Self Imposed Limitations And How To Break Through Them | Real Estate B-School

Hey there. Welcome back to another edition of the Business Freedom Podcast. Lars Hedinborg here, founder, real estate B school and co founder of High Performance Real Estate Advisors out of Charlotte, North Carolina. I am sporting my new glasses here. I am 46 years old as of this recording, so apparently your eyes start to go in your 40s, so hopefully you're, you're not shocked by the new look. And today I want to chat about something that I've noticed in my business growth journey and the title of which I'm going to call self imposed limitations and how to break through them. And so here's what I mean by that when I look back in just in the last 12 years. So it's 2019 and I got into real estate in 2007. Before real estate, I was kind of just a corporate guy. You know, I made my living kind of just showing up at a corporate job. I mean I always had did good work, I had good relationships with my bosses and you know, I didn't really politic very well. So I wasn't a real good corporate, corporate ladder climber because I don't really do that like maintaining relationships somewhat artificially for the purposes of advancing. And that was the real motivator for me to get into just being a business owner. I didn't know exactly when I got into real estate what I was in store for. And especially those first couple years to really kind of. There was a moment there in 2007, probably 2007 was like, oh shit. Like nobody told me that this was, you know, like you had to start every day at zero and you know, your friends weren't necessarily going to use you to buy and sell a home and that it required, you know, learning every part of what it takes to build a business, even if you were just going to be a solo agent. And then I figured all those parts out and it forced me to get so busy that I could. The only way to have a life was to add leverage, you know, through people and systems and marketing and those sorts of things. And you know, as I progressed, you know, 2007 into 2008, that was me learning a little bit about marketing in terms of getting people to raise their hand and want to do business with me or at least want a thing that I was offering. And then, and then how to have that conversations with which is more of a sales dynamic, convinced them to meet with me. I was only selling an appointment in the first conversation and then at the appointment, the face to face consultation, I convinced them to do business with me. And it also brought marketing in because I had different guarantees that I offered in terms of cancellation guarantees or if they didn't like the home that they bought using me as their buyer agent, I would sell it for free within two years. So all of it kind of wrapped together. And then in that 2008 year, my first full year, I hired an assistant because I realized 80% of where real estate agent does is not dollar productive, where I could hire somebody for less than $20 an hour to do it, including into 2009, you know, maybe $30 an hour. But I can basically get buyer's agents or even with my clients, have a showing agent, you know, do most of the quote unquote work of a client. The legwork, not the work, because the real work is securing the client and owning the relationship. So every step of that, you know, it was really uncomfortable. And I would, you know, I would almost feel the level of discomfort as I kind of got to the next level. And it was, it was an opportunity for me to break through. When I hired several buyer agents and I said, man, I, you know, the limitation was, you know, I don't know if I could be a team leader. You know, I don't know if I could manage people because I've never managed people before in my entire corporate journey. I really never managed people. I wasn't running a business unit of my company. I wasn't running a small team. I, you know, so the limitation or the lie was that I can't be a manager. Like, I've only figured out how to be a productive real estate agent. And then when I became a manager and I'm like, now I'm doing production, so I'm helping buyers and sellers still. I'm recruiting and managing people and I'm building systems still. And I'm trying to manage the finances because my costs are going up and overhead and I'm spending money on leads. And you know, I have a boomtown platform at this time. So, you know, the limitation at that point was, well, I can't get out of production. I can't give up buyers because 50% of my income now is from buyers. Even though I had some leverage with my buyer's agents being my showing agents, I still sort of wondered, you know, how is this going to work if, you know, the year we did 118 sides. No, I think it was the year we did 178 sides. I did about 66 of the sides and I did just under half the year we did 118 sides. And how can I make, you know, the move from, you know, a producing manager to, you know, more of a manager leader, where I was more coaching my agents. How was the income going to work? The limitation, the lie that I was telling myself that I couldn't make the numbers work if I got out of production, I couldn't possibly add that much value where, you know, where I could not sell homes. And again, I just leaned into it and I made sure my economic model was the right economic model, which that's the one thing, one thing among. I mean, I guess I did a handful of things right from the beginning. The economic model and value based commission splits, something we teach in real estate B school, that was one thing that I got right way early on. And it's something that I just brought common sense into an industry that doesn't have a lot of common sense around compensation for real estate agents. Everybody focuses on split and split is one of eight types of compensation that you could offer a real estate salesperson. Maybe I'll do a podcast episode on that. That would be a good one. That's a writer downer, eight types. And so, you know, that was another imposed, self imposed limitation. You know, when I'm, when I'm looking back on it, you know, how do I make that shift? And then another shift was, you know, so I figured that part out and this was like 2011, 2012. I hired more buyer agents. I gave up buyers 100%. I hired a couple listing agents. We probably had six or seven, so buyer agents, a couple listing agents. And I made that commitment to get out of listings. And then I made the commitment to show others how to do the thing that I did. And in order to do that, so at this point I went from seven days a week to six days a week to five days a week, you know, managing and leading the team. And then I needed to go build this other thing, which at the time wasn't called a real estate B school, which today is real estate B school. This started back in 2013, April, early 2013. And so the limitation was how can I carve out enough time where I'm not working eight days a week? You know, so the limitation, like, is it possible? Could I go down to three? I started at three days a week in the real estate team, then two days a week in the real estate team, then one day a week in the real estate team, and I spent four days building real estate B school. And then I got back into production in that business. And then there's a whole series of self imposed limitations. And, and so the advice here, and my takeaway is that when you're feeling uncomfortable, and for me it always feels like a little heaviness, it's because I'm in an area of business that I've never been in before. And it's pushing me in a way that I've never been pushed before. It's pushing me in a way to see my business or the opportunity to show up differently in my business differently. And the saving grace, not the saving grace, but the thing that I held on to the whole time is that there are so many businesses whose owners don't ever show up, you know, go into a McDonald's, go into 10 McDonald's and ask to see the owner. You know, just go into a McDonald's, you'll get the manager. You know, I think managers are there, the owners aren't there. And so that's, that's, if you've ever read the book E Myth by Michael Gerber, that is the ultimate in terms of, you know, removing any limitation you could have. In terms of what's possible, is thinking about your business as if you were going to replicate it 10,000 times. And, and when you do that, therein lies the opportunity to design a business that doesn't depend on you. And so there really are no limitations in what's possible for a real estate team if you continue to lean in. And if you've heard the podcast before, you've heard me talk about the four drivers and the 12 accelerators, and that's how we sort of frame out your business in terms of being strong enough to scale without you. And so if you missed that one, make sure you go back and get it. And actually I might cover that one on the next one I do here. I think I'm going to do that. You know, you've got to have the proper frameworks, you've got to have the right tools and systems in place. Then you've got to get people at the right pay grade to run those tools and systems, which if you want to make 250 bucks an hour, let's say, which is $500,000 a year working 2,000 hours a year, think of how many tools and systems you can put into place and get, get folks at the right pay grade to run those systems for you. So here's my final thought. No matter where you are in your real estate journey, if you're a highly productive top producing agent, or if you've got a small team and it feels hard or a big team and it feels hard that the money isn't where you thought it could or would be. It's hard either way. It's hard either way. Building a tight business that's going to sustain the shift storm that we're going through, not only sustain, but get out the other side super strong and can compete in any environment. No matter all the technology disruption and the changing business model and changing consumer sort of demands and requirements from businesses, you can build this thing in a way where it can with withstand all that and come out the other side and be a premier provider of residential buyer and seller residential real estate services. That's what we're building, a world class provider of real estate services. So if, and so that's hard. The other thing that's hard is just going about it the way you're going about it, hoping that the industry doesn't change, hoping that, you know, someone doesn't come in and completely collapse the way that we've charged commissions historically. That's going to be a hard road, I promise you. Working seven days a week, working with buyers and sellers, having a loose collection of agents that aren't sort of highly coordinated, that aren't running processes and systems, you know, is a really hard way to go about this. And so if that's you and you're not quite sure on what the future holds for you, you've got to reach out, you've got to go to realestatebschool.com I literally have nothing to sell you except 45 minute conversation with me about your business, what's working, what's not working, what do you see for the future, what's possible and what's holding you back? And what obstacles do you see that'll be the conversation. If a relationship with real estate B school is something that's possible, we've got a pilot program which is 30 days of free training that we can talk about. And other than that, just make sure you're really looking at, well, not looking, thinking about your thoughts. When it comes to self imposed limitation, you've got to push in, lean into those times where you're feeling like, you know, another level of growth is impossible. So go to realestatebeachschool.com and book in for a business growth strategy session where we can unpack this as it relates to your business. We'll see you there.