Stop Selling and Start Building a Business Part 1

Welcome back to the Business Freedom Podcast. This is going to be an awesome three part series. I'm kind of on a kick here in terms of letting you into our world. This is a session from fall 2018. We were in Charleston, South Carolina, right when the hurricane tore through there. We had to cut our event a day and a half early and luckily Andy Mulholland was able to give a 60 minute session that just was awesome. And it's called Stop selling and start building a Business. I just have a ton of respect for Andy and what he was able to do within the real estate B school community. He built a business from the, you know, being in it seven days a week and, you know, 80% of the production of his small team was him to, you know, 250, 275 sides where he was able to exit that business 100%. And then he was able to come on with real estate B school and help us for a couple years as a business coach. And it was just an awesome journey. So all I ask because I'm letting you into our inner, inner circle is to share this on social media, if it's helpful, and to leave us a five star review. That is what I ask of you. So stay tuned. It'll be three parts and I promise you, this is one of those podcast series that you want to grab a journal and a pen and get someplace quiet and sip on something while you listen to. Just some really good lessons around making the shift from real estate agent to business owner.

I'm not going to tell Andy's story because I think it's one of the best stories that we have. And I'm just honored to be in business now with this guy who really puts his priorities straight. And I always joke if anyone has a time management problem or they can't get to everything, I'm like, it's because you got too many kids. He has four kids. So I'm like, that's the problem right there. You gotta lock them down for a period of time. So like I said, I have a lot of love and respect for Andy and his wife Ellen and the work that they're doing in their family, in their faith and in business. So if you all would just give Andy Mulholland a big round of applause.

All right. Hey guys, you can hear me. All right. Okay, so topic for today is.

Stop.

Selling and start building a business. And I guess for whatever reason, Lars decided I was going to be the guy to talk about this. So maybe we'll go into why. But this is a topic in industry that probably isn't talked about enough. It's all about selling more, doing more deals, chasing the next person on the list of top agents in your company. And that's what motivates us. It's a human thing. There's nothing wrong with that. But we're going to talk about that because maybe there's an alternative and maybe we really need to look at this a little bit differently. I know I did and I did pretty early on. So I have three things that I kind of want you to take from this. At least my goal is, so hopefully I deliver on that. The outcomes are. Number one is I just want to share with you my story and my challenges. I can almost bet that there isn't anybody in this room who hasn't gone through some tough, tough times in this business. As Lars had mentioned earlier, it is tough. I don't know a whole lot else. I'll share with you a little bit about some of the other things that I've done, but it's difficult, man. This is a tough, tough business. Why? Probably because there's people involved, right? I mean, just at the level that we're connected with our clients and with our team members and then our families, you know, it can make it difficult. There's just the market. There's just all of these things that are coming at us all the time. So good for everybody in this room to be doing what you are doing and living at the level that you're living. So there will be. Hopefully there'll be a chance for some Q and A at the end as well. So please write down some questions for me. I may deliver some information better to you through Q and A as well. So deliver them or write them down. And I'll definitely take any questions as well. The next thing is I want to talk about a potential roadmap. Now, I think we all know that there's a million different ways to do this business, right? There are some key principles that we need to follow, but everybody does. What I love about all of you is that everybody's doing it a little differently and we can learn from each other, but it can be successful in many different ways. I want to talk to you about what I think is potentially a roadmap to shift from this idea that it's all about production and shifting into a business person's mindset. And there is a shift. And for me, anyway, it was literally a mental shift from I'm selling houses to I'm a business owner, right? And there some things that May happen to get you that shift. Maybe there's a roadmap. I want to share with you what I think that might be and then what are some of the mechanisms? Right, so the mindset. I think the mindset is probably the most important factor in this and being diligent and disciplined with our mindset. Number two are the systems. We have to have those systems in place in order for our mind to be free to have the right mindset, I believe. And then leadership and management and the people aspect of that. So important. So those are my outcomes for today. Let me just start real quick with. I'm just going to get it out of the way now. The mindset.

Read everyone what you have in your hand.

Yeah. Okay, so I put a math equation. 7 times 7 divided by 3. If you do that, then you stop crying. They say your mind can't get emotional and do math at the same time. The hard part is I can't do math either. So I only am left with the emotion. But so anyway, so yes. Thank you, Lars. The Mulhollands. These are us. These are the Mulhollands right here. So we've got four kids, Noah, Grant, Grace and Leo. And 49 divided by seven times seven divided by three. My wife, Ellen. So I'm gonna keep moving with the picture, but those are the people that drive me to do what I do. As I know you all know. You know, you've got people like that in your life that drive you to do what you do.

So.

So I started in real estate in 2010. Prior to that, I drove a limousine. It was a second job, but it was a full time job. My wife and I were newlyweds and we were, you know, had the typical debt, right? So we had car loans, we had student loans. We had the things my wife had, student loans. I never went to college, but worked for my dad full time. He owned a marketing company in our small town in Rochester, Minnesota. And we decided we were going to pay off our debt and we didn't know how we were going to do that. And part of Dave Ramsey's plan is you sling pizzas, you do something, whatever it is that you got to do to pay that debt off and you live like no one else so that you can live and give like no one else. And so that for me, you know, I love driving, I love cars, I love, you know, just driving and that thinking time and all that. So I became a limo driver. I drove for a company who would. We would drive doctors and surgeons from the Mayo Clinic. In Rochester, where we live, up to the Minneapolis airport and back. And so I did that oftentimes, you know, weekends, evenings, and those kinds of things. After I worked, you know, with my dad during the day, I also worked for. Through that. I worked through a company called LifeSource where we actually would pick up surgical teams. I'd get a call in the middle of the night and they'd say, hey, we need a ride. And so I'd go pick up the surgical team in the limo, drive them up to the airport, they would fly to whatever or, I'm sorry, I would drive them to a hospital in the cities. They would harvest organs to bring back to Rochester to use for transplants. And it's funny, my wife for many years was a transplant nurse. And so I'd always kind of have the heads up, like, hey, they got this lung coming. You know, she was in heart and lung transplant, so I'd know before she would, that there was something coming. So anyway, that was our life for a while until we paid off her debt and we had six months of reserves saved, right? And it was just that focus of that's all we're gonna do. And we did it. She did a lot as well. She picked up a ton of overtime and we paid that debt off. So now we're debt free and we're thinking, what do we do? And this was late 2009, and I decided, let's do real estate. It was time for me to do my own thing. So I got out of my dad's business and got. Got my license and started. Had no idea what to do. I did some model chasing. So the first thing I thought is, you know, where do I go? Who can I learn from? And so I went to a brokerage, a national brokerage there in Rochester, and a guy that had done really well in our town, and I learned from him. And what I quickly realized is he's been doing this 20 years and he's on the phone every Saturday calling for sale banners and expired listings. That's not what I want to do. I was a little bit like, shoot. I just got into this. I was all pumped up. And that's what it's going to look like in 20 years from now. No, thanks. He had a team, but he was in there prospecting for, taking his own listings. His model just wasn't what I wanted. So I'm like, okay, that's all right. So there's another company in town that I'm going to go to because there's two agents There I want to follow and see what they do. So I made the shift, went there, and it was the same thing. In fact, one of the gals that I went there to kind of chase, I was friends with her son in high school. And he. One time he broke down to me and said, I never see my mom and my parents. I don't see them right. His parents were divorced. She hooked up with one of the other guys in the office. She worked all the time. It was just gross to me. I didn't even want to get involved in that lifestyle of work, work, work, work, work, work, work, even if it meant I could have the level of success that she had. And I made that distinction in my mind at that moment. This is not what I'm going to do. The problem was I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what to do. There was no one in my market that was running anything like I wanted to run. So we had to find a different way. And really, for me, that was the shift. So that moment when I realized the other two people I wanted to follow were running a business that I didn't want, which really wasn't a business at all, it was a job. I had a shift. I'm gonna figure out how to do this and run it like a business. I'm gonna figure this out. And it was tough because I didn't know what to do. I fumbled for a few years, trying different things, trying different methods, following different people. It just. Nothing really seemed to stick. And here I was still in production at a high level. My final year in production, I sold 110 homes on my own while running the team. Never should we go to that level, right? In other words, like, you know, I let myself get so busy selling real estate, you know, that I forgot about a lot of things back at home. So I got ahold of Lars because I saw some things that were going on that seemed different. Like, what do you mean out of production? What does that. Can you do that?

Right?

You know, I had seen some people do it, but I didn't believe it was possible for me. We talked, we talked about how we were going to do it and. And we set a three year goal. And I'll never forget the conversation. I was in my house, in our little office, off of our kind of entryway, and just this belief with disbelief, right? It was this belief that it can happen, but the disbelief that I could get there. But we set a three year goal. And that three year goal, he asked me, what do you Want in three goals, three years as your three year goal. And I quickly responded with, I want the freedom to be able to buy an RV and drive all over the country not tied to my business. That's what I want with my family. That's what I want. I don't know if ever since as a kid we used to go to South Dakota, we live in Minnesota, go to the Black Hills, and we always drove like this ugly old conversion van. I'm like, someday I'm gonna take this trip in a giant RV with my family and we're gonna, it's gonna be a blast. We had a great time as a kid, but it was just something I wanted to do. But I knew that if my business didn't get to a certain level, there was no way I was going to be able to do that. I was trapped. So we set that goal and we just got to work. About a year later, I was out of production. Took about a year of hard work of building up some other people, of building some training systems and processes to be able to get out of production. And it was like unbelievable. Was like, I've arrived. Like, this is the real deal. I don't know, it's like my wife runs marathons and at the beginning she always says, like, I don't know if I could do it. But when you get to the end, you're like, I did it right. And it's just this unbelievable feeling. And that's really how I felt. Didn't believe it was possible. And the feeling when you're out is great. I got sucked back in at times. As you're learning how to really build a business, you. You get sucked back in. And that's just part of the process. And I did as well. It wasn't easy. The next step in this process for me was building leaders, develop other leaders. And there were definitely some tough lessons. I'll tell you, leadership is, I think marketing and systems, some of the key functions of our business are super important. But without leadership and true leadership, it's impossible to build a business. And I'll tell you, I struggle, struggle, struggle with it for a number of different reasons. But, you know, a lot of tough lessons there with people and learning how to balance expectations as well as letting people know that you care about them. How do you manage and lead somebody but still be their friend? Those lessons that, man, they're just difficult, at least for me. So I was down at that point to one to two days in the business. I had key people in my business that were Running the day to day functions. We had built those systems. They were working. Our marketing was working very well. You know, people were calling us, we weren't having to call them. And I was down to those one to two days in business. It was great. I remember that first summer I was able to do that. I basically went in on Tuesdays and ran our team advance day, our team our day where we did our meetings and really brought some accountability to that day and kind of talked to the team members. I was there. Otherwise it was kind of touching base with people as needed throughout the week. And I was at home most of the time. And with four young kids, I mean, that was my goal, was to live life differently than everyone else seemed to live where they had a 9 to 5 job. I wanted to live where I could be at home with those kids while they're young. And I was there. A lot of tough lessons, okay, Getting sucked back in, okay, this person quit, all right, I got to go back, you know, and that's tough when you're. When you're used to not being there. And that was kind of a back and forth for a while until we got it figured out. Then kind of a lot of stuff hit the fan, right? And it has to do with my leadership. I think what happened was I felt I could get out, and I'm out now, right? They got it, I'm gone, see you later. And it just doesn't work that way. I still needed to be a part of that. I didn't realize the effect that I have on my team. And I think that's one of the big takeaways for me and I would want to share with you, is don't forget the power that you hold as the leader of your team. Right. I think sometimes we think, well, I'm just a person. I just worked hard for a number of years and I've built this thing. And, you know, at least that's how I kind of felt. And, man, they need you and they look up to you and they're intimidated by you. I was like, why would anyone be intimidated by me? But they are, right? And so to show up and just look at them and smile at them and say, how are you today? Like, in fact, I had a guy on my team come up to me and say, did you know the other day you went and talked to Heather and you just asked her how she was doing? She came back to me later and said, he asked me how I was doing. And I'm like, what's the big deal? Like, I didn't get it. And, you know, eventually it dawned on me that the power that we have with our team. So there's a lot there. There's a lot of things we could talk about leadership. And that's a key piece of this puzzle. But that was kind of part of my story, was learning some of those pieces. So we had to build it back up. I lost team members. I mean, I don't. Let's see, two years. Or was it. So it's 2018. So 2017, early 2017, basically, 2016. Going into 2017, it was the worst. The worst time of my life. Just so many things from. So here's where it all started is okay, this is me fully leveraging myself as I never did my own ce. I would have my wife do it. She liked doing those things. She looked forward to quizzes. I didn't want to do it, so she would always do it. Gal on my team, operations director, would make sure everybody had their CE done. For some reason, it all got missed. And I was the broker, and we lost our broker's license. I was in a meeting. I'll never forget it. My agent comes in. She's like. And I'm like, we're in a meeting. We'll talk to you in a bit. She's like, I need to talk to you now. She's like, I just got an email from the doc that says we don't have a license. So I dropped everything. We figured it out. Turns out because I missed two hours of CE, they revoked our license. I have 15 people on my team all dependent on me to help them sell real estate. And none of them can practice real estate because if the broker's license is inactive, all of their license are inactive. And sure, of course, because it's the government, it's very difficult to just snap a finger and get it reactivated. You can't just call up. I'm like, can I just pay some extra? What do we got to do? No, no, you got to do this, this, this. It takes seven to ten business days. Then we got to process. I'm just like, oh, my gosh, like, what am I gonna do? We worked through it, but in the meantime. So now I have agents. We talked not to get into the details. We talked to the doc. They said, tell you what, you need to serve your clients. Go ahead and just show some houses, but just know that you could get reported. My aunt of a family member who's in real estate in my market, uber competitive, maybe has something out against my dad. I'M not sure. Reports this to the DOC for showing her listing because she knew we were unlicensed. So now I'm under DOC investigation for this, and I'm dealing with that. They're calling me into the. I mean, it was a nightmare. One nice thing happened. The local paper decided to do a story on me. A friend of mine recommended to them that they do a story with me. They decided to do it. It was great, this nice publication. Another broker in town sent a letter to all the brokers that said, hey, Andy doesn't advertise in the newspaper. And they did this article on them. We should all write to the newspaper and say, we're going to pull our advertising if they don't retract that article. And I got a copy of the letter. And so the whole city, and we're in a small market, was attacking us to try to shut us down. Then I had five team members leave all in one day. Like. Like, this is the reality of.

It's tough, you guys. We are fighting the fight. It's not about the money. It's not about those things. For me, I knew I'd let my team down. Not just about the ce, but in leadership and just caring about them at a level that they would want a.

Leader to care about them.

And, man, that about broke me. I will never forget a moment in our home. I was alone and my wife was working out, and I called the gym and I said, send Ellen home. I need Ellen right now. And I was. She came home and I was on our stairs and I was just broken down because of all the people that I had let down. This is real estate, right?

It's not about houses. This is the ability that we have to change lives. And I felt I had let a lot of people down. That's the responsibility that we wear on our shoulders. It's a great responsibility. And since then, building back up our team and watching people grow and watching people hit the success, the levels of success that they wanted. And since then, having people reach out saying, hey, like, you've changed my life. You know, we have the ability to be difference makers. It's not about real estate anymore. So that's my story. Probably the most exciting thing for me recently is I. I got out of real estate completely. We built our team back up, had a great, you know, really start to the year, and I decided that it was time for me to make a shift.

And. And.

What'S very cool about, I guess, my story and I think why Lars had me build or speak today on this topic was I built the business in such a way and personally had set myself up in such a way where I had a lot of options. I could continue to do it. I could not. I could get out, I could retire, do whatever it is that I wanted to do at that point. And I realized very quickly that, you know, real estate wasn't serving me and my family anymore. It had done its job for us. And so that's when we made that shift. So for me, I have, you know, shifted now into being able to pour into other people through coaching and other things as well, which I've been very excited about.

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And if you're ready to scale your real estate business sustainably and profitably, there are a couple options for you. If you're doing under 500,000 in annual GCI, our business foundations Program is for you. Head over to getbusinessfoundations.com that's getbusinessfoundations.com and learn how you can make the shift from overwhelmed real estate agent to true business owner. If you're doing more than 500,000 in annual Team GCI, there's our graduate program designed for top producers and team leaders who want to grow their team and scale their business. If that's you, go to realestatebschool.com and apply for a free Business Growth Strategy session. No matter where you are in your business growth journey, we have the tools, systems, strategies, training and coaching to get you where you want to be. Remember, only you can create your future.

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