How to Step Off the Technician Hamster Wheel & Build a Systems-Driven Real Estate Business

As a real estate team builder, are you stuck in the never ending grind that is real estate? Are you buried in transactions? Or are you elevating out of your business on a consistent basis so that you can actually build a business worth owning and live a life worth living? This is a follow up episode to the conversation that I had with Misty Solwish out of Des Moines, Iowa, runs a real estate team that consistently sells this. This year she'll do about 450 homes. Last couple of years, 400 to 410. And the thing I love about Misty and her approach to business is that it is straight up E. Myth. Her business is a system of systems and all of those systems live in Trello. The conversation I want to have today on the podcast is conversation around E Myth. It's a book written by Michael Gerber. It's actually the first book I read after getting into real Estate in 2007, the year I sold 27 homes in my first 10 months in the business and instantly seven days a week, instantly traditional success in our industry, right, is selling a lot of homes. Nobody asks how many hours you're working. Nobody asks the sacrifices you're making by being away from. At that time, for me, it was my newborn Anders and just not showing up great as a husband or a dad, not taking care of my physical body and so out of bounds when it came to the comes to the things or when it came to the things that mattered most to me. And what I would say my priorities are and then the what I would act out is that my priorities were business. Because it was, it was just constant evenings, weekends, eight days a week, full on, full stress, taking on all the drama of all of my clients. And so I want to take the conversation, you know, after getting a glimpse of how Misty views her business, how she views everything that happens on a repetitive basis, whether it's daily, weekly, or monthly, or quarterly or even annually. Those things reside in a Trello board, which is simply a way to organize your business because a business is a system system. So I want to do a little bit of an E. Myth lesson here and the the E. Myth questions. So this is the premise of the book and how it relates to the conversation we had with Misty. The question of the book is how would you think about your business differently if you were to replicate it 10,000 times? So how would you have to think about your business differently if you were to replicate it 10,000 times? So just maybe even pause the podcast, think about that for a second. If you showed Homes to buyers last week, if you went on a listing appointment last week, if you ran a sign out to a property, if you input a listing into mls, if you did all the hundred tasks that we do as real estate agents and even team leaders, sometimes we get sort of caught up in the minutiae of real estate and we're doing tasks that are sort of beneath our. Not our pay grade, but. But in a certain sense, our pay grade. We want to make more money per hour, yet we get caught doing the technical work in the business. If you were to replicate your business 10,000 times, that means you have to approach it as if you're not going to do anything in the business. And that doesn't mean you have to exit production or stop working with buyers or sellers or any of that. Yet your mindset has to be, how would this business look? How would I design it? How would I build systems to do the tasks in the business so that I can empower team members to run those systems? That, in essence, is what real estate team builders is about. It's helping you get better at building systems and empowering team members to run those systems. And so in the book E Myth Revisited, Michael Gerber calls this the franchise prototype. There's a really good video if you go on YouTube after you're done listening to this podcast, you go on YouTube and you Google the founder. There's actually a movie on the McDonald's Brothers the Founder Speedy System. It's like a four and a half minute video. They're in a. I think it's a tennis court where they're designing the franchise prototype. I feel like that video in so many ways is how we need to look at a real estate transaction. Acquiring customers, servicing the customer, and getting a customer successfully to the closing table in a way where they're going to say awesome things about you and they're going to get folks to come back in the front door. And so this is the mindset I had in my business. Even when it was just me and my business, I was thinking about the business in a way where what if I couldn't show buyers homes? What if I couldn't, you know, work with a seller or go on a listing appointment? I certainly couldn't run signs around town. I certainly couldn't. If I'm in 10,000 different, you know, businesses, real estate businesses, what if we all had a closing on the same day? I couldn't be in 10,000, you know, so I reimagined what was possible in my business. There's an awesome quote by Michael Gerber. He says the problem is, is not that small business owners don't work, the problem is that they're doing the wrong work. As a result, most of their businesses end up in chaos, unmanageable, unpredictable and unrewarding. I know 20 year veteran agents that are selling 50 to 60 homes per year and they got to the point where they have completely fallen out of love with real estate because it is complete chaos all the time. And so I want to spend a little bit of time in the book E Myth. I want to talk about the technician, the manager and the entrepreneur as it relates to real estate team building. So the technician, and this is where a lot of team owners or team leaders get caught up, is that they are, they grew up in the business doing the technical work. This is working with buyers, working with sellers, the work of a real estate agent. They get caught up in that work and they never give it up. Even when they surround themselves with other team members, they're not actually elevating their business, they're just adding more complexity, more headaches, more people to that are going to sort of pick at them for their time. So the technician lives in the present and is focused on doing the work of making it, selling it and delivering it. And so in real estate that is, you know, lead generation, lead conversion meeting with buyers and sellers, showing homes, working offers, negotiating appraisals, negotiating repair requests, attending closings or worse than those are actually pretty dollar productive activities as a real estate agent or real estate team leader. Worse than that is entering listings into mls. You know, working with scheduling inspections, scheduling closing times, going out to a property to get a lockbo or put a sign out or design a marketing brochure or put a listing into mls. Though all of that is the technician, the technical work of a real estate business. And you have to make sure you're moving to the next stage here, the next level of the manager. And so the book. Let me back up one second. The book talks about, we have all three of these inside of us. The technician, the manager and the entrepreneur. The premise of the book is that the E Myth comes up where it's an entrepreneurial myth. Just because we went into business for ourself doesn't mean we're actually an entrepreneur. We don't spend any time doing the entrepreneurial work. And so the technician is where we spend most of our time. And that's why we fail to scale. And we're overwhelmed and life is chaotic and we're miserable all the time. We're working evenings and weekends, the manager focuses on achieving results through people and systems, focusing on the present and strategizing for the future. So, so, so pause for a second and ask yourself, in the last seven, 14 days, how much time have I spent focusing on achieving results through people and systems or strategizing for the future or think about that. That's, that, that's a crazy thought. As I'm recording this, we're in a crazy market with low inventory. Every real estate team leader that I know is working with their agents to get offers accepted. They're doing their own production. A lot of them are set up on the wrong economic model, not using value based commission splits. And so they're forced to be in production and they don't have enough time, they don't have enough margin in their day to spend any time being the manager, getting that part of who they are as a business person to actually become part of their calendar. You know, being the manager means that you have two or three time blocks of 60 to 90 minutes apiece where you are focusing on achieving results through people and systems. So you're working on the business rather than working in the business. Working in the business is doing the technical work. The technician working on the business is doing the manager and the entrepreneur work. And so the entrepreneur in most of us never comes out. The entrepreneur defines the business and focuses on closing the gap between where the business is today and where they want it to be in the future. So this is, this is the visionary in you, where you are maybe let's say you're, you have a small team or doing a hundred transactions, 60 of them are your own. You've got three or four buyer agents doing 40 transactions. You got one administrator. Let's say your three year vision, we use a tool in real estate B school called the Three One 90s Three Year Vision One Year Plan. And we live in a 90 day world with the Business Freedom Planner. So let's say you're talking about a three year vision. You're at 100 transactions right now and you're overwhelmed managing some people, doing a bunch of production yourself, working with buyers and sellers. You haven't exited the buyer business yet and you probably don't slow down on a regular basis to build systems, to effectively do delegate so you can elevate. And so what would it take to go from a hundred transactions where you're working way too many hours your way stressed to go to 300 transactions three years from now, thinking about that and focusing on it and putting a plan in place or even a vision of how you're going to get there and what the team would need to look like and what key players you'd have to have in your business. What key systems would you need to have in place so that you can actually realize that vision of tripling the business and taking, cutting your hours in half and you know, 5xing your income. That is entirely doable, but not if you stay in the technical work. So that's where the E myth comes in, is that we claim to be entrepreneurs, but we're not spending any time as the manager or any time as the entrepreneur. For me and my journey, I went from those 27 transactions in 2007 in my first 10 months to 44 transactions part time administrator in 2008, 2009, I hired my first buyer agent in the fourth quarter of that year. We did 58 transactions. I did 55 of them. So about 95% of the production of the team. But then the vision started to take hold. My vision was to triple the business in a two year period. I probably had a three year vision at that point to I think my three year vision was to get to 300 transactions in three years. We got to 248 and to be out of production. So I went from 58 transactions to 118 with a few buyer agents, to 178 with a couple buyer agents, additional buyer agents and one more admin to 248 in 2012. And of the 248 transactions, I closed one single transaction. And so that was my vision realized. And I was only able to achieve the vision because I spent more time than the average real estate agent or real estate team leader in this entrepreneurial sort of mindset where I would carve out time in my calendar to define the business and focus on closing the gap between where it was today and where I wanted it to be in the future. I also spent time as the manager focusing on achieving results through people and systems. How can I ad systems that gave me more leverage and got me out of a piece of, you know, something that I didn't want to do. How could I get down to only a few things that I did for that business? Right? Maybe, you know, create content for our recruiting blog or create content that went out for our clients for life program. Like there were very few things in 2012, 13 and 14. We went from 248 transactions to 312 to over 400 transactions in 2014. And that year I worked 42 days. The only work I did in that year. And ever since then has been the work of the entrepreneur. Let's say 70% entrepreneurial, 20%, probably 60% entrepreneurial, thinking about the future and bridging the gap, 30% manager, because I still get involved in achieving results through people and Systems. So about 30% and only 10% technical work. Sometimes I'll catch myself kind of going into the technical work in either real Estate B School or in my real estate team. And you're always going to have that propensity to want to dive into the weeds of the business because there's satisfaction in doing the thing that you were really good at when the business was in its fledgling stages and it was just starting to ramp up. And so my hope for you, and this is what I will leave you with here, is this question, do I have do you have a clear roadmap in place to build a profitable systems driven business so that you can live a life of meaning, impact and satisfaction? The thing we're most passionate here on this podcast, Real Estate Team Builders and in Real Estate B School, is to help you build a business that allows you to live out a life of meaning, impact and satisfaction. And that could be in your immediate family, it could be in your community, it could be globally like the world. If it ever needed leaders to stand up and step out of their sort of their small world to lead better in our families, to lead better in our community, to lead better globally and to have a bigger impact, this is the time. And so that's the underlying motivation of doing this podcast and for doing Real Estate B School is to help you build a business that provides plenty financially, more money than you can ever use financially. But we take your hours down to a point where you can actually have more freedom, freedom of time, freedom from stress, so that you can have more impact. That is the recipe. More money, more freedom, more, more impact. So that is my challenge as you leave this podcast episode is just to spend a little bit of time thinking about where do you spend your time? Are you the technician? Are you the manager? Are you the entrepreneur? You're actually all three. But according to your calendar, what's living out most in your calendar? My gut tells me that it's for most of you listening, it is probably over 90%. Is that technical work just grinding on transactions and all the technical work, you're not spending much time as the manager, let alone any time as the entrepreneur. And really sit with this question, do I have a clear roadmap in place to build a profitable systems driven business? So that I can live a life of meaning, impact and satisfaction. We'll see you on the next episode.