How to be the Calm in the Storm

What's up, business freedom podcast listeners? I guess technically I got into business for myself in 2007 when I left the corporate job. At the time, I GUESS I was 34 years old, born in 1973. So I've been at business ownership for 12 years now. So. So that's when I started my real estate career. Hired my first assistant in 2008, hired my first buyer agent in 2009, failed miserably. Trial and error through all of that, had good coaches, bad coaches. I think I'm over $750,000 spent on figuring all of this out. And I continue to invest in really great coaches. And the point of this podcast is to share just the fact that doing this is really hard. And what I mean by that is doing this is being a business owner. Building a real estate team that stands for something that has staying power in the midst of all the stuff we have going on in our industry is really, really hard. I joke with our members, our real estate B school members, that it's going to suck either way. That's what I tell them. I said it's going to suck either way. Like if you're doing 50 transactions a year and you're working, that's full on seven days a week. When you're on vacation, you're working as well. And then most small teams, you know, 100 to 150 sides, the team leader hasn't set it up the right way. They're still in production, so they're more stressed, they carry overhead now and it's just even more complicated if they didn't set it up the right way and that, that life sucks and doing it the right way. And of course I'm biased. Real estate B school teaches you the right way to set up systems and bring a person onto your team to leverage that person to run a system that you built so that you can get more time and money, freedom and have less stress over time. Doing that is really, really hard. So doing it the other way is really hard. There's no end game, there's no sustainability. It's stress anxiety. Your physical body is probably suffering, your relationships are suffering, your spiritual life is probably suffering. Your emotional well being is not where it needs to be. And then doing it the right way takes a lot of discipline, it takes a lot of determination. It takes doing things that others aren't doing in our industry. And so I was able to, I am at the point in both businesses now where it's like, it is awesome. And I just got to that point in the Coaching business. So in real estate, you know, I went from 58 to 118 to 178 to 248 to 312 or in one year I did over 400 sides. And the team continues to run systematically. I don't have any day to day involvement. I go in on Tuesdays in that business. Real estate B school I started in 2013 and you know, I guess I didn't realize it about real estate and I didn't realize it about starting a coaching company, but I put myself right back into production. It was just me in the beginning and then my first client ever, Stacy Peterson, who now runs our operations, she runs the entire business essentially. She came in and sort of was kind of like my first buyer agent. You know, she was able to help me do the things I wasn't good at in the business and she had gifts where I was lacking. And you know, we really good combination. That was back in 2000, I think probably early 2014, maybe even 2013. And then I hired an administrator and then we hired a marketing coordinator and then. And it took me about four years to get out of production in that business to get it to the point where it runs really smoothly, super profitable, built on the right model, high value add to our clients and the same thing in the real estate business. So I went on a trip this past weekend and it was annual guys ski trip. We go on a Wednesday, it's usually in February, Wednesday to Sunday. So four nights, three days of skiing and just reconnecting with three guys from college. 25 years ago we graduated college, which is crazy. So just connecting with some of my buddies and getting out. And all of these three guys, well, one of them is a stay at home dad and he's my best man at my wedding, just the best guy ever. The other two are employees in a business and they've done really well. So they now have management responsibilities and you know, they've done really well. They've been consistent, you know, in terms of not jumping around but really adding value in their business, in the companies to move up. What I've noticed is that, you know, when I'm around guys like that and I hear them talk about kind of their freedoms and their view of their work and how it fits into their life. It's not that I have envy at all because at this point I've built the businesses to be sustainable and to, to give me the wealth that I need to have an impact in my, in my community and around the world and in my family and for us to live an amazing life. There's three things I want to go through though. When I think about the journey of building a business that is a true business. Like, you know, in real estate, are you the best provider of buyer and seller services in your market and do you achieve a result for your client that's unlike any other option? And then are you marketing that result? You know, so it creates this virtuous cycle and you're getting referrals consistently. Not the kind of teams that are just buying leads and pay per click and Zillow. That's not sustainable. That's going to die. I've done many podcasts on that that you can go and check out. So I won't dive in there. But there's three things I want to talk about when I compare like a W2 employee and there's nothing wrong with W2 employees. So this is not a bash on like business ownership is the way and W2 employees is. Because that's not what this is. If anything, it's like, you better make sure you want to do this before you do it, because it's hard. So the first thing I want to talk about is freedom. As a business owner, there's a period of time where you may not have freedom. And so let's take the example of going from 50 transactions to 100 to 150 and let's take a 10,000 average commission check. So our entry point real estate B school is about 500,000 GCI with a really good administrator. Going from that to a million requires you probably bring on, you know, it's definitely systems driven. You bring on a couple showing agents, slash buyer agents. It's not all that complicated. You're still heavy in production to get to 150. That's the point at which 100 is about a million of GCI. 150 is about 1.5 million GCI. 1.5 million in GCI. You could make a move if you've set yourself up right and you've got good people and you've sort of done the right things. At that point you're in a position to be able to transition away from production if you want to. If that's a goal at a million gci, you're probably transitioning out of the buyer side production. And so the freedom comes when you can get a little bit farther in the journey. It is not at 50 to 100 transactions. That's the point where we want you to get to as quickly possible. I went from 58 to 118. That was not a fun year. 118 to 178 was a little bit more fun. I think I had listing partners taking over at that point. And then 178 to 248. The year we did 248, I only did one transaction. And so freedom comes as a business owner when you set the business up properly and you have really great people that are doing the work that they're uniquely qualified to do. In the corporate world, there are some freedoms. Right. When you're checking out at 5 o', clock, you're probably not all that worried about the business. Right. You're not as vested as you are if you're taking the risk in the business. So just a different way to look at freedom as a business owner. I've set myself up now. I do five or six trips with just my wife every year. I do five or six trips as a family every year. I do a father son trip. I do a father daughter, triple. You know, I travel probably when I want to, to different programs to learn and kind of increase my knowledge in different areas. So I have a tremendous amount of freedom now. But it didn't come without the, the two to three years of just putting your head down and building the systems and having the right people come in and run those systems. The second thing I noticed, and I'll go back to the early days of doing this, is that the income, you know, I know in 2007 and 2008, maybe even. Nah, yeah, definitely 2007, 2008, I made less than I was making my corporate job. I don't remember my financials honestly from 2009, but I probably did. That's the year I brought on my first agent. Late in the year, I was probably spending money the way I shouldn't spend money. So I probably made less for three years in a row than I made in my corporate job. And so the income only came when I was able to really figure out that, okay, I got to turn this into a business. I want to be making more money per hour. My first Business Freedom Index sort of Data point was $250 an hour. If you've not heard me talk about the Business Freedom Index, it's just a measure of your income relative to the time you put into your business. And we want folks to get to 250, 500 to $1,000 an hour. So as a corporate, a W2 person, your income, it's pretty consistent. You show up, you do a really good job, you're going to do well, these two guys that I went away on the ski trip with, I don't know what they make, how they do financially, but one of them was talking about the stock price of the business that they're involved in went down. I don't know. I did the math in my head. It went down like 15%. And he lost $150,000 he was gonna sell. So he has a million dollars of stock is my guess. So that's awesome. That's great income. But he made comments about, like, you know, not necessarily doing the bare minimum, but I didn't get the feeling that he was, like, overly enthusiastic about changing the world through his job. The income in business, you go through that period of time where you're investing, you're putting. Hopefully you're making the right decisions how to invest in your business. And you get to the point where even if there's a little bit more risk and a little bit more stress because you have overhead, you're making income that is like public company CEO income. You're making twice what most doctors make. The ability to separate your time and money is a real thing. You can't do that in a corporate job. So that's the biggest sort of differentiator between just kind of checking the box on the work you do and setting this thing up the right way, where your time is not attached to your money, and you can have freedom of money. And so that's another thing that I noticed. And then the third thing is these guys were talking about their bosses, and one of the guys is doing two other guys jobs that were laid off. So now he has three bosses, and he's sort of being pulled in these different ways. Who. He's working more hours than he wants to, and he's not getting compensated for it. And he's like, just super smart. And then the. The other guy wasn't speaking really highly of his boss. You know, it's like that typical. What's. What's the movie Horrible Bosses, where they hit. They plot to kill their bosses or something like that. So that's the corporate side. You know, people that have that life. On our side, we have, like, the worst boss ever. It's ourself, you know, so being a business owner and getting back to the discipline part of it, you are the worst boss ever. You need to accept the fact that you are the worst boss ever, because you don't give yourself accountability. You spend money on stuff that has no proven return. You maybe sometimes you take the easy instead of building a system to do a thing. Maybe you're thinking you're taking the easy path by just doing it myself. I'll just do it myself. And so sometimes it takes 10 times longer to build a system, to do a thing that needs to get done in the business. And most folks don't have the patience to build the system, which is why they keep doing the thing and they keep this perpetual. You know, I'm never going to build a business because I'm not changing my mindset around everything. In a real estate transaction, from generating a lead to keeping in touch with a client for life. Every part of it can be done with a system and a qualified person. We have people on our team making $12 an hour, and we have people on our team making a hundred dollars an hour. That's the spread. Our lead agents, our listing agents are making about $100 an hour, and our runner, I think, is making $12 an hour. So I just know that that's the truth. And I know that you can build it and put it together in a certain way where you can kind of make this thing work at a better level than you do being involved in all of it. So that's the third point, that you are the worst boss ever. You need to focus on doing the things that are going to make the business run more without you in the future. And that's really hard because you're only accountable to yourself. And it's this weird dynamic you have as a business owner that folks that literally have bosses, they sort of have to play the game and engage with their boss in such a way where their boss thinks highly of them, where if there's opportunities in the company and for us, it's like as long as we're disciplined, we do the right things, we make our own opportunities. So just a different perspective on it. Not right, not wrong. I just thought it was interesting coming out of this weekend, you know, with two really successful guys and the other guy's super successful because he has two great kids and he supports his wife in such a way. And he's like one of my best friends in the world, so I didn't want to leave him out. And the other two guys are just super successful corporate guys and they've done a really good job. And it was just an interesting dynamic. And it made me think about my love hate relationship with business because there were years where I just hated was hard. I was doing a whole. I think that my biggest year of production was 66 transactions. And I think that's the year we did like 170. No, it was the year we did 118 transactions. I did more than half of them. The year we did 178. I think that's when I transitioned. I wasn't doing any buyers at that point. I transitioned out of listings. I think I did 30 or 35 sides the next year I did one transaction and I was building the systems. I was learning how to lead and manage people. I was stepping down from seven days to five days to three days to two days to one day a week in that three year period. That was around the time I was starting real estate B school. And so that's my love hate relationship with business. It's mostly not mostly, it's 100% love at this point. And there will be times in your journey where you absolutely hate hate your business. And if you're at the point where that is the feeling you have right now, all I can offer you is a conversation about your business. Honestly, just go to real estate B school. Actually go to rebspilotprogram.com our pilot program is a taste of real estate B school and we help you build out. We do four things in the pilot program. Number one is we do a deep dive in the business. We look at the four key drivers of your business and the 12 accelerators so that you can really build this thing out foundationally. Sound next. Number two, we do help you go through a three year vision for the business. Without vision, you will perish. I think that's Proverbs 27:18. When the people have no where there is no vision, the people perish. And so you have to be super clear on where you're going to be three years from now in order to actually get there. Start with the business, then we extend that to your personal life. Number three is your one year plan. We break down that three year vision into a one year plan for your business. And then number four is we take that one year plan and we break it down into your first 90 days. We call it the 90 Day World to help you hit the ground running and build momentum on what you need to focus on. All of that happens in the pilot program, which is no risk whatsoever and it's completely free. And so it is really just our extension for someone that is a fit for real estate B school to kind of get into our world. So if that is, you go to rebspilotprogram.com There's a short application you'll fill out and we'll connect with you and see if you're a fit for the program, and much love and respect, and we'll see you on the next episode.