[REPLAY] MASTERCLASS: Planning in a Crisis: How to Capitalize During an Economic Shift

Alright, let's get after it. So this is planning in a Crisis how to capitalize during an economic shift. And I'm even going to call this an outright crisis that we're getting ready to head into. So you're definitely in the right place if you signed up for playing in a crisis and how to capitalize during a shift. My name is Lars Hedinburg, Founder, Real Estate B School. In 2013 I founded Real Estate B School which is a business school for top producing real estate agents, team leaders and I've been in the real estate business since 2007. Launched a real estate team. In 2008 I hired my first administrator and in 2009 my first buyer agent. Almost 4,000 families served at this point and the last client I worked with was in 2012 and I've been working one day a week in that business for the last six or seven years. That's sort of my claim to fame in there. I just love building businesses. I'm less attracted to the grinding out of transactions and the working evenings and weekends and seven days a week and all that. So here is why I do these masterclass trainings. I was even wanting to call this a crisis briefing to kind of give you my thoughts on what's going on right now. Most of us are just in a holding pattern in terms of our business and it is the time to really think about what you want to be when all this loosens up, when we get back to life as semi normal. And so there's a couple things I don't watch any news, really. Truly I don't watch any news. We never have it on. I don't do a whole lot of social media. I follow a couple guys that I trust and they're sort of business mentors and they sort of help me filter the stuff that really matters. I want to share something with all, all of you that a couple things that I'm keeping my, my eyes on in terms of what we might be in store for. And the first thing I'm going to show you is the thing that is the most scary right now is the jobless claims. So here's the thing that we're tracking with jobless claims and this is just some random site. I don't even think I could, yeah, I can't even change the timeline. But if you look at the timeline, you know, our worst economies in the last 50 years, you know, didn't have a million jobless claims in a week and we've had last week was 5.5. Then like 6.3, then 6.7 and then like 3.3. So 22 million jobless claims in the last four weeks. Here's the thing we're waiting for. So I'm not in freak out mode yet and I won't get in freak out mode and I'm not in like this is going to be a full on multi year economic really bad situation until I see the next report. There's a report coming out on May 7th or 8th, I forget the exact date it goes through and it categorizes the jobs, the jobless claims by their profession. So the last time they ran this report it was only 700,000 were in this report and it was mostly servers, teachers in home, you know, stuff like that. Jobs that will absolutely come back when we get out of this sort of acute phase of this pandemic. My gut tells me though that the last four weeks, these millions and millions of jobless claims each week for the last four weeks, 22 million total. My gut tells me that a lot of the businesses they used to work for are not going to bounce right back and they're not going to hire all those folks. So the question is where will unemployment go and how long will it take to come down? So some are calling for 15 to 20%. I've heard estimates as high as 30%, which is higher than the Great Depression. And so we have to watch that number, we have to see where it goes because businesses are still, you know, are still laying folks off, they're furloughing and there's lots of jobless claims. The other thing that I'm watching and I don't, I don't love the tickers of death counts and all of that. This is probably the most reputable site that I've found. Let me see. So critical trends. So this is Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource center and this is the second thing I'm tracking because our ability as a country to get this virus under control by staying, by keeping to ourselves or doing whatever you need to do to not spread the virus, at least not at least slow the spread of it anyway. You can play around with this. Not now, not while you're on with me. These are animated one that's not the one that I wanted. Bear with me. Which states have released breakdowns. Is it growing? Has the curve flattened? I think this is the one that I wanted and I think it's by country. Yeah. So here you could see us. So this is daily confirmed cases, the five day moving address, five day moving average. And this Is like as of yesterday, this is updated daily and so you could see the most confirmed cases you can see. If I take us out of this, you can see other countries and granted we're a big country, other countries, when I layer us into this, we are ahead of everyone. And so we were slow to respond and take action to slow the growth or the spread of it. And now we're sort of, we're kind of at. We're normalizing, which is good. And we still have a lot to go. So the reason I'm watching this is because more businesses are going to be hindered, more people are going to lose their jobs and we're going to have how many more weeks of millions of people going to claim for unemployment? That is the variable that I'm looking at. And then the question is, you know, does an off the charts unemployment really impact the housing market? That's what I'm looking at as a real estate team owner. And so there's just some unknowns. So I'm going to do these regularly and I'll keep you updated on my thoughts on all of it. I just thought that was interesting. So those are the only two things I'm looking at online. I don't do much anything else online as far as that stuff goes. So let me stop my share here and I want to bring us into. Let me see this here real quick. So hopefully that just kind of set the stage for what we're seeing and where I am sort of focusing my energies when it comes to. So you should see my screen here. I'm just going to take us through this is mostly going to be just freeform. I'm going to take you through some content to keep us on track. I just want to help you understand what an economic shift, a severe economic shift could mean for your business and how to come up with a clear plan to not just crush this shift, not just survive through the shift, really just come up with a plan to grow your business. My journey, I mean, I'll slow down a second. Make sure you grab a copy of our Market Shift toolkit. If you haven't grabbed a copy of that. That is just our 12 best trainings. Real Estate B school has been training fol to prepare for this shift for the last two to three years. Those are our 12 best trainings. It's just a give. I just want you to have that information. So please, please, please grab that and get into it. And all the documents, tools and systems you'll need are within that. The theme of a lot of what I'm doing right now in my personal life and my professional life in my businesses is like, what do I need to protect right now? My confidence, my mindset, those sorts of things. How do I pivot in the different businesses, the coaching training business and the real estate team. And then ultimately my mind is already at how am I going to profit from this? Not in a evil capitalistic kind of way, but in a way that I'm just a business guy and I know that there's pain and suffering with folks that need to buy and sell here locally. And I know around the country real estate agents, top agents and team leaders are going to be in a bad position. And so, and if you're just hopping on it was because of severe tech difficulties, make sure I did go live on my personal Facebook. So make sure you go in and consume the first few minutes. There was just some interesting information I brought up about the situation in terms of Corona spread and how it's impacting jobless claims and businesses and that sort of thing and what I'm looking at with respect to the market and all that good stuff. So the question I have, and this is just my question, if you've been around me for any period of time, you know the question I have for you, especially with what we're getting set to get into and we haven't even entered into it yet, you know, now everyone's just sort of at a standstill. We can't really practice real estate. The question is, do I have a clear roadmap in place to build a profitable systems driven business so that I can experience true time and money freedom and live a life without regrets. I'm going to give you the very, very short version of my journey. I got into real estate in 2007. I left a cozy corporate job, got married in October 2006, November Anders was in the world. Everything was changing and it really was this like make or break do or die moment. It had to work. The reality was I sold 27 homes in 10 months, my first 10 months, and then 44 homes in 2008 as a solo agent. And it wasn't working. I was just non stop 24 7. And it was not sustainable. And in no uncertain terms could I keep it up or make it sustainable. So for me this is two years later. So April 2010, our daughter was born, a couple miscarriages in between and I had to make this thing work. What I was doing was not going to be sustainable. And I'll say that my journey was not. And I'm going to go into how I planned, what I executed on where I put my mindset and all of that here in a second. What I will say to you, if you want to build an amazing business, it will not be perfect and it must be intentional. You're not going to magically end up, you know, if 2020 is the. This is the year where a shift, a major shift occurs and it's not going to be this V recovery, there's a lot of economists saying there's a pause button, it's going to recover quickly. I know I'm not as smart as those guys. And I also know that I think there's a chance that it might not do that. So it has to be intentional where your business is going to be in the future in your life, it has to be super intentional. So that's what I want for all of you. And I'll say that Real Estate B School in 2013 was born out of the fact that it was really hard to do what I did. I went from 44 to 58 to 118 transactions when I started my team to 178 to 248 in 2012. That year I sold one transaction and I haven't sold a home since. Even the home we purchased and the home I sold in 2017. So I love business. You don't have to exit production. We get that question a lot. If you come into our world, it's not a requirement. Some folks love production. They just do it too many hours in a week. And it's all about systems and all that good stuff that we could put around you to make it bearable and enjoyable again. So, yeah, and Real Estate B school really does pick up and we teach and train and help support implementation of real tools and systems. And I'm going to talk about what those are and how you can use them to scale your business. So this is my mission for you. Whether or not you ever come into our world and work with us formally. It's to help you scale your real estate business through the use of two things. Sustainable systems and empower people so you can make more money, enjoy more time off and experience less stress. You'll hear me talk a lot about time, money and stress and the balance of those three things. So I want to leave you with this question. For me, the biggest reason to build a sustainable business was the fact that I did want to be an awesome husband and I wanted to be a great dad and I didn't want to fail in other areas of My life that honestly I knew mattered more than business. So ask yourself the question. This is the first thing when it comes to planning through a crisis. Like, what are the top three reasons you want to build a sustainable real estate business? And I don't mean sustainable. Like I'm doing 24 transactions and I can work 40 hours a week doing it. I mean, you know, you can work eight hours a week in your real estate business and you can sell over 400 homes, like have that mindset, even if you think you don't want that. How can we build this thing in a way to give you that opportunity? So this is the game we're playing. I tell our members I pretty much go through this slide on every training that we do. This is a screenshot, able, worth screenshotting. And I have them laminate this slide with one that I'll show you here in a second with our drivers and our accelerators on it. So this is the game that we're playing. If you're not playing this game right now and you're sort of just hemming and hawing about what's going on in the market, you're going to lose. You need to make sure you're tripling down on new business development, meaningful conversations, setting appointments. You're meeting those appointments through virtual consultations and you are stockpiling listings and buyers right now and getting buyers all the way through pre approval underwritten and all that and getting sellers totally ready to come back on the market when things loosen up. And if you're not playing that game, you're going to lose the entire game of business. You're going to be out of business. We definitely don't want that. So the question is, you know, not even how do we get there. That was sort of my question before is like, what do we do now? You know, what do we do now? We are in this pause, you know. So as of this recording, it is April 23rd. I am going live April 23rd of 2020. This training was relevant three months ago, as relevant as it is today. So I'm definitely going to lace in some of the acute coronavirus stuff into this. But it's basic business, business training is what we're going to talk about. So like I said, this is the question I get asked the most. And this is another. When I get this built out, this slide for you, I want you to screenshot it and I want you to look at it and I want for you to think about your journey as it relates to this. This is the opposite side of that pipeline chart. So I want you to scale your business in a very specific way. There are lots of guys and gals across the country that are running big real estate businesses, and they don't have time freedom, they don't have money freedom. They have nothing to show financially for it, and they have a bunch of freaking stress. And so scaling your business in a very specific way so that your time in the business and the stress you endure is not related to. To the amount of money you get. So we're delinking time and money, and I'll go through that more deeply in a second here. So there's three elements I want us to focus on. First is to create your future. And let me back up one second here. So create your future. So create your future. And I'll go into the specifics of it, but this is getting really clear on where you want to end up in the future. You create your future today. It's easy to say, really very few people do it, and it's actually not that hard to do. Second part is to know your numbers. This is the part that most top agents and even team leaders just shy away from. They have no clue about numbers, economic model, any of that stuff. And then we talk about growing your team. And I don't care if you want to. You think you can't manage people or that part of the business scares you. There's a way to do it. It's not. Not very complicated. Last year we did 2.9 million GCI in our real estate team. I think we had about 12 team members, no production from ownership, over 30% profit margin. So not a real complicated business. It's a nice little business that we're running. And there's a way to do it the right way, where it's not this convoluted thing that's overly complicated. So when it comes to creating your future, if you don't create your future, you will have no direction. You'll be rudderless, you'll be just a ship going out to sea. And who knows where you'll end up if you don't know your numbers. You can't have a predictable business. This shift or even this acute sort of coronavirus, you know, not being able to do real estate at 100% capacity. It wasn't really complicated for us to make decisions on our numbers because we track all the leading and lagging indicators in our business, and lagging indicators are the thing that produce the thing you want. So if you want an activated listing, you know, what are the Things you need to track ahead of that to get that most. Most even team leaders, sometimes they, they think knowing your numbers is looking at your books once a month. That is the most lagging indicator. If you're, if you're relying on your books to know your numbers, you're going to lose the game and then grow your team. If you don't grow your team, you won't have any sustainability. We have members that will do million and a half GCI in a 300,000 price point market. They've got one or two administrators, maybe one resident administrator and a couple virtual assistants. And they have four or five buyer agents and they do all the listings. They're working 45 to 50 hours a week and clearing 40 to 50% net profit. And so you could do it in a way where it doesn't overwhelm you. So when Create youe Future, we're going to dive a little bit into each of these areas. It's getting clear on your model, putting your life first and plan your future. I've got something over that part right there. Let me move it. Hold on. Bear with me. There we go. All right, move this to a different slide here. All right, so plan your future. So when it comes to knowing your numbers, critical. And I want to talk about it and I don't want you to fall asleep when I talk about it. In economic model, deciding ahead of time what that's going to be. Foundational financial tools and then achieving financial freedom. There's an absolute process to achieving financial freedom and it's not talked about all that often. It surprises me that in these coaching, real estate, specific coaching companies that I've been a part of earlier on in my journey, nobody ever had me calculate net worth or track it regularly. What's the point of owning a business if you're not at least tracking one score? It's not the only score by any means whatsoever. It's an important score. We don't track it. And then grow your team. Identifying, attracting talent, hiring and onboarding and the cadence and culture that you follow. Give me a second here. I want to show my navigator so I can jump around a little bit. I don't want to do every single thing. And I also want you to interact and ask questions. If you have any questions whatsoever, go to the chat. If you're on Facebook watching this live, I'm not monitoring Facebook, so don't sweat it. Put your questions in there anyway. I'll go in after and I'll get those answered. If you want those links to Those first two websites that I pulled up, I will post those. I'll make a note here to post those in the Facebook group. Post it was John Hops Hopkins and I'll find a better jobless. I didn't like that jobless claims there are ones where you can do a slider on the time. So I'll post those in the Facebook group. So this, my friends, if this doesn't sort of make you nervous or excite you, I want you to take a screenshot of this and really consider if you're wanting to go someplace different than you are today in your real estate business and you're wanting to detach yourself from the business, this is the path. And so I'm going to spend a little bit of time on more on different aspects of this. But just know that all of this is here and we talk a lot about, you know, real estate, B school. The B is for business. Our tagline is Roadmap to Freedom. We really believe and we've shown it over and over and over again. I've done it and our members are doing it since 2013. Achieving freedom from their business. That's the ultimate goal. And it doesn't mean you can't be in production like I said, but you have the opportunity to build it in such a way where it doesn't revolve around you. Alright, so let's dig into Create youe Future. I'm going to challenge you quite a bit and I want you to slow down and take the time to think about and even write down the answers to these questions. You can go back into the Facebook version of this or we'll probably send out a replay since we had some tech difficulties. But based on where you have been, so based on your past, how confident in where you're. How confident are you in where you're going? So the first time I did like a future, a multi year outlook into the future was 2009. And I'm going to go through, I still have that plan right here. I'm going to go through it with you later. There's a lot. Oh man, that scared me, Siri, is you guys probably saw me jump there. It was scary. So for me, every year I've always had a three year plan and I've always been looking out three years and I've always been working on the first year of that three years and then the first quarter and then, you know, break it down by month and by week and by day. And so that's what I mean, going to reset my Camera got a little fuzzy. So that's the question I have for you based on where you've been. So I have a high degree of confidence looking into the future that I can create three years out, you know, so the question, like three years ago, where'd you plan to be today? Did you even have a plan, a written plan, spelling out exactly what you wanted three years at least to look like? That's what we call it, three year vision. So get clear on the model. The game of real estate is changing. And no matter what you do in real estate, it's really hard. If you maintain a top producing agent status and you love the money, you're sacrificing time and stress. You are working seven days a week. There's no way around it. To build a business where you don't have to show up in the business is really hard. Here's the thing though, there is a proven path and it's way more satisfying than being on call 247 for the next 10 to 15, 20 years. So it really is hard either way. If you haven't read the book E Myth by Michael Gerber, I think it's E Myth Revisited is the version they talk about the franchise prototype and the question from E Myth. This is a mindset shift. Back in 2007, when I read the book, I remember this question. How would I have to think about my business differently or no? Right. How would I have to think about my business to replicate it 10,000 times? So how would I have to think about my business in order to replicate it 10,000 times? So think about that for a second. Like if I'm even running a small real estate team and I'm still production, no systems around anything, I'm telling my assistant everything to do on everything, you know, and I'm not putting systems in place to have the thing run without me. You can't replicate it even one more time, you know, so you may never have a second location. You have to think about your business as if you're going to have 10,000 locations. There's that scene in the movie, the founder where they're in the parking lot and Michael Keaton, I think is the guy, Ray Kroc, and he's orchestrating the movement of the restaurant, like he's laying out a restaurant with paint or something in a parking lot. And you have to think about your real estate business that way. Like a lead comes in. How is it handled? What are we texting them? What are we emailing them? How are we having a conversation over Text versus on the phone. What's our lead management policy looks like when we get someone on the phone, what are we saying when we set an appointment? How do we make sure it's qualified? What do we do to follow up to make sure they show up? When they show up, you know, what are we sending them in a pre list packet when they show up, what are we saying? What are we showing them? You know, when we sign, do we have a listing packet? You know, once they sign, what happens with client care and who takes over? And you have to think about it that way. You have to orchestrate this process from the moment a lead is generated all the way to a closed transactions. So the question is, do I truly own a business or do I simply go to the place that I work? So systems, I kind of beat that dead horse, you know, the question is, do you currently have the know how and systems in place to scale your business to the next level? Most folks that come into our world can emphatically answer this question. No, not even close. And that's why I'm coming into real estate B schools world. So this isn't a question that most folks will answer a heck yes on. So there's no shame in some of these questions being a negative answer really. It's why we exist. So there's definitely a selfish motivation here if there potentially is a good fit with real estate B school. Second part of creating your future is putting your life first. And the question I have been crazy over personally and I've been asking myself this question personally is will I have regrets? Will I have regrets if I continue to go down the path I'm on right now? So just think about, Sorry, hold on. I'm just going everywhere. Just think about this for a second. So the path you're on right now in your business, the time you're putting into your business, the time you're putting into your family, the time that you're putting into your physical body, your spiritual, your finances, you know, are you going to have regrets if you keep going down the path that you're on right now? And it's a tough question. I ask myself this question quite a bit. I just don't want to end up at a point in my marriage or with my kids or with my physical body or my spiritual walk or in business or my, you know, any of that where I have regrets. I don't want to end my life at a point where I'm going to regret any of this. So find your leverage. What is the thing that's going to get you out of bed. To be so laser focused on doing the work you need to do to build a business that runs mostly without you. It doesn't mean you have to stop going to your business or stop doing production. You have to find your leverage. For me, it was mostly, I want to be a great husband. But if I'm being honest, this is not a takeaway from my wife, Julie. I really wanted to be. I want to be an amazing dad. I just. I didn't have a great childhood. My dad was an alcoholic. Drank till I was 15. My parents divorced when I was 4, and I remember them even just a real challenging upbringing. My childhood from, like 4 to 10 was just not great. My mom did the best she could. We just lived in a really not so great area, and it was pretty challenging. And so my leverage is probably. I'm being honest. I'm over shooting on the dad part. You know, the experiences I'm creating with my son Anders. And we were fishing at Lake Lohr here in North Carolina, and this is in our backyard. My girl even got into fishing and caught this big, wide mouth, wide mouth, open mouth, largemouth bass. I'm not a fisherman, but I've gotten into it because they're into it, and I don't want to miss the good stuff. So find your leverage. And every day, even in this time now, find the things you're appreciative about. So if you see here every day, this is my planner. Every day I record, where did I win today? And what am I grateful for? And so do you have a practice of gratitude? And just don't sweat stuff that doesn't matter. Life is too short. If nothing. If this acute period of time with COVID revealed nothing to you, it was like, man, just don't get overly worked up about stuff that that doesn't matter all that much. All right, so plan your future. This is the third part, and this is where I'm gonna slow down quite a bit, and I'm gonna go through this business plan, and I'm gonna drop this in the Facebook thread. I have spent more time looking at this business plan that I wrote back in 2009 and putting myself back into the thought process that I had back then. When I wrote this plan, I hadn't hired my first buyer agent, and I had never built a business before. I had never marketed anything before. I had never managed anyone anything before. I had never done anything I put in this business plan. And so the question I have for you is, am I making Consistent progress toward meaningful goals in the areas of life and business that really matter. And you can see from this business plan that I'll post and print it out. There's personal stuff on here. Don't make fun of me. The whole backside of it is personal. So it's pretty dense. I read this every day, every day. And I'll go through it here in a little bit. So Proverbs 29:18. Where there is no vision, the people perish. To me, this is powerful with yourself personally, with those that are going to come into your world in your family. Like if you don't have a vision for where you're going in every area of your life, the chance that you get there is 0, 0% chance you'll get to an unnamed destination. Think about it. Sounds stupid saying it and that's the truth. So this is that business plan and I'm going to drop the link. So don't worry about it. You can grab it. I want you to print it out. I want you to read it. The thing I take away from this, I remember when I was writing this, this was late, like September, fall time, 2009. I wrote this and it was my 2010 business goal. I said, keep in mind, I'm in. I'm only what, eight months through the year that I did 54 transactions personally. And I said, how me and my team will nail 160 plus sales in 2010. First, this is a done deal. I only had an assistant at this point. And I said, first, this is a done deal. That said, this is going to take laser focus and pigheaded discipline. This next year will be the most incredible stretching and growth year of my life. I will exceed my goals and expectations. I will close 100 sides personally and 160 plus sides with average commission in excess of $6,000. I will accomplish this by focusing on key personal growth areas and business impact zones. And then I had a quote here. I will create raving fans out of every person I come in contact with by providing over the top customer service. And I am not outgoing. I'm not a very caring person, I hate to say. And so before I hired my first agent, I was predicting that I was gonna do 160 sides. I didn't get there. I went from 58. I hired an agent late in the year. He did four sides and I did 54 sides in 2009. Yeah, 2009 and then 2010. I brought on a few agents. We hit 118 sides and they were seasoned agents. They were agents that didn't know what to do. They had no idea what to do as the sky was falling in the market. And I was able to step in and share with them this vision, right. I was able to share with them this vision of what I was building. Hey, do you want to come do this with me? And so we went from 58 where I did 54 to 118 where I did 66 to 178. I think I did. I still think I did a bunch that year, a third of the production that year to 248 in 2012 where I. All of my production went away. I did one transaction out of 248. I did it on the right model. I'll go through economic model here in a second and all that. So I want you to. Do you have anything written down that dictates where you're going to be in the future? And if you don't, you've got to just stop everything. This is the perfect time to do this sort of thing. On one side of this, you can see I pulled it up here. It predicts where I'm going to be three, five and 10 years. And the 10th year is 2020 and we will not hit that GCI. And I don't know what I was thinking about a 50% net with me out of production. I was a little bit aggressive aggressive there. We're over 30% net margin consistently with no ownership production. That's the key. So I'm only working eight hours a week in that business. Take more than 12 weeks of vacation, maybe less this year because of this coronavirus. A whole lot more than the liquid net worth and my total net worth. And at this point I don't feel like I'm ready to retire. I think if I lived in pretty modestly, I probably could. I only say any of that for you to realize that all of this stuff was predetermined. Like it was intentional. It wasn't always pretty, but it was super intentional. So they say the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time to plant the tree is today. This is the planting of the tree. If you're not doing this, your chances of, of crushing it is going to be really, really, really, really, really narrow chances of crushing it. So clarity breaks. This is just a time where you sit with your by yourself. I'd recommend printing this out and just reading it. Honestly, that's what I would do. There's just. It's not exactly how we teach today. It'll just Put you in the mindset of what I was going through and what I was thinking in a time where I hadn't done. I haven't built a business before. I hadn't managed overhead or people or any of that stuff. I'd never sold before. I'd never learned scripts in any phone work before. And I was just on point with my new business development time and learning scripts and I learned everything from the bottom up. And a consistent practice of clarity breaks. This is 90 minutes where you're alone, technology free, where you're just thinking about your business and your life and you're asking yourself in the areas of life that matters, what's working and what's not working. Put that in your calendar right now. It's a free gift that'll change your life and your business forever. If you practice that once a week. And then just be patient. There's so many folks that, you know, we, we. What's the, what's the saying? We over. We think we can do more in a year. Like we underestimate what we can do in like a three to five year period and we overestimate what we could do in a year. So we get discouraged and we don't keep pushing through. You know, my goal was 160 sides in 2010. We hit 118. I didn't like it wasn't a woe is me. You know, we didn't hit our goal. I'm like, man, we put some awesome systems in place. I have folks on my team that need me and they need what I'm building my cadence and my culture. And now I'm able to go to 178, then 248 and get out of production and do what I really, really, really love you. Pull up the chat here. I see Vanessa is chatting in. Yeah, Vanessa, what I'm going to do is I am going to, I'm going to share this in my personal Facebook. So I went live on my Facebook. I'm hoping it's still live. It says it's still live on my Facebook. So I'm going to share those two links I started this out with and I'm going to share this one as well. So, yeah, so my point here is be patient. You know, it's going to take you trial and error and effort and failing and you got to be so committed to where you're going that the way you get there, you can't possibly predict what it's going to look like to get there. So just be patient and then you know, if you want to be fit in your business and you want to have a plan to go from where you are today in your business to where your business is just crushing it and you're just kicking ass and taking names, you are 100% responsible for being able to do that. The analogy is being physically fit, right? If you're not physically fit, there's a 1 billion excuses you can come up with that you're not and it's 100% your responsibility. Limited instances. So don't hate on me if you have some sort of illness or anything like that. Even those that are challenged in those ways could go for a walk, they could eat less, they could hydrate, they can get more sleep, we can consume less so we're not stressed when we go to sleep, so we sleep better. You have to claim responsibility for all this stuff. And then the lesson here is for you to run your race and stay focused on you. This visual, I think all of these are good visuals just to grab and have a screensavers. A horse cannot run its race if it doesn't have its blinders on. So it'll get spooked by the horses next to it and it won't be able to run its race. I think the same is true in life. Even in just your personal life, you're so focused on, you know, going through your Facebook and Instagram and you're not running your race and you don't know anything about that top team in your market that's doing 5 million GCI, 500 sides. You don't know that the team leader is selling 100 units on his own. You don't know that they're single digit profits. That business, even with the hundred units that the team leader is doing, you don't know that that team leader is working 80 to 90 hours a week consistently. That's a real story. So focus on your race. Don't get screwed up and freaked out and spooked by folks around you and what they're doing. I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time, I want to push you all. If you're watching this@realestatebschool.com you can click on real, real results and you can click on case studies and we have like 23, 24 case studies on there. Dave Hook came in at a time where he was that small team working 80 plus hours. They didn't. His wife Jenny was pregnant with their first child. They have three children now. If you're friends with Dave Hook on Facebook, he's putting out some awesome videos about life at home with his family and what those three little kids are up to. He did I think 265 transactions last year on the right economic model. So the highest returns that I've seen any team do with the owner not in production. And he, I think he worked about 35 to 40 hours a week down from double that before. And his take home income quadrupled in just over four years working together. So just an awesome, awesome. I didn't do it. I just showed him the path. So he is definitely, you know, takes all the credit for it. Second part here is knowing your numbers. And I'm going to be really cognizant of time. We did get started a little bit late. This, this section is important. So if you're not paying attention, now's the time to pay attention because this is the time where you normally would put this screen behind some other screen because it's talking about numbers. The game of business is won or lost in this area. You cannot put your head in the sand when it comes to your numbers. And so the first thing I want to talk about is your economic model. You decide ahead of time what the profit in your business is going to look like. I got a lot of things wrong in my business. I did get the economic model right. My goal has always been a third. A third, a third. When this thing was fully built out and I didn't have to show up to it, I wanted a third to go to my broker and my agents or my salespeople, A third to go to operating expenses and the third for the owner to split with the government. That's been my model forever and always. You may think of that and say, well I'm making 70% of you know what I'm taking. You know what my production. Now I'm a top agent or have just an assistant or I have, you know, one other agent or whatever that's, that might be on like $200,000. You're taking 70%. So you're taking a home. 140 where if you had a 1.5 million dollar business and you're probably working a lot to get to that 140, you know, let's teach you how to build a real business. And then you can make triple that amount of money working less and having less stress. And so your economic model is critically important. It's just pre deciding what the numbers are going to look like from a financial standpoint. Your P and L, your profit and loss statement, foundational Financial tools. There are certain tools you have to have in place. You have to be able to track leading and lagging indicators in your business, the things that move the needle. You know, our one thing that we track is listings activated. We track a whole bunch of things. The critical measure for us is how many listings did we activate this week. All of our activities come into that measure. Marketing our sales and what we're doing to generate activity around listing appointments and then signing those listings and activating them. So you have to have tracking mechanisms in place to be able to look at that. And then on the financial side, you have to run books, a set of books where you have good, meaningful data to know that you're on point with the economic model and habits make or break us in the area of profitability. There's an awesome, awesome, awesome book. I highly recommend it. It's called Profit First. You won't see me geek out about, like, sports stars or, you know, music stars. I don't watch sports. I don't really listen to a whole lot of music. I'm a little boring in that regard. I love movies, though. I do geek out on movies. We're usually ahead of Hollywood when it comes to good movies that are coming out. Mike Michalowicz, Profit first Author so my point of saying that is I met Mike and I took a picture with him. I thought he was just a rock star. He says, profit is not an event, it's a habit. Profit is not this monumental event. Just one day, if I keep doing this, all of a sudden, you know, another quote from the book along these lines is putting your nose to the grindstone is a really easy way to cover up an unhealthy business. We think that if we can just work harder, longer, better, if we can just hold out, something good will happen one day. And it rarely does. It rarely does. So we have a very specific way that we move money around in my businesses called Profit First. I could share this template as well. I will share this in the Facebook group. You probably want to read the book. You probably don't want to jump right in. You're not going to understand it. The whole point is that you decide what your profit is. It's not what's left over, it's what you decided to be. So your revenue minus your profit equals your expenses. He just flips the equation, the accounting equation. It's actually a phenomenal book on Audible. So third part here is financial freedom. And this is where I mentioned earlier, very few coaches have I ever been around that have actually put a system in place for their clients to increase systematically their net worth. And so the question is, am I consistently tracking and systematically increasing net worth? And so what's the point of a business? What's the point of the business? Yes, you have to take care of your people. Yes, you have to take care of your clients. Yes, it gives you something to do that leads to a feeling of fulfillment and achievement. The point of a business is to make the owner money consistently. That's it. If it's not doing that, it's charity, you know, and so you have to dial this. These things in. And I said it before, and I'll say it again, that net worth is not, by any means, even the most important measure that I track. It's just one thing you have to track that'll make everything that revolves around your business, you'll just be more aware of what's going on when you're tracking your net worth. Every month, I do it on the 10th of every month. I track my net worth. And the cool thing about all of this and time and money and stress that the scorecard are your finances and your net worth. Like, if I can look at your net worth and I can look at your calendar and I can talk to your spouse, maybe draw some blood and talk to your kids and those sorts of things, I might get an accurate picture of what's going on in your life. The cool thing about it is, though, time is finite, and 168 hours in a week is what we all get to make decisions about where we want to spend our time. And yes, we have a lot to do. And, yes, 100%, I want you to show up in all the areas of life that matter. And it's crazy times. Not just in what's going on now. It is even more crazy right now. You know, our goal is to just get through the day, and, you know, Julie and I will look at each other at the end of the day. You know, good job. We made it one more day in this, you know, in this. Shut in. I don't know if you guys watched Jim Gaffigan. He's a comedian, and he's in a New York City high rise with his wife and five kids. And he just comments daily on all of that. So it is extraordinary times because of COVID and also just because we're all so freaking busy and we get distracted with so many things that don't lead to the kind of life that we want. It definitely leads to this feeling of frustration because you have these goals yet you're not achieving them and you're working more hours and you're getting nowhere. And so just know that the struggle is real because our industry set us up for failure. I believe that our industry measures the wrong things, that measures things that do not matter. And we promote, you know, agents top line. You know, we just shifted our 10 year focus. So three years ago we came up with a 10 year focus to be the number one team, the number one single location team in Keller Williams, in GCI. And just recently we shifted it to profit. So our goal is to be the number one team with a single location with the highest profit. And so we're working on a way to get folks profit numbers to know what's actually going on. I know some guys that, like I said, they're not making more net income than the production that they're doing, which is complete insanity. And even if you never get out of production, you don't ever want to sacrifice profitability. So there's this exchange of time for money. And I call this exercise the Business Freedom Index. And I want you to just pay attention for now and understand what this is calculating. Business Freedom Index is a calculation of basically the money you take home to the hours that you work. So for me, I take my annual income, I do AGI for my tax return, adjusted gross income, that number, and I divide it. I literally go back in my calendar and I calculate roughly the number of hours I worked in a year. And so my corporate job, I made about 200 grand and I worked about 2,000 hours. It was a hundred bucks an hour. I got into real estate. The first year in real estate I made, I can't probably like 37,000 net. And I forget how many hours I work. I did the calculation, it was just under 20 bucks an hour. It's like, I think it was actually like 16 bucks an hour or something. And so my journey in real estate has gone from that 16 bucks an hour to over $500 an hour. And, and that journey is possible. I'm not going to dive into the phases of growth that we teach at real estate B school. I want to let you know that there are six distinct phases and there's something to do at each phase so that you're going to the next phase with momentum and strength. And there's a lot of folks that are selling, you know, 50, 60 homes a year, but they haven't put the right systems in place or they're not progressing through the phases. It took me about 2007, about six years to go through the six phases. I spent one year in each of these phases. And so I went from, you know, 27 homes my first 10 months to 44 homes, to 58 homes, to 118 homes, to 178, to 248, to 312, to over 400. And the year we did 312 is the year I worked one day a week. And then a year after that, I've been working one day a week ever since. So that this was. This is my journey. When you look at that business freedom index that I just went through. Hold on a second. When you look at the six phases of growth against what you could make in each phase, the fallacy is that most folks think that the more. The bigger you get, the more hours you put in, the more stress you endure. It's actually the opposite, assuming you do it the right way. So you can get to the scale phase, you can do 144 transactions, you can make over $100 an hour, and you could be working less hours. And so it's an inverted relationship. So the question I have for you and what I want you to do is calculate your actual number for 2019. Then I want you to decide what you want your number to be. My number I wanted to achieve was $250 an hour in real estate. I went from $100 an hour with really no risk in a corporate job, and I wanted to make $250 an hour. It was $500,000 divided by 2,000 hours is what I wanted to do in real estate. Took me five years to get there. So this wasn't an instant process. It took me another five years to get to 500, and now I'm in that third block of five years, and I'm growing beyond that. And you have to know the score. So this is something that I absolutely tracked and I predicted, and I've been tracking it ever since. And if you're not tracking your net worth and this is the next year, I had a very specific vision and purpose for my financial independence and the things I was going to do to get there. And what I wanted these numbers to look like is each year thereafter. So I use a very simple calculator for net worth. Everything we do in real estate, B school, has a tool associated with it, and they're not complicated and they will change everything for you once you implement them. So two words of advice here. I guess one word of advice is stay focused. Squirrels are real. We chase them. It's in our DNA to chase them. And you have to stay focused while others are chasing all the shiny stuff in our industry and they're changing CRMs and they're doing this and they're doing that. You have to stay focused. One guy who is the ultimate non squirrel chaser is a guy named Dan Jones. He's on the website. Go to realestatebschool.com and click on real results, case studies and you can. It's about 25 minutes I spend with Dan to just go through his journey. When I started working with him, it was 2015. He's still in our world. He was actually on my real estate team in 2012, 13. He tried it a couple years on his own. He got to about 65 transactions on his own with an administrator. When he came to me, he had four paid lead sources. I made him go down to one paid lead source. He went from 65 to 105, then 105 to 175. I let him add back a second lead source that next year I made him go deeper on the two lead sources. He went from 175 to 225 and then 2018 even deeper. He went to 265 sides on two paid lead sources. Two paid lead sources, yard sign and database. And I think he does some expired FSBO direct mail. He's one of our pillars as well. So. And he doesn't have a complicated business. When we first started running his books, he would write all his expenses on a yellow piece of paper and he would tally up all his revenue and that was his P and L. He just made it happen. He followed the system. So last part here is to grow your team and I think we're doing okay on time. I'm going to get you out of here before 2:30 Eastern. So grow your team. So the question is when it comes to people, this is the part where people get a little freaked out is am I taking the time and effort to build culture? If you have a team. So to build culture on my team and if you don't, are you taking the time to build a system to surround yourself with team members or players that I truly want to coach, serve every day. The reality is you cannot do it all. You will not have the kind of lifestyle you want, meaning the time and money and stress. If you're thinking about not having a systems driven business and not doing this the right way, our people are our true advantage. It's our only true advantage when it comes down to it. And if you think about the future of real estate it's not going to get easier to compete like the business we're building and the way we help buyers and sellers. I would not want to be a solo agent in Greater Charlotte competing with my team because we're focused so heavily on how our people are delivering an experience to our clients that they could not imagine being any better and just realize that it is not going to be perfect in any way whatsoever. Is this journey going to be perfect? And it's just a hang on, follow the path. The river is going in the right direction. Get in the river and just succumb to the journey. And really, it is about committing to the journey and knowing that there's going to be some challenging times. But committing to the journey is super important. So the first part of growing your team is identifying, knowing what you want and then attracting those people. We do that through an exercise. It's our course Values builder, I think, is what we call it. And we take core values seriously. This is not a put on the wall and, you know, it's like some big corporate document. We live and breathe our core values. And mine are different than yours. And it's a critical part of your journey. Second part is to hire and onboard folks. So your hiring process, how are you making sure you're bringing quality people into your world? And then how do you onboard them to help them be successful? You know, we have a very specific onboarding process for agents that join our team. That's part of what we train in real estate, B school. We give away that entire system to make sure that they're going to get paid as a salesperson as quickly as possible. And then the third part of growing your team is the cadence and culture, the ongoing cadence, structure and culture of the business that you're building. And so the question is, am I building a business with a culture of productivity so that I can consistently grow my income and impact? And if you aren't building the systems in place to have a culture of productivity, it's going to be tough. Like I see some of these traditional real estate teams, where there's no cadence whatsoever, there's no tracking in place whatsoever, there's no accountability for people or spending or anything. And that business, as a result of having all of that, it's a loose collection of people with no tracking and no real standards whatsoever. That business is going to be maybe not even at all profitable. If it is profitable, it's because the team leader is tripling down on their hours and their effort in the business. That's not a true business. So you got to ask yourself this question. So it's a journey of I do it, we do it, they do it. So most folks that come into our world have already mastered the I do it. So they've already figured out how to absolutely crush traditional methods in real estate. I will not. We teach all of that stuff and it's not our best, our best fit. We take over where most coaching programs leave off as it is right now with our current programs, where you are already going from I do it to we do it. And you know that an administrator is a key hire. You know that getting out of buyers, at least with a showing agent or two, is a critical move, right? So you know you want to grow. You just tapped out your hours and you're super stressed and your money probably isn't that great because you're spending and not tracking and it's this weird thing. So I do it, we do it and they do it. So it took me, the I do it phase for me was 2007, 2008, and then most of 2009 had an administrator in there. The we do it was 2010, 11 and 12. That's when we got up to 248 transactions. And then they do it has been that 2013 and since then. So seven, eight, eight complete years at this point. And we're consistently doing, you know, anywhere 2.75 to 3 million this year might be a little bit lower just because of what's going on with coronavirus. And so I just think that's an important thing to remember when it comes to productivity and a cadence. You know, it's going to be tough to succeed in this business if you don't eat a frog. Brian Tracy the book Eat that Frog. The ugliest of all frogs is the first part of your day. And I don't think you'll ever love it. Maybe there's just a few crazy people out there that love new business development, lead generating. I was consistent 12 to 15 hours a week. I didn't do it every morning. I had strategic time blocks, different times of days. And it was the ugliest of all frogs. And then when I was done with that frog, I would eat the follow up frog. I would call people I've never talked to before is the biggest, ugliest, fattest frog. And then the next ugliest one was the follow up of people I've already talked to. Honestly, I didn't feel like talking to them again. And I still did it. And so we want to be productive, not Busy. So many real estate agents are chickens with their heads cut off. They think they're doing dollar productive activities and they're just not. Another awesome case study you must go to the website to listen to. I'll just give the punchline. Dave did seven $600,000 more GCI than my real estate team last year, which I think is just awesome. The year I started working with Dave he did 65 transactions and he had a part time assistant only. The first intensive workshop he came to we do two live intensives a year. The first one he came to, his takeaway was to hire buyer's agent. He actually sent me a picture of where he wrote that down. He was moving homes and he sent me a picture of that and he's still in our community. I guess his first intent came to me in 2014. So he's over. Yeah. Going on six years in our community and just another not chasing shiny objects kind of guy. Like his path was to true business ownership. He's had been out of production for about three years now and he didn't take any vacay vacations. Was nearly. His marriage was in a really difficult situation and they do about 12 to 15 weeks of vacation a year now. Seven figure income. So he's just amazing. Awesome. So just go check him out on the, on the site. So the question after all of that is how scalable is your real estate business when you look at it? And I'm going to hustle through this one. This is what we call the business freedom blueprint. Just know this, there's four drivers that you need to focus on as a business owner and there are 12. I can't do 12 with my fingers here. 12 accelerators. The four drivers are attract, convert, deliver and scale. And then attract is all about database marketing, listing marketing and buyer marketing. Convert, lead management, appointment setting and consultation process. Deliver is buyer and seller, client servicing, transaction coordination and critical tech tools and scale we just went through is create your future, know your numbers, grow your team. I spent most of the time kind of high level going through scale. There are two to three systems, no three to five systems and tools for each of these accelerators that we teach to. So as you look at this, this is another screen you want to do a screenshot on. You know, ask yourself, when I look at these different accelerators, how strong is that accelerator in terms of that running without me tinkering with it. So is your database marketing happening? And you're normally getting leads from your database and you don't have to do much Maybe record some videos. You know your listing marketing. You have listing leads consistently coming in from efforts that are ongoing marketing or advertising or telemarketing. Buyer marketing, same deal. Are you getting high quality home search leads coming in? And I'm not talking about Zillow. Zillow is not marketing. Zillow is paying someone else to be a better marketer than you. And we don't, we don't play that game. A fun fact. My team doesn't do any paid home search at all. Where about 6% of our GCI is spent on marketing, mostly to our database. We do a little bit of radio, but even that is a marginal return these days. So look at each of these accelerators and ask yourself how scalable is my business? And that's all I've got in terms of content. If you've got any questions, definitely get them in the chat. I'll go into the Facebook group afterwards and post some things and put some stuff in there. There are some of you that will consume this and you're at a point in your journey where you have to take a next step and have a conversation with us. It's the only thing I can offer you. And as of the recording of this, I am doing these business growth strategy sessions. Personally, this is probably my most fun thing to do in the business in terms of talking to someone that is in the midst of growing their business and they're not quite on the right track. And what can we do to analyze where you are today? I'm going to cut to the chase here. So where are you now? Where are you going two to three years from now and what's holding you back or what are the obstacles? So go to rebstrategysession.com or you can go to realestatebschool.com and your next step is obvious over. There's a bunch of cool free resources over there. Well, I'm going to leave you with this quote. If you want something you never had, you must be willing to do something you've never done. And I really believe that when it comes to business, especially the times that we're going into right now, this is not going to be pretty. What's going to come out of this? I am an eternal optimist and I'm really waiting for that May 7th or 8th report to see the complexion of these jobs that were we're losing and to start to make, start to have an opinion about what those jobs are and if they're going to come back. I think a lot of industries are going to change. A lot of business owners are going to realize that they can do more with less people and less space. I think the commercial market is going to be hit and I think the real estate market is going to go through some struggles and we've got strategies and systems in place already to pivot our marketing around what's going to happen in the real estate market. You need to be ready to do the same thing. And so if you're struggling right now and you know that you need to have a conversation, just go to rebstrategysession.com and I just have a lot of love and respect for those that are doing this work right now and are grinding it out and have committed to just being the buffalo in the storm. I don't know if it's a myth or not, but they say that the difference between a cow and a buffalo when a big storm rolls through is that the buffalo runs straight into the storm and by doing that they get through it quicker. The cow runs with the storm and they're ultimately slaughtered in the storm. So be the buffalo. Put your head down. If we could help you get over to realestatebschool.com let's jump on a call. Let's dig into what the business looks like today, what you want it to look like, and I'll share my journey. You know, my journey isn't the end all, be all. I only use it as an example. A guy that had no business experience whatsoever, never led or managed anyone at all, and I was able to put it all together with a lot of help from mentors and coaches. But there was not one place I could go to get the straight roadmap on what had to happen. And that's the thing I'm most proud of with real estate B school is that we put that roadmap together. So much love, much respect. We'll talk to you all soon. Be well.