 10 to 15 years, let's say 10 years. Pretty pretty involved. 10 years times four quarters per year. I have 40 more quarters to do this exact same process. I'm taking you through. So don't be shameful, don't get discouraged. You know where you're starting. Just take it is just a starting point. Ok? So everything you have learned up to this point is going to be fuel for everything going forward. Then we talked about brainstorming what you could do and now we are talking about choosing rocks. And these are projects that you could start and finish in a 90 day period. Boulders. Sometimes we choose boulders and we try to get them in 90 days and it is a crap show. A boulder is an annual goal that we try to fool ourselves into thinking it's a quarterly rock. So don't do that. The discipline here is really, really important. I'll give you the example of a member that didn't make the decision I thought he should have made. He made his own decision and here's why I'll tell you, I disagree with it. So when you choose things to focus on, there's limited resources. You have limited resources, your team has limited resources. So this individual ran one of the top three CRMs with a really awesome bolt on tracking system with Mojo integrated like a very clean integration with Mojo. And the business was humming along, reached out to me, I gave advice on should I switch CRMs. And I'm like, what you set up is running at a really high level. You know, why would you switch? And we always have the rationale as to why we should switch. And that was not a piece of his business that was even remotely broken. And it's not the thing that's going to get him the result that he says he wants. So the discipline to choose the next right thing in your business, I would have had that person, that member spend their time on agent onboarding or a recruiting system or you know, better tracking systems, you know, financial tracking, or spend some time learning how to be a better leader or manager, you know, those sorts of things. Then switch out of CRM. And so that's a good example of the discipline to do the next right thing in your business. So you can choose up to five rocks in a quarter. I prefer two or three, honestly. And these rocks need to be smarter. So smarter is a little different than smart goals. Smarter means they're specific to focus your efforts, they're measurable to gauge your progress, they're actionable to direct and drive your effort. They're a little risky to get you beyond your comfort zone. They're time keyed so they motivate action, they're exciting to keep you inspired and they're relevant to avoid conflict with your life value or other goals. And so what's a good example? Let's pick a rock around database. So the rock would be like this. I'm database marketing, increase database from 57 contacts to 500 contacts by March 31st and launch First Paper newsletter and and build a content calendar and social media calendar. That's a really good. The inspiring part of your database is that it's a multimillion dollar pillar in your business. If you treat it as such. It's time keyed. It's exciting, it's relevant, it's one of the baseline systems that we teach. It's a little bit outside the comfort zone. If getting to 250 is going to be easy, then what would 500 look like? It's definitely actionable because you're increasing the database, it's measurable number of contacts and getting those pieces, the calendars built out and it's super specific. So that's a really great rock. The next thing you do on each of these rocks is something I learned from Tony Robbins called Bridge the Gap. And it's actually a good exercise. You can use Bridge the Gap pretty much in any area of your life. And it's really simple. All you need is a journal for this on each rock. Step one is, what result are you committed to creating? What results are you committed to creating? And so in the database, you're committed to having a pillar in your business that systematically generates the highest quality leads. There are referrals. I am committed to that. And the collateral pieces, the social media, the content, the E newsletter, the print newsletter, the, the events, the postcards, the quarterly calls, all that happens like clockwork, even if you're part of it. It's a system that we're building. That's how I would describe in step one. That's the result I'm committed to creating. Oh, yeah. And I will have 500 quality contacts in the database with first name, last name, email, cell phone number, and physical address. This is. This rock is not as sexy and attractive as changing CRMs. This rock that I just described will change everything forever. It will get everyone in your world and you, especially in the discipline of focusing on the database. So that's step one. Step two of Bridge of the Gap is what results have you been producing in the past? Well, I have not focused on my database. You can, you know, as evidenced by the 57 contacts that there are in my database. I haven't done a good job bringing Facebook bringing online to offline. I probably have 500 contacts in my phone that I just haven't done a good job of bringing them into my CRM or my database. CRM stands for Client Relationship Management. It's usually a software of some kind. What results have you been producing in the past? Referrals don't come in consistently. I don't send out any items of value to my database regularly. Paint the picture of what reality is like in this area of your business. And then step three is what specific action steps will you take to bridge the gap? So going from 57 contacts and there's nothing around it, there's no energy, or there's no pillar at all to 500 contacts in a single quarter. You need to do this. You need to start a Google Sheets document with, you know, we have a whole system for this. We lay it out and we give you all the tools around it for our members. All you need to do is go from 57 to 500 in a Google sheet, get that Google sheet input into your CRM. We have the tools for the social calendar and the content calendar, but build out those what they look like by week, by month, link to templates on social media, posts and examples of content. And first thing is probably block out three 60 minute time blocks every week for the whole quarter to work on this project. That'd probably be the first thing that I do. But you're listing the action steps. Okay. And that's a really good example of a bridge the gap. And you'll do that bridge the gap exercise for each one of the rocks that you choose. All right, so the next thing, this is really important and I'm going to end this part 2 with an explanation of this here. This process is called delegate to elevate. And I originally heard of this concept. I've been doing it since 2008 when I hired my first assistant. I just knew that any job I was doing in the business I wanted to replace myself in. So I was more if I was going to work with a buyer that was looking for a home an hour away from my home. This actually true story in Lincolnton, North Carolina, it was like an hour and 15 minutes from my home and it was a low price point. And they fell through on two contracts. We finally closed them on a home all in the same area. I probably had 100 hours in that deal. And I think I made it was like 115. If I probably made three grand on it, I didn't make a whole lot of money. The only reason I did that though, because I was building a system around this so someone else could do it. So when you think about your business, what are the things you're doing that you could delegate so you could elevate? And so I heard of this. The delegate to elevate was from. I think it's how to be a great Boss, Gino Wickman. But there are lots of versions of this. There's the eisenhower grid, the 4D matrix. That's an example of this. I've always been really good at delegating so that I can elevate. And so here's what you do Every quarter you're answering four questions. I would just write a quadrant on a piece of paper. The first things you need to list, the things that you're focused on in the last 90 days are high passion, high pay, high passion, high pay. So the top part of this page are high pay. The bottom part are low pay. On the left side is high passion. On the right side is low passion. So I'll walk you through it. So high passion, high pay is upper left. And it's what are the things you love to do in your business that pay really well? That could be listing consultations, it could be building systems, it could be marketing, it could be coaching your agents, whatever. So you're going to list all those and look back the last 90 days. The things that were high passion, high pay, then low passion, high pay, that could be, for some of you, it's going to be, you know, working with buyers, maybe high pay, maybe you're just not passionate about it. Or it could be low pay and you're high passion. It depends on what you think. High pay could be recruiting, but you don't love it. High pay could be tracking and knowing your numbers, but you don't love it. High pay, low passion could be building systems. You know, it pays really well. I mean that's like thousand plus dollars an hour type work to build systems in your business that other people can run. But maybe you just don't have a low, you have a low passion for it, or your passion is low because you don't know what a system actually is. Real estate, B school, we have systems that you can deploy pretty easily into your business. You don't have to build them from scratch. A lot of folks are sort of not threatened. What's the word for it? I can't think of the word for it. They're scared, they're fearful, they don't know what, they don't know when it comes to systems. And so sometimes your passion is lowered when you're not confident in that area. So list out all the things that you have low passion that are pretty decent pay. And then the lower left is high passion, low pay. This could be working on a website, working on your logo, could be working on, could be doing stuff in social media. It could be showing homes. Showing homes is low pay. A lot of agents have high passion around opening doors for buyers. In our market, we can get showing agents for 20 to 25 bucks an hour. And think of your average commission check, our average commission check on the buy side this year we're running at $12,000. So about 400,000 average buyers. And even if they have 20 hours in the deal at 25 bucks an hour, that's 500 bucks. Plus they get a little, they get a 5%, so 600, so 1100 and they may get a bonus. So they may get $1,200 on a $12,000 commission check. Really great pay for the showing agent, right? Because, oh, and they also get a base salary. So their compensation is, you know, it's blend it out. It's about a $25 an hour type deal. And so that's low pay. But some, some agents just love it and it's going to limit your ability to make a lot of money per hour if you, if you stay in that world. So that's an example of low pay, high passion. And then the right bottom quadrant is low passion, low pay. What are the things you don't love doing in your business that don't pay well? The things you don't love doing in your business that don't pay well. Check an email, running your calendar, running signs, inputting listings into MLS. We have offloaded so many tasks to our VA team at like $3 an hour on the low end to $6 an hour on the high end, depending on skill set. So six bucks an hour in some geographies is really top notch pay like $25 an hour here. So we can get like really good administrative help for $25 an hour here. But most of the button clicking things that they do we can get done in a different geography so we can elevate our administrators here locally in that low passion, low pay. So spend some time with this. This is a quarterly thing that you'll do and it'll change everything. If you do this for 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 quarters this exercise, you'd be surprised at what remains in your high passion, high pay, low passion, high pay. And this is something you will do every quarter and then you have all quarter to eliminate all the low pay activities. You want to make more money in less time. You have to constantly get rid of anything that is low pay. Doesn't matter if it's high passion, if it's low pay, you have to get rid of it. And low passion, low pay, you can't be doing those things anyway. It's just not good. Even in your personal life, you can't do your own laundry or cook or shop or mow your lawn or get your oil changed. Unless you're really passionate about those things. You can get them done by somebody at $12 to $15 an hour here locally. And you're blessing that person by letting them do it. So do this work. It'll change everything. And yeah, we'll see in part three, Part three, I'm going to go through weekly, our weekly cadence, weekly review weekly commitments and then we'll get into the daily planning process as well and what that looks like. So stay tuned. Oh I almost forgot. So if you're at a point in your journey where just this conversation maybe, maybe it inspires you and you really don't know how to kind of bridge the gap to use a term that I just taught on. You don't know how to bridge the gap from where you are to where you want to go. That is why real estate B school exists for no other reason. So take action. Go to realestatebschool.com and book in a business growth strategy session. It's simply a conversation about your business, where you are today, where you want to go and what's holding you back. If you qualify for our programs, we'll have a conversation about it. If you don't, that's totally cool. We have free resources and we're also launching a lower level program here in the next week or so. So stay tuned for that and stay tuned for part three where we'll dig into the weekly and daily cadence and how we end our quarters.