My 4-Minute Work Month - 3 Steps To Explode Your Income Working Less

The real estate industry has failed to create a clear path to time and money freedom. Having helped over 5,000 families in my real estate career and coached thousands of agents to scale their businesses, I know what works and what doesn't. And my goal on this podcast is to share it all with you. The good, bad and ugly of building a highly lucrative lifestyle business so you can focus on what truly matters in life. You won't find any hype or fluff on this show, just real world tactics.

And strategies that get results.

Let's grow together.

Welcome back to Real Estate Business Builders. This is Lars Hedinburg, founder of Real Estate B School. Today I'm going to brag a little bit with the intention to help you grow your real estate sales and live a life by design and grow your income and grow your time off. I was able to take 30 days away from my businesses recently and I had a few key takeaways that I think will help you in your journey. I had planned to do this 30 days completely unplugged. I actually ended up working what I estimate was about four minutes in 30 days. So that's why I'm calling this my four minute work month. And there were three things specifically that I was able to take away from that experience that I was thinking about my journey in real estate. And I grew up in the great Recession years in real estate. You know, got Into Real Estate 2007, first full year was 2008, sold 44 homes my first full year, hired administrator that year, went on to, you know, do 10 times that production while I was working, you know, one day a week in the business. So my journey was one of leverage. And the game I played in business was how do I make more money in less time? So I want to make a lot of money. I just don't want to give my life away in the process. And probably the question that I get asked the most is how were you able to decouple the time that you worked with the. The money that you made? Typically in real estate, you're going to hit a ceiling where if you're doing all the stuff in your business, you're not going to make the kind of money that you want. So this episode will serve an agent who is struggling to get things going, as well as an agent that might be more seasoned, that's doing, you know, 1, 2 deals a month that wants to go to 3, 4, 5, 6, whatever, 8, 10 deals a month and not lose your life in the process. That is the key. So my 30 day sabbatical was really the intention was I, I, I wanted to decompress, really. I wanted to see if my businesses can survive 30 days without me. Took about eight months to plan for it. The good news is that I probably made, I made a six figure income net net during that time off because I had started this journey of decoupling time and money way back when. I hired my first administrator in 2008. So let me unpack this a little bit before I get into the specifics of how this may help you, how my taking 30 days off might help you wherever you are in your journey. I want to give a little bit of context in terms of why this conversation about time and money matters. And really, wherever you are in your journey, if you're running a team and you're still in production and you're managing agents, I know what that life is like. I've helped hundreds, if not over a thousand team leaders specifically sort of optimize and build a sustainable business. If you're a solo agent and you're selling, you know, two, three homes a month, I know what that life is like. You're thinking about business all the time. You're probably working seven days a week and you're probably kidding yourself if you count those days where you're like on the computer catching up with emails, emailing, you know, texting and doing all the stuff we do as real estate agents. If you're struggling, solo agent and this is the market you're growing up, growing up in, God bless you, it is a difficult, difficult market. So everything I go through today is going to help really wherever you are at in your journey. Like I said, my sort of growth journey was during the Great Recession years. So in my market we went from 15,000 agents to 5,000 agents in about a 24 month period this year, so far as I'm recording this, an average of 10,000 agents per month have left the industry. So in terms of like why this matters, I want you to be on the thrive versus like barely survive, let alone get out of the business. Right. I want you to crush your real estate goals. I want you to take home money, take home more money, work less hours, all of that good stuff. So let me get into the three takeaways that I experienced during, during my time away that I think will serve you no matter where you are in your journey. The first one is that what I realized and I was, let me sort of set the stage. I was off of social media, I was not allowed to go into email. I was what else? I was logged out of Slack for the most part. My team, my businesses operate on slack and I was out of slack completely. I didn't do anything in Slack for 30 days. I didn't work at all for 30 days. And I completely unplugged from social media. I actually haven't gone back to social media. So that's just another really cool thing that I was able to figure out that I just didn't want to be in that noisy world anymore. I still use social media in my businesses, but my team handles the content and the different channels and the connection points there. So that's kind of setting the stage. I completely unplug from everything. So the first takeaway is, is around that. It's, it's the realization that there's so much noise in the world that once I stepped out of the noise, all of the chatter just dissipated. You know, if you're plugged into social media, you're, let's say you're, you know, sort of entwined in the 247 news cycle. If you're, you know, watching Netflix to decompress or you're watching sports or you're on your different apps on your phone and you know, all of that stuff, right? That is noise. And when I say the world, the world is a big place, right? There's so much going on in the world that you have very little control over. And that's what I realized. Very little of the things I get wrapped up in, you know, YouTube videos or social media or whatever, I have control of none of it, right? And we have set out to do the impossible for me. I'm a husband, a father, my faith is important to me. My businesses and making money is important to me. My physical body, I'm taking care of my physical body. So I have enough in my world that I can't focus on anything else really if I'm going to crush those areas, those five areas that I just mentioned, what I realize is that I really can't focus on much of, of anything else outside of those five areas. So the, the, the action item for you is to, to really look at, you know, maybe you don't take 30 days, right? This, this was, you know, probably 10 plus years in the making. When I was able to, you know, it took me about five years to scale my real estate business to over 400 transactions. And then that's probably about 10 years ago. And now it's, you know, I've been working on every quarter getting out of things that I, I don't want to do in my businesses. So for you though, it may mean a 24 hour period, you know, where you're completely unplugged from everything, where you can just get a sense of what it's like to be out of all the noise, right? Just let the chatter go away and really make some decisions on what your priorities are and what's most important to you. So that was the first thing. This like the noise going away, the world versus my world, the second takeaway that I think will be critical to you in your journey. And I even realized this, know, completely unplugging from multiple businesses for 30 days, that very little of what I do has like a big impact in the business in terms of growing the business and increasing my income. So let's take real estate sales for example. I would venture to guess. I mean I, I've done a study before, I've broken down all the tasks that real estate agents do and there's like 12 broad functions that a real estate agent does, but probably a hundred different things from, you know, generating a lead in social media and marketing and all that, all the way to post client, you know, clients for life program and all of that. Right? A hundred different things you could do in a given day, week or month. 12 main functions. Most of those functions and most of those tasks and activities aren't impacting your impact your income dramatically. I did a call recently with someone in our business, foundations program and she has a goal of taking home $300,000 pre, you know, post taxes, post expenses, pre tax. And she wants to work about 30 hours a week or 1500 hours a year. And I'm trying to, we worked out the numbers to be about $200 per hour is what she wants to make in real. When we calculated her current income, it was around $22 per hour. Very similar to where my income was back in 2007 when I first got into the business. I made less than 20 bucks an hour. It took me about three, four years to get to 2:50, another year or two to get to 500 an hour, and then another couple years to get to over $3,000 per hour. So even in this 30 day sabbatical that I was able to take, like I had set the whole thing up in advance, making sure that anything that I was responsible for that drove income, mostly one to many things like a podcast or a video like this, you know, group trainings, I was able to get covered by our other coaches. But then when I realized it like very little of what I do on the day to day in my businesses lead to dramatic income. I'm actually going to record another podcast episode that will be the episode after this that goes deep into the four things that you could do as a real estate agent to dramatically increase your income. So I'm not going to go specifically into what those are. So make sure you watch that episode because I want to spend a lot of time. There's only four things and I'm going to go deep into each one of those four things. But the takeaway is that I want you to realize that very little of what you do actually increases your income dramatically. Like if you're in the car running a yard sign or you know, dropping a contract offer, getting a signature or in a crawl space or whatever, think of all the things you do all day long as a real estate agent. Those are marginally productive activities. Like you can hire someone who can be the best in the world at installing yard signs for $10 an hour in my major metro market, right? You can hire someone for about the same amount of money that can, you know, bring a brochure out to a property or, you know, run something from here to there. Most of the things we do as real estate agents, we're glorified, you know, errand runners, right? It's, it's business errands and we take some of our data, run personal errands and we're just not dollar productive. So that's the second point, that very little of what you do actually makes you money. The third thing I realized, realized on my sabbatical is that, and I, I, I mentioned it just a minute ago is that this didn't happen, you know, overnight. Like I didn't decide like, okay, I'm going to take off from May 15 to June, June 15, and it's going to be awesome. Right? This was, this started back when I saw the path of leverage. And leverage is people leverage, technology leverage, systems leverage, marketing leverage. When I decided to take the path of leverage and every quarter I would decide which things, which activities in the business I would hold onto and which I would delegate. That's when this 30 day sabbatical became possible, right? Not, not just right now. I've been making decisions over and over again. So the third thing I want to just highlight for you and put on your radar is that you have to begin with the end in mind. I began a long time ago deciding that I was going to take the role of business owner in anything I did versus the owner of like the technician. If you've ever read the Book by, by Michael Gerber called E Myth Revisited. Right. The technician does all the stuff in the business. The entrepreneur sets the vision, you know, and maybe does one or two high level things in the business, but they don't do everything in the business. So a three year vision is critical, right? So no matter where you are today, no matter what the market is today, you have the ability to decide right now where you want to be in the future. You know, I did another call recent recently with a guy that, you know, he is, he's selling about two homes a month, which is about top 2 or 3% of agents in, in the country. But he's doing like five or six different things to get there. He has no vision about where he wants to go. He's just sort of haphazardly, you know, going tactic after tactic in his business with no vision. He's not beginning with the end in mind about where he wants to get to. I literally did a quick call with him, I said okay, you're doing six things, we need to pick two things. You know, you've got a database of 750 people that know like and trust you. Your business can triple just with us doing three simple tactics around social proof, social media and some Facebook live stuff that we've been testing that's been working really well. And then just a normal sort of communication plan, a touch program, a clients for life system for those 750 contacts and way simpler business, way more profitable, way more predictable. And, and he can go from 25 sides to 50 to 75 to a hundred, maybe adding a third lead gen lever, you know, once he gets to 50, approaching 60 plus transactions. Right. So simple is, is always better. Simplify to multiply. I guess that's a bonus tip is, is always, always, always if you want to scale your business, especially when it comes to lead gen levers, simplify to multiply. Only implement or install a Legion lever in your business if you know you can get that legion lever to 25 + transactions within 12 to 24 months. That's how I was able to grow my business from 27 homes as a solo agent, 44 homes with a part time administrator, all the way up to 453 transactions where I worked 40 days and I had 10 producing agents. Right. The way I was able to do that is I just picked lead gen levers that were, you know, good for 50 plus transactions. So we only had about six or seven lead gen levers to sell 453 homes. So that's a bonus one for you. So if you are if you are not in our free Facebook group it's called Real Estate Business Builders. It is just pure value added to community of agents that are like minded in that they want to grow and scale their businesses and and live a life by design. A life defined by time and money freedom. So go onto Facebook, find Real Estate Business Builders. Few questions to answer to for us to let you into the group and if you know you want to take a next step with Real Estate B school, all we have to offer you is a conversation about where you are in your business. It's called a business growth assessment. Go to R E B S that's Real Estate B School, R E b s growth assessment.com and just fill out a short application and we'll get you booked in for a business growth assessment. Much love, much respect. Make sure you tune in for the next episode where I'll dive deep on the four things only four things that you can do to make money in real estate. We'll see you then. Bye.