My Transformation Journey: From High School to Real Estate Pro

Today's video, I'm going to dive into my journey from like my high school years, into my college years, into my corporate existence, the decision to go into real estate and what that journey looked like and the lessons I learned along the way. None of this was easy for me. In fact, I'm super introverted. I'm an engineering undergrad. So I'm like a nerd that loves spreadsheets and not as good a people person. But after serving 5,000 plus families in my real estate journey, after having helped over 2000 agents build businesses that absolutely allow them to have time and money, freedom, I have definitely learned some lessons and I have this vantage point. I'm 51 years old, so I'm not going to talk like I'm the oldest and wisest person that you know, but I do have a vantage point of like the things that along my journey really helped me realize what was coming or prepare myself for that next season of growth. I'll give you the quick backstory on my childhood. Parents divorced when I was 4. My father was a business owner. They owned a hair salon together. It was their dream. They moved here from Sweden to become hair salon owners. And I believe the stress of that business not performing really well and just the amount of hours it took really had. It really took a toll on my parents relationship and so they divorced when I was four years old. It also contributed to, I believe my dad was an alcoholic, so he actively drank until I was 15 years old. So that's the probably the most defining moment for me is that early on in my journey, this was in my high school years, I made decision to, to do whatever I could do to not live that life. That I came out of a lot of chaos, a lot of uncertainty around finances and you know, we just didn't have much. Had a lot of love and support from. Thank you Lord. For my mother, she was just the constant rock for me. She ended up starting her own business and really, you know, just an awesome example of, you know, I did have the one good parent that was a great example for me of how to work hard, how to focus and make a life for yourself. And she always just did a great job of that. And so for me, making decision early on that I was going to choose the path of achievement, there was a dark side to that, you know, so I was unnaturally driven to achieve. So if you put, you know, schoolwork in front of me, I was going to study to the point where I knew I was going to get an A. If you put Me into a college classes, I was going to do the same thing. I would pull all nighters that I knew going into an exam that I was going to get an A. So I would leave no doubt in terms of anything I did around schoolwork. And I went to an engineering school, very challenging engineering school. But I just applied discipline and focus to the most important thing in front of me. And here's the thing, I didn't necessarily even like engineering. I was just good at math in high school. But the lesson coming out of all that, and I tell my kids this now they're 14 and 17, it's not so much that you need to like what you're doing, but guys, and this is me talking to them, but what I love to see from each of you is the fact that you do well in school regardless of if you like English or history or math or science. You're applying the same level of effort in each class and you guys are crushing it. And they just get A's and they're naturally driven. And so I had that little bit unnatural because I was coming out of a very jacked up childhood. But I was going to focus on the thing in front of me that was the most important thing at the time. So the lesson there, if you're in a difficult part of your journey in real estate or making money, is that if you're struggling now getting deals, it's likely that you're not focusing on the thing that matters most and focusing on that thing every day. And that is looking for new business. A lot of agents say they want to do deals, but when you actually look at where they spend their time, they're not spending their time in like the most dollar productive activities. So that was a lesson. Coming out of high school and college, I just did the work that most won't do because I knew it was going to lead to something better for me. My first job out of college, it was not great. I worked for a utility company. I was counting light bulbs most of the time for like schools and like large facilities. And it was an energy conservation division of a local utility. It was awful. I worked for a guy named Don, don the engineer, 55 years old, pocket protector and all. And I knew pretty quick that I was to be like if that was an engineer, I was like 21, 22, looking up at my boss who was 55. If that's what it was like to be an engineer, I didn't want to do that. Sure, there are way cooler engineering jobs out there, but it only took me about 18 months to realize that I could apply my skill set, my quantitative abilities, you know, spreadsheets and numbers and all that, which I was really good at. And I enjoyed it and it came easy to me. I could apply that to Wall Street. So I became a, an analyst. It was sort of a grunge low level. Worked a 138 hours in one week. Yeah, do the math on that. 168 total hours in a week. And there's one week I counted, I was physically in the office or traveling. We were actually doing a deal for 138 hours. Not cool. What's the Delta there? 30 hours I was sleeping divided by seven days. I slept four hours a night on average and regularly 100 plus hours a week. But I was working in an environment that really lended itself toward my quantitative abilities. So we were running, it was like a merger, mergers and acquisition type environment and looking at businesses and valuing them and like running comparable analysis and just crunching numbers and looking at financial statements and essentially in a two year period. And these are like massively competitive programs. They're Wall street investment banking analyst programs and they're really competitive to get into. And I was alongside like all of the people, you know, they didn't have my quantitative background and an engineering background, but they were from Harvard, from Yale, from Wharton, nyu, like all of the top business schools. That's where they all came from. And I from a small engineering school in New Jersey. My quantitative skills were superior to most of the analysts that I was working with. The big lesson in this one is that I learned that I wasn't willing to sacrifice my life entirely for money. I remember there was a vice president which it goes analyst, associate and then vice president and there was a vice president. And then there's like, you know, a bunch of levels up there above that, like probably five or six levels above. Vice president, but there was a vice president, Fred, I remember Fred, the investment banker. He earned a 750 figure bonus. He was the youngest VP to ever earn a seven figure bonus. Here's the thing about Fred. He did not leave the office. He worked more than 138 hours every week on average. And he was like a good 150 pounds overweight. And I felt sorry for the guy. Everyone on the floor sort of revered this guy. Like seven figure Fred. And it's like I just knew in my heart that, that I wasn't gonna be in this world if that's what this world looked like. The same sort of thing I Said about Don the engineer. Like counting light bulbs, you 45 grand a year. I wouldn't do this for $400,000 per year. And so I made the decision two years in, in the investment banking career that I just wasn't going to do it. And I remember we got our bonus checks and it was like a $50,000 check was more in my bonus than I made a year as an engineer. I told my, the guy I reported to, I'm like, I can't do this. I like the track. The future I see for myself in this environment is not one that I want. And you could pay me enough to do the kind of, the sacrificial like giving away your life, it just wasn't for me. And so I had that level of conviction. So the lesson there for me, I was beginning to think about work, supporting life rather than taking all of it, you know. So I was beginning to think about, you know, how could I make money and have freedom, you know. And it took me, it still took me a long time because I was only 24, 25 at this point. It took me another eight, nine years to figure it out. But that was the first part of this journey where I was like, okay, I see that that's one path to making money. But you give away your whole life. The engineer I wasn't making a lot of money and it was mind numbing and boring. Like that wasn't going to give me any sort of drive or freedom in a sense. So I left Wall street and then I worked six month, six months as a carpenter swinging the hammer doing high end kitchen renovations in the nicest area of New Jersey at the time. And I literally picked up a newspaper and I responded to an ad for a carpenter's assistant. This was a breath of fresh air if I'm being hon glad to not have stress, you know, mid morning I would run out, take the truck out and I'd get, you know, donuts and coffee and just me and this guy would kind of just shoot the, shoot the, the breeze and it was very chill and the cool thing there. I loved homes. Like I just had this affinity for renovating and a buddy of mine was renovating a home that he had purchased. And so I was taking these skills I was learning during the day and I was helping him in the evenings. He worked a corporate job and this is really where I began to, to figure out that like something in the world of homes, I have this affinity for homes. I don't know what's going to look like yet. But there's something there. So I didn't last too long in that job. I ended up working for evaluation consulting company for a couple of years, which again was number crunching, mostly litigation, but we're valuing businesses and looking at financial statements and all of that. I pivoted from there into Curtiss Wright, where I worked in acquisitions and strategy for a global manufacturing electronics, mostly aerospace and defense. Got to go to like 40 countries. And I'm flying, you know, first class because I fly so much. I'm like one of the chairman's level of at the time, US Airways and the coolest corporate job ever. The big lesson in this one was that the guy that recruited me from our corporate headquarters in New Jersey down to North Carolina, George, he was 33 years with Curtis Wright. He had just announced his retirement. He was running a big division, our aerospace division down in North Carolina just announced his retirement and within four months I think he found out he had pancreatic cancer. And he was no longer with us within four months and never got to enjoy a day of retirement. Like after, after he found out, he quickly sort of left the company and they had to sort of scramble there. But he never actually enjoyed a month of retirement. Another just defining moment for me trying to figure out like, okay, is there freedom in spending 33 years with a company and playing the political corporate ladder type games that you need to in corporate America? Is there freedom in that? And George was just the example, like another just like, like two by four in the head of like this is not it. No, that's not it. I remember within months of George passing away, I got my real estate license. I was acquiring some rental properties. I had acquired a few properties in New Jersey and I took those funds and I acquired some property in North Carolina. I was working with a broker, TJ and I ended up buying eight investment properties and just getting to know him. And basically he convinced me to leave my corporate job around all the time that this was, this was happening. And and so that was March 2007, right before the GFC, the great financial crisis. But what I learned there, I quick got into real estate. Sold 27 homes my first 10 months in the business, 44, my first full year. Five years later, 10x the business. I had 10 agents doing an average four or five deals per month. A couple did over a hundred one year. And so just a highly systemized, highly profitable, you know, one year, I think it was 2014. Took 1.2 million home that year, worked 40, 42 days in the business. So I really built this thing out like an actual business. The big takeaway, especially with that first broker and some agents I just knew and I worked with, was that there's no freedom in real estate. You know, tj, my first broker, was the top producing agent. He owned the whole thing, had three physical offices, 40 agents. He was a top producing agent and worked seven days a week and had all the overhead and all the grind and no freedom, right? He had money but no time freedom. And so I was like, I'm not going to do it. That's that way. So I just worked toward building this business based on systems, mostly around Legion and lead conversion, knowing that that's the biggest challenge that is in the industry. And I was able just to generate so much business that I couldn't handle it all. And this is no paid leads, no cold calling, none of that. So the lesson in all of that, and this is kind of my parting thought for, for this video, is clarity on what I wanted for my life and not willing to accept the status quo that exists in the real estate industry. Status quo is like agents sell six to eight homes per year. The brokerage doesn't have the tools necessary to teach you how to sell two to three homes per month. They don't make money if you sell more than one home per month because most brokerages are in a cap model and you cap at 8, 9 deals per year. So they do really well when they have a ton of agents selling six or seven homes. And there's no freedom in that, right? So for me, I was looking for freedom and I had to build the systems out myself in a way where it was attraction based marketing because I was an introvert. I didn't want to cold call. I call, one expired. He was super mean to me and I was like, there's no way I'm going to do that again. So I got to work building the systems out in my business to support my ultimate vision, which was being a good husband, being a good father, being present in all those really important roles and not falling into the trap of like the traditional methods that exist in our industry. So if you've been around for any length of time, you know, all I can offer you is a conversation about your business if any of this resonated with you and you want to build a business that gives you freedom at least to get the two to three deals per month. We have some members that have taken our systems and gone to 20 to 30 deals per month. But in the million dollar agent method, we work together for 90 days. And we implement systems into your business specifically around lead generation and lead conversion. So you can get to a minimum additional two to three deals per month without paid leads, without cold calling, without door knocking, without begging for a free rules. And this stuff works. Just go to milliondollaragentmethod. Com, that's million dollaragentmethod.com and we'll see you on the next video. Be good.