How To Cultivate A Business Mindset (Is It Even Possible?)

Are you stuck on the real estate transaction treadmill? You know, are you running hard and getting nowhere in terms of time and money freedom and you're stressed all the time. You know, the first year I got into real estate, I made less than $20 an hour. Here I am selling 27 homes instantly, sort of a top agent in my market, and I made somewhere between 14 and $18 an hour. How do I go from that to $2,300 an hour? My real estate business just a handful of years later? Stick around. I'm going to sort of unpack all of that for you. I'm also going to give you access to our Time Freedom Challenge where you can gain 20% of your working hours back. If you like the video, give me the thumbs up. It helps me tremendously with the Google juice and searchability on YouTube. If you haven't subscribed to the channel, please do so and turn notifications on so you're the first to know about new videos when they drop. I want to take you through my mindset journey, through my business growth journey. So I'm going to step you through every year of my business journey. And not in a like braggadocious kind of way or a big ego kind of way, but really, what was I thinking? What were my mindsets, my limiting beliefs, and how did I sort of step through those? You know, I got my real estate license in 2006, the same year I got married. So here I am, I'm getting married, I'm making a commitment to my wife Julie. That's going to be this great life, and I've become a real estate agent. If you haven't figured this out yet, real estate agents are not on the top of the respect totem pole. Right? We're right there with used car salesmen and lawyers. In terms of trust factor, literally, there's a survey that says so. And I had that mindset going in where I knew that I couldn't like, promote me as a qualified professional and go down the brand imaging route. So that was the first mindset that I held near and dear to my heart. I was excited and nervous on the one hand to get into real estate, and I just knew that my approach had to be to come out of the gate with a way to generate business that didn't require me having that glossy photo and just say, hey, look at how good looking I am or how great my smile is, or, hey, look at my dog or my wife or, you know, all those things that agents still do to this day to generate Business. So that was my first mindset that I had to shift in 2007. That's when I started. March 5, 2007, I left my cozy corporate job to become a real estate agent, not really realizing what I was getting into. The mindset I had was that, hey, I have my real estate license. Surely they taught me in real estate school what I needed to do to be successful. And it turned out that without leads, you were not selling anything. So the mindset of like, this is going to be great, the job. I'm just going to make money with these big commission checks. Two, I had to have the mindset of a marketer. I studied Dan Kennedy and all the direct response marketing gurus of the time to really figure out how do I generate an opportunity in the form of a lead, a buyer or seller lead that can follow up, meet with that person, get them to be a loyal client, and then sell them a house or sell their house. So that mindset shift in the early days of like, hey, real estate's great, I've got my license, it's going to work out to actually becoming a marketer. And the mindset of a marketer is a mindset that I teach today and I hold like really near to my heart in terms of my business success. 2008, it was the mindset of how do I get out of all of this paperwork? You know, it doesn't feel like I'm really in a dollar productive zone when I'm working a lot of deals. 2008, I sold 44 homes and I was forced to hire a part time administrator who quickly became my full time administrator. I started out with 20 hours a week at $14 an hour. I think it was two weeks later that that first assistant said, hey, listen, I've got to go full time and you're going to pay me 20 bucks an hour. I'm like, sold. Let's do this thing. So the mindset of thinking that you have to touch everything in your business when truly you don't. You know, there's 12 different jobs that a real estate agent does. And if you think you have to be the one to run signs, to enter listings into mls, to design a brochure, to handle the details of a closing coordination, to walk throughs to showing homes to anything you can think of that you do on a regular basis, just really consider your mindset around those things and are you the best person that could possibly do those things. 2009, it was the mindset of like, oh crap, things are getting even busier I'm working every evening and weekend. And is it possible for me to make this shift to get out of buyers? It seemed to me, and it was. It didn't seem to me. It was true that I was working most evenings and weekends, but most of that time was spent with buyers. If I could hire a buyer agent or a showing agent, I could, you know, free up some of that time to give back to my family. At that point, my son was turning. I guess in 2009, he would have been turning 2. So he's sort of like running around and just really a time that you don't want to miss as a parent if you've ever been there. And so this mindset of, you know, how can I design a system to provide a service to buyers without me having to do it myself? And while I still worked with buyers, I just didn't show them homes. And so I built a system around, hey, listen, I'm your account executive. I'm going to negotiate the deal for you. I have a few showing agents which were buyer agents on my team, but they agreed to show homes for me at like 20 or 25 bucks an hour. That was the system, right? It's a concierge service that we provide, that we have showing agents available to help you get into homes so you beat out other buyers, and that was it. And that's how I crushed that mindset, or I established that mindset and changed it from the limiting belief that I had around me being the one that had to show homes. 2010 was, let's, let's start to scale this thing. Let's. The market was really bad at the time. We were two years into the Great Recession. I was able to bring on an equivalent of like 20 or 25 years of real estate experience with three agents. So we went from one agent to four agents on my team. I had already built out the lead gen systems, the sales processes. I had administrative support at this time. Everything was running smoothly. And now I can just drop more agents into the system. We, we went from 58 sides in 2009 to 118 sides in 2010. The only difference was the mindset of letting go of kind of what was comfortable. It was comfortable with one agent and one administrator, right? That was comfortable. 58 sides. Money was okay. You know, I was a little bit more organized with my time. I was giving a little bit more time back to my family. 2010 was the breaking the mindset of like, if you're gonna do this, we have to really do this. We have all the systems in place to go from one agent to five or six agents. And so 2010 was adding a few agents. 2011, we went from 118 in 2010 to 178 in 2011. All I did was, I think I actually fired one of the agents that was not pulling his weight. And I brought on two other agents and hired one more administrator. And so more of the same. There actually wasn't a mindset shift from 2010 to 2011. Well, I would say I'll take that back. Cause 2012 we went to 248 and I only sold one home in 2011. It was envisioning me completely out of production. And what would it look like for me not to work with a single client ever. And that was the big mindset shift. So I almost missed that one. It's a big one. And not everybody wants to get out of production. So I understand that. For me though, the ultimate freedom in my business and to put me in a position where I can focus on the things that I was better at was for me to get out of working with buyers and sellers. And I had great people around me. I was able to elevate a couple buyer agents into listing partner roles. I was able to bring a couple of new agents onto the team to backfill those positions. And we went from 178 to 248. My last closing was in January 2012, so. So one out of those 248 transactions, you know, I was a part of. I still worked mostly full time in the business that year, kind of shoring up the systems, managing and coaching my administrators and my sales people. The shift in 2012 was to prepare for really. I didn't really know it at the time, but I was building Real Estate B School for six years, well, five years at this point. And I never really envisioned that I'd be on camera sharing stuff with you or on stage or have a podcast like. I built Real Estate B School out of necessity for my. My life, for me to enjoy life on my terms. And so 2013 was when Real Estate B School launched in April 2013. And I went down from, you know, I'd been down from seven days to six days to five days in 2013. I went from five to three to two to one day a week. We went on to sell 312 homes. Then in 2014, 400 plus homes, that's the year I made $2,300 an hour. My real estate business, so I don't tell you Any of this to come off as preachy or look how awesome I am. I tell you this to share that none of it was comfortable. None of it did I feel prepared for none of it did I not fail. Double negative, none. Not. I failed a lot. I failed forward, I failed fast. And I was just willing to fail and get back up. Fail and get back up. I hired a lot of agents that didn't fit. I had systems that were, you know, barely half baked. When I started running some of these systems, when I got out of listings, I was so happy to not go on appointments anymore. I didn't even track the success of my first listing partner. Turns out that he went on 105 appointments the first time I tracked it. We were like three or four months in to me being out of appointments. He only took like 30 out of 105 listing appointments. And I'm like, oh, crap. Here I was, I was at 70 or 75% conversion rate on met to signed on the listing side and my first listing partner was at like less than 30%. So it was like an oh crap moment and it didn't matter. Right there's a failure. I jumped back in for 30 days. I went on some appointments, figured out where he was kind of missing the mark. You know, he was kind of giving commission before they agreed we were going to market their home the best. He was giving price before they agreed that the market sets the price. There were all these little things that I had sort of missed in the process that we had to re bake into the process, you know, solidify that process. And then off we went. And then future listing partners have been 70 to 75% on cold leads. You know, so we're more soi sphere based now. But these were on cold leads at the time. So no matter where you are in your journey, just know that there is a progression. Know that it's going to be uncomfortable. And if you're at the point where you wish there was a way where you can get some of your time back, join me in the Time Freedom Challenge. This is a time where I'm going to coach you, I'm going to train you, I'm going to push you in our time together. And so go to thetimefreedomchallenge.com or click on the link below. If you liked the video, please give me the thumbs up. Up. Subscribe to the channel. Turn notifications on and we'll see you in the next video.