Quit Thinking Bigger Results Means Harder Work, Because You Can Double Your Returns and Work LESS!

Welcome back to Real Estate Team Builders. I'm Lars Heddenborg, the founder Real Estate B School. And today I want to have a deeper dive into something that came up on our last episode. So if you're new to the podcast, the cadence is we have a guest on for the Monday episode. And then I rant and try to add value, maybe in terms of a personal experience or having coached several hundred team builders at this point, having had multiple more than a thousand conversations with agents that are struggling to scale and grow and all that. And the conversation I had on the prior episode was with Jonathan Popowicz, who went from $75 million with his team of four agents and himself working. He was personally working 80 hours a week. How did he go from 75 million to 180 million this year? And his hours are cut in half. He's got four kids, so he's a busy guy. He wants to be available as a husband and as a father and he's a believer, so his faith matters to him. So how does that transformation even happen? And the conversation was like just square in everything I believe about our industry. And I just want to dive deeper into like, how does that actually happen? You know, there are folks out there that don't know anything about economic model or value based commission splits or the mindset required to think that it's not only possible, but predictable when you plug into something that's proven and built out. And so let's decompress that or decompress, deconstruct that a little bit here. So we talked about most real estate teams are built on a model that gives the team owner very little margin and it's not sustainable. And those are words that Jonathan used. And it's really what we believe and subscribe to at Real Estate B school. And so what does it mean to have no margin? This is a typical team leader, that the business was not set up from a systems perspective. The economic model and the splits they're paying their agents. There probably wasn't a whole lot of thought in terms of where that would lead them in the future as the business scaled. And so it requires them to just double down on personal production. And so you've got a producing like a top, top agent selling a lot of real estate. And they're inviting agents into their world, but they're not inviting them into like this legendary onboarding experience where the agents are able to plug in and they're getting homes under contract within the first 30 to 45 days on the team. They just haven't built anything out. They haven't built the ongoing cadence of achievement to be an agent on their team. And their agents are typically involved in all the administrative stuff that comes along with being a real estate agent, where a properly designed team, it's built on systems. And what I mean by systems are the way to grow, you know, to do more production is to build the key systems out in the business before you scale. And so what's an example of that? So for you, bring a buyer agent into your team and you already have the training cadence built out. You know, like an eight week training program where it's 80% done. I mean it's, it's 80% them doing self learning and 20% you're, you're, you're coaching them. So if they're, you know, working 40 hours a week, it's probably more, less than 20%. But you want to have the training program built out. You want to give them the straightest path that you could possibly give them to be successful on your team. If there's one system outside of the actual recruiting attraction system, it's that agent onboarding system that's super valuable. And most teams don't have that system in place. They bring agents on. There are no systems built out for them to get in that quick path to a commission check. And the agents sort of spin out. They're marginally successful. A lot of them don't even continue because they're not making money. They weren't prepared properly to be able to go without getting paid for six months. And so, so, so the team leader. Let me get back to my train of thought. The team leader is without the team leader that there is no business. And most teams don't think of it that way. They don't actually consider that what they built isn't a business. And it's a hard thing to say to somebody. It's a hard thing to realize and is that there is no business without the team leader. And that, that's the one thing I want to drive home. As you're, as you're listening today, is there a business? If you're running a team, is there a business? If you were to step out, if you were to step away from your business today, I'll give you the rest of this week. So it's as you're listening, if you're listening to on the day it came out, it's Thursday. I'll give you a couple days to get things in order and then you can't show up for 30 days. What would the business look like after you got back in the 30 days, if you don't have the systems in place to be able to pull something like that off, then you don't own a business. You own a job and you probably own a worse job now that you've surrounded yourself with agents and maybe an administrator or two, and maybe you have more overhead. And so your expenses have crept up where it feels like it's not as good as it was, you know, when you were just a solo agent. And so that's the conversation around margin. And this whole conversation about sustainability is, and it's exactly what Jonathan said, is that he wanted a business that would allow him to be in it for the long game. You know, he's got four kids, I think, ages six to like, what was it, 13 or 14, you know, so he's, he's got at least 12 years left, you know, before the six year old is in college. And, you know, they're sort of empty nesters. And I viewed it the same way. Like I had kids coming in as I was getting into real estate. And, you know, even now I'm in a position where I have businesses that are run on systems so they allow for long term sustainability. And so the question to ask yourself is, you know, the business that you built currently, is it sustainable? Can you keep up the pace in terms of the hours and the stress you're enduring? And that doesn't even bring money into the conversation, but can you sustain your marriage or your relationship with your kids or your physical body, the pace that you're running at now if, if you're running a real estate team? So this conversation about sustainability is a critical one and it requires us to be honest with ourselves about what we've built and what needs to be rebuilt, or do we need to tear down some pieces of it? Because it's the analogy of a home. If you don't get the foundation right, that home is not going to stand. It's going to have damage as the years pass on and there's going to be collateral damage. Foundation will crack, you know, it'll fall into the earth. Who knows what, what could happen, right? And so no margin, not sustainable. Those are two, two key things. I wanted to make sure that you really understood the context. And my journey, like, I'm not preaching here on the podcast, I have suffered the pain. You know, sometimes when I'm interviewing folks, I come at it from a position of like, hey, listen to me, I've achieved the thing and I'm interviewing somebody who's on the journey as well. I have been there. I feel your pain. I remember what it was like to be a new dad only just over a year into a marriage and instantly be top producer working seven days a week and not showing up as a great husband or a great father. And I remember what it was like to be a full time agent. The year My team did 118 transactions, I did 66. So I was like a tippy top real estate agent. And now I was bringing people into my world to help me grow and scale and I didn't do much of it right. It was eight days a week at that point in the journey and I finally figured out, you know, mostly by getting to the point in the journey where I didn't have the thing in place yet.

So.

So real Estate B school, we teach six stages of growth and we want you to know all six stages of growth so that you can predict and anticipate what's coming and get a system in place before you need the system. A good example is like an agent achievement system, meaning so an agent, you know, you attract an agent, you get them through the hiring process, interview and hiring process. You onboard them talked about that. What's the 30 to 60 day process to onboard them? Whether they can get paid. But then what's the ongoing cadence? What's the agent achievement system? What does accountability look like? What metrics do they need to hit on a daily and a weekly basis so that you can predict their success or their failure? And if you don't have those systems in place and reporting, how do you report? What numbers do you report? What are the key metrics in the agent's business? What scripts are they using?

Right.

Are you role playing and training on scripts? What's your weekly coaching and training look like for your team? Your weekly team meeting, what are you covering? How do you keep high energy? How do you keep people engaged in an industry that has a high burnout rate?

Right.

So if your agent achievement system and system and the cadence and structure isn't in place before you bring agents into your world, you're going to fail and fumble and lose agents and make promises that you can't keep. So we always want to be anticipating as we're building businesses and on Jonathan's podcast, that's why I offered. You know, the only thing I really have to offer you, it's a couple things. You can go to realestatebusinessgrowth.com and grab a free copy of the Real Estate Business Growth Navigator that's going to give you the step by step process that you'll need to follow to go from wherever you are. Even if you're at stage one, which is under a hundred thousand GCI or stage two is 100 to 500, it's going to tell you the tools and systems you need to implement. The questions you need to be asking yourself what your team structure needs to look like as you build a real estate team. And so go to real estatebusinessgrowth.com or the other way that I can help you is simply by getting on a phone call with you and talking about your business. And we're going to cover three things on, on that call, we're going to talk about where you are today, where you want to be three years from now and what obstacles have you seen, what's holding you back from achieving that kind of growth. And we want to help you build a business that allows you to live a life of freedom.

Right.

We don't want to take you down this journey like Jonathan achieved at a high level. He was at 75 million, which is a monster real estate team that's more volume than most teams will ever do. But he was working 80 hours a week and at that point he had a 3 year old to a 10 or 11 year old.

Right.

So his kids were even younger. So we had that motivation to get him out of that vicious cycle that team leaders put them in. And if that's you and you want to have a conversation with us, I'm a little bit kind of all over the place today. Go to realestatebschool.com and their buttons to book in a call. So grab Real Estate Business Growth navigator. Go to real estatebusinessgrowth.com or just go to realestate bschool.com and schedule a call to have a chat with us. There's no obligation, it's not a hard sell. It's literally just a conversation about your business. So much love, much respect. Hopefully you were inspired by someone that more than doubled their business and cut their hours in half. And it's all about this desire to have margin in our lives and to have this big why for Jonathan was the four kids and and then to ultimately build a business out that is sustainable. So much love. Take action now and we'll talk soon. Be good.