How to Eliminate Distractions & Keep Your Shiny Object Syndrome in Check

Welcome back to Real Estate Team Builders. Lars Henneborg here, the founder of Real Estate B School. And we are going to dive deep into the solution for entrepreneurial add. And I'm going to grab my little friend here, this guy. If you're watching the YouTube version, you see that I'm holding a squirrel. I've had this squirrel on my desk or around me in the vicinity of my desk for probably 1112 years now. So entrepreneurial add is the ability to. Or not even the ability. Everyone has the ability to get distracted, but entrepreneurs are always looking for the next best thing and they want to believe that there's some easy button or shortcut to growing and scaling. And I see this hundreds and hundreds of members, probably more than a thousand members have been through Real Estate B School and some have been successful and some have failed to succeed. And I think it comes down to this sort of the ability to get distracted. So this is a squirrel and so it's like looking, imagining like a dog seeing a squirrel and then go like squirrel jumping over and trying to chase the squirrel and then running and chasing another squirrel. So business minded. And that's. You're listening to this podcast. If you have a mindset toward growth and you're going to do that inside the real estate space, residential real estate sales, you are likely sort of a squirrel chaser, or we also call it shiny object syndrome, where you're constantly chasing this next best thing. If you listen to the previous podcast, Greg Miller, who is a business coach for Real Estate B School, he's been a coach for us for years and I admire him so, so much. His team last year did 420 transactions with nine agents selling 3.1 million of GCI, which he said was a sweet spot for him. 88 million in volume. Do the math. In a very tight market, he's Getting more than 3%, he said 4% on the list side on average. So how. And he also commented that he had slow, steady growth, so he resisted the temptation that is all around us is to spin out into things that we think are going to make our business grow faster and ultimately they don't. So how do you solve this? Let's say you have a wiring, which I do, and I have messed up many, many times before. I've gone to conferences and I come back with a whole bunch of crap that we're going to pivot hard into and it's going to be great for our business. And it just spins everyone out on my team. Everyone loses faith. They're wondering if you're even worth following or any of that. How do we solve this sort of innate rampant challenge that team builders have? You know, this easily, easily distracted and we kind of want to chase, chase the squirrel. So I'm going to break this down into three parts. The first thing and this, you know, it's not. You would think that someone building a team would, would follow this basic thing, but I'm going to break it down anyway because I'd say 80% aren't, aren't following a clear plan. That's number one real estate. B school, we call it a 3190 which is a three year vision. A one year plan, 90 day. We're also quarterly but also a 13 7. So 3190137 and the 13 is 13 weeks and a quarter and the 7 is 7 days in a week. So how do we take a three year vision of clear three year vision as clear as you could possibly get not only in your real estate business but also in your personal life. And how do you break that down into the daily and the hourly and, and the choices you make about what to focus on? Right. That is something that is not widely taught. And I mean I guess it probably business planning is something that is obvious and it should be obvious but creating a plan and having it live in the business, in the daily is where I see a massive, massive disconnect. And so you are not going to be able to scale your business consistently and achieve that slow, steady, profitable growth that Greg talked about in the prior episode unless you are building toward a three year vision. And so let's say, say you, you want to build a real estate team or you just had your first admin hire. Liken this to if you've heard me talk about my journey before, this is, let's say the year That I sold 58 homes was when I started, when I, when I first launched the team, 58 Homes. I decided late in that year, September, October in that year that I was going to build a real estate team. And I think I decided Pre decided in 2012. So three years out, my three year vision was to sell I want to say like 240 homes. And I did, I get it. I did get it. So my goal was to get to 240 homes where I was just doing listings and so I didn't want to work with buyers anymore. Like I, in detail. I wrote out exactly where I wanted my business to be in three years. So three years in 2012 we sold 248 homes and I did One of those transactions. And so I was just super clear. But beyond the three year vision, I broke down that first year, that year 2010, and I've done this three year vision, one year plan 90 days at a time, weekly and daily and hourly ever since 2009. So this is something that I've just done consistently that I've gotten really good at. I've made all the mistakes you can make in business, but this is the one thing that I've always been good at, is knowing as clearly as I could possibly articulate in my businesses and in my personal life where I want to be in three years. Break it down into one year plan, one quarter at a time, break down weeks at a time, days at a time, hours at a time, time blocking all of that. And so if you don't have a clear vision, three years or an actual detailed plan of what has to happen in the first year of this three year vision, or breaking that one year plan down into to the projects which are tools and systems that you need to deploy or install in your business in order to achieve, you know, stack these quarters to achieve the one year plan that feed into this three year vision. If you're not playing that, that part of the game of business, you're not going to win the game of business. You just don't have a shot if you're not clearly articulating and documenting a three year vision, a one year plan, living in the quarter, breaking it down into the weeks and then, and then the hours. So that's number one in terms of the solution to this distraction or the shiny object syndrome that we see very, very often that takes our eye off the ball of building a profitable business. And the reason it's the solution is that no longer do we need to like see someone post in a Facebook group or we go to an event and some thing is talked about and we're like, oh man, I got to do that in my business. Because that guy sells a lot of homes and clearly if he sells a lot of homes, I got to start doing that. But it's not in our one year plan and it's not a project that we committed to. The 3190 allows you to commit to your plan of attack and to not get distracted. Like you can put blinders on in your business and not get distracted. That is critically important if you're going to scale your business, grow and scale your business profitably and sustainably. And when I say sustainably, I mean like you're going to build it in A way where it gives you some freedom and you're not sort of enslaved by the business, which is a typical real estate team doing hundreds of transactions. The team leader did not set it up the right way from an economic model standpoint, from a planning standpoint, they're not getting closer to true freedom, which is time freedom, money freedom and freedom from stress. So that's number one is to come up with a plan. The three 190. Number two is to eliminate distractions. And what would this look like? So this is potentially not listening to 12 different podcasts, not reading, you know, a book a week on business that might pivot the way you're thinking about your business. This may mean something simple like eliminating news or consumption of Netflix or you know, getting the things out of your world that aren't contributing to you achieving the three year vision. And I mentioned the personal side of things. So business is just one aspect of what we want to help you achieve at real estate B school. So by eliminating distractions, let's say you want to have a killer, fully leveraged business, but you also want to be physically fit, you want to be spiritually strong, you want to be emotionally well, you want to have an amazing, you know, passion filled marriage, you want to be a great parent, you want to be an awesome sibling or son or daughter. Like you want it all right, you, you want to live an amazing life and succeed at a high level in multiple areas of your life, not just business. You must stop doing things that don't serve this greater purpose. And usually it's just a bunch of distractions that aren't, aren't getting you closer to achieving these goals that you set out for yourself, making meaningful progress in the areas of life and business that truly matter. So that's number two is eliminate distractions. And it may like, one thing I had to do recently is I had to physically like, if you look behind me, the picture behind me there used to be, if you go back to older episodes, if you're watching this on YouTube, there used to be a giant blue, like really pretty painting. And I took that painting and I physically put two 3 inch sheetrock screws in the back of it and I physically hang it over the TV in our bedroom. First of all, we probably shouldn't have a TV in our bedroom, but we do. We enjoy watching TV probably too much, but for five days a week, I physically have that painting hanging over the tv. That's one way to actually eliminate the distraction of a tv. And so what is that for you? It could be social media. Right. Your cell phone is a monumental distraction. At a bare minimum, if you say you want to achieve in business and life at a high level, you probably can't spend 90 minutes a day on social media. Right. Are you actually using on the iPhone? I know there's a native app like time Tracking. I'm sure it's on other devices, Android or whatnot. Well, you have to know where you're spending your time. And yeah, there are like, it's scientifically proven, like their dopamine hits. When you're in there getting likes or liking stuff and engaging with quote unquote friends and whatnot, it's not serving this bigger purpose, this bigger vision you have for your business and your life. So that's number two is to eliminate distractions. And we actually have a tool called the time study that allows you to do an honest assessment of where you're spending your time. And I'm going to give you my email address if you want a copy of the time study. There's no obligation or anything like that. Just email me at larsealestatebuilder b school.com so Lars, Lars at realestate b as in business school.com so larsetatebschool.com and I'll just send out the time study to you. I really want you to get an honest assessment of where you're spending your time. This is from the moment you wake up until the moment you go to bed for two weeks. It's a little bit painful and probably the most rewarding thing you'll ever do in your life in terms of identifying and being honest with yourself about where you're spending your time. That's number two, number three and probably the most important. And we covered it. We actually went pretty, pretty in depth into this in the episode, the last episode with Greg Miller. Greg's a business coach, real estate B school. So he has the perspective of running a team, but also he's well networked in the industry and he coaches a lot of the top teams at Real Estate B school. And it's this comparing yourself with others. And I told a story about, you know, I was having a conversation with someone that was building a brokerage. They were doing a lot of transactions and they had these slick offices and Apple products everywhere and they were out of business like pretty soon after. They were teaching and they were on Apple's website and they were teaching at an event on stage with 5,000 agents. My point of telling that story is that if you were to look at this person and how their offices look and how they're dressed and how they carry themselves, you would think they have it all together and the number of homes they sell. But she was losing money. And so the bigger the business got, the less, you know, the less wealthy she would be. And she, she was funding this business and it was not something that she can fund for an extended period of time. So it was growing but it was losing more money as it was growing. And, and so if you were to compare yourself to that person you would think, man, I love those offices. Like man, she got to speak on stage and you know, but there's not an underlying well run sustainable business there. And there this is, it's going to sound bad, but being successful in business is not glamorous, it's super boring. It's doing the same things over and over and over again and not getting distracted or being lulled into some easy button or you know, that if I just embrace this bolt on technology or this AI bot or you know, if I do this or if I do that there's just, you know, there's no, there's no easy path in, in real estate, although the commission checks that we earn still allow us to. And the way that we set up our teams in real estate B school will, I believe that it's whatever happens in the industry, there's still going to be a place for the business that are set up the way that we set them up. Because these are bulletproof businesses because we set them up like high level of client care, we're getting more than our fair share of commission. No, I don't, I don't mean it's unfair. We're just providing a differentiated service that buyers and sellers are willing to pay for. And we leverage ourselves in these business to get out of the day to day production if we want to and empower other agents to step in and take over that production but to do it in a way where they have leverage now. And so the businesses we're building in real estate B school are different than other businesses that are sort of maybe doing a lot of transactions but there's not a lot to show for all of the efforts. And the business ultimately isn't sustainable with, without the production of the team owner. And that's not what we want. We don't want you to build something that has you more enslaved to the business the bigger it gets. So number one is you have to have a plan. That's the 319 0. Number two is eliminate distractions. That's that time study that you're going to email me about. I'll send you over a copy. And then number three is stop comparing yourself to others. It will bring you down in the dumps thinking you're less than when you probably have more figured out just by listening to these two podcast episodes than most team builders that are selling a lot of homes, but they're doing it on thin or no margins. All right, so if you're at the point in your journey where you just want to chat about your business, maybe to get a gut check if you're going in the right direction, and to talk about the opportunity to partner directly with me. And again, I'll say it, this is not the exp show. I pivoted into exp about 18 months ago and I'm one of the fastest growing sort of divisions of EXP because I've sort of put Real Estate B School into EXP. It's real estate B School powered by EXP Realty. So go to partner with Rebs. Partner with rebs.com if you want to look at what what this opportunity looks like to put your business on the EXP platform. Get access to the growth tools of Real Estate B School and also me guiding you through implementing and deploying those tools in your business so you can grow and scale your business and have a lot to show for in terms of stock and medical, health care insurance, a whole tech stack training, and also residual income through Agent Attraction, which is pretty exciting as well. So go to partnerwithrebs.com we'll see you over there. And yeah, heed the advice here. I've struggled and toiled as Greg Miller, the business coach on the last episode, has done the same. We've seen it all and we are trying to teach you a different way. So take the advice. If you guys need anything, reach out to me and we'll talk soon. Be good.