Selecting The Right Model For Your Real Estate Business

If you're looking to scale your real estate business and not lose your life in the process, you have to ask yourself this question. How would you think about your business differently if you had to replicate it 10,000 times? This is the E Myth question. The first pivotal piece of work that I studied when I got into real estate and specifically how do I get out of the grind of being a real estate agent? Was the E Myth revisited by Michael Gerber. And while it doesn't give you like the tools or tactics or systems or strategies, it changed my mindset around what's possible in my real estate business. Just like you, I started out as a solo agent and I was grinding out transactions. I was working pretty much every evening, pretty much every weekend day, and I was even working like 10, 10pm to 2am you know, many nights to kind of get work that I couldn't get done during the day and sort of that catch up time when I put Julie and Anders and Kendall to bed. And so as you think about your business growth journey, just challenge yourself to think about it differently. At the end of this video, I'm going to show you how to get a free roadmap. I built out a whole six stage process that you can swipe and study as you kind of navigate these six stages. So stay tuned for that. Make sure you give me a thumbs up on the video if you enjoy the content. Subscribe, subscribe to the channel and make sure you turn notifications on as well. So in terms of the model that you're building in your real estate business, this is something that you really want to begin with. The end in mind. It actually doesn't matter where you're starting. You could be a solo agent selling 10 or 20 homes a year. You could, you could maybe be a top agent, 40 to 50 homes here with an administrator. You could already have a small team or even a large team. There are ways to design this thing where maybe you don't have the freedoms that you thought you would have when you started in this business or you started building your business where if we could just sort of break this down into what you want the model to look like. Truly, if you could wipe the slate clean and you could design this business from scratch, what would you focus on? So there's a handful of things I want to go through, things that I really see now that over time I kind of failed through most of these things. And you know, being in this business of business coaching, you know, we've had the ability to help our members not fail. Like I did in those early days. The first decision you have to make in terms of the model you're following is are you going to be transaction based or relationship based? Are you going to grind out deals on the transaction treadmill or are you going to focus on providing a service to your clients that is legendary, that they want to go to the hilltop and scream about how awesome you are? If it were me, in a service based industry where generally we're viewed as a commodity because there's too many real estate agents in most markets, I would choose choice B. I would go down the client care world class experience path so that this virtuous cycle is created where you acquire a client, you do a great job, they sing your praises, you use that social proof to generate the next client and your marketing costs come down. You don't rely on junky lead sources like Zillow or pay per click leads. The business becomes way more elegant. You know, it's this elegance and ease versus this blood and guts approach that most real estate agents and team leaders taking their business. So that's the first thing that I would focus on. The second thing I would focus on is this decision whether you want to be in production or out of production. And this is a really foreign concept, especially if you're a solo agent and you thought that traditional agents, traditional success is I just, I find a buyer, I find a seller, I help them buy, I help them sell and I repeat the process. I'm showing homes, I'm entering listings into mls. I want to stretch your mind a little bit to think about like ultimately if you could have your way, would you want to, you know, continue helping buyers or sellers or maybe you want to be the person that is building the systems or coaching your agents or you know, being, becoming more of the business owner. It's critical that you decide that ahead of time so you can build out these foundational systems that allow you to have leverage, growth and to build a business that's truly sustainable. This concept of sustainability means that what you build you can do forever. You know, so working seven days a week, working most evenings, constantly being on call, not being able to take a vacation, your health, physical health, spiritual health, suffering, your relationship suffering, that's not sustainable. And unless you decide ahead of time what you want the business to look like in the future, it's okay if you want to be in production, but maybe we can have you focus just on listings. You know, maybe there's a vision here for yeah, I want a million dollar business. I've got a Couple agents, one administrator. And I work only listings only nine to five, Monday through Friday. Our virtual consultation process that we built out and we're employing, I can actually be on five listing presentations at one time. And so you're thinking about, you know, that possibility in your business. That's the second thing. The third thing I want to talk about is this concept of leverage through people and systems, or do you want to remain the technician in your business? This E myth revisited. You know, the E stands for entrepreneurial myth. It's a myth because most people think they're an entrepreneur, but they're doing only the technical work in the business. They're not spending any time as a manager or as an entrepreneur. The technician in a business does the work. They're working with buyers, working with sellers. The manager is setting up systems to do the heavy lifting, right? So there's a marketing system in place, there's a sales system in place, there's a buyer showing, you know, a showing agent system in place. There's the way we track numbers and hold the team accountable, right? All these systems have to have to be in place. And then you have leverage through people. So sustainable systems and empowered people. Even if your vision for your business is, like I said earlier, to have one administrator and a couple buyer agents where you could just focus on listings, you have to think about your business in a way, like, what if I couldn't do any position in the business, what would that look like? And really focus on the systems that you have to build out and the people that would run those systems. In real estate, we have an awesome opportunity to put the right person on the right task. So if you slow down and even just now think about all the different jobs you do as a real estate agent, there are Basically, there are 12 main functions that a real estate agent does from marketing coordination, listing coordination, closing coordination, you know, a courier, you're running signs, photographer, you know, there's all these things you do, right? You're, you're lead generating, you're showing homes, you're, you know, on listing appointments, maybe you're planning or running numbers. Like there's all these different things you need to do. When you break down your ability to do those things better than anyone else, or your desire to make a certain amount of money in a certain amount of time, that forces you to think about, like, what things must I get off my plate? So this, we call this concept the Business Freedom Index. And I want to end with this concept. It's simply your income divided by the hours that you work. And so if you want to make a lot of money and not work a crazy amount of hours, you have to just look at the things that you're doing during your day and be honest with yourself. Is this the highest and best use of my time, or can I get someone else to do this thing? Maybe even better than I can? And I just have to be the systems creator and coordinator? Right. We have a system in place where a friend of mine sold their $1.6 million house recently. I did go out on the initial consultation with my listing partner. I had less than 60 minutes in that transaction. We double ended it with we made more than $90,000 on that transaction. So was that a good use of my time? That was an awesome use of my time. I could only do that through massive leverage through systems and people. Even when I received word that they were thinking about making the move, I followed our system of getting that potential opportunity in our appointment. Our consultation tracker, Inside Sales, called them, you know, set up the appointment on the calendar for my listing partner to come out, and I attended that appointment. When we took the listing, it went to listing client care. All the stuff happened, all the coordination. It went to closing, you know, our closing transaction coordination team. And it's this like, systematic approach to real estate. And the reviews at the end were just raving reviews for the way we were able to serve them at the highest level. So think about, you know, the model that you're following and what's possible. You'd be surprised what you could do with your real estate business. And I'll end with a quick story about clients of ours that really, when they looked at their business and what they had built and the leverage that they had for themselves, they were discouraged. Allen and Crystal Johnson, they had built a $28 million real estate team that it was not built on the right model. They had not paid attention to core values. They had not done the right commission splits, value based commission splits with their agents. And they didn't have a cadence and a structure and a culture in their business. Unfortunately, we had to kind of break that business down before we can build it up again. And they went from 28 million to 32 million the next year. Even though we had to release some of those agents back into the, into the real estate industry to find, you know, a better opportunity that might be a better fit for them. They've gone on just a few years later to do 85, 90 million in volume. And they have built this thing on the right model where they are now able to do the thing that God created them to do. Their God given abilities are being put to good work in the business. AJ is all about coaching and building people up and Crystal is really just an operational genius in terms of the backstage of the business and making sure the operation runs smoothly. And so doesn't matter where you are on your journey, you may be selling 10 homes a year, you still need to build this thing on the right model. Now I mentioned the six stages of real estate business growth. Just go to realestatebusinessgrowth.com it's our real estate business growth navigator. I take you through step by step by step, stage by stage, what you need to look for and how you need to show up when you're in that first stage, 0 to 100k, that next stage where you're ramping the business and you're doing more transactions but your time is getting away from you and how you need to think about it. Even a part time administrator of hiring, what that looks like, the questions you're asking yourself, the personal disciplines and habits that you're putting into place, the habits that you need to break to go into stage three and four and five, six and kind of make that journey from agent to owner. So go to realestatebusinessgrowth.com if you like the video, give me the thumbs up. Subscribe to the channel and make sure you make sure you turn notifications on. We'll see in the next video.