How to Navigate the 6 Stages of Business Growth

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.

All right. Welcome back to Real Estate Business Builders. I'm the co founder of Real Estate B School, Lars Hedenburg. Today we're going to talk about how to make the shift from agent to owner and specifically, how do you profitably navigate the six stages of business growth? If you're listening to the podcast and you want a copy of the Real Estate Business Growth Navigator, it's a pretty in depth guide to all of these six stages. Make sure you head over to our free Facebook group, Real Estate Business Builders. You can find the training in there and just type in roadmap and you'll get a free copy of this guide. You're at this point in your real estate career, wherever you are right now, if you're sort of struggling, you know, most are struggling as I record this anyway with market as squirrely as it is. But there are a few reasons why you're, you're tuning into a podcast or you're watching, you know, YouTubers that can help your business and you're consuming stuff, right? There's typically a point in your journey where you, you need something to change. There's a level of frustration, you're not achieving your goals, maybe you're failing at home, something has to change. You could be here because against all odds, you figured out a way to make your real estate business work. And maybe there's still something that's a little bit off. Maybe you're working a little, you know, too many hours, maybe the money's good. But you're stressed all the time and you're, you're maybe not showing up in your home the way you want to. Some of you are just filling the gaps, right? You're, you're looking to get better and your business is going good, but you want it to be going great. Most of you though, I would say know that there's this element of. And if you ever, if you've ever read E Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber, you know, he talks about working on the business. So you know you need to work on the business, but you really don't know what that means. This episode will help you in that and a lot of us just want to go further, faster. And so my guiding question, every episode I seem to have this guiding, provocative question. And a lot of it, a lot of these questions have the same theme. But the one I have for this episode is do I have a clear roadmap in place to build a highly profitable systems driven business so that I can systematically grow my net worth and have more time to enjoy the things that truly matter in life and much of the time in real estate. You know, you can have money, but you can't have time. You can have time, but you can't have money. And I am all about the double win. And that's helping you win at home and when at work and in the financial area of your life and just amassing, you know, enough net worth where you could ultimately check out and be free and clear of having to grind all day long on real estate transactions. So in terms of like this concept of growing your business, I want to frame up the conversation because I'm hoping most of you go and grab this, the detailed guide, Real Estate Business Growth Navigator. So I want to talk a little bit more about mindset and then you can go and grab the guide. You can read through. Every stage has specifics and I'll kind of frame it up here in a little bit. But from a mindset perspective, you have to believe that's number one. If you're going to go from 100,000 GCI to 500,000 to a million to a million five and have, you know, less stress along the way and have more time freedom along the way, you have to believe that it's possible and you have to focus on it. And I would say become obsessed with it. Not to the detriment of all of the stuff that probably matter more than selling the next home, but I want this to become your focus, is to build a business foundationally that has the ability to progress through these six stages. And the stages go all the way up to 3 million GCI where you're taking home seven figures and you're working one day a week, right. So if that's like so outlandish, go back to the first thing that I said, that you just have to believe that it's possible and anyone can do it. The next thing I want you to think about your business as a series of oil wells. So if you, if you were to sort of look in a field of, a field of producing oil wells, like the oil well people, the oil people, you know, see those, each of those as a, that's where the money comes from, right? So they put all the infrastructure into identifying the land that has the oil. You know, they put the physical equipment, you know, to be able to extract the oil out of the ground and then these oil wells just run. And I want you to think about your business, especially when it comes from a lead gen lever perspective. So the first thing we need to figure out in your business is how do you put lead gen levers, I. E. Oil wells in place that throw off more business than you could possibly get to and that is the thing that allows for the growth. And then when that happens, you know, you're going to go deep on these oil wells, these lead gen levers, not wide. You're not going to do 10 things to sell 100 or 200 homes. You're 200 homes. You're going to do four or five things that each of those four or five oil wells, legion levers yield 50 plus transactions. That's key because in real estate B school we squeeze the lemon. We did this exercise as a team one year I said, we handed a half of a lemon in a bowl and we gave each of the team members, we said squeeze the lemon till you can't get any juice out. And the first person would squeeze the lemon, they would hand it to the next person who would then squeeze the lemon and get more juice out. And I said until you can't get any juice out, who would then squeeze the lemon? You know, so there's always more juice to get from the squeeze. And in your business you have to really think about each of the lead gen levers in that way. And there's just a reminder here that you guys have tuned in or watched me on YouTube or you know, hung around for any period of time, you know, that I focus on systems. And there's a book, Atomic Habits by James Clear, which is like one of my business bibles. One of the quotes from the book is you do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. I mean, just think about that. If you're not where you want to be in any area of your life, it's not your goals that are holding, you know, that are failing you. It's the systems you put in place to achieve those goals. Really, really powerful. All right, so let's get into the six stages. I'm going to go through these. Pretty like an overview of these. I'm not going to go real deep on these because I want you to grab a copy of that free report, Go into the Facebook group Real Estate Business Builders. Grab a copy. There's, you know, it's going to go through. Here are the things that each of the stages in, in the free report. So it goes through the, the annual GCI range per, per stage, the Business Freedom index, which is the amount of money you will earn in that stage via the. Divided by the hours you work. So essentially your, your hourly rate, the time you have to put in for that stage, how does it feel emotionally? The strategic questions you're going to have to ask yourself, how do you get to the next level? And then your team structure. So when it goes from stage one is zero to 100,000, stage two is 100 to 500,000, stage three is 500 to a million, a million to a million, five is stage four, a million five to two million is stage five, and two million to three million plus is stage two, six. So let's go through briefly each of these stages. The first stage is where most of the industry lives. It's called the start stage. And the question that you're asking yourself at this stage, it's, it's literally, where is my next deal coming from? And this is zero to a hundred thousand. So if you're in a, a market where your average commission check is, is $10,000, that's. Or what is that? So, yeah, 10 transactions at $10,000. So you're not crushing it at this stage. Right? You're not, you're not necessarily like, you know, 95% of the industry, 90% at least, live in this stage. And you're not crushing it.

Right?

So there's not any freedom of money, for sure, because you're grossing 100,000 a year and there certainly isn't freedom of time because if you're full time in real estate, you're wondering how to make more. You know, you're probably only making about $25 an hour, tops. You know, you may be working a full time work week. You're a little excited and naive. 80% dropout in the first two years. Two years in real estate. So new agents come in by their second anniversary. They don't make it in real estate because the average agent only makes $9,000. This is from NAR, National association of Realtors. They're only making $9,000. Two years in the business. Think about that. That's like one home sold. Traditional methods are failing us. Like I said, the strategic question is not strategic. It's where's my next deal coming from? If you're in this stage, there's no shame, right? To get to the next level, which is really where you want to get to is 250 to 500,000. So we have something to work with. It comes down to keystone habits. So I'm going to slow down a little bit with stage one because a lot of you listening, you may be a business builder and I say want to be, for lack of a better term, I don't mean that derogatory, but you want to be, you know, doing 500. A million, a million five. Some of you are doing 500 to a million and you're not taking home a lot of money and you're working crazy hours. I will tell you that you may need to go back a stage or two to get some of these things right. So keystone habits, building your skills and a determination to grow. That is what's going to get you out of the sea of agents that don't, you know, do more than $100,000 of GCI. And at this stage it's just you, right? 85% of agents don't even have an administrator. But, but 85% of the work a real estate agent does is administrative in nature. Crazy. So the next stage is the ramp stage. And I'm going to go a little bit faster here. I'll spend a little bit time on ramp, but then I'll go through the others quicker. 100,000 to 500,000, you can make up to $50 an hour. That's the business freedom index. You're probably working more hours, probably 50 plus hours per week. You're feeling hopeful, really busy, and you're wondering if there's more to life than real estate. The strategic question you have to ask yourself if you're going to get to a million, which is where the next stage, the build stage ends is where do I need leverage the most? And to get to that next level, you need to delegate administrative tasks. You need to build out leveraged lead generation systems. Oil wells and selling is the priority. So you cannot get bogged down in 85% of work that's administrative in nature. You know, you may have a showing agent in the upper level of the ramp stage. When you're getting closer to 500,000, you probably have a full time admin if you're looking to build beyond this stage.

Right.

So maybe two people that are in your world that provide leverage. The next stage is called the build stage. This gets you from 500,000 to a million where you could make a hundred dollars an hour. You're probably, if you don't set things up the right way, you're probably working another 10 hours a week and you hit a ceiling with your time and stress. You need a clear roadmap. So the systems, so the strategic question, it's all about systems. What systems do I need to build or firm up? And then I'm not going to spend a lot of time on how to get to the next level. You know, maybe you add an agent or two at this stage, but it's not a complicated business. It's not more than two or three team members. And you're just focusing on the listing side. You're getting leverage on the buyer side. Right. Maybe you definitely have to get others doing lead generation with you. New business development, we call it in the mornings. The next stage. I'm going to go through these fast. It's the lead stage. It goes from a million to a million and a half. You can make up to $250 per hour. You're working less hours, your hours are going backwards now. You're uncomfortable at every point of it. And you're asking yourself the question, how do I help my team members get ahead? And it's about culture and cadence and running the business by the numbers. The exit stage is where you have the chance to exit production. It's a million and a half to 2 million GCI. You can make up to $500 per hour. You're working another 10 hours less per week. So you're taking home a lot of money versus the start stage. We're probably working as many hours, probably 40 hours a week. And you're succeeding through others and you're wanting to grow leaders in your business. And then we have the own stage, which is the sixth stage, 2 million to 3 million GCI. I made over $3,000 an hour. You know, the year we did 453 transactions. Highly leveraged business. I worked one day a week. So it wasn't even 20, 30 hours a week. Now you're shifting even more out of the business and you're talking about impact. And the whole business is the culture and the cadence. You know your numbers. You're running the business by the numbers. You can run your business from the beach. That is the goal. So that was a lot. I'm not gonna lie. Went through that pretty quick. But the thing I want to leave you with is that there is a method to the madness here if you want to go further faster. You guys know I don't pitch anything on the podcast. All I can offer you is a coaching session essentially about your business to help you get clear on how to grow your business through these different stages in a challenging market. I think this is the best market to be able to grow your business. Just go to Rebs. That's Real Estate B School R E b s growth assessment.com grab a time on the calendar and we will figure out how to get you to the next stage on your way to the next stage. So much love, much respect. We'll talk to you soon. Be good. Thanks for listening.

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