How to Set Your Real Estate Business Up for 2021

Is it really possible to, in advance of a year, create a plan to achieve your goals? You know, in real estate, this concept of business planning for some crazy reason has eluded 99% of real estate agents. So as we enter a new year, you know, what can you do to scale your real estate business without scaling your hours to achieve more this next coming year than you ever have achieved before and to plan it out in advance so you know exactly where you're going in your real estate business? I've made more mistakes than anyone I know when it comes to building a real estate business. And in that failure, I would call it, you know, failing fast. Often I fail fast more than anyone I know. In that process though, I've learned how like planning and having intention about where I want to go. And then maybe it doesn't go exactly where I want, but I'm getting closer, right? So it's kind of like this heat seeking missile where, you know, I know the target is out there. And maybe I'm off a little bit in the first quarter, but I adjust and maybe I'm off a little bit in the second quarter. By adjusting, I've just gotten really good at taking step by step and achieving my goals on a consistent basis. Make sure you stick around to the end of the video. I have a special training that I've created that goes through the five steps to grow your real estate business to a million dollars of gross commission income without losing your life. And so make sure you stick around for that. If you like the video, give me the thumbs up. Subscribe to the channel and turn notifications on and make sure you leave comments as well. When I first got into real estate, it was 2007. I had no planning process whatsoever. Nobody taught me how to do any of these things. I just kind of failed into the business. I tripped in. I figured out one thing and one thing only is to generate leads. And so I figured out how to generate leads. I would talk to those people. If they didn't want to meet with me, I would put them into a follow up system. I would meet with them, I would sign them as clients and it was mostly buyers. And I would sell them a home. That's all I did. And I would start the process over again. And this is my business for like the first three years in real estate come 2009. So in 2009, I wrote a business plan. Plan. It was sort of like the Jerry Maguire moment, if you've ever seen the movie Jerry Maguire, where it was like that profound moment for Me, where I saw the world differently. And I said, hey, I can't do what I've been doing, you know. We had our first child, Julie and I, back in November 2007. That was my first part year in real estate. So anders was turning one in 2008. That's when I sold 44 homes as a solo agent. Then that was like, top 0.5% of agents in my market. I was working seven days a week, stressed all the time, spending no time as a dad or a husband, right? So I was successful in real estate, yet I was failing at home, which is no success at all. And so going into, you know, 2009 was a similar year, except I sold more homes, I had less time, and it was not sustainable. And so me building out a plan for a different future in 2009 was out of necessity. It was out of saving my marriage. It was because I wanted to be a good dad, because I didn't have a dad growing up. It was out of this. This necessity to achieve in areas of my life that were more important to me than real estate, while at the same time, I saw this opportunity in real estate to build a business that didn't rely on me. And all I did was basically decide how many homes I was going to sell in the future, you know, where I was going to spend my time, working with buyers or sellers, working in the business versus working on the business. I also projected, like, how much net worth I wanted to have in three years, five years and 10 years, how much debt, where I wanted to, you know, spend my time outside of real estate. And my wife, also Julie, I wanted to give her the option of not having to work. She worked a really tough job in a hospital. And over those three time periods, I wanted her to have the option to not work at all. And so that was like, when I think of that plan, it was committing in my mind, beginning with the end in mind, to what the future could look like if I had a plan. And so from that 3, 5, 10, I broke it down into, okay, what has to happen in this first year, end the year, wrote this plan. I did 58 sides. I worked eight days a week. I was stressed out. I hadn't ever really built a business before. I'd never done marketing before. I'd never sold anything before I got into real estate. And so I just committed to seeing the future a little differently than it was for my current reality. And then I broke that three year down into one year, and that one year down into four quarters. Those four Quarters into months, weeks, days and hour by hour. What are the things I have to focus on right now to move my business forward? And it was mostly systems, right? If I didn't want to be the one generating leads all the time, I had to build out marketing systems. We call them lead gen levers today. So we've got eight or so lead gen levers that our members can swipe and deploy and put them into your business database, yard marketing, open houses, except expireds, FSBOs, all these are lead gen levers that you can employ social proof client care as a lead gen lever. So how could you treat your clients in such a way where the natural byproduct is a referral? That's a lead gen lever in our business. And so if you're not thinking in lead gen leverage, you're not thinking in systems, you're not going to win this game of building a business that was number one, Number two was sales systems. I didn't want to have to be the one sitting down with every buyer or every seller. So what did I do to compel a buyer on our first meeting to do business with me? Same thing was a seller. What did I do to get a seller not even only to say yes to listing their home with me, but to do it at the right price and to do it in a way where we're earning the kind of commission that we want to earn and the fees that we want to earn on the transaction. And then you think about client care systems, you know, how would I have to design a client care system to be able to run without me but still have clients feeling cared for and they're going to generate referrals or give you referrals as a byproduct of them being treated right. So my plan, you know, that one year plan consisted of breaking down the business into systems. And how would I, what would I need to work on in the marketing world in terms of systems, sales systems and client care systems? And then how could you get people to help you run those systems so that you can build your business in such a way where it actually can scale without you scaling your hours so you can do more transactions, make more money in less time with less stress. And so for me, that's what the planning process look like. It always starts with a three year vision. We break it down into one year plan. We break that down into four quarters, right? And we have a business plan planning process. We call it the business freedom Planner. Now I didn't have it back then. It took me sort of a decade or so to create that business freedom planning process. But that gives us that 90 day where we break it down into weeks, we break it down into days, we break it down to hours. We're working on our most important projects all the time so that we're moving this plan forward and we're achieving the vision that we set out to achieve. So if you're at a point in your business growth journey where you honestly just struggling to put the things together, the steps like what step do I need to take at what time join me in a training I put together. It's the five steps to a million dollars of GCI and beyond in any economic client. So go to realestate business freedom.com that's realestatebusinessfreedom.com or click on the link below. If you like the video, give me the thumbs up. Subscribe to the channel, make sure you turn notifications on and also leave comments on the video. We'll see you on the next one.