Real Life Week - Rise to the Level of Your Systems

What up, Business Freedom Podcast listeners? Lars Hedinburg here, Founder of Real Estate B School, co founder of High Performance Real Estate Advisors in Charlotte, North Carolina. Been at the Real Estate Team building for about a dozen years. I hired my first assistant in 2008, which was my first full year in real estate. Hired my first buyer agent in 2009. Almost 4,000 families served. I only tell you that to give a little bit of context to the the conversation I want to have today, which is about systems. And I've been at Real Estate B School for about six years, and I've done very similar things in that business in terms of building systems to kind of replace me in parts of the business that I'm not really good at or I don't enjoy a whole lot. There's a quote from James Clear in the book Atomic Habits and it's going to serve as the kind of I want to say scripture. It's not the right word. I'm thinking of a pastor when they sort of lead off a sermon. This quote is going to serve as the grounding point for the conversation that we're going to have today in the podcast. It is something to the effect of we don't rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems. We don't rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems. And that is why I am calling this podcast Rise to the level of your Systems. And so in that in me telling you to rise to the level of your systems, it assumes that you have systems in place. And we do. We all do. They may not be serving the goals that we want for a certain area of our life or a certain area of our business. When you look at areas of your life and business where you're not maybe achieving at the level that you want to, you've got to look at your system. So in the book Atomic Habits, which is an awesome book, highly recommend it. I recommend getting it the paper copy, listening to it a few times. I've listened to it three times already and I'll probably listen to it again. It's an awesome work and it's worth sharing with your team as well. In the book, James Clear uses the example of physical health. It's kind of the easiest one to pick on in terms of the systems you have in place are in direct correlation with your physical body, right? So if you're 30 pounds overweight and you just look at things that are sort of the systems you have in place around your health, you'll probably find that there's crap in your pantry. There's, you know, you're not eating enough fruits and vegetables because you don't have them in your house. You know, you're maybe drinking too much, you're drinking during the week. There's just things that you're doing which aren't serving, you know, a goal you may have in a certain area. Another one is in relationships. You know, what are the systems you've put in place to have a healthy marriage? What are the systems that you've put in place to have a good relationship with your children, your spiritual journey? What are the systems you put in place to be surrounded by a biblical community, to be in the Word, you know, and this isn't a faith conversation, but you've got to look at those things, right? What are the systems you put in place to make sure that you want to be doing the things that you are doing to get the result that you are looking to get in any area of your life? You know, rest and rejuvenation. What are the systems you put in place to make sure you get the proper rest and rejuvenation? Every week I make sure I get seven and a half hours of sleep a night. I make sure I get two hour massage every week. I also do a salt bath on the weekends that I'm here, which is. You just lay in salt and it's super relaxing. I've done the put the systems in place to make sure I'm able to rest and rejuvenate on a regular basis. You know, in your finances, what are the systems you put in place if you have crappy consumer debt and your net worth, you're not even tracking it, it's not going in the right direction, or you're building this business, or you think you're building a business and you have nothing to show for it financially? What are your systems that you have in your business to budget properly, to spend less than you bring in and invest the difference, move money around consistently? There's another awesome book, Mike Michalowicz, Profit first, where he says that profit is a habit, not a, not an event. Profit is a habit, not an event. And so you don't magically come up with profit. It's a habit. Just like you know any other area of your life that you want to be consistently successful in. So I want to give you a little bit of advice here, things that I've done in the real estate business and just business in general, to make sure that you have the proper systems. In place to be successful. I'm going to kind of explain my journey a little bit. I don't want to take too much time. Every move I made to elevate myself in my real estate business was a byproduct of a system that I built, and I got someone to run the system. So let's go back to 2007, and honestly, what I teach and the journey that we teach hasn't changed a whole lot. You know, I knew I need administrative support. I spent my first nine months. March 2007, I got out of my corporate job. I sold 27 homes. I generated leads. I followed up with the leads. I showed homes. I sat down and did consultations. I handed all the closing paperwork myself. I attended inspections. I negotiated appraisals or repair issues. I attended closing. I did photography. I think for most, I only took two listings out of the 27 that I did, But I think I did photography on both of them. I did the marketing, put those into the mls. I printed out showing, you know, the properties that I showed in a nice little packet with my cover sheet. Everything that had to be done, I did it. And it took like, 70 hours a week to do it. And that trans. That kind of moved into 2008. It was easy for me to see the things that I can get someone at. I think $14 an hour is where my first administrator started. And I quickly. That was part time. She demanded full time at 20. And I'm like, yeah, sure. I knew at that point that I wanted to make $250 an hour. She wanted to make $20 an hour. There's a $230 an hour Delta there. And she was willing to work even more than 40 hours a week. And it was this beautiful, awesome first relationship that I had. It lasted about seven or eight years. And it was one of the reasons I was able to kind of grow so quickly is because I had a solid administrator. 85% of our industry doesn't even have an administrator. Real estate b school only deals with folks that have an administrator. A couple buyer agents. They've hit 500,000 GCI minimum, all the way up to 5 million GCI. Even more than that, we've had people in our system that had nothing. Now, I don't want to say nothing, because these are big businesses, the things that you would think a big business, a $6 million GCI business would have in place. Some of the bigger businesses, teams don't have in place. So you'd be surprised. And so, you know, you think about Showing homes, that's a 20 to $25 an hour activity. And I can put on one sheet of paper exactly the way that I want home shown. And then I can, I can. My first buyer agents served as my showing agents. And when I generated, the way I generated leads in the beginning was to post Craigslist ads. I had my administrator post those ads. And then I leveraged it out to, you know, some, we can't do it anymore. Craigslist has figured all that stuff out. But we offloaded it to somewhere in the, in Nicaragua or somewhere. Some, some guy that did it for like next to Nothing. He generated 10 times the results for like 250 bucks a month or something. And so I was always thinking about systems and leverage, closing out files, same thing. You know, I worked with my administrator to come up with the perfect closing and how would we want this to look every time and let's just repeat that and same thing on listing client care. Like how would I want you to touch this client? How would I want you to tee up price improvement conversations? The business is not all that complicated. We tend to complicate it. As real estate team leaders, you know, new business development, you know, was something that I always did, I did for 12 to 15 hours a week no matter what. You couldn't not have me do new business development, which is lead generation. And you know, what's your system for making sure that you lead generate for three hours a day? There's no way around it. Like you can't be successful in any sales environment if you don't focus on new business development consistently. It is your job recruiting, right? What's the system you have in place to make sure that you're recruiting on a regular basis? What's your system for having people apply to join your team? They have all the bits that are built out. You know, in real estate B school we talk about attract, convert, deliver, scale. So those are the four drivers that make up a really strong real estate team. Each of those drivers have three accelerators. And I'm not going to go into all the nuances of it. Under attract, right, you need to make sure you have database marketing, listing marketing and buyer marketing. There's two or three things tools in each of those accelerators that make up the driver that need to be put in place and run without you so that you can focus on converting. Converting is all about lead management, right? The appointment setting process, you're listing consultation frameworks. Those are the three accelerators. And there's tools and systems inside each of Those that have to be set up in a certain way where you don't have to be doing all these things. Same thing in delivery, right? There's buyer and seller, client servicing, there's transaction coordination, there's tech tools that you need, right? Those are the accelerators. In each of those are two or three tools and systems that you must put in place and have them run without you. If you are to focus on scaling your business, which is all about growing your team, knowing your numbers and what is the third one? Growing your team, knowing your numbers and creating your future. Creating your future is having a three year picture. Bringing it down to one year plan, then breaking it down to 90 day world, knowing your numbers about tracking and your finances, leading indicators, lagging indicators, um, and then growing your team is all about attracting and, excuse me, and bringing the right talent into your world. So if I talk about those four drivers and the accelerators and tools and Systems, there's probably 24 to 36 tools and systems that you have to put in place in order for your business to run at a high level. Without you, if you don't do these things the right way, in the right order, you won't actually have a business. You'll be stuck in the business forever. Even if you love production, that's totally cool. The business can't rely on your production to even be in business. That is just really risky for those that are involved in your world. It's not fair to them if you don't run it like a true business. So if this conversation about systems and drivers and accelerators and tools and like if it's just has you a little bit crazy, this good. It's good to feel that feeling of craziness because it knows that I've struck a chord and you're out of your comfort zone. And the only thing I can offer you is a conversation about your where your business is today. Just the good, bad, ugly of where the business is today. Where do you want it to be in the future? And what's been holding you back from achieving where you really, really want to go with this real estate team, this real estate business that you're building, that's you Go to real estate, go to realestatebschool.com and you'll just see there's an obvious next step in terms of booking in a business growth strategy session, which is just a conversation about your business. If a conversation about real estate B school makes sense, we'll talk about it and then we'll let you in on our pilot program, which is 30 days of 100% free coaching where we'll build out a three year picture, a one year plan, 90 Day World, and we'll land it on what you do every week to build a business. And that's our free 30 day pilot program offering. And so if that's you, you've got to sort of qualify. We only work with small teams to large teams. So you've got to be a team, you know, 3 to 500,000 GCI on the minimum side, administrative support, you know, a buyer agent or showing agent some leverage there where you can work on the business. Because we will have you be working on the business all the way up to we've got teams that are, you know, run five plus million GCI that need our help as well. So if that's you, go to realestatebschool.com we'll see you over there.