How to Capitalize During The Economic Shift | Protect, Pivot & Profit During Uncertain Times

Welcome to Real Estate Business Builders. I'm your host, Lars Hedenborg, the founder of Real Estate B School. Bottom line, the real estate industry has failed to create a clear path to financial freedom. Traditional brokerages and coaching are designed to keep you running on the transaction treadmill with no exit strategy. While I didn't have any sales, marketing or business building experience when I got into real estate, I was willing to bet on myself and figure it out because my family was depending. Having served over 5,000 families with their real estate needs, I've made every mistake you could possibly make in this business. Through Real Estate B School, I've helped hundreds of agents and team leaders realize their goal of true time and money, freedom, and living a life without regrets. If you know there's another level of growth inside of you and you want to learn how to build a highly lucrative lifestyle business, then you're in the right place. You won't find any fluff or hype here on this show. Just real world tools, systems and strategies that work. Let's grow together.

Welcome back to Real Estate Business Builders. Lars Hedinborg here, the founder of Real Estate B School. Are you in any way nervous or fearful or uncertain or doubtful about your real estate business, given the squirreliness, the uncertainty, the demand supply issues that we're having? And so in today's episode, my guess is that there at least is a little bit of concern in terms of what we're going through with just no inventory and less sales available for the maximum amount of agents that we've ever had in real estate. So the topic for the conversation today is how to capitalize during uncertainty, chaos, economic shift. Right. So even though the housing market in some respects is pretty strong, there's just not enough available for all of the agents out there clamoring for those deals. So the subtitle for today's episode is how to Protect Pivot and Profit during Uncertain Times. So I got into real estate in 2007, March, officially. I left my corporate job March 5th till 2007. And that was three months, almost exactly. Looking back, you know, 18 months later, at 2007, June 2007 in my market was when inventory shot through the roof. So it was ugly. We went from 15,000 agents in our market to 5,000 agents. It was really bad. And there are things that I did that worked for me that I want to share with you. And I think this may be helpful if you aren't in the free Facebook group. So I have a Facebook group called Real Estate Business Builders. It matches the name of the podcast, get into that group because I gave away what I'm calling a financial freedom guide that accompanies this podcast that you want to jump in there and get a copy of that. So the question I have for you as you consider your future and some level of uncertainty or not enough income, you know, or you're working too many hours or you're enduring too much stress, is this is you need to ask yourself, do I have a clear roadmap in place to take advantage of an economic shift and grow my business and wealth? This is the time, I believe the next 18 to 36 months are going to allow some agents and team leaders to add a 0 or 2 to their net worth to grow and scale your business and do the personal finance side of your world in a way where you can not even recognize who you are financially on the other side of it. So the, the things that I'm thinking about as we contemplate what we're going to go through and, and I'm not a doomsdayer per se. I do think that our economy, that we've kicked the can, politics aside, we've kicked the can in terms of deficit spending and the amount of debt we have and the potential default on debt and raising the debt ceiling and like all stuff that we've been through before. But I just think there's a reckoning that we're gonna face. And I think one more major world event takes Taiwan and we get involved and we're spread in a couple conflicts across the world. I think things could get pretty bad. I think there's a downside in our economy that we haven't quite seen yet. And I believe the first thing I'm thinking about, this is the time to get excited. I am super excited because I've been through something like this before and it was really, really bad. And I just decided to stay the course, play my game. Things I'll get into here later in the podcast that I think will help you. But if you're not excited, then you definitely need to keep listening. I do think you could. So my first sort of like thing that I'm thinking about because I went from 12 years of no news, not watching any major news sources, to squirreling out for about a year in the 24, 7, the 24 hour news cycle, right? So just these talking heads regurgitating the same stuff all day long. And a level of fear and uncertainty and doubt, you know, really fell upon me and I'm now back out of that rabbit hole. So my recommendation is to follow a source or two. And maybe in the middle I went to one side and I only listened to one side and it really didn't serve me and it made me very anxious and fearful and you know, it has this tendency to, to not connect people. And I didn't like it and I didn't like who I was. So I listened to a podcast called the All In Podcast, which is four really smart business guys that if anything major were to happen in the world, they would bring it to that podcast at least once a week. It's a weekly podcast and so I feel like if something major happens, I'm going to hear it on that podcast. And there's two of them are sort of in the middle as far as their politics. One is definitely more liberal leaning and one is more definite conservative leaning and they just get to hash it out on all the stuff that's happening. So that is my recommendation. Follow just a source or two. And not daily. Weekly. A weekly source that you can make sure the world didn't end and you missed it. And then I'm interested in mostly the sources or what's going on with the real estate industry. I am building a cloud based brokerage is one of my businesses and obviously I have a business coaching company in the real estate vertical. And so I'm deeply impacted by what goes on to real estate. So I follow a resource called Keeping Current Matters. It's a monthly resource. Again, not weekly, but I feel like that resource keeps me up to speed in terms of what's happening in the real estate market on a national level. And then I monitor my personal economy really closely. Really, really closely. So once a week, Monday mornings before my day gets started, I am following or I'm going through my weekly cash flow, all the cash flows in and all the cash flows out from the two businesses. And personally. So essentially I'm creating a weekly profit and loss statement on a cash flow basis once a week. And I'm calculating my net worth once a week. And I'm moving money to my different. My profit account. It's essentially a modified version of Profit First. And so I can just see on a weekly basis what's going on in my personal economy. It's really, really important. And all of this stuff we do at a very high level in real estate B school. So I will have a very, very chill sort of pitch to have a conversation with us at some point here. But we have the tools. If numbers scare you and you're not monitoring your cash flows and your net worth we have a tool for that. The next thing that I'm thinking about in these times of uncertainty is I pay attention to, I call it the fud, right? The fear, uncertainty and doubt. These are the headlines that are out there that are meant to get you to fall into whatever they want you to click on. It's mostly clickbaity. But I stay out of the fud, so I know what's going on in the world, but I stay out of it. And that's really, really important that you're not sucked into the latest headline. They're there to suck you in to the FUD and don't fall prey to it. The next thing that I will tell you is that I'm going to give you some tactics here where I think it can really serve you tactically and practically how to take advantage of a shifting economy. What I'm going to share with you is so simple. It is so simple, but it's not easy. The things I'll share with you, this is where the real money is made. When most agents are going to be freaking out, totally engulfed by the headlines and getting in their own head and there's no business, you know, why should they even try? The goal. And this is what I did back in, you know, my steep ascension in terms of the growth of my real estate business came in the Great recession year. So 2007, 2008, by the end of 2009, my second full year in real estate, I had done 1.2 million GCI in those first, you know, two full years and a part year, 2007. And I did it by staying focused on myself. If you've ever seen a horse run a race that has those blinders around its eyes, those blinders are there so the horse doesn't get spooked out by the horses beside it that are running their race, right? So you need to protect yourself. Put your blinders on and keep your eyes focused on what you're doing, not what everyone else is doing. Right. That is a key takeaway. So my journey, I'm going to tell it very, very quickly, but in June 2007, that's when the market shifted in my market radically. And then we went up to 30% were distressed sales, 15,000 agents down to 5,000 agents. You know, I went from new to real estate, no sales background whatsoever to 2010. We did 118 transactions and then 178 and 248 and 312. And we set the foundation in place during the worst years so that when the market Came back, we were able to capitalize in a big way. The year we did 453 sales, I worked 42 days and I made, I think close to $3,300 per hour. So that is what I would have you take away, is that these next couple three years, you'll be able to put the foundation in place to be able to scale your business to whatever level level you want to scale your business. And that's the only reason I started real estate B school was because none of it was easy. Everything was sort of counterintuitive against the status quo in our industry. I've made every mistake you can make in terms of building a business. And I think part of why I've been at this game of business coaching in the real estate space for a decade here, as I record this, is that I've been willing to share the mistakes with you. And so some advice I have for you as we think through this tactically, is that you have to know what you're worth per hour, what your current hourly worth is, and what you want it to be. My first 10 months in real estate, I made 18 bucks an hour. Failed in every way you could overspent, Made a lot of money, but wasted most of it. Worked a ton of hours, did all my own administrative work. I worked my way up to $3,300 per hour. So you need to know where you are now, where you want to be in the future. And just understand that most INC agents, the game they're playing is a game of control, chaos. They wake up every day, chicken with their head cut off. They're in their email, they're in a transaction, they're scheduling showings, they're, they're doing a lot of busy work, but it's not the real work. It's not what gets them paid the highest amount of money per hour that they're putting into their business. There's only five things that get you paid really good money in real estate, and it's the acronym P L A N S, prospecting, lead, follow up appointments, negotiating deals and working on systems. That's the only things, right? So if you're not doing those things a big chunk of your day, you're not in the game of real estate. In the training, in the Facebook group, I go through this visual and so I'm not gonna go through it. But you need to understand we're playing a certain game. There's leads that come in and, and we want commission checks and happy clients to come out the other end and you need to view your business as a system of systems, right? You need to structure your business in a way where you're building a future version of your business. We call this business Foundations. You're doing the tactical work today, the work of a real estate agent, but you're also doing the business building work as well. And that's really, really important. The last couple points here I'll make is that you need to defend your time when there's chaos in the world, when there's chaos in the real estate industry, you need to focus on working your ideal week, mastering time blocking, protecting your time daily, right, and living by your calendar. I get that the struggle is real. I get that there's a lot to do. I get that, you know, we're parents and we're spouses and you know, we have friends and we want to take care of our physical bodies. But at the end of the day, you need to be honest with yourself if you're actually doing the work required to turn this, you know, little practice, this solopreneur thing you have going on into a real business. And it's taking that approach and building the muscle around doing the work most won't do. And that's actually the good news. Most agents won't do this. They won't time block three hours a day for new business development. They won't time block an hour a day for lead follow up. They won't live by their calendar. So that's good news. Becoming an expert in your market is critically important as well because then you can control the narrative. Tracking your numbers. I've done podcasts, endless amount of podcasts on tracking your numbers around new business development. We did a training again, this is in the real estate Business Builders Facebook group. If you jump in there, you look for this training. I think it was the lead conversion challenge and I gave away a 13 week tracking system. It's a daily weekly, so it's 13 pages, but each page is for a week and it's Monday through Sunday. And it tracks all the metrics that you need to track in your business. So I would say jump over there to get those couple free tools that I mentioned. It's if you know you're at a point in your journey where you want to have a conversation about your business and about how to 10x your business while other agents are exiting the business, go to Rebs Growth assessment dot com. It's just a conversation about your business, where you are today, where you want to be in the future, and maybe you will be our next case study. Our Case Study program, it's for our Business Foundations program and is at rebscasestudyprogram.com you can check out the details there. If you know you're ready to go. You've been in our world. Everything is there for you to take action. Or you can jump on a growth assessment call at our EPS Growth assessment. So much love, much respect. We'll see you guys on the next episode. Be well.

Thanks for listening. Would you please take a minute to share the show with other agents who may be struggling? And if you love the podcast, please leave us a five star review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform. And make sure you visit ScaleOrDiebook.com to get a free copy of my book. It's a nuts and bolts guide to building a real estate business that gives you true time and money freedom so that you can live your life without regrets. Thanks again and see you on the next episode.