How to Gracefully Grow Your Real Estate Team | Real Estate B-School

Hey there and welcome back to the Business Freedom Podcast. As usual, this is Lars Hedinborg, founder of Real Estate B School and co founder of High Performance Real Estate Advisors out of Charlotte, North Carolina. And today I want to dig into a real world example of how to gracefully, profitably, sustainably scale your real estate business, your real estate team. And I find myself talking about this individual. So I'm going to really sort of pick on one of our members who I've been working with for probably going on four years now. And I want to kind of lay out his journey in terms of building what we talk about as sustainable, profitable, systems driven, empower people, high culture, consumer facing real estate team and what that journey looks like. So it really doesn't matter where you are now in your business growth journey. I want to break down what I consider to be one of the most graceful ascensions to business ownership that I've seen. And we have dozens of success stories and I just want to pick on one. If you want to look at a bunch of case studies on realestatebschool.com if you look on the top navigation there's a link to case studies. I've been connecting with our members and documenting their journeys as a way to sort of help you in your journey so you have more confidence in scaling your real estate team the right way. And so at the end of this scaling process that you have a business worth owning and ultimately a life worth living. So the person I'm talking about is Dave Hook out of Central Pennsylvania. Average price point of I think 200 to 225. So not an incredibly high price point. And that matters a little bit in some markets. You know, it's we work on $2 million in the west coast to you know, we have a client in outside of Moncks Corner, South Carolina at 115,000 average price points. So real estate B school is business training and coaching and implementation tools and systems implementation doesn't really matter the price point. But I mentioned that just so you have some context. And so when I met Dave Hook he was a typical real estate team leader, quote unquote. His team was doing about a hundred transactions and I think he did 85 of them. I think he had at the time two buyer agents and a solid administrator. And his time wasn't his own. 60, 70 plus hours a week consistently. I think that year I met him I think he netted about $250,000. And he also had a brokerage, an independent brokerage. And the thing I like about Dave's progression is that when I really break down what made him successful and sort of shortcut and spoiler alert is that this year he'll do around 275 transactions. He's been out of production for I think over 18 months now. He's raised up an operations leader in his business and a sales leader in his business. Long term team players that have now stepped up to manage the day to day backstage and front stage. Backstage is operations, front stage is sales. And his role in the team is really just leading the team. He does some content marketing that we've been working on and just out of at least one person removed from all the drama, whether it's with the sales team or whether it's with clients, he's one, at least one person removed from all of that drama. So his stress has come down considerably. We talk about time, money and stress in real estate, B school and his time went from 70 hours to 30 to 40 hours. His money went tripled his net income this year. He about triples the net income from four years ago. And his stress being in 85 transactions and running a team and running a brokerage has gone from like off the charts high to he wonders what to do with his time literally. He posted in our private members Facebook group he was sawing two by fours in his backyard and his wife Jenny asked him what are you doing? And he says I don't know, I just have to do something. And I thought I would saw two by fours for no other purpose than just to get out that entrepreneurial add that we all suffer from. And so when I think about Dave's journey, there are three things that I want you to hopefully take notes, mental notes or literally taking written notes. Number one is that when we first had a conversation and I still do business growth strategy sessions, so in my initial conversation with Dave, there's an exercise that I took him through and where it's stretching the gap. And when I say stretch the gap it's let's really dig into what your life is like today, all the elements of your business, the marketing dollars you spend, your team, the complexion of your team if they're A players or B players, your profitability, the time you're spending your business, the stress that you're enduring. And then we also talk about some personal areas. Where are you physically and emotionally and spiritually, relationally with your spouse or your children? Do you have friendships? Do you have other hobbies going on? Are you living a full life? And so that's on the one hand that is where you are today. And then we talk about, all right, let's shift gears. Let's talk about what's possible in the future. What do you see for the future of your business and how does that business serve the other areas of your life that I just talked about. And so I basically talk about today and what life looks like three years from now. And I've talked about this previously on other podcasts. The context of this though with Dave was he didn't necessarily know what was possible three years. From the conversation that we had, it turns out that he went from about 100 units to 225 units in three years. And he was fully out of production. And he had just promoted these two team members that are now, I think about a year in each of their position and they're crushing it with him as the leader, leader, the real leader, the visionary leader, the transformational leader of his team, which is different than a lot of people calling themselves team leaders and all they do is sell homes and they have a loose collection of agents. And so getting really clear on what the outcome, what was possible and me helping him to see that you can double the size of your real estate team in three years, you can double your income and you can cut your hours in half. Like time, money, stress, time and money delinking those two. In real estate, traditionally we're taught that time, in order to make more money, you have to put more time into your business tradition. Traditional success in our industry, we'll have you selling 35 to 40 homes, maybe 50 homes, 60 homes, 70 homes, working eight days a week doing it. And so for him to really consider what's possible in the future and getting clarity around that and having a clear outcome. So that was number the first thing that we did that Dave really, even if he didn't quite believe it, I asked him to suspend disbelief. Let's get to work on what's possible. Let's get to work on this three year plan. And he had a vivid picture of what was possible. We created that together. That was number one. And we do that for everyone that we work with. Number two is that one thing Dave did, which I don't see in every real estate. B school team member. There are folks that come in and they just want to do it all at once and they don't want to actually do the work. And that sounded harsh the way I said it. I didn't mean it that way. It's more a contrast to what I saw in Dave is that he knew that this was a program. Real estate B school is an implementation program. It's a training program and we also provide coaching. So going down the path to true business ownership requires that you build out systems in your business, that you learn how to hire the right people, even if it's not a big team.

Right.

We'll do about 3.6 million,325, 340 transactions. My real estate team, there's only 14 of us and split 50, 50 sales and admins. So it's not these, we're not teaching this big, you know, team and just throwing bodies at something. So for Dave, he understood that this was a program where I had to block time to work on my business versus in my business. E Myth Mastery by Michael Gerber is something easy to say and really hard to do. You know, the book is actually really simple in its message and the question that it poses is, you know, how would I think about my business differently if I had to replicate it 10,000 times? So let that soak in. How would I think about my business differently if I had to create 10,000 just like it? And obviously the whole world changes. You can't do anything in your business if you had to have 10,000 versions of it. So everything has to be systems and everything, you know, a systems driven business with people running those systems. And so Dave Simply time block, three 90 minute time blocks in his calendar every week. He didn't necessarily know what he would fill those time blocks with. He just knew that his natural inclination was not to sit down for 90 minutes at a time and create a lead management policy. The good thing about real estate B school is that we have 80 to 90% of our systems are those that you can R and D, you can rip off and duplicate right into your business. And at the same time, it requires that you learn the system in the first 90 minute time block, you make it your own in the second time block and then you sort of adapt it or train it to your team in the third time block could take a whole lot longer than that. That process, that's essentially what you need to do. And this is not the work that you as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, as a visionary. This is not the kind of work that you're naturally going to be drawn to. This is the work that you run from. Creating a lead management policy is probably the most valuable thing or one of a dozen most valuable things that you could do in your business. It's basically designing the perfect lead sequence for others around you to follow with excruciating detail and we have samples and templates and we know best practices and we offer all the emails and texts and voicemails that you could leave that get the best response and it's still on you as the team leader, the team owner to take that system and, and make it your own. So that was something that he would never give away. These time blocks. If he had to move them, he'd move them, but he wouldn't give them away. One of his longstanding 90 minute time blocks was Saturday mornings. I think he told me it was like 6 to 7:30. So 6am 6 6:30 to 7:30 or 8am he knew that he could have that time available even if he was in production in the early days and even if he was working on Saturdays. He knew that he could give his best energy, his best focus to that time block and he knew he could get some great work done. So if it came down to reading a lead management policy and making it your own, you can't do that 4pm on a Thursday when you've got, when you're just fried from working with clients to managing team members. So think about these time blocks as your best time. This is the most building systems, probably one of the most valuable things that you'll do in your business. So that was number two that I really admired about his journey. Number three was his focus. We do training calls weekly in real estate B school. So I'll get on once a week and I'll train on something and it's always really good training. I don't say that from an ego perspective. And typically it will introduce a squirrel or a shiny object into everyone's world. Not every training, you know, because some things it's just we need to know about productivity or we need to know about culture or leading or managing or those types of things. There are other times where I'm, I'm just training on something that's really cool that I tell everyone they should implement right away. The cool thing about Dave is that he was very intentional about what he was working on. No more than one or two things at a time. What I see in a lot of real estate team leaders is that they, I could tell them that there's 36 core systems that you need to implement. Most team leaders would say, give me an example of a system, you know, lead management system, buyer consultation framework, listing consultation framework, buyer appointment setting process, listing appointment setting process, you know, tracking your numbers, leading and lagging indicators, recruiting, just the culture and cadence, weekly daily quarterly cadence on your team. All of these things, your database and your events marketing, your giveaways, your email marketing to your database, they're all little systems. So let's just say if I told you there were 36 systems and all you needed to do to go from where you are today to running a 2 to 3 million dollar real estate business with 30 to 40% profit, you're completely out of production. You only need to implement two systems, let's say two systems a quarter. So what would that be? Two systems a quarter? 36 systems would be 18 quarters, that'd be roughly four years most. And it's probably not even 36, it's probably 24. That's probably a more realistic number. So that's 12 quarters, three years. That's probably better math. So let's say in three years you could go from 50 to 100 sides to 250 to 300 sides and you're totally out of production. On the right economic model with value based commission splits with everything is sort of easier. The business is 90% self managed and it's not this lopsided time money stress equation that most team leaders are experiencing. Most of you wouldn't be able to do it. You wouldn't have the mental fortitude to sit down for 90 minutes three times a week. And that's all I, let's say that's all I required of you. And in real estate B school you have to do that. You have to be able to commit 3 times 90 for 3 years to get this done. The systems work, the time blocking around working on your business, that's the most valuable time that you'll ever spend on your business. The challenge is that it's not urgent even though it's important. So I don't know if you've studied the Eisenhower grid, you can go on Google and just look at Eisenhower grid. On the one axis, it's a four quad set up on the one accent is access, it's urgency. So urgent, urgent or not urgent. And then in the other access, it is important and not important. And so obviously not urgent and not important. Things like social media and TV and watching the news, those things just have to be frickin eliminated, deleted from your life forever and always. If you want to achieve something in business, the urgent important, those are things that they really are urgent and they're important and you've got to get them done. These are things that hopefully it's in your unique ability and you're not spinning out on a bunch of things that you can otherwise delegate. The not Important. Let me see if I'm the not important urgent. Those are things that you really should be delegating to an administrative professional. A VA showing homes is something that.

Is.

Well, probably fall under urgent, but not really important. Yeah. So you could really delegate that work too. That's what we teach. And so the not urgent but important is the stuff that I'm talking about building systems out in your business. Dave Hook really understood that the not urgent, important stuff is where you need to spend as much of your time as possible. And that's building out systems. That is taking care of yourself physically. That's reading your Bible. That's date night with your spouse. These are things that if you miss them, nothing would really happen.

Right.

Like if I don't take my wife out or we don't, we do an annual honeymoon where I surprise her with this epic honeymoon, like trip, seven day trip. I don't have to do that.

Right.

That's. It is definitely not urgent. And I view it as Critically important. So 10 years from now, when our kids are going off to college, I am just as in love with Julie today as I will be 10 years from now as I was, you know, 13 years ago when we got married. And physical fitness, right. This is one I've struggled a little bit with. And now I'm really in a zone mentally around the importance of it is not urgent. There was nothing urgent about me working out this morning, yet it was critically important. I took my blood pressure last night and I've never really had a blood pressure problem. My blood pressure was floating around. This was probably six months ago. It's floating around 1:30. Yeah, 130, 135. It was a little bit up from where it has been historically. Over like 90 or something. I don't even know the relative numbers, but last night it was the first time I looked at it. I'm 90 days into. Yeah, 90 days today. So April 15th. And as I record this, it's July 15th, 90 days in, and my blood pressure, I couldn't even imagine it. I looked at my wife and she used to be a nurse, and I asked her like, is that too low? It was like 111 over, like 60 or something. And she's like, no, that's great. And my pulse was like 55. And. And I'm like, my pulse used to be 65 to 70. And I've really been intentional with my workouts and my diet. And my point is, mentally, I'm in the zone now. So a bit of a tangent there. And These types of things, though, are the not urgent and really important. And Dave Hook made a conscious decision to be intentional with the amount of time that he had blocked out. So when we started working together, it was 70 hours a week, and. And it was all urgent. Some important, some not important.

Right.

So the shift, you know, now it's less than 40 hours a week, making two to three times as much money. The stress is probably, you know, on a scale of one to 10, when I met Dave, it was 10. Now it's probably a three or four. And he's got two team members, Drew and Jenna, that have stepped up and they're running the business with him. And so it's just a different world for him all together. So it's that focus. It is being intentional and just having a clear idea where you're going and know. Just know that it's going to be hard either way, you know, and it really doesn't matter where you start this journey where you. It's where you end. And that's one thing too. Just, you know, I guess I'll add a bonus number four that I really appreciate about Dave. And he's challenged me in my faith and in my marriage to think about things in a longer game, like just to think long game on everything. And when you think about things like, so a good example in my business is, you know, if I'm playing a 66, let's just say 66, I envision myself working in some capacity until I'm 66. Not because I have to, because I really want to. And I'm doing the things I love. I'm 46 now. I've got 20 years. I've got 20 years to become the best real estate business trainer that we've ever seen.

Right.

I don't have to be there today. So I'm thinking this long, this. This long game. Same thing in my marriage, same thing in my faith, this eternal sort of perspective around the areas of my life and even in business, my ability to make an impact in the lives of my team members, in the lives of the clients that we serve. And so that's one thing that really I've seen Dave do really well is to think about everything in terms of a long game. And even if there's no faith component to how you think, it's just not rushing to get to the final destination. It's more of a marathon than a sprint. And so if you're at a point in your business where this is just something that maybe you haven't figured out, this journey. Maybe it's like you're constantly spinning your wheels. You're on a treadmill of sorts, you've started a team, and it's just like, it's not, it's not flipping over. The time, money, stress equation is not flipping over. The only thing I can give you is a 45 minute deep dive conversation about your business and your life. What's working, what's not working, what do you think's possible? What's holding you back? What are the strengths you bring to the table? And just go to realestatebschool.com that is the only thing I can offer you. And we've got a pilot program now, which is 3:30 days of completely free training to set up some foundational systems in your business that will allow you to scale, detach time from money and lower your stress significantly. So go to realestatebschool.com if that's you, and I'll see you over there.