How to 'Buy Back Your Time' in Real Estate

You may think is madness. You know, most agents cannot even contemplate because so few agents get to a level of success 2, 3, 4 homes per month, let alone 8 homes per month, which is the million dollar agent status which a lot of agents are really after. You can't even contemplate it because it hasn't been really laid out for you.

The real estate industry has failed to create a clear path to time and money freedom. Having helped over five families in my real estate career and coach thousands of agents to scale their businesses, I know.

What works and what doesn't.

And my goal on this podcast is to share it all with you. The good, bad and ugly of building a highly lucrative lifestyle business so you can focus on what truly matters in life. You won't find any hype or fluff on this show, just real world tactics.

And strategies that get results. You just gotta do the work. Is it really possible to buy back your time as a real estate agent? You know, a good friend of mine, Dan Martell, came out with a book in 2023. Stick around for details on a giveaway for this book, we're going to be giving away multiple copies of this book. Wrote a book in 2023 and how the process as it unfolded for him to buy back his time. He's in a totally different industry. He started a software company. But the principles in that book are the same principles that I followed in my journey in real estate. And so why is it that only 2%? So two out of every hundred agents achieve 25 transactions. So 25 closings or more a year. Right. So do simple math. Let's say it's the average Commission check is $10,000, 25 transactions, $250,000. Maybe take out your brokerage and other expenses you're taking home. 180, let's keep it simple. 180,000 a year. So 15,000amonth, that's pretty good money. But only 2% of agents get there. I would argue that 100% of agents want to get to at least 15,000amonth take home. If not 20, 30, $40,000 a month take home. So the business gets really fun. And your financial bucket in your life, the financial compartment in your life gets a whole lot easier to when you're bringing home an extra 10, 15, 20, 30, $40,000 a month on top of maybe what you're used to or your base living expenses. And so let's run through. I'm going to use my journey as an example with the backdrop of how we teach other Agents now to go about this, this journey to complete financial freedom, complete time freedom, and ultimately freedom from stress, but to have the impact in the areas of life that really matter. So for me, I came out of a corporate job. You know, everyone thought I was crazy for getting into real estate. I got into real estate three months before the gfc. The great financial crisis really reared its ugly head. So for me, that was March 2007 in my market inventory shot straight through the roof in June 2007. And you know, it took maybe three or four years for all of that to settle out. We went from 15,000 agents in my market to 5,000 agents. And it was a bit of a crap show. I just kept my head down and I did the prerequisite work to be able to buy back your time. So before I get into the formula around buying back your time, there's a few principles here that I really need you to understand. And I learned the first principle. We now call it the Business Freedom Index. But I learned this from a book I read by Dan Kennedy. I think it was no BS no BS Time Management for Entrepreneurs by Dan Kennedy. I think it was the second edition. There's a third edition now I don't remember anything about the book except this simple calculation is how much money are you taking home at the end of the day before you pay taxes? But like you're. I use my adjusted gross income off my tax returns, the money you're bringing in versus the hours that you're expending. So in real estate B school, specifically earn a million dollar agent method program, we put the systems into your business to be able to make an unreasonable amount of money in a reasonable amount of time. So that equation income divided by hours, let's just do the simple math. 180,000. So 250 gross. You know your, let's say your adjusted gross income so before you pay taxes is 180. Let's say you're working simple math, a 40 hour work week. Actually, I'm not going to do simple math because that's probably not even, not even realistic. And I'm going to do the, do the calculation here on my calculator. And you should take out your calculator and run these numbers for your actual so 180,000 divided. Let's do a 50 hour workweek. So that's 2,500 hours per year. So I don't know if you can see that, but it's $72 per hour. And we call that your Business Freedom Index. In my journey, I I didn't calculate, I didn't call it this back in the day. I didn't know I was going to launch a real estate coaching business coaching company when I first got into real estate. But looking back on my journey in terms of my business freedom Index, my income per hour, my first 10 months in the business, March through December 2007, $18 per hour. So I wasted money on a bunch of stuff. I sold 27 homes. My top line was pretty decent. I, I overpaid my broker. I didn't know anything about anything. And I made 18 bucks an hour. It took me, I think three years to get to 2:50, one more year to get to 500 per hour, one more year to get to a thousand, then another year to get to 2000, then ultimately over $3000 per hour. I ran in that business pretty consistently for, you know, six or seven years after I cracked the code on buying back your time, putting systems in place around lead gen, lead nurture appointment, setting your sales frameworks and all of that. And so this principle of knowing where you are in terms of the money you're making per hour and where you want to get to is kind of the baseline that we need to establish. And for you to have confidence that even if you don't know the path to increase what we call Business Freedom Index, there definitely is a predictable route to go about it. And so that's the first thing that we have to sort of normalize and speak the language of like okay, how much money am I making per unit of hour I put into this thing? And that brings me to the second principle is that in order to give yourself a shot at buying back your time. And we have, and it's not building a big team. It's not like making this thing overly complicated. You know, we had an agent come in, pretty decent agent come in and within the 13 week implementation. So that's our million dollar agent method. If you know you want to come, come into our world. All we have to offer you, by the way, is a conversation about your business. Go to million dollar agent method.com and book in a strategy session. But this agent was able to bring in, we've got really good relationship with a company that trains up virtual assistants for real estate agents. Take over 80% of all of his administrative work. He was able to buy back and this is not a big monetary investment, but he was able to buy back a full 20 to 30 hours a week just by getting this virtual assistant installed in the business. And that virtual assistant was able to run probably 80% of the systems that we help him install within this 13 week implementation. So a real simple example of even if you don't want to have multiple buyer's agents and you don't want to build a big team, you still need to kind of put your head down long enough to be able to do the work required to get busy enough to earn the right to bring on someone that can help you work less hours. So that, that second principle here, before I get into some of the tactics, is you need to be willing to do the work that's going to get you busy enough to be able to afford essentially and have confidence that bringing in a virtual assistant, the first thing you need to get off your plate is all the administrative listing coordination, marketing coordination, closing coordination, hire a local runner, you know, to do all the business errands that you're running throughout the day so you can focus on the things that make you money, the things that truly matter in your business. And so that's kind of the second principle here is that you need to focus on the activities. And that that comes with the third principle here or thing that I want to touch on is you need to start saying no to more things. And so this could be, you know, we've had members before, you know, they're flipping a home like they're, they're, they don't flip homes at a level that they can consistently and repeatedly do it and predictably do it. They have one flip that's going on and it's an hour away from their house. And you know, the last flip they did, they made, you know, $12,000, but it took them nine months. And you know, they never even calculated the amount of effort put into that with the drive time and trying to manage the subs on their own. And so that's like one example. Maybe something like that has to go away for you to focus on the main thing and make the main thing the main thing. Another thing is you probably, myself included, have to get off this thing here. Your cell phone, social media, 24. 7 news cycle, we all use this thing to, as a distraction, as a dopamine, to get our dopamine hits and to get the likes and to all the crap, right? Be honest with yourself about where you're spending your time and be diligent about taking the time away from, you know, social or the 24. 7 news cycle, or if you're looking at sports or whatever, take that time and put it back into the business and honor that first part of your day. Which is new business development and lead follow up. So once you do that for 30, 45, 60 days, you will be in a position where you'll have too much business, too much business going on. And the only answer is to for sure systems we want to be able to automate and bring some technology in, but then you want someone else running the, the admin side of your business. And so when it comes to. And again, so to, to qualify, I kind of left you hanging there. To qualify for the giveaway, wherever you're consuming this, go into the comments or go into, if you're on our real estate business Builders Facebook group, go into the, the thread there where this is posted and just write the words buy back your time and you'll be entered into. I think we're giving away, we have a rolling giveaway. So whenever you're reading this or seeing this or hearing this, go in and put in buy back your time. And that'll alert our team and put in exactly that like four words, buy back your time. And then the team will be alerted as soon as you enter that and will enter you for the next raffle for a book to be sent out. So my journey specifically, now that we have the groundwork sort of laid out, my journey Specifically, you know, March 2007, I did what was required. Very simple, like one lead source, one script, one activity. I think it was 25 out of the 27 were buyers. So I got really good on the buy side. I would list buyers so I would sign them up to be clients of mine before I ever showed them homes that worked really, really well, especially in light of the NAR settlement. We had been teaching listing buyers forever. You know, I did it myself personally. I taught my team members to do it. And we've been teaching it since 2013, which is when Real Estate B school launched. We've done probably at this point eight specialized trainings around the NAR settlement and the different bits of collateral and you know, the listing addenda that we need and the verbiage, you know, depending on how you're going to get paid on the buy side or whatnot. So another benefit of being in a world that like we're proactively on top of the tactical, tactical parts of what's changing in the industry. So for me specifically, it didn't take me long. After selling 27 homes in 10 months, 2008, my first full year in the business, I sold 44 homes. I was able to set up systems and ultimately all of the systems I set up became the four pillars of our million dollar agent method that we teach now. But back then it didn't seem, it didn't seem so concise and you know, I kind of fail forward more than I would have liked in trial and error more than I would wish on anyone. But essentially I got really good at building out what we now call lead generation levers. Then I got really good at appointment setting. That's the second part. The lead nurture sequences, the email text sequences, how to warm up the 90% of leads that aren't ready to transact the appointment setting process. You know, increased chances that someone's going to meet with you and be predisposed to work with you and sign you up as a buyer agent or a listing agent. The third pillar is the sales frameworks or the consultation frameworks as we call them. So you put yourself in a position to get your commissions, to get your transaction fees and to sign clients like clockwork. And then what we call our fourth pillar is leverage client care. So so early in my first full year I brought someone on that was able to run all the systems that I built. So I mainly focused on doing the core activities of front stage activities which was, you know, generating leads, working on the lead gen systems, the lead gen levers, working on the lead nurture sequences, the emails, the text, the follow up scripts, and organizing the lead management system and all of that in the CRM. Meeting with buyers and sellers and signing them and then having an admin in place, all the marketing coordination once I built the system, all the listing coordination once I took a listing, all the closing coordination on the buy side and the list side. That was my first bit of leverage in terms of buying back your time was at admin and then even in. And I didn't have this book, you know, it was only written in 2023. The second part is you get leverage around client delivery and that's with any small business owner. It's first everything admin you've got to get out of and then you have to get out of the service. So you can sell the service. But typically delivering the service is where any solopreneur or a business owner that wants to scale their business, they can't be the one generating the lead, following up with the lead, getting them to meet with you, signing them as a client and delivering the thing, you know, it's just, it's just not an efficient way to make an unreasonable amount of money in a reasonable amount of time, especially in real estate. So the next thing I did was hire My first buyer agent at the end of 2009. He acted as my showing agent on my buyer client. So I focused a little bit more on the listings, but I still had buyer clients. He showed them homes. He loved it. It was an hourly wage, more than he'd ever made in any job previously. I was able to take my first buyer agent and he was 18 months in real estate. Sold two homes his first 12 months with me. He sold, what was it? I think it was 27 homes. I think it was what I sold in my first 10 months. He sold in his first 12 months with me. So the systems at that point, all the lead gen systems were running. My appointment setting process was very, very dialed in, for lack of a better word. And then my sales frameworks, our consultation frameworks, that whole process, the presentations, the packets, pre list packet, how we show homes, all of that was completely dialed in. And I had leverage in, in, in the client care with my full time administrator who was licensed to be able to do the listing coordination, the closing coordination for anyone that came into my world. And we ran that model, you know, we did. He came in late in that year, we only did 58 sides. But then that next year I proved him out and then we were able to bring on one or two more agents and get to 118 transactions. Then 178, I did 66 of the 178. In 2011, 2012 I did one of the 248 transactions. Then we did 312 and 453 and then pretty much hundreds of transactions per year as I went from seven to six to five to three, three to two to one day per week in my real estate sales business. And it allowed me the freedom to be able to build real estate. B school, you know, starting in. We were incorporated July 2023 and so we're more than 11 years in at this point. So all of that said, and the reason for telling you that story, and if you've been in my world, you might have heard it already, is that there is a method to what you may think is madness. You know, most agents cannot even contemplate because so few agents get to a level of success, two, three, four homes per month, let alone eight homes per month, which is the million dollar agent status which a lot of agents are really after. You can't even contemplate it because it hasn't been really laid out for you, you know, and there is some fear around. I've never managed a person before and you know, I can't imagine what it would look like to grow my business. Maybe you're only doing one or two, if you're lucky, homes per month and you can't imagine like, you know, putting more hours into your business. And so the thought of even coming into our world is like, I just can't even contemplate putting more hours in. But once you know the path and you have the systems installed in your business, you have a platform built out that will allow you to go to whatever level you want to get to. If you're at 100,000 GC annually now, GCI annually now, you'll get to 250 on your way to 500,000. If you're at 250,000, GCI will get you to 500 to a million. The million dollar agent method in those four pillars I described, that is the template, that is the roadmap, that is the framework that we help you follow. But behind all of those pillars are the systems that will install in your business and they're yours to keep and they'll run in your business forever. So if you, if this resonates with you even a little bit and you're curious about how do I, you know, make 100 or 250 or $500 per hour as I'm selling more homes, but I'm doing less? If you're even curious about that, you have to jump on what we call a business growth strategy session. It's a 45 minute conversation with my business partner that will take awesome care of you. Just go to million dollaragentmethod.com There's a video that you could watch there, but right below the video it says book. In a strategy session, just click on that, pick a time in the calendar, there's a few questions to answer so we can make the best use of our time. And if you are interested in the giveaway, just type buy back your time and we'll register you for the raffle there. So much love, much respect. We'll talk to you soon. Be good.