Set The Kind of Goals That Make Your Wildest Dreams a Reality w/Jose Luiz Morales

All right, welcome back to Real Estate Team Builders podcast. This is Lars Hedenberg, the founder of Real Estate B School, and we're going to dig into a business today serving Southern California, Jose Morales, who has achieved at a high level in multiple businesses. So this guy's running a, I think a 90 million or so in volume, maybe even 100 million, close to it, real estate team. He's got 57 doors in 10 or 11 buildings. So he's an investor. He's, he does three to five probably opportunistic flips per year. He's, and he's also a coach and a trainer and he's putting stuff out and he's got a following. He's doing YouTube and, and so, and he also has a two and a half year old. And as we're recording this, I think you said a nine day old, which is really tiny baby that needs a lot of, lot of help from their parents. So, Jose, I'm going to give you a little bit of a chance here to introduce yourself, but from the perspective of, you know, for someone that's looking, they're in the team building world and maybe they don't have leverage, they haven't figured it all out. Give us a couple minutes on you and your background and why we would want to listen to you.

Hi, everybody. So my name is Jose Luis Morales. I'm a real estate agent in Southern California. I went from not selling any homes for six months, meaning it took me six months to sell my first property, to now, obviously selling close to 150 homes a year as a team.

Basically.

My journey was a journey where I've been lucky enough to find the right people in my life at the right time. And I've been mentored by different people, including yourself. And that mentorship has allowed me to basically follow the path of people that have already achieved what I wanted to achieve. And it's basically allowed me to get to where I'm at. It hasn't been easy, but it has required obviously a lot of discipline and it's required me to just take leaps of faith sometimes, you know, just basically say, hey, look, these guys are already there. They've already accomplished what I want to accomplish. I'm blindly just going to do what they tell me to do. And I've done that enough times where that has allowed me to obviously get to where I'm at throughout my journey. I've been buying real estate for the last 10 years, meaning that from the beginning, I think one year, two years in the business, I bought My first rental property bought, the second, 1 third, 1 fourth, 1 fifth one, and obviously now we're at like 57 doors, $12 million in portfolio, and just growing. My goal in this interview is just to obviously share as much as I can and just provide as much value to anybody. That's maybe where I was 10 years ago or 5 years ago or 3 years ago even.

Awesome. And we didn't talk about this, but I want to get into it because I love what's behind you. So talk a little bit about, like, how vision and your why has played a part in what you've built. You know, so you've got vision board, and I kind of know a little bit of it. But how has that played a part in it? Like, how did you envision your life in the future when you were grinding out deals as a solo agent? So talk a little bit about your why vision and how you kind of worked it all together.

Yeah, so I remember the first goal that I set, my first goal was to make $100,000. And when I set that goal, Lars, I was like, man, if I could just make $100,000, my whole life will be different. Then I got to $100,000, and then I said, well, now that I made 100, why don't I make 200 and then 300 and then 500 and then 700 and then a million. And now it's like I've been kind of hovering from 15 to 1 7. Now it's, we're finally going to break that 2 million. I think it's probably the most important thing to obviously set goals. And I think what I've done really well is I don't think I've ever achieved my goals. What I mean by that is that I've always set goals higher than what I thought I could actually do. Like, initially that a hundred thousand dollar goal was really big for me, but. But I didn't reach it in that year that I said it. It maybe took me a year or a year and a half afterwards for me to reach it. And it was the same thing with that million dollar mark. Now it's that $2 million mark. So I'd say that's been extremely important to just set goals. This is a great line that I heard at some point. They said, what is your maximum potential? Like, what is your maximum potential? And the reality is, we don't know. Like, some people say the sky is the limit, but the reality is that you don't know what your maximum potential is until you actually Start achieving. Achieving at higher levels. I used to think my maximum potential was $100,000. Now my maximum potential is 2 million. Now I'm forcing myself to expose myself around people that are doing 5 million, 10 million. Just big things. Because now I don't think that. I think my purpose is a lot bigger than what I'm actually doing now. So I would say it's extremely important to set goals. But not only set goals, but set high goals. And just a quick thing, a lot of the stuff that you see on that vision board behind me, I've scratched off. And it's so crazy how it happens. Like, I've got like my wife's car in there. I've got like a, like a, like a, like a G wagon there. I ended up buying the same color. I got a gray Mercedes, same color. Didn't even realize it. I've got the watch. Same, same kind of. It's just apartment complexes. Like, like I've set goals where I'm like, I don't know if I'm going to accomplish this and magically it just ends up happening. So it's, it's really, it's really been very crucial for me to set big goals and continually, year after year, adjust those goals, basically.

That's awesome. And we're going to get to it later in this episode, but we're going to talk about what's your residual income goal?

Uh, so I'd probably say minimum of six figures a month. Minimum. Minimum.

Okay. And we'll table that. I want to talk about more, more of that later. Um, okay, so that's. That's awesome. So let's get into the conversation around leverage. And so how do you go from, man, like a hundred thousand is like life changing to now? It's like you're probably already thinking of 3 million. You know, if, if you're kind of like me and we're always pushing to the next level. But let's talk about leverage. Let's break it down into, you know, systems and people. But, but really break it down. Like, do this some justice, you know, for, like you said, anyone in their journey. When you first hired your first administrator, like, what did it look like? How did you delegate tasks? Like, so let's have the conversation around leverage, but then let's bucket it into systems and then people.

Cool. So I. In school, I learned one principle that changed my life. And the principle was called opportunity cost. And it just basically means that how much you make an hour, and if you. And to delegate anything less than, like, if it costs less to delegate it, to basically delegate it off. So if my goal was to make $50 an hour, anything that costs less than $50, to hand it off to somebody else. So even when I was in college, I delegated oil changes, I delegated car washes. I delegated very simple things because I always knew that my time was worth more, and I knew that time was extremely valuable. So when I got into real estate, my very first hire was a virtual assistant. I became aware in 2011 that I could hire virtual assistants in different parts of the country and that they would work for what I thought was very little, but to them was a lot of money. So my first virtual assistant cost me $4 an hour. And. And I'd probably say within a year of being in the business. I hired them initially. So it would get to the point where I prospected a lot in my career. So me and two agents would show up to the office at the same time. I would jump right on the phones. The other agent would have to import his leads to his dialer and do all this data entry stuff. And I would show up and I would have that already done, which allowed me to be the first person to call these expires. We would show up to the office at the same exact time. And it probably cost me like $2 a day to do. It would also reduce stress because the other agent was trying to hurry up, type everything to get on the phones. And I just show up, put my headset on, and be like, all right, time to dial. So that was like my first introduction and then my next assistant. I probably hired them prematurely, but I had enough rental income where I could take that risk in my business. I probably hired them before I actually needed one, but that one actually allowed me to produce even more. So a lot of people say, hire your first one when you get to 30, 50 deals. I think I probably hired them when I was like, at 20, 25 deals a year. But that allowed me to get to the next level because I delegated all of that administrative work. And I just continued little by little to delegate more and more stuff to basically try to simplify my life. And for me, I focus on activities that generate income, meaning income producing activities. And I've trained the agents that work on my team to focus on income generating activities, basically, and delegate all the other stuff.

Yeah. So let's. Let's break it down. And you told me this. This blew my mind. People, you know, think of, like, there's this massive financial commitment to hire an administrator and they're going to be flaky. Or you hired someone from Upwork 11 years ago and they're still with you?

They're still with me 100%. And it was funny because one time he told me, hey, Jose, I've gone really busy. I'm going to have to stop working for you. And I basically went to him and I told him, hey, what if I gave you a raise of a dollar or $2? And he said that would work, that would keep me around. I think it was a kind way of him telling me, hey, maybe I have somewhere else that will pay me a little bit more. And I ended up increasing his pay, which to me went up from four to five dollars an hour, but it allowed him to stay. And then I started offering him opportunities where he could have people working underneath him. And as long as he managed the project completely and the project got done, he can keep the spread of whatever he paid them and whatever I paid him. So I think it just treating people nice. I would always give him bonuses, like on his birthday, anniversaries, like just. I remember one time he called me saying that a family member of his was sick. Didn't ask me for anything, just said, hey, I can't complete the work today because somebody's sick. Sent him some money. Just basically, hey, thank you for all your help. And just treating people nicely will get you very far sometimes, you know, doing. Going a little bit above and beyond knowing that these people have families. These people have just financial obligations as.

Well too, you know, and I've seen that mistake made very, very often is that you hire a VA in another country and you don't treat them like a team member.

Oh, yeah.

You actually don't even treat them like a human being. I mean, it's almost like it's. And then it doesn't work out. And you know, real estate, B school, we only have one local person outside of our business coaches. One local person and two VAs that run a seven figure business.

Yeah.

You know, and the two VAs are smart. They are, you know, probably more. What's the word for it? More conscientious than a lot of the administrators that I've hired over my career that are local, you know, because they have like different challenges. Right. There are typhoons coming through the Philippines and, you know, they're now providing for their families that can't make the kind of money that they're making, even at $5 per hour. So that is awesome. I think we could probably do a whole episode on just making one hire. It's something like 85% of real estate agents never hire. Yeah, including that agent that was trying to compete with you on getting first on the phones. They don't have an administrator. And if you think about all the jobs, like just go through in your head all the jobs that a top producing agent does all day long, they're 80% of their of them are administrative. All right, so I want you to break down, think of a system in your business. Because I think where some team builders struggle, you know, if they're being honest with themselves about where they're spending their time. Let's say that it's an existing team team leader, but they're still doing listings. But a listing comes in and, you know, it's complete chaos to get to the front door of the listing. Nothing is sorted together. So. And we talked about this in your business, like, how do we get you leverage on the listing side? So maybe it's the buyer side, maybe it's the listing side. But talk about a system in your business and how you built it, because I think that's valuable for people to hear.

So it's probably the system that I struggled with the most, but it's been the system that has helped me the most. And it basically became our listing checklist and our buyer checklist. I used to use a system called Wise Agent and Top producer, but it never worked for me because it was. For me, it was too complicated. And then we came across Real Estate B school, and they taught us Trello, basically. And it's been the simplest way of being able to know exactly where every single one of your transactions is at. And that basically changed our business because it made it so that not only do we sell a lot of homes, but we take pride in providing excellent customer service. So anytime we've ever experienced a problem in the checklist, or anytime we've ever experienced a problem in a check in real estate, we add that problem to the checklist. So it's something that's continually improving. Like, I'll give you an example. One time we had a client that took the ring doorbell with him at the close of escrow. And the buyer's like, where's my doorbell? And it was something that we never thought about asking. And now at every listing appointment, after we take the listing, we asked them, hey, are you planning on taking the ring doorbell or are you going to leave it behind? Because if they're going to take it, it's okay. We just want to know about it up front so we can Counter it. And we're not wondering on day of closing, like, why is the doorbell gone? And the buyer saying, hey, I need a new doorbell. And the seller saying, I'm already in Mississippi, I'm not bringing back a doorbell and I'm not buying one. So it's just that system alone, the step by step, what happens after you take a listing or you do a buy or sale, knowing that that's a constant and never ending process, meaning you're always looking to improve. It has allowed us to delegate to our administrative people not only that they know what to do because now they have a checklist and it allows us to basically hand it off with confidence, knowing that everything is going to be going to be solved. Now I'll give you just another really quick example. Like one of the things that we do is at the listing appointment, it's the listing agent's job, meaning my job, to write down as much info as I know about this customer. That way, like, if the customer has said, I don't want a for sale sign, my admin doesn't call and say, hey, look, we're putting the for sale sign on today. So just, it's almost like a handoff basically to our administrative assistant. And we've done a really good job systemizing that. But like, I've had people like I was talking to an agent and he said, jose, like, I didn't have any luck with my assistant, but the reality is he didn't have any systems in place for his assistant to follow. Like no systems whatsoever. So if you don't have anything in place, how can you even hold them accountable? A lot of times people will say the assistant's no good, but sometimes it's you as the leader that hasn't set up the right platforms to give them the opportunity to be successful.

Basically, yeah, that's so good that, man, there's so much in there that I can just go super deep on. But there's one thing you said that I don't want to miss. First of all, Trello is free and it is so powerful. Like, it's so simple, it's stupid. And it's like all of our top teams are running on it, you know, so 4, 5, 600 homes a year. There's a book that I don't think anyone actually needs to read this book, but there's a book called Checklist Manifesto. And it talks about like the reason people go into a hospital and for the most part come out, you know, with their problem solved and the reason planes don't fall out of the sky is because there are just checklists where somebody did get their heart pulled out by accident and it was like a liver transplant. Right. And they said, okay, add that to the checklist. Let's make sure we ask the patient that, okay, you're getting a heart transplant today and not a kidney transplant or whatever. Same thing with a plane. Like a plane falls out of the sky and it was this part failure. And they add to the maintenance checklist. Right. Same thing in client care. Like, we are not going to exist as real estate agent agents if we're not building out checklists that drive client care and client experience through the roof, you know, so think of all, like, the wow, touch points that you can integrate into your business that will never happen if it's just reliant on Jose to remember to send brownies or to send a closing gift or to send. You know, there's all these difficult points in a transaction that you could make. So anyway, so I just wanted to drive that home. So, okay, so that's the system side. That example is awesome. It's. And I love the example of the agent friend that you talked to, the hired assistant be like, oh, it didn't work. It's like, I promise you, you suck. You know, you didn't take time to actually just list out the things that you do and then give them, empower them to make it better. You know, a lot of times as a team leader, you just have to get started with 10 things. They're going to make it into the 25 things that really need to happen to be world class. But talk about. So. So that's the system side of it. And then talk about, like, people and, you know, administrators and agents and how was it for you to, you know, managing one VA is different than building a team. So talk about how it was bringing in maybe the second administrator or, you know, additional agents to come alongside you.

Yeah. So everything changed when I learned about core values and when I started hiring based on core values. So before I was hiring based on their personality. But I wouldn't really dig into what type of people they were and I wouldn't dig into whether they were a good culture fit as well, too. So we started. So basically our hiring process became more about the core values, which. Our core values are strong work ethic. So we'll ask questions about whether they have a strong work ethic or not. Especially for our salespeople, you know, because some of the problems that I had with early Summit agents is that they wanted to Be at the bar at 2 o' clock on a Friday, Thursday and Wednesday and just kind of hang out and hang out with our friends. And I said, wow, like I wish I would have known this before I actually hired this person because on our team they would have never made it just knowing that they wanted to be at the bar. And that was a real life situation. Not only that, but that agent would tell our other agents, hey, you want to go to the bar with me? Want to go to the bar with me? And the other agents were like, no, I got to work. So we started asking questions about like we just hired a new agent and we asked him, have you ever had more than one job? And he goes, yeah, all the time. And he goes, I've had X amount of jobs at any given time and just questions around work ethic and some of the other core values. And basically that has worked really well for us to basically ask questions around our core values to see if they match those. Knowing that if they match our core values, they're more than likely going to succeed on our team as opposed to somebody that wants to be at the bar at 2pm but the main thing is just knowing that you're not signing up for administrative people. You're not signing up for a year commitment. You're signing up for literally a month. And if it doesn't work out, it's sometimes you got to let people go, you know. So it's just, I think it's just doing it and knowing that it's not a cost, it's an investment. Meaning a lot of people look at this as it's costing me money. No, it's not costing you money. It's an investment to allow you to make more money, basically.

Yeah. That's awesome. Are you a Dan Kennedy guy?

I've read some of his books. Yeah, I have.

So I was at this event. You might have seen it on Social Funnel Hacking Live.

Uh huh.

Where Dan was like on his deathbed. So this is a guy that I studied in the beginning that actually introduced me. You won't see it unless you're watching the video version of this, but you can see Dan and this guy was like literally he was in hospice and everyone thought he was dead. And so you can actually Google Dan Kennedy death and you'll see all this drama. But his deal, it's the same conversation, you know, it's, it's looking at where you spend your time and how much money you make in those different activities. And no business owners slow down enough to really consider like, okay, I made 100 grand. This, this, this year, net. I worked like, man, probably 3,000 hours. What's the math? 100,000 divided by 3,000 is $33 per hour. I'm going to lose my marriage if I keep working 3,000 hours. So how can I make 200 working 2,000 hours? How can I go from 33 an hour to 100 an hour? Those conversations are going to force you to think about systems and people. It has to go into systems and people. I want you to go through. So talking about core values and culture and finding the right agent. Now, now talk about, like, what's the system you have on your team that allows agents to make more money in your world than on their own? Like, what does it look like? Are you guys prospecting together in the mornings? Are you, is there a cadence, a structure? Do they have buyer presentations? Technology, what is it?

I would say it's more technology. Like, basically we, we use real geeks as a, as a, as a CRM and, and we have everything go through there to real geeks. So the agents come into the office and it's not like, oh, who do I call today? They, they have a folder of the new leads that have not been contacted. It's free for everybody to call. If those people aren't get a hold. If you can't get a hold of that person, it goes into the next folder, which is folder one, folder two, folder three, and folder four. And that's basically what they do. So I would say it's, it's technology, meaning, like the way that we have our leads set up. And I would also say training, meaning I've role played with some of the best agents across the country. And I would say from a level from 0 to 10 in terms of sales skills, I'm probably like at a 8.5, maybe 9. There's probably 100 people in the country that have more sales skills than I do. What I mean by that is I really made that my competitive advantage over all the agents in the marketplace in my area. So what I've done really well is I, I'm training my salespeople. When a client says, I've already got an agent, what do you say? When a client says, I want you to cut your commission, what do you say? When a client says, I'm gonna wait for the marketplace to drop, what will you say? So it's combining consistent leads with sales training and following a very disciplined schedule that I would say that allows the agents to succeed better on my team versus on Their own as well, too, along with mindset shifts. Like, we had an agent that didn't value their time, and that was one of the conversations we were constantly having with them. He would drive 45 minutes to save $5. Not thinking he's saving money, but not factoring in his time on there. So just whenever you see that type of activity, just saying, hey, like, you're not actually saving money if you factor in your time. So I probably say coaching, sales training, and. And obviously, the way that we have all of our leads set up is. Is key, basically. Yeah.

Let's. Let's talk about another thing. So this is only going to work if I'm showing a picture of a squirrel. So look. Look at this guy. He's constantly outside my window.

Yeah, yeah.

Like, literally, this is a guy outside my window. Record him every time he comes by. And I have this on my desk, you know, as a constant reminder. And it's. I'm showing a picture of a squirrel outside my window, and this is a squirrel statue I have. If you're just listening to the po. Let's end the conversation then. I've got a question for you to end our time together. But talk about distractions. And, like, my guess is that you've been on a certain platform for a long time and you haven't switched like everyone else does every year. So talk about the shiny object syndrome. Chasing squirrels. Are you naturally distractible? Have you guarded yourself against that? Talk about that a little bit.

I would say that I've. What I've learned is that there are certain systems that we can put in place that will make a dramatic impact in my business. And there are certain systems that I can put in place that won't move the needle forward very much, but require a lot of time and attention to set up. So I would say that at the beginning, maybe I was more shiny object syndrome, where I would look at something and instead of putting it off to the side and say, okay, this is good, but it's not one of those systems that's going to move the needle forward in our business, so let's just put it to the side. So I've improved a lot in that regards. But at the beginning, I would say that I wouldn't look at the outcome. I would say, oh, this is really good, but it's not going to change the business by 10, 20, 30 deals a year or hundreds of thousands of dollars. So I've gone really good at or better at taking a look at which systems are gonna help out the business. The most. But I would say that it's something that I'm guilty of. But I've had Real Geeks for maybe like seven years, probably have not switched. I remember there was a friend that I had that he's like, oh, I'm gonna switch to Y Lopo because they have the automatic. The AI integration. And then he switched to something else after that, and something else. And I just stayed the same with Real Geeks and I made it work for our team because it takes up so much mind space. Not only that, but eventually my thought was, well, Real Geeks is always improving. I'm pretty confident that if they see a competitor implementing AI and that works really well, I'm pretty confident Real Geeks is going to take a look at that and say, well, let's just add AI. Not only that, but I don't try to recreate the wheel. So I see top agents using Real Geeks that I look up to and I'm like, well, if they're using it, they're probably smarter than I am. So let me just follow what the smart people are doing versus me trying to reinvent the wheel. Not only that, I don't. I didn't select Real Geeks because of the cost. I selected it because of the value that I thought. I see a lot of people choose their CRM because it's the lowest price CRM because it's 49.99amonth versus maybe something that's 200 or 250 that has more features and benefits. Yeah.

So, yeah, that's really good. And the one thing I would say that is in common, so having done real estate B school for eight plus years now, working with top teams across the country, all the platforms work. So it's not a Real Geeks sync Boomtown Firepoint. So do not change to Real Geeks just because Jose is using Real Geeks. That's my advice. Um, but. But they've all used one platform consistency consistently. So I've only ever been on one platform and it doesn't matter what the platform is, because it's not about the platform. I had a guy at an event one time, totally bared his soul in a room of 150 people, which was not easy, but tears, you know, going to bed at 1am, waking up at 4am, trying to get those two to three hours of work in before you had to be a dad. And yeah, I asked him one question and I knew the answer, which was a little harsh, but I said, you know, Jose, in front of everybody, how many Times have you changed CRMs in the last four or five years? It was five times.

Yeah.

Right. So he's constantly chasing. So anyway, I don't know, there's somebody listening that is struggling thinking it's changing to the thing it's not about the thing it's not about. And that's why it brings us full circle. And we'll end it with one last question. Because you had a vision, right? Because you have a vision about where you want to be in the future. You're looking at that versus being distracted by all this crazy marketing all the time and this thing and a bolt on AI thing and a chatbot. And remember when seller Legion online Seller Legion came in, I was just like, please do not show me that until. Until you can show me 10 top teams that are actually converting business. Do you know how many teams wasted their time on Facebook home eval leads that turned into zero closings? Right. And now there are still people. We finally cracked the code on seller lead gen online. It's like you cracked Jack. Like it's just not. Unless you have 10 callers for every thousand leads, there may be one seller. So here's my last question. So you've, you've achieved, you know, as an investor, as a home flipper, as a real estate agent turned team leader and still progressing and leveraging that business. And you're training and coaching, You've got a YouTube presence and I want you to drop some of your channels or whatever you call them at the end as well. And I say this when I bring someone on from exp, this is not the EXP show. And when someone that's playing business and real estate at a high level like you are, pivots into exp, I just like to ask them why. So why'd you move from, I think you were REMAX prior into exp.

And just so you know, in my area, Lars, REMAX is number one. So for me, one of my big fears was I'm going to be switching to a company that nobody knows in my area. Will people still want to do business with me? That was one of my biggest fears. And I'm having the best year of my career. It's the first year we break $2 million. It's my first year with exp. The other thing I wanted to comment on is exp was one of those things that I heard about three years ago. And I basically said no because I thought it would distract me from my ultimate goal, which is the production. But looking back at it now, once I actually saw the model and saw what it had to offer. That's when I couldn't look back. What really hit home for me is owning 57 doors and a very large real estate portfolio and the amount of residual income that I make and how much I had to invest to get to that number of residual income and comparing it to how much I would have to do to get that same amount of residual with the EXP rev share. It's so much easier to do it with the exp rev share. And that's when I was like man, I've had to invest millions of dollars buying real estate. We've had to manage it. We've had to deal with toilets, tenants and payments. We went through a pandemic where none of the laws favored the landlord. And I was like man, like is there's gotta be an easier way to make residual income without having to take on all this risk basically with owning real estate. And I don't regret the fact that I've owned real estate because obviously it's been good to me. But when I looked at exp and how much I can make in residual and not only that, how I can actually help people improve their businesses. Almost like you're helping me improve my business. And it was just a no brainer at that, at that point. The other thing is I've been through the entire, I've been through building a team, I've been through building multiple businesses and leverage and scalability with the EXP model. It just works out so well. Like I'll give you an example. Like one of my value propositions to my administrative people is hey look, you help me out into my administrative people, I'll pay you extremely well. But here's what I'm going to do for you. I'm going to become a YouTube celebrity. I'm going to become a TikTok celebrity. That means people are going to want to be under my exp rev share. I only need 40 people. What am I going to do with the people after that? Hey, how about I reward the people that help me build the business? Like how about I add people underneath you as a, as a way of compensating you for helping me build Morales groups. So the, the way that people around you, which was the reason I decided to switch, so now I can compensate my administrative people. I can compensate my salespeople as well too. I can basically there's just so much that you can do with the model. The model is designed to help the agent and it's designed for you to help the agents underneath you because you get paid more on some of the lower levels as well too. So the system is designed brilliantly, basically.

Awesome. Are you doing the 10% discount? 5% stock.

I've got 60,000 in stock since I joined EXP in February.