Learn how "The Business Freedom Blueprint" can Help You Profitably Scale Your Real Estate Business

Alright, so welcome. We're going to get after it here and dig in. So hopefully you're in the right place. If you are in real estate and you're looking to get leverage in your business. We're going to dig into the three key drivers and this is what we call the rev scale model versus our traditional model of real estate. And I'll dig into all of that and I'm going to dig into really the elements of scaling your business that are critically important. So make sure you have the worksheets, make sure you are intentional in terms of getting insights and getting actions and jotting them down on. There's a page there that is insights and actions and the first one that I'm going to go with, my clicker's not working is the traditional model. And then we're going to dig into the scale model so make sure you get those. There are pages for case studies, notes and insights. We've got members that are just crushing it that I really want you to be able to learn from and so make sure you take notes on those as well. And the overarching question that we're going to dig into today, and this is something that, you know, there's a small percentage of folks of our industry that ever even make it out of what I call their survival phase of growth. We have six phases of growth we're going to go through later here in the webinar and I think it's like 2% make it out of survival mode. And so the question to ask yourself if you want to ultimately build a business that's bigger than you in real estate is do I have a clear and actionable plan in place to build a sustainable business so that I can live a life of meaning, impact and satisfaction? My daughter just came in here and didn't realize I'm on a live webinar. So I can't help you right now, my sweet love. And so let's dig into probably the most common question that I'm asked. Because I was able to scale my business, I was able to as a solo agent, you know, new to the business. I sold 27 homes in my first nine months. Then I did 44 with part time assistant. That full year 2008 market kind of did some wonky things. I still managed to bring on one buyer's agent and went to 58 sales. Then 118 and 178 while the market was tanking. Then 248 was the year I only sold one home. And I did it all on A really sound economic model. So I get asked this question a lot. How do I scale my business? So what I want most for all of you, it's not so much that I want you to scale your business as much as I want you to have time. Freedom. So do what you want when you want. Money. Freedom. So money to be able to do those things. And then freedom from stress. So for me this was 2007. November 2007. I am 7 months into real estate. Never had done any sales before in my career. Never had built a team, never had generated a lead of any sort. I had a corporate job before I got into real estate and I had a new son. And I only got married in October 2006. So the math is legit. This is 11 months after I got married. We had a kid, or 13 months rather. And so this thing had to work. I left a cozy six figure corporate job where I was in really good with everyone. I did acquisitions and strategy for an aerospace company. And I was really in good with the chairman of that publicly traded company and my boss. And just really good situation. I just knew it wasn't going to give me what I wanted out of my life. So this thing had to work. Here's the thing though. So that was 2007. You could see Anders is slightly. He's like new. This is Anders, like straight out of the belly. He's about a year old here. And I was working all the time. So this was the year I did 44 transactions with a part time assistant. My first full year in real estate. And you can see Anders in the picture on the right. He's still pretty happy. He doesn't know what's going on, that I'm not being a great dad. This is our first family vacation. I want you, even though I can't see you, I want you to raise your hand. Even if you're watching a recording of this someday, raise your hand and you can actually do it on the chat there. Raise your hand if you have done work on vacation. I've got a text, someone here. I've got guys outside on a live webinar. If you guys can hear those leaves, leaves are blowing. I'm gonna have that stopped. So this was our first family vacation. This is probably 2010 or so. And so this is the year. I've already got a team. I'm still working deals. This is a buyer. $850,000 buyer we had under contract. And I blew the whole vacation. And Julie still remembers it. I mean, really sort of broke. Broke some I definitely ate up some goodwill in this by doing this. And this was in the mountains. And so I had to go down the bottom of the mountain to even get reception and all that crap that we do. I'm not gonna get too deep into my motivation for being, you know, showing up in business a certain way, showing up as a father a way, and showing up as a husband in a certain way. Though my dad, I think he honestly did his best. He didn't do really great in any of those areas of his life. So I had a really good example of how not to do any of it. My parents got divorced when I was four years old. He had addiction issues. He drank. He was an alcoholic, drank actively until I was 15. He owned a business, he was a hairstylist. And he, he was like the E myth. It was a total myth that he was a business owner. And, you know, he opened the shop up, he closed it down, he stayed late, got in early, ordered supplies, you know, swept the floors, took out the garbage, did hair color, did hair cutting. Like it was just E myth, the entrepreneurial myth, 100%. And so for me, this is our second child, Kendall. She was born in April 2010. So this was the year that we did 118 sides as a really small team. And I did half, over half of that production. I think I did like 50, maybe 66 sides or something. I had to make this thing work. So I was actually full time running the team, team leader. I was a full time agent and I was also working on Systems from like 10pm to 2am pretty consistently to make sure I got some leverage and I can get out of it. And so for me, scaling the business was all about time and money, freedom and lowering my stress. I was super stressed out all the time. The life I've built before me for myself now, I've done seven years in a row of an annual honeymoon, a week off with my wife Julie. I do an annual daddy daughter trip, an annual father son trip, an annual Hilton Head trip. We go to Disney on a Disney cruise once a year. We go to Gatlinburg, the mountains once a year. I take a ski trip once a year with my guy friends. We do all these random weekends together. We go to Asheville, we went to Universal Studios. It is definitely not perfect. And that's not why I'm telling you any of this. Here's the thing I need you to take away. It was super intentional. I was just not willing to fail as a husband and to fail as a father and to fail as a business person the way that my dad did. So I was very, very intentional about what I was going to build and how it was going to surf the different areas of my life that mattered most to me. And I don't know what motivated me to put this together. I took the real estate market in Charlotte and this is a little bit older, but these are number of units sold by year in Charlotte. And I put my life events on top of it. And so at this point I think we're almost at 4,000 families served. I, I've only really been involved in just over 200 transactions personally. About a billion dollars worth of real estate I've been involved in as a team owner. And you can see when I got married, you can see when I got into real estate seemed like a good idea. You can see when my son was born, Julie's dad had a major tumor, my dad had a stroke when bottom of the market, little uptick. When Kendall was born, I was able to exit production and then I launched the coaching company because my journey was hard. My dad did pass away. That was probably one of the saddest moments of my life. Just a man that was at the end of his life was full of regret. And then I really do believe we're still at a pretty hot market in Charlotte. Most of the country is still. We're definitely going to see a shift, hopefully just cooling off and not anything crazy. So my time in the business, I went from seven days, five days to three days to one day a week. I've done one day a week in the real estate team for seven, six years now. Yeah, probably six years 2000, middle of 2013. So that's about six years now. I went from a net worth of low six figures to multiple seven figure liquid net worth. And I'm not bragging when I'm saying that. I'm just saying that's what's possible if we set this thing up the right way. And I went from a stress level that was intolerable, which is higher than high to moderate, to, you know, at this point I don't really stress out about a whole lot in either of the business businesses that I run. And in all of that there was nothing easy about it. I didn't really have. I wasn't prepared for any phase or stage of growth. I really came up with the idea to launch Real Estate B School because my journey was so painful. So this is 2013, this is actually our first intensive workshop. This is 2014, but I launched Real Estate B School in 2013. And I went down to one day a week, I think it was in 2012. And that's when I got out of production. So all of that to say that I want you to just take a minute and think of the top three reasons. That was all of my motivation. And to me that story is meaningful. To you, that story doesn't matter at all. What is your story? What are the top three reasons that you want to build a sustainable real estate team? And when I sustain. When I say sustainable, I mean the thing. Not everything relies on you. So doesn't mean you need to exit production. Doesn't mean anything like that. But what are the top three reasons you want to build a sustainable real estate team? I'm just going to give you a minute to think about it. Hopefully you're taking notes. I want you to write down a few reasons. Maybe there's family that you're letting down right now. Maybe financially you're not where you need to be or thought you could be. Maybe you've got debt that is weighing you down. Maybe it's just that you're super stressed. Maybe you used to love real estate and now you despise it. I did a case study with a client of ours in Phoenix, Arizona. She went from 300,000 GCI to 1.2 million GCI in four years. And she loves production. She still does more than half the production on her team. When I met her, she hated it. And so she was. She's four times the size business and she went from hating it to loving it. From working 60, 70 hours a week to working, you know, 35 to 40 hours a week and making a whole lot more money. So what are the top three reasons you want to build a sustainable real estate team? So when we look at the traditional model, you know, so everyone wants to scale. Everyone talks about time, money, freedom, you know, who wants stress if you can avoid it. The traditional model calls us to attract business. However we do that, convert that business to a consultation, then into a client and then deliver on the thing you promised. Show them homes, get them under contract, get their home on the market and get it sold. Here's the thing, if you're the only one doing all of this and it's not systems based, if you can't attract systematically, you won't have consistent opportunity. If you can't convert systematically, you won't have clients unless you're doing all of it. If you don't deliver systematically, you won't have a consistent stream of cash coming in and ultimately Traditional agents, traditionally successful or conventional success in our industry leaves you slave to your business straight up. And this is true of, you know, top producing agents as well as small team leaders as any size. We deal with mainly 3 to 500,000 GCI on the low end all the way up to we just brought a client on at 5 million that is working 80 days. 80 days, I wish. He wishes working 80 hours a week consistently and does a million GCI of the 5 million is not even netting close to a million. So a complete economically end time and stress, a slave to the business, which is not what we want here is what we're going to dive into today and I really want you to dig in here with me. So we talked about attract, convert, deliver, right? Every business, it's business 101. Every business needs to attract, convert and deliver. If you can't figure out how to do a track convert deliver without being in it, you're never going to have a business. It's a critical part of our training in real estate B school. What I'm going to focus in on today is still the time, Money, stress, freedom. I want to talk about the scale side of this. The first thing we need to do is create your future. The second thing we need to do is know your numbers. And then the third thing we need to talk about today is how do we grow our team the right way? Even if it's just one administrative hire, a couple buyer agents. You know this the person I talked about just a second ago that did 1.2 million from 300, she has two administrators and two buyer agents. So she's the listing agent for a team. She has two buyer's agents and two administrators and that's her whole team. And so super, super profitable. So if you don't create your future, you'll have no direction. And this is 99.9% of probably just the general population. They don't really have a clear plan about where they're going. If you don't know your numbers as a business owner, you have no predictability in the business and you cannot, you cannot scale the business. And if you don't know how to grow your team the right way, you cannot have any sustainability. And like I said, sustainability is that you can keep doing this thing called a real estate business for a long time. The reason I can be in the real estate business is because I've set it up in a way where it's all sustainable now. Like I don't even get pulled into any client issues whatsoever. I'm not the broker of that business. I don't get pulled in if someone gets unhappy. You know, for me, it's completely leveraged. And it's been that way for the really last five years, like just five or six years where I've just been total hands off acting as an owner in that business. So when you do this the right way, actually, before I get to that. So if you, if you look at create your future, know your numbers, grow your team. When you, when, when I talk about create your future, it's getting clear on the model, you know, so what model are you building? Who are you listening to? You know, are you, are you going to be more brokerage? Are you going to be more small team? Are you going to be a big team with 50 agents and they only sell, you know, 10 homes each? Like, what model are you pursuing? Then we talk about putting your life first, planning your future. When we talk about know your numbers, it's all about economic model. There are some foundational financial tools that you need to focus on. And then we talk about financial freedom. What does it really mean to achieve financial freedom? And then we talk about growing your team. It's all about identifying and attracting talent, hiring and onboarding, and then your cadence and your culture. And when you do this part right, there's true business freedom awaiting. It's on the other side of doing this the right way. And so that's a lot of words I want to dig into, sort of how do we get there? And so this is a tool that we look at to basically just help you kind of figure out where you're at, where you are in the journey. We call this the business growth navigator. There's more to it than the simplified version I'm going to cover today. Each phase of growth comes with it. The time, money, stress stuff, but also like what you need to do to get to the next phase. So I'm not going to dive too, too deep into it because it's pretty, it's pretty in depth. But 90, I think it's a full 98% of our industry lives in the start phase. They never get out of it. They never sell more than two homes per month. And that's survival mode. There's no real way to make money in real estate or have a life if you're in the start phase. We generally find most of our clients, of our members, they're in the ramp phase of their business where they're doing it all and they honestly don't know what they don't know. They know how to do real estate at a high lever. They don't know how to build systems or you know, hire someone to run those systems. So that's like two to six homes per month. Then we talk about the scale phase, which is really building that foundation where this business starts to take on a life of its own. You've got a key administrator, you've got a few agents that are producing pretty decent. You can get up to, you know, 12 homes per month. Then we talk about making that shift into leadership and management and empowering others where at this point you're likely still in production. You're probably just working your sphere and you're probably just working listings so you're out of buyers. This can take you from 12 homes per month to an average of 18 homes per month. Then we talk about making the decision to exit production. That's where the true freedom of time is. When I had my Last closing in January 2012, I committed to never selling a home again, no matter what. And I didn't. I even moved in 2017. I bought and sold and I didn't represent myself, so I really, really made the commitment. Not everybody wants to exit production, so I will say that as well. Some people love production. They just don't have the systems to make it fun. And it becomes a grind, it becomes miserable and it steals their joy. So that's up to 30 homes per month. And then once you get really even 25 to 30 plus homes per month, that's where you can make the decision to maybe promote someone on the operations side of your business, someone on the sales side of your business where you can, you know, let others run the business and do the one day a week thing and really kind of live that good life of business ownership. And you know, like I said, exiting production isn't required and going down to one day a week isn't required. Those were just decisions that I made. The cool thing is, is that you, you have to think about your business as if you couldn't, you know, you couldn't operate it, you couldn't be in it every day. And having that mindset is what forces you to build the systems to get the leverage so you can build this thing that's a little bit more sustainable. Alright, so now I want to talk about the Business Freedom Index. And if you are not paying attention right now and you hear me saying that, stop whatever else you're doing, get off your phone and just be here for this. This is one of the most powerful things I'll go through. I Read a book. The first business book I ever read was when I actually was a business owner was E Myth Revisited by Michael Gerbil. Probably one of the next five books was no BS Time Management for Entrepreneurs by Dan Kennedy. And he took me through an exercise that, that changed everything for me. It was a simple exercise and it was looking at what you make divided by the hours you work, right? Not, not rocket science. And we tend to think, and in real estate especially, that we are, the money we make is linked to the hours we work. And as a business owner, that's actually not true yet for most real estate agent because they haven't made that shift to business ownership. The only way for them to make more money is to hustle a little bit more and to work a little bit harder so they don't have the ability to add any different level of value to their business than lead generation, doing buyer consoles, doing listing consults, going to closing, you know, and those are the dollar productive activities of a real estate agent, let alone running signs, you know, putting listings in the mls. They kind of knit, never make that shift. So the, the, the calculation I did, and at the time, I think in 2008, my first full year real estate, I sold 58 homes, no 44 homes, probably 7,000 average commission check. So I think I probably grossed about 300,000. I think after expenses, I don't think I netted more than 10,000amonth. So my take was probably about $120,000. And I probably, that year I probably worked more than 2,400 hours. So if you think of, you know, I probably, let's say I made 125,000, you know, before taxes and owner's compensation. I'm doing this out loud because I want you to do the calculation yourself. Let's say I made 125. And let's say I worked 2,500 hours, which is 50 hours a week. I probably worked more than that. But let's say that's the math. That's $50 an hour. And so I wanted to make $250 an hour. And I was making $50 an hour. So I wanted to, I was willing to work 2,000 hours. My calculation was I wanted to do 500,000 in net income, income that I got to split with the government divided by 2000. So 500 divided by 2000 is $250 an hour. So what is that number for you today and what do you want it to be? And that is what we call the business freedom index. And when we look at this concept in action. So the thing I want to drive home to you is that there is an ability to delink time and money. It took me about five years to get to 250. I did achieve. It took me another five years to get to 500. And now I'm in the midst of getting to a thousand. And part of it is just cutting down my hours, getting really smart people to do parts of the job that I'm not good, I'm not that great at. And so this is the Business Freedom Index in action. If you remember the phases of growth, this is roughly what the Business Freedom Index, how it plays out in the different phases of growth. So as I was able to build systems and hire people to run those systems, I was able to go from that $25 an hour calculation to 50 to 100 to 250 to 500. And now I'm somewhere in the 500 to $1,000 an hour. Not because I'm any smarter than anyone, it's just because I've made this commitment to be a business owner and a business builder versus a technician. And here's the thing, there's nothing wrong with being a technician. There's nothing wrong with it, right? Real estate B school, we teach people how to get out of the technician world, become a business owner. 99.99% of the world of the marketplace of people that are out there making money are technicians, right? They go to a job and they do really great at that job. They get compensated. The market takes care of what that job is worth. And as a business owner, you can't think that way. You've got to build a system so someone can do the technical work, so you can elevate up into managing, into leading, into, you know, really becoming a business owner. So at each phase, there's sort of, you know, at the, at the start phase, this is where every agent, 98% of agents are overworked, underpaid. You don't know what you don't know. You can make that shift to two to six homes where you're starting to make a little bit of money. But you're working way too much, way too much. For me, I think that next year I probably, I don't think I made 250, but let's say I went from 125 to 250 divided by 2500, which is probably still pretty light on the hours. I probably. So that's $100 an hour. I don't think I made that big of A jump. I don't think I went from 50 to 100, although I may have. I think I was still working more than 2,500 hours. So it gets a little. You've got to consider the amount of hours. So when you get to the scale phase, 50 to 100, you know, money's decent, but your time is not your own. And systems are the thing that's going to get you out of that scale phase. Then leadership, you know, leverage is kicking in and things are actually going really well. There's not a lot of people making $100 an hour or more. If you canvass your friends and people, you know, not a lot of people make $100 an hour. And so think that that's just the starting point. That's really just the starting point of what's possible. And then the exit phase, if you do exit production, you can actually get your hours down and make more money per hour than being in production and leading a team. And it doesn't, it's not for everybody. Maybe you stay in listings, but this is where your ops and sales leaders are developing and kind of over the day to day. And then, you know, with, you know, you get a strong team cadence, a strong culture, a strong, strong structure. That's where you can really sort of delink time and money. All right, I know I'm talking a lot at you. I'm going to get a chance here for you guys to chime in and go to the chat. We talked about the goal of all of this and what we live for at real estate B school is to help you make more money, have more time, and experience less stress. The focus I've touched on it is to build sustainable systems and empower your team members. And I'm not talking, sometimes I say that to someone that has an assistant or maybe one buyer agent. They're like, I don't want a big team. You don't need a big team. Right. The example I just gave was, you know, five people doing about, I think it's 1.25. So 250,000 GCI per team member. And that business is more than 50% margin. I think it's a 60% margin business. So work less, make more is the goal. We do that focusing on four key drivers. And we just talked about it. Attract, convert, deliver and scale. So as you, as I calibrate you into the real estate B school world, this is where we live. And when we think about the strength of your business, we talk about, are you strong in attracting business? Are you Strong in converting business? Are you strong in delivering a world class experience? And do you have the elements in place to be able to scale your business? And when we think about attract the driver, attract, there's three accelerators that we focus on in real estate B school, database marketing, listing marketing and buyer marketing. And we focus on them to be self sustaining. So they're systems driven. They're not you tinkering with it all the time to make it run and generate leads. When we talk about convert, we talk about lead management, appointment setting and your consultation process. And we build these out in a way where anyone can adhere to the system and the process and frameworks that we create. When we talk about deliver, it's all about buyer and seller, client servicing, transaction coordination and the critical technology tools that we need to have in the business. And then when we talk about scale, it's all about creating your future, knowing your numbers and growing your team. And that's where we're going to spend some time today. So as you look at this model here, again, so this is what we live for in real estate B school, I'm going to ask you the question I want to get in the chat. Maybe it's a one to five, you know, one based on that model, you know, I don't feel like the business is scalable or sustainable, but where the business is right now, one being it, it's not real sustainable or scalable because it relies on me 100%. And five, you know, maybe you already have a sustainable and systems driven business. Go to the chat and kind of chime in and let me know where you are at just so I can get a feeling and a flavor for what's going on here. You got to play. Don't be here if you're not going to play. All out. All right, We've got them all over the board so far, everywhere from 1 to 5. Got some twos and threes. All right, so that's helpful for me. So rest assured that you're really, no matter where you are, you're in the right place. There's always a way to optimize the business and make it better. So I do want you to kind of take insights and action items. And just a quick reminder as we're going through this training, let's just be here, let's be intentional with our time. I want you to really understand foundationally as I get into these teaching points, I really want you to understand it. So act like you're in school while we're here. I want us to be real with each other. I'm going to share the good, bad, ugly about my business journey. I do want you to just be curious and be open minded to what I may share and what's possible. And I want you to be really clear on what some action items and next steps might be for you so you can be super confident leaving our time together and take action. That's what I'm about. I've dedicated my life to helping this industry build leverage, the use of tools and systems rather than brute force and more hours in the business. So we talked about attract, we talked about convert and deliver. I'm not going to spend time there today on those things. In real estate B school our we call it our toolbox. Each of those three drivers has three accelerators that each have three to five tools. So there's drivers, accelerators and tools. So there's a bunch of stuff we do to train in there. Today we're going to focus on helping you scale your business. The first thing, the first accelerator here that we're going to talk about is creating your future. Number one is to get clear on the model. I'm not going to dive deep on this. I'm just going to explain what it is. This is where it's really the spread of like brokerage to tight knit, highly coordinated team that delivers a world class experience to a buyer or seller. That's the one end of the spectrum. We teach closer to that than we do brokerages. Brokerages. I just think it's a really flawed model. I think it's super challenging to make decent money. I don't think there's a whole lot of time, money, freedom to be had in a brokerage world. We have members that make 50,000amonth from their real estate team that has six people on it and their 150 person brokerage only makes them $10,000 a month. So it's just, and we see that across the board. So I want to dig deep into putting your life first. This to me is super foundational. I want to ask you the question, you know, will I have any regrets? And I don't need you to answer but I want you to ask yourself the question, will I have any regrets if I continue to go down the path I'm on right now? So think about the time you're putting into your business, the money you're making, the stress you're enduring. Are you bringing that stress home or into relationships? Will you have regrets if you continue to stay on the path that you're on now? We talked about like the different phases of growth. For me, this, you know, the whole reason I give you a little bit of a sense of it, the reason I got into building a team is that my why for me was really significant. And this was my business plan I put together in 2009 for 2010. And I was really specific. This is the second page of that, that plan really specific around 2012, which was three years, 2014, which was five years, and then 2020, which as I'm doing this, we are 12 days away from 2020. Pretty much every one of these bullets, I broke it down into like team numbers. And the time I put into the business and my focus, charity and giving and vacation and liquid net worth versus total net worth, my wife working or not working. And I've achieved all of it and so way ahead of where I thought I was going to achieve it. And so having intention around this area of your business is ultimately the thing that's going to be able to drive you forward and you know, really think about what you don't want in your life. You know, in real estate, it's hard to be a top producing agent or even a team leader that's in production and not have systems. Like you can't have a life if you don't have systems that help run the business. And so when I was in production, all the drama from the transactions really impacted me and it was an eight day a week job. So think about what you don't want and also what you do want. You know, what do you want in your life? What do you want your work week to look like? What do you want your ideal morning to look like? What do you want your weekends to look like? How many days do you want to disconnect from the business and then think about what you want and what you don't want, what's in the way, you know, when you're not here, right. So thinking about your legacy, what do you want to be known for? Like, I promise you it's not selling an additional home yet. We get wrapped up in our businesses to the point where it becomes the most important thing and it's all consuming. And so for me it's been helpful to think about like, hey, when this is all over, you know, and I'm surrounded by my loved ones, I don't want to have regrets. Like, I just don't think the money I made or the homes I sold is really going to be the thing that matters. So when I think about this area of our business and really more Importantly, our life that I call create your future. If you have not gotten into a consistent. Every year you have a three year vision. So every year I have a three year vision. So now it is the end of 2022. What do you want the various areas of your life to look like? Like, it's one of the first exercises we go through with our members. And so I challenge you to think about your physical body, your spiritual walk, your relationships. Maybe you're a husband or a wife or a father or mother, you know, your finances and your business. Your business is only one of the, you know, your emotional wellbeing, right? What do you want those areas of your life to look like? And are you taking time away on a regular basis? We call these clarity breaks in real estate B school. Once a week we carve out time. I still do this to take time just to think about my business and my life. We have a set of questions that we follow for this. Are you taking any time away from your business to think about if it's going the way that you want it to go, and if you're not, it's pretty simple. All you do is put it in your calendar. I challenge you to do it now. Put a recurring 60 minute appointment in your calendar. Just call it clarity Break. Literally ask yourself the question, what's working? What's not working in the areas of your life that matter? What's not working? What's working for me as a husband? What's not working for me as a husband? What's working for me in my physical body? What's not working for me in my physical body, in my business, in my finances, in my walk with Christ. Right? Super simple life changer. I'm in a group called C12. It's a Christian business owners group. Their slogan is priorities are what we do. Everything else is just talk. So if you're, if you're claiming to, you know, want to show up as a world class dad and a world class husband, you know, you want to be on point with your finances and your fitness and your faith. And if someone were to look at what you're actually doing and where you're actually spending your time, you know, are they in alignment? And that's a tough, a tough, tough thing, right? That's a punch I'm not willing to pull. And it's tough to challenge you in that area. Are your priorities lining up with what you want in your life? I get, I feel awkward saying it every time I do. And I'm gonna say it, you know, if you, if you look at where you're spending your spare time, you know, are you, are you watching sports? Are you, you know, watching Netflix? Are you in social media? I don't have, I took social media. I had one week where I was 2 hours and 44 minutes on social media and I deleted, I deleted Facebook in that moment. So now I really have no use for my phone. I got out of email, 99% out of email. It just wasn't serving the areas of my life that really mattered. And so maybe you're not at that point yet. You have to really think about are your what you say you want to do, lining up with what you actually do. And then we have a planning process that we're not going to get into today. It's a three year vision exercise. We break it down into one year plan. We break it down into 90 days and then we break it down into weekly measurables and tracking. I want to spend a little bit of time talking about Dave Hook. He's in Central pa. He, I think his wife Jenny was actually only pregnant with their first child when we met. They have three children now. He did I think just under a hundred sides when I first met him four years ago and he'll close 255 to 260 homes this year. And he, he was the guy I was just talking about that, that has a brokerage and has a real estate team. He has total time and money freedom now. He was able to exit production. That was a desire of his. He elevated his first administrative hire and his first agent hire. They're both with him for since he started the team. They're now running sales and operations. Super. You know, I think they have about 10 team members doing about 255, 260 sides and just an amazing guy. And the takeaway that I want you to have from, you know, he was at the point where he was working 70 to 80 hours a week. He's working less than 40 hours a week now. He leaves his office. It crept up a little bit here recently and I challenged him again to get home by 5:30 every, every day. So 8:30 to 5:30 with a lunch five days a week and he's making I think four times more money than he was when he was heavy in production. Just under a hundred sides and so just an awesome dude. I did a full case study on him that you can check out on realestatebschool.com so what insights and actions did you take away from putting your life first? Is there anything challenging or the conversation around regrets. I really want you guys to think about what can you take away from that, that from this that's going to help you move the needle in your life. I'll give you just a second to think about that. And I think we're pretty good on time. For those of you clock watchers, one thing I have committed to now, we're talking about health, physical body. This is my gallon of water that I chug every day. So in terms of creating your future and putting your life first, is there an obvious takeaway, insider action that you need to just get after right now? I find a lot of top producing agents and team leaders, they just don't have any standards around their time. They just give it away to everyone else except the people that matter. So maybe that's something that you just need to look at. Alright, so let's get into the topic that most real estate agents just love. It's numbers and tracking and all of that. I'm totally, totally kidding. This is a struggle for most, most salespeople just don't like to dig into ROI and tracking and lead sourcing and P&L's and any of that. I want to break it down in a way where it'll at least give you a high level picture of how you need to think about your business in terms of your finances. The first thing we're going to talk about is your economic model. So as you scale your business, you need to know the model that you're building it on. And so the question I have for you is, is my business set up on an economic model that will allow me to compete at a high level and achieve my personal financial goals? And, and what I mean by compete at a high level is what we're seeing is that we, we don't see a high level of client service with the teams that have like 40 agents each selling 10 homes with two admin that honestly that's way closer to a general brokerage than it is tight knit, high client care, world class experience type business. In order to be able to give a world class experience, you have to make sure that you set up on the right model. And so when I talk about becoming the CFO of your business, you know, ask yourself, are you tracking the numbers that need to be tracked in your business? We break it down into a simple process. There's a weekly scorecard, we actually give you that scorecard in our pilot program which I'll go through. It's a free coaching program that we offer for those that qualify And I'll go through it here in just a little while. But, you know, how far were you on the spectrum? One, I am the not even close to a cfo, my business to five. Like, I've got all the numbers dialed in, you know. So think about that. When I think about business, the economic model, you know, it's how much I pay my agents, how much I pay my brokers, the decisions I'm making on how much to spend on marketing, how much to spend on administrative support, how much to spend on overhead and what's left over. Most team builders, you know, agents, top producing agents that are starting team or small team leaders that are scaling their team, they don't think through the ramifications and they don't even consciously choose an economic model. And so we have guidelines on how to go about this. We have ways to change commission splits. If you've set it up where it's just not going to work, you have to contemplate these things. The next thing is take profit first. The whole point of owning a business is to have something to show for it. And you can't just sell a lot of homes and not be building net worth. It's just not acceptable. As a business owner, there's a really great book, it's called Profit First Mike Michalowicz. And in the book, one of the most awesome quotes is that profit is not an event, it's a habit. So if you don't have a way of consistently moving money around in your business, even if you're on the smaller team side or you're just getting started, you probably are not on the right track with being able to achieve true financial freedom. Right? So it's comforting to know that we get to set up the economic model so that we can consistently make money. Then when you're scaling a business and you're bringing on team members, you have to be really clear on the value of your team. And most team leaders don't really think they're as valuable as they are, especially going into a shift. The coaching, the cadence, the structure, the tools and systems. Maybe you don't have some of those things today, but you will over time build those things. You offer way more value than you think. So when we talk about value based commission splits, we build our splits based on the value that our agents bring versus the value that we bring. And it depends on lead source. And it also depends on the fact that we offer more services to our agents than the typical team in our market. So we don't have a lot of agents, we only have five salespeople. We only have 12 people on our team to do roughly 3 million GCI in a market. That average price point is around 270 to 275. So you could do the math on the number of transactions. So we call that value based commission splits. We don't offer what everyone else offers. Right. Some of our lead sources are higher splits, some are lower. But we do it because we know our economic model and then we stick to that model. So you have to make some decisions. The warnings, there's two warnings that I will kind of throw in here when it comes to money and salespeople is a lot of times we see this constantly getting distracted. And we call this squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Like, you need to sort of make sure you're going down the right path in your business and not get distracted by the latest thing that's going to be marketed to you. This lead source is awesome. Instant offer. This referral source. Like, if you're clear in your economic model, you're clear on the fact that you can't pay Zillow 30%. You can't, you can't scale a business on paying Zillow. Whole separate training that I won't dive into. You've got to be able to generate your own high quality buyer and seller leads at less than 10% of GCI, not 30%. So it's a flawed model. And the second part is that most agents go too wide, most team leaders go too wide, and they spend their money on 12 different things. I was at a boomtown conference and this is the only reason I'll say it publicly. Tom Ferry was speaking, and the dude has built an amazing organization. I think it's a $50 million business. It's a monster. Right? He made the comment that most of you have too few lead sources, you need more lead sources. And I was like, no, sir. I think I'm gonna go through a case study here and I'll dive deeper on that point. But that would be the kiss of death. And he considers a lead source is like zillow or realtor.com it's not a lead source. I guess it's a lead source, but it's not marketing. Right. And people that are heavy into that recommended lead source are going to get screwed by Zillow and their economic model is not sustainable. This is a great quote from that book, Mike Michalowitz, Profit first. Putting your nose to the grindstone is a really easy way to cover up an unhealthy business. We Think that if we can just work harder, longer, better, if we can just hold out, something good will happen one day. And I feel like that encompasses so it's so applicable to our industry and where we struggle. We just want to hold out, like someday yet. Then a crappy market comes and our net worth is obliterated. I'm not going to get into the foundational financial tools. If I lost you on that part, I will lose you even more on this part. We do have tools in place to help you achieve financial freedom. You know, we teach you how to track net worth and those sorts of things. We teach you how to move your net worth in the right direction. So it's not what you make, it's what you keep and what you do with it. And so when I think about, you know, this area of our business, you know, we talked about creating your future. We talked about, you know, knowing your numbers. Our lead business coach, I started working with Andy. He now coaches for us probably for a little maybe about four years ago. I think they had two children. When we started working together, he was just about the same. I think he did about 80 transactions with an administrator and a buyer agent and he was able to scale his business. He tripled, more than tripled his business. And he went from that seven day a week down to one day a week in his business. And so he worked about, you know. Yeah, it was about 500 hours a year. When he got down to one day a week, I'm trying to think of what he made per hour. I think he's pretty close to that thousand bucks an hour because he had to hire like a legit sales manager, a legit operations manager. So he's willing to give up some dollars and trade them for hours, which was awesome. Like I said, he coaches for us. Now. His motivation was clearly around spending time with his family, right? They had to. And they wanted to have more kids. And he actually told me on our first call, we do a strategy session for folks that are kind of inquiring about our world. And he told me, like, Lars, you know, honestly, all I want to do is get an RV and just, just disconnect. This year he did a 67 day RV trip where he was totally unplugged. I'm actually super jealous of it because it's actually my dream. My wife, I don't think she'd really like it as much as I would like it, but anyway, so just a really cool cat. If you ever have the chance to get coached by him or interact with him, It'd be an awesome learning experience. And so again, what are the insights and actions when I talk about economic model and becoming the CFO of your business? You know, is it that you. Where you should be, you know, in terms of knowing your numbers or. I've got lots of work to do. Take, take some, take some notes there. In the interest of time, I'm going to keep pushing through. The next area that we're going to talk about is grow your team. And again, I don't want you to get all discouraged in terms of like, yeah, I see some of these teams out there and they're, you know, they're 40 people and the team leader is still selling homes and they're just as stressed as they ever were. And that's not what we stand for. We don't teach that when we talk about growing your team. It's doing it in a very specific way in a system. You build a system first and then you backfill a person to run that system. Different than most teams you'll see in your market. Number one is, and this is where we'll spend a little bit of time is to identify and attract talent. I feel like the biggest area where folks flop in terms of growing their team is their ability to identify and attract talent. And when you think about is your only competitive advantage, if you're building a business that serves buyers and sellers and you're making the shift from I'm an agent, a technician that helps buyers and sellers, the people you hire, it's your only competitive binge, the systems you build and the people that run those systems. So you have to think about right people and right seats and then right people. It's just your core values. And it's not like core values that you put on a wall and you don't live by them. It is real core values we go through with our members. We go through a process where we generate core values that are meaningful to you. We have them for real estate, B school, we have them for high performance real estate advisors. So that's right person. Right person. A culture fit. They fit your core values. You have to be super clear on what your core values are. Then we talk about the right seat. I see team leaders hire agents. Let's ignore the fact that they're not even the right person. They don't fit their core values. The team leader is not even clear on their core values. Let's just think about the seat itself. They don't really have a clue. Does this person really get the position? Do they really want it? Do they have a capacity to do it? So I want to spend a little bit of time here. Does the person you're hiring to fill a position really, truly in their core get it? It's aptitude, the ability to do the job. Think about some. If you've hired agents before, think about some of the agent hires. Were you hoping they would work out or did you know? Did you just take a chance? Right. Do they really get it? Do they really want it? Have they already done the job? Do they have the fire in the belly for like the ups and downs, the roller coaster that is real estate? Right. Are you hiring someone onto your team where you're not even sure if they want it? And do they have the capacity to do the job? Not just the amount of hours that it will take, but the emotional capacity or energy, the physical capacity, the intellectual capacity to do it? And have you set them up with clear responsibilities on our team? Each position is clearly laid out. Only five things, Five responsibilities per role on our team. Are those clearly spelled out so you can sit down with this person on a quarterly basis and talk about if they're actually doing their job? And here's the thing. You have people issues. 100% you do, even if you have the right person in the right seat. But you have a bunch of misfits on your team, you're probably spending too much time with the misfits. You're ignoring your true talent. And so a lot of times we see, well, right person, wrong seat. So there are core values fit, but they're not in the right job. And maybe you don't have a job fit for them. Or we see wrong person in the right seat. Good example of that is like someone who kicks butt in sales, but they're just horrible to be around. They've just got an ego that's unbearable. Right. If it's the wrong person, wrong seat, we see a lot of that as well. An administrator that does not cannot do the position of a key administrator on a growing real estate team. Wrong person. They're not a core values fit and they're in the wrong seat. They can't do the job. There's a. My pastor is Steven Furtick. He runs Elevation Church, or the pastor of Elevation Church. He did a sermon called the Power of Potential. And regardless of your faith, it is a straight up business lesson. Go to YouTube or write this down. Go to YouTube to write Furtick. F U R T I C K and I think it was called relationship advice. He talks about the difference between Potential and patterns. And so the lesson that I took away because I saw it live was that we hire people based on potential instead of really figuring out what their patterns are. And the relationship advice part was that, you know, women, you guys, you know, you think there's so much potential in the guy that you're with, but you know, he's overweight, he's in debt, you know, he's a gamer, he watches porn, like all these different things that his pattern is not someone that you want to be with. Trust the pattern versus the potential. And I feel like it hit me like a ton of bricks. Like, oh man, I have done this. Probably I've hired more than 100 people and probably maybe not 80, but definitely 60 of them are hired on potential. So don't do that. So the second part of grow your team is to how you hire, the hiring process, the interview process, and how you onboard talent. If you're bringing a salesperson into your world and you don't have an onboarding system built out, you are. It's irresponsible. You know, I'm on our fourth generation of our agent onboarding system. We give it away as a system in real estate B school. It gives someone with the right pattern of success the best chances of succeeding in a real estate team environment. And so make sure you're not doing that. And then a team culture and cadence. I feel like a lot of team leaders fall down on this one as well. They just don't quite, you know, know how to lead and manage and hold people accountable and what the cadence of a high performing real estate team looks like. Real quick, I want to talk about Dave Friedman. Near and dear to my heart. He came to our first intensive workshop and ever. Which was August. No, it wasn't. Yeah, maybe August 2014. It was our fall 2014. It was the first intensive workshop. Two day workshop and he was a client. He voxed me in last year in fall. So four years. Four years. In August 2014. He had yet to hire his first buyer's agent. He had his part time assistant. He did 65 transactions with a part time assistant similar to my journey. And he wrote down leaving this intensive in 2014, hire buyer agent. So it's just him and a part time administrator. He was hustling. She was building the systems in real estate B school this year. He'll do more than my. We're in the same region with kw. He'll do more than my real estate team this year. Seven figure net income. He didn't take any vacation in 2012, 13 or 14, when he was just getting into real estate in 2000, I don't think 15, I think 16, 17, 18 and 19. More than 12 weeks vacation from his business. He's been out of production for probably two and a half years or so. He also hired from within an operations person and a sales leader. Just built an amazing business. And when I think about growing your team, I haven't seen anyone do it as well as Dave Friedman has done it. He actually sent me a Vox 4 years almost to the month. He found his workbook from that first intensive where he wrote down hire buyer's agent. So anything's possible when you give yourself the right environment and you give yourself a little bit of grace and a little bit of time to do it. Alright, I want to take you through an exercise that I think is going to be super powerful. So whatever you're doing, if I've lost you, get your butt back here. Let's finish this thing strong. I am pretty sure I'm going to be on point with timing. We've got about 25 minutes left here. So let's go through three questions that I want you to really think about. I want you to think about the different areas of your life. So think about your business, think about your personal life, your physical health, your spiritual health, your emotional wellbeing, your finances, your relationships, your roles as, you know, spouse or parent. Where are you now? What's it like to show up as you every day now? Maybe you talk about time, money and stress. Just think about that for a second. Let me give you a second while I take a sip here. This process, these three questions are questions I use all the time. I do it on a quarterly basis. But it's fun to think out two or three years, then think, let's say two short years from now. So 24 months, it's only eight quarters. Let's say eight quarters doesn't seem as much as 24 months. Where do you want to be in those different areas? Maybe even just think about time, money and stress. So time. I'm working 60 hours consistently now. Money. You know, I seem to be making good money, but my net worth isn't increasing or I still have this junk debt. Stress level 9, 10 consistently, where do you want to go? I want to work 40 hours a week. I want to make $500 an hour. I want to be out of junk debt or all debt. And I want to have a million dollars of cash in the bank. And then stress. I want my stress to be at A level four or five. So when I actually have real stress in my family, I don't blow my lid. Speaking from experience there, I did that consistently because real estate is freaking stressful. So when you think about where you are, where you want to go, what's holding you back, what's getting in the way? Think about, you know, I like to ask people, three years ago, what was your three year plan and did you achieve it? Most people, even business owners, they scratch their head. I didn't have a three year plan three years ago. It's like, okay, that's a big problem, not cool. And so when you think about what's holding you back, what obstacles have you experienced, what gets in your way, what barriers do you see to being able to achieve this vision you have for those different areas of your life? Dan Jones, one really good example, really near and dear to my heart because Dan was on my real estate team. He moved from Hilton Head to Charlotte. His mom was passing away. And when I think about like just a simple business, he'll do 2.7 million GCI this year. He was on my real estate team back in 2011. Probably 2011-2012-2013-2014. He did it on his own. Sold about 60 homes per year with a part time assistant. And then I think finally in 2015 I convinced him, even though we're in the same market, literally, I convinced him to come to real estate B school so I can help him with his journey. We got him down to a single lead source when we started working together. And he went from 60 deals, going from four lead sources, excuse me, four paid lead sources to one paid lead source. He went from 60 deals to 125 deals. I think I have the specific numbers here. I'm gonna move my head then. So that was in 2015, 2016, we added a second lead source. We went to 175. 2017, it was just going deeper on those two paid lead sources to get to 225. Then he went to 255. And this year he'll do about 303, three to 320 transactions. His whole business is four lead sources. It's database, yard signs, realtor.com and I don't know, I think he does some prospecting or I don't think he does pay per click anymore. He may do some pay per click. Really super basic business, super profitable. And so the takeaway there, this is the guy that goes really deep and not wide. You know, don't get into a lead source unless you know it can get you to 50 transactions on that one lead source. That is my rule of thumb. He has four lead sources or even lead categories. Well, these are more lead sources. Four lead sources, 200 transactions. That's the whole business model. Not very complicated. Everyone wants to spread themselves way too thin. You're on 10 lead sources to get to 80 transactions, 10 lead sources to get to 100 transactions, right? Or thinking you're at 40 to 50 transactions and you're doing two or three thinking that, hey, for every two or three that I add, I can add 40 to 50 transactions. And it never translates because you take your eye off the ball on the first ones. Instead of going deeper, getting lead management practices and policies and protocols in place, getting better at lead conversion and your scripts and dialogues and, you know, getting good people in there to help you convert. So if you haven't read the book Atomic Habits, I think we give it away in our graduate program. This is an awesome quote, James Clear. Becoming the type of person you want to become, someone who lives by a stronger standard, someone who believes in themselves, someone who can be counted on by the people that matter to them, is about the daily process you follow and not the ultimate product you achieve. So as you consider, you know, the three critical questions, you know, what will it take for you to get to your next level, right? And so then, you know, even spending time together today, like why, why did you show up today? Really think, think about the reason behind the reason, right? It's a free webinar, you know, I didn't have anything planned, you know, maybe really, why did you show up today? And I asked you the question earlier, you're like, will you have regrets if you stay with your current plan or if you don't have a plan you're working against? The chances that you drift, we all want to sort of achieve at a high level in the areas of life that matter. But the chance that you drift away from that high level, whatever great looks like in those areas, the chances you drift are really, really high. And I bring up those case studies because I think you are on here because you're the potential. You're our potential. Next case study, right? I really do believe that in my heart. Our mission is super clear. It's to help you build a real estate business. Two ingredients, and I talked about them earlier. Sustainable systems and empowered people so you can make more money, enjoy more time off and experience less stress in your life. I have nothing to sell you. Nothing to sell you. A conversation and a discussion about our pilot program. So I launched this pilot program probably about six, no eight months ago. And it's your first sort of taste of what we real estate could be where we build out a three year vision, we build a one year plan with you, we chunk that down into what we call a 90 day world and then we work on, we get a scorecard and we work on decide what projects we're going to work on together. And so the goal, the pilot program is to give you a clear plan so you can profitably and predictably scale your business. And I'm just not a hype guy. There's no gimmicks at all. It's the real stuff and so it's not for everyone. That's the thing I mentioned earlier and I'm not sure if you picked up on it. We do really well with folks that have already figured real estate out. So it's not that we don't teach lead generation or we don't, you know, have scripts and dialogues or teach, you know, how to do database marketing or listing marketing. We have all those things. Our ideal person coming in has already gotten to the 3 to 500. We've onboarded folks that are doing 5 million in GCI. So anywhere from 3 to 500 to 3 to 5 million GCI, running a big team or just getting started. It really helps if you have administrative support. Even in the pilot program, some of the things we're going to build with you need you to have administrative support. So the first step is just to go to rebstrategysession.com Again, there's no sell in this. It's a 45 minute conversation. I want to make sure that link works. Someone can go to that. We've changed some stuff up. I want to make sure it works. Rebs strategy session dot com. Yeah, hopefully it works here. Yep. All right, so that takes you straight to an application. So just give us a little bit of information about your business, where you're at so we can serve you in the best possible way. One last and the best story of a success story that we've ever had with Real Estate B School. Stacey Peterson was literally the first client for Real Estate B School. She's now our chief operating officer. She was able to sell her business seven figure valuation in a market that that's never happened before. Within six months of working with Stacy, we were able to position her business in a way where she could exit production. She was already at about 100 transactions, triple the size of the business over the three years that we were Working together and she had that exit where she really did want to exit the business and get a, have an exit, a financial exit of the business. And she has. She was my first client, she was the first coach, she ran our coaching and now she runs the entire business and she gets to do what she wants every day. And I really connect with Stacy because our kids are the same age. That was her motivation for being able to do this and just super proud to have her on our team. I'll say a few few words of caution as we close this out. There's a lot of fear. I think there's just fear in general and specifically with within real estate especially with a lot of the shifting going on around ibuyers and economic shifts and seasonal, you know, stuff that goes on our industry not knowing who to trust. And there's guys that are teaching just models all over the place. There are guys that are teaching how to do this that don't make money in their real estate team that I know for a fact. And so really we're asking you just to let go of the fear. Let go of the fear of making the shift from agent to owner. That's the conversation we're trying to have with you. Your mindset around this is really, really important in terms of what is possible. And I bring up those case studies because I want to inspire you to think about what is possible based on real actual people. I think we're up to 20 different 20 case studies. I'm doing a couple more over the next couple weeks but go to realestatebschool.com there's a tab there that's case studies. Block out some time and go through those case studies so you can begin to shift your mind around what's possible. And just know that change will, I won't say can change will be hard. And that is where we come alongside you. We have been there and we have done this ahead of you. Probably the biggest differentiator for real estate B school is the fact that we have a pretty only four business coaches that help our members and they have all done the thing that you're looking to do. And we have also separate implementation support team to help you install these tools or systems. So the first step is really simple. It's to go to rebstrategysession.com Our pilot program is 30 days free. So if you qualify for real estate B school based on where you are in your journey. The only way to engage with us to begin with is in this 45 minute conversation which doesn't cost you anything. We'll talk about where you are, where you want to go and what's holding you back. And with that. Yeah, so we had a question about any product or any help for people that aren't quite there yet. We do have a program. I'm gonna answer that question directly here. Let me. Yeah, so we, I mean, I lost my. There we go. All right, now I got the chat up here. Yes, we have an undergraduate program as well. So there are folks that haven't quite gotten to the 300,000 GCI level, which is honestly, it's 90% of the industry. So there's no shame in that, Michelle. So I appreciate you chiming in there. I would still. Here's what I would do. I'm going to write down your name and just because you asked the question and I'm going to have Stacy with our team. Michelle Matissi. There it is. Perfect. Matt Tazi. All right. And it's our undergrad program, so probably would still come with a quick conversation with Stacy, probably a 10 minute conversation just about where you are in your journey. And if that undergraduate program is for you, it's at a lower investment level. We can't get the results for someone that's already at the 3 to 500 or beyond. We can't get the results without our graduate program. Oh, so you've spoken with Stacy. Yeah, so I would definitely, I would just ping her and I'll let her know that you asked the question as well. Yeah. So any other questions that you guys have before we. Before we get out of here and you enjoy an awesome Christmas and hopefully there aren't a lot of questions because I really went pretty deep on some things here. Like I said, if you're at the point in your journey where you just know there's a better way to do it and there's a way to build leverage into the business. It is all we do. Like it is. The only thing I stress about all day long is how can I build a tool or system that's going to make this journey easier for someone that goes after me? And I've been doing that for six and a half years at real estate B school, and I've been doing that for, as a real estate team leader myself for 12 years. I got into the business 2007. I guess technically I hired my first buyer agent in 2009. So I've been 10 years as having salespeople in my life. So I love all of you, even though I may not know any of you. Personally, I have a lot of respect for you just for being in this business and being willing to put yourself out there and get on a masterclass training that challenges you the way that hopefully I did today. And we're going to do this for all of 2020. And I'm going to do a really good job of bringing different topics as well and kind of going deep on different parts of what we call the business growth blueprint that'll hopefully serve you at a very high level. So much love, much respect. We'll talk to you guys soon. Bye. Bye.