Passion vs. Pay - Delegate to Elevate!

Hey there. Lars Hedenborg, Founder of Real Estate B School this week's training is a concept I call passion versus pay. You must delegate to elevate. So no matter where you are in your business growth journey now, whether you're a solo agent just getting started, or if you're kind of in that 100k to 500k ramping up your business and you don't quite know what's coming, or you might be in build phase where you're that 500 to a million, you know, you have an administrator, you're bringing a team on no matter where you are or if you're like in owning and leading, right, all the different stages of growth that's possible. The concept of making better decisions with your time will never go away. You know, and I'm not world class at this. I'm probably better than most in terms of just for the last 13 years, deciding where I wanted to spend my time and where I thought my time was best spent to do as much as I possibly could, the highest value tasks in my business for the least amount of time. So I believe when you look at most people, they, whether it's a corporate job or a, a business owner, a real estate agent, most people aren't making great decisions with their time. Like they're not like slicing and dicing their day up in a way to just put themselves in a position to have a better chance at making more money in less time. Real Estate B School, if you haven't figured it out yet, we are all about three things. More money, more freedom and more impact. So, and it goes in that order. I do believe that if you have more money and your financial issues are solved and you have more money than you'll ever need, that gives you a whole lot more freedom. Money isn't everything. So that's not my point. When you have enough of it or even too much, you feel free and you can have more impact in your family, create a life that your family didn't think was possible, or impact your family members or friends around you that are in need or, or your community. Right. There's just a lot of need where more money can definitely help out. So it's kind of that progression. And when I think about folks that are struggling and they can't figure out, especially in real estate, you can't figure out how to make more money. It typically comes down to the fact that you're not making. Well, you don't have a great system to make better decisions with your time. I'm going to share my screen here. And I just did this training for both of our high ticket, our higher level coaching and our business foundations. This is straight out of a planner that it's taken us 13 years to build and perfect. It's the business freedom planner. And there's an exercise that we do quarterly in here. There's a few elements that feed into it, namely a time study. So we kind of track what we do with our time. And then we put our activities, personal and professional, into these four quadrants. And it's passion versus pay. So you don't need this printout to do this exercise. You can just take a piece of paper and draw basically box, not a box, but a T where you have four quadrants. The upper left is high passion, high pay. The upper right is low passion, high pay. So everything above the line is high pay. It's whether or not you love to do it or you don't love to do it. Below the line is low pay. The lower left is high passion, low pay, and the lower right is low passion, low pay. And let's say you had an inventory of everything that you spent time on the last two weeks, and those two weeks were representative of where you typically spend your time. If you're not making the kind of money that you want, it's likely you're spending too much time on things that are low pay, activities that are low pay. So a good example is entering a listing into mls. It's not that that activity is not critically important, because it is critically important. It's just that it's low pay. So we pay, you know, 15 to $20 an hour for administrative staff to do those things. You know, handling closing, contracted closing is generally about 20 to $25 an hour in my market. Critically important. And we provide a level of care that is better than any real estate agent in my market, in my opinion. And then we have showing agents, we have people that show homes. Showing homes in my market is about a $30 an hour activity. It's not good, bad, or indifferent for some of you. Showing homes, you think it's high passion, high pay. Really, it's high passion, low pay. I know that's a challenging shift for some of you, but there's someone in your market that can do that, that loves to do it, that will do it evenings and weekends, and they could do it better than you, and they can preserve your brand and your relationship with your client. Again, I'm not going to try to shift your mind around that right now, but my point is there's all these things we do with our time. Running a yard sign, installing a yard sign, taking pictures of a property, designing a marketing brochure, posting stuff on social media that may be high passion. Well, putting a yard sign in the ground can't be high passion. I wouldn't think low passion, low pay. Social media might be high passion. Super low pay. I wish it paid more. It doesn't pay more. You could have maybe some input. Designing a social media strategy for the year is high pay and maybe even high passion, but executing it on a weekly and daily basis is low pay. So my point of this exercise is to be honest with yourself about where you're spending your time. If you know, my first year in real estate, I made less than $20 an hour. It was because I was doing every single job myself that year or so or that 10 months in 2007, I sold 27 homes. I did everything myself. So all the jobs of a real estate agent to generate a lead to get them to closing and beyond in my database and service them, I did everything. So it diluted all of it to the point where I made less than 20 bucks an hour. And there were some bad decisions on where I spent my money and all that. But my point is, I didn't make a lot of money per hour. And as I started to crack the code on this exact conversation and this exact exercise, well, it didn't look like this back then, but in essence, this is what I did. I just looked at where I was spending my time and I knocked off the things that were like when I hired my first administrator, instantly, marketing coordination, listing coordination and closing coordination. Coordination, not system design. So I designed all the marketing. I designed the listing, client care process, I designed the closing process. I didn't coordinate it all the day to day. My first administrator actually came on at $14 an hour, part time, 20 hours a week. Within, I think it was like a day. She was excited enough to say, hey, listen, I'm all in. Here's the thing. You need to pay me 20 bucks an hour and I'm going full time. I'm like, sold. And so instantly I had someone at 20 bucks an hour that saw the vision that could now do all of those things. My pay in a couple years tripled. No, even more. I went up to $100 an hour pretty quickly within a couple three years. Then I went to $250 an hour, which was my original goal. And then I got up as high in that business to $2,300 an hour with this same exact, you know, process of just looking at what I love to do versus what I get paid really well to do. And there are seasons in your business where you'll have to do a thing you don't love, but it pays really well. Right? But you can't afford to do things that don't pay well even if you love them. If you want to make more money, if you don't want to make more money than all day long you could do high passion, low pay activities. Really think about the things that add value in your business. You know, it's listing consultations, it's new business development, it's sitting down for a buyer consultation or a listing consultation. It is designing systems, anything with your database in terms of setting up systems, your listing marketing, your buyer marketing. There are some things you can do, put in, you know, 40 hours initially to set up a database the right way where that thing's a seven figure income pillar in the future. Right. Super valuable. That may even be low passion, but high pay. And then when you get it set up, you can just put in an hour a week on that thing. And that's the work it takes to go from agent to owner. And so if you're at the point in your journey where you're convicted by this, not in a shameful kind of way, I'm not trying to shame you into thinking that you're not doing something right. You just know that you have the skills to do the higher dollar productive activities. You're just not. You haven't figured out how to structure it, your week or your day. What we can offer you is a conversation. It's a business growth strategy session. We look at where you are today, where you want to be in the future and what's holding you back. It's not all that complicated. The systems that we built out, the tools, the strategy, the process that we have in place to go from, you know, the different stages of growth. If you haven't seen our Real estate Business Growth Navigator, it's a super valuable tool. I'm trying to think of how I can get you a copy of it. You probably just Google. Let me see what happens if I Google Real Estate Business. Real Estate Business Growth Navigator. I want you to have it. Ah, actually you can just go to Real realestate Business Growth dot com. And so I kind of muddied the waters there. But I want you to have a copy of realestate Business Growth Calm. That is not what I'm telling you to do necessarily. But yes, grab a copy of that. It goes through the six stages of growth and the tools and systems, the team structure, the compensation, you'll get all of that. What I was telling you is that if you're at the point where you want to have a conversation, a coaching session around your business, where you are today, what you think is possible, what's holding you back, what you've tried before, let's have that conversation. There should be a button below this video or somewhere where you're consuming this to be able to have that conversation with us. Go ahead and do that. Also, grab a copy of our Real estate Business Growth navigator. Go to realestate businessgrowth.com that is something I am really proud of. That is a combination of not only my journey in the six stages of growth, but also all of our most successful members. And we've had, you know, hundreds of people through Real Estate B school have had success with our program, our tools and systems that we've really dialed in the straightest path to real estate business growth. So much love and respect, guys. We'll talk to you soon. Bye.