Kodi Riddle: 3 Tactical Ways to Push Through Internal Limitations & Build A High Performance Real Estate Organization

I just finished an unbelievable episode with Cody Riddle who this year will do 2.3 million GCI with 55% profit margin. She told me a story of a recent vacation she took where she came back and this was a long weekend, four or five day weekend. She came back to five commission checks in hand and three listing appointments set for her for her on the couple days when she got back. So she has achieved, you know, almost every bit of leverage she could possibly achieve in her business. And it wasn't always that way. 2015 was when Cody started with real Estate B school. And I think she said that year she sold 41 homes, her and her husband and an administrator. And she has come to the point where she has a 13 person team and she is scaling beyond what she ever thought was possible. I want to hone in specifically on this follow up episode about the journey and this journey from agent, you know, top agent to business owner. And in real estate B school, this is what we teach, this is what I obsess over. This is why I started Real Estate B School in 2013. My journey in real estate took me about six years from the start of my real estate business to fully leverage leveraged 300 plus transactions per year, where I'm not doing much of anything in the business. And that is what we teach, concepts of leverage. Yet as you'll recall, if you missed the episode, go back one episode. Cody got into a bunch of issues around mindset and comparison and all the different things, control and fear and the challenges that we go through over and over again, what we have to push through if we're going to achieve true business ownership in the real estate industry. And so I want to go into three tactical steps. The first one is to begin with the end in mind. The second one is your world versus the world and avoiding the comparison game. And then the third is to know the stages of business growth. So let's jump right in. Our most successful members and folks that actually build a business worth owning so they can live a life worth living are very clear about where they're going. And so this concept of beginning with the end in mind escapes most highly productive real estate agents and even team leaders in that they're not clear on their destination in their business. And more often than not, they're not clear in where they want to be in any area of their life that matters. So their marriage, their relationship with their kids, their physical body, their emotional well being, their spiritual journey. Without a specific end in mind, the chances that we hit it are literally impossible. Because we haven't identified it. And it's not that it's always going to be exactly a straight line. So let's envision in Cody's example a tripling of the business. Well, probably a quadrupling when it comes from GCI and probably a 6, 7 times increase when it comes to take home net income in her five year journey in real estate B school. The clarity in terms of what was missing in Cody's business when she started with real estate B school, her time wasn't her own. She didn't know her numbers. She wasn't clear on how all of her effort was translating into increasing her net worth. She didn't have a lot of freedom. She was stressed out, she was out of love with her business. And so this beginning with the end in mind, you know, there's a very popular book, I forget what book it is. It's in proverbs where the scripture is. Where there is no vision, the people perish. And I believe that is true for us personally when it comes to our businesses, when it comes to our personal lives or any area of life that we want to achieve at a high level, we have to be clear on where we are going. So if you're selling 40 to 50 homes today and you are losing your mind and your relationships aren't strong and you're not tending to your physical body and you want to grow so you have this natural drive in you to grow, you have to make a commitment to specifically declare, three years from now I'm going to be selling 150 homes. I'm only going to be working with soi sellers. I'm going to be working less than 50 hours a week. I have a fully leveraged team around me crushing it, selling an additional hundred homes. I'm taking home seven figure income. Get really granular on where you're going. So that's number one. Begin with the end in mind. Number two is this comparison game and avoiding the comparison game, I call it your world versus the world. We gave examples on Cody's episode about, you know, teams and team leaders that are selling a bunch of real estate. Right? They're doing great, right? We put them on a pedestal, yet we don't know their profitability. We don't know if they have a strong marriage or if they are able to take time away from their business or if their net worth is increasing or we don't know anything about them or their business yet. We still want to think that we're less than them. Cody really has struggled with this and I would take her business over 99.9% of the real estate team leaders that I've talked to over the last eight years of my journey in building real estate B school and specifically helping real estate team builders. And yet there still is this. I'm not quite enough. I'm not quite enough. Look at that guy has it better than me. Look at that, you know, girl over there running that team. She must have something figured out that I don't have figured out. And so the way to avoid this trap, this comparison trap where we're constantly comparing our insides, our ugly pieces with everyone's outsides, what they put on Instagram or Facebook or how many homes they sell versus the profit they take home, right? So how do we avoid that? There's a couple of things here. The first is to get really clear on your world. Like what is my world? What are the things I care about? Right? I care about my schedule, I care about my relationship with my spouse, my relationship with my kids, my physical body getting in the word. I care about my emotional well being, maybe a sibling or a parent, right? Get really clear on what those things are and then what's the world? You know, I was asked the question, so that's number one, get clear on what, what's important to you. The step two of this step two, part two of this, step two is to eliminate the things from the world that have no bearing on your world. So constantly getting in social media and thinking like, oh, look at that person, their spouse and their pretty kids and that nice car and like, wonder what they have going on that I don't have going on. Or constantly and incessantly watching the news, right? That's the world. That's not what's happening in another country doesn't really have an impact on the world that you've defined in the first step of this part two, right? So get clear on the world versus your world. And then it becomes really, really easy to focus on the things that matter most. Another tip here is to give yourself credit and Cody elaborated on this. Give yourself credit for how far you've come. Hard charging business builders tend to be so focused on the future that we rarely take note of where we've come from. And so Cody built a business like less than 500,000 GCI before 400 or so increased it to 2.3 million with a seven figure take home. And she's taking steps to get out of production 100% and she'll do it and still maintain a seven figure net income. Yet she still felt like she wasn't achieving. That's because she's looking up the mountain and she hasn't looked back to see how far she's come. Luckily, she's building her business on the right mountain. There are a lot of real estate team builders out there that have, you know, they're focused on just top line only and they get to the top of the mountain, they have a 3, 4, 5 million dollars business and it's marginally profitable if not for their own production. And so that's number two, your world versus their world or the world. And to avoid the comparison game, the third thing here is to know the stages of growth. When I started real estate B school, I didn't quite know what the stages were. I knew that I took me about six years to navigate agent to true owner, down to one day a week where the business ran without me intervening much at all. Six year journey. Yet it took me three, four or five years in working with dozens and now hundreds of real estate team builders for me to detail the six specific stages of growth you'll have to follow in order to build a business that is on the right economic model, that brings in people that you want to be around and you want to serve, that is systems driven and your people are empowered and it's high culture. The cadence is, it's a tight cadence, everybody knows what they're doing. It's a new business development focused business that is tracking everything they do right. This is a high performance organization that we're building. And you've got to know the stages and you have to know what questions at each stage that you're asking yourself and the struggles that the next stage is going to bring and the tools and systems that you're going to build out at each particular stage and what your team structure looks like and how much you'll be making and the tasks that you'll have to shed and delegate so you can elevate in your business. These are all the things that you need to know as you ascend these different stages of growth. And you may be at, let's call it stage three, which is 500,000 to a million in the real estate business growth navigator. Yet you miss something in stage two. So you've got to go back, you've got to go back and put a tool or a system in place. Maybe you missed the concept of economic model. And knowing your economic model, value based commission splits when you bring an agent on your team, how to train them properly, how to track their numbers, how to get them to embrace accountability and discipline or you may have missed those things. You got to slow down a little bit, adopt some of the tools and systems from the prior stage so you can move on to the next stage. And I put together a report specifically to navigate these six stages of growth. You can go to realestate business growth.com to grab a free copy. There's no agenda whatsoever. It is packed full of content. Just go to realestate business growth.com to grab a copy right now. It will detail the strategic questions, the tools and systems that you need to focus on, how you're feeling at each stage, what your team structure looks like, how many hours you'll be putting in, how much money you'll be making at a specific stage. It is chock full of just pure value. So go to realestatebusinessgrowth.com and if you want to have a conversation about your business where you're at, you know you need to be in a world that is applying sound business principles to help you scale your business without losing your life. You could be our next case study. Go to rebs. That's rebscasestudy.com we'll see you over there. Be good. Thanks for listening. Would you please take a minute to share the show with other team leaders who may be struggling? And if you love the podcast, please leave us a five star review on Apple Podcasts. If you want to learn step by step how to build a profitable real estate team that allows you to get out of the real estate grind and live lifestyle you've been dreaming about, Visit us@joinrebs.com that's joinrebs.com Our coaching, training systems and support will help you get more high quality leads, increase your conversions and sales, improve your client experience and allow you to scale your real estate business, all while reducing the amount of hours you work and the stress you endure. Just go to joinrebs.com for more info now. See you on the next episode.