The 3 Step Team Building Process | Build a Profitable Business That Gives You True Freedom

Welcome to Real Estate Business Builders. I'm your host, Lars Hedenborg, the founder of Real Estate B School. Bottom line, the real estate industry has failed to create a clear path to financial freedom. Traditional brokerages and coaching are designed to keep you running on the transaction treadmill with no exit strategy. While I didn't have any sales, marketing or business building experience when I got into real estate, I was willing to bet on myself and figure it out because my family was depending. Having served over 5,000 families with their real estate needs, I've made every mistake you could possibly make in this business. Through Real Estate B School, I've helped hundreds of agents and team leaders realize their goal of true time and money, freedom and living a life without regrets. If you know there's another level of growth inside of you and you want to learn how to build a highly lucrative lifestyle business, then you're in the right place. You won't find any fluff or hype here on this show. Just real world tools, systems and strategies that work. Let's grow together.

Welcome back to Real Estate Business Builders. Lars Hedinburg here, the founder of Real Estate B School and today's episode is about the journey to building a team. I'm calling it the three Step Team Building Process. How to build a profitable business that gives you true freedom. If you did not grab a copy of our giveaway for this episode, it's now. Need an admin? Start here Hiring guide. So it's how to find, hire and quickly ramp up your new admin. I would jump over to our free Facebook group called Real Estate Business Builders and just search for need an admin? Start here and you'll find it. Make sure you grab a copy of that. It is an essential part of your journey to leverage. So the question I have for you is to contemplate where you are in your business, the amount of money you're making, the time off that you're experiencing, and the stress that you're enduring is how are you thinking about your business in terms of your ability to scale, to grow and scale. So growing, you know, is different than scaling, but thinking about it in a way where you're succeeding through others. So what if you couldn't be the one to show homes? What if you couldn't be the one to enter a listing into MLS or, you know, to do your social media to do all the things we need to do? There's fully 10, 12, 15 jobs that we do as real estate agents and they don't all pay the same. The reason you're not making more money and the reason you don't have as much vacation as you want and the reason you're stressed out all the time, it's actually not your fault. The industry is set up in a way to make sure you're not successful. Meaning that the, the industry, generally speaking, all the little MLS boards around the country and around the world, they benefit by a million plus, 2 million plus agents in the U.S. selling, you know, not that many homes. Right. I think this year in the US there'll be like four and a half million homes sold. So that's, you know, potentially nine million commission checks with two million agents. So what is that, four and a half homes? Four or five homes per agent? The industry is more interested in keeping the millions of agents in business rather than teaching each agent how to sell a ridiculous amount of homes. Right? So it's not your fault. And we're living in extraordinary times. So the reason you're not growing, the reason why you're not figuring out how to, how to leverage is that you don't have any mental rack space. Right? The news, the social media, all the things. On top of that, we have competing priorities. We're married or we have kids, or we're trying to work out and take care of ourselves physically or maybe spiritually. And you can't do it all. But you have to realize that your time is money and you're spending a majority of your work week doing things that don't pay very well. We've talked about on the podcast before a concept that I call the Business Freedom Index. It's simply a measurement of how much money you make versus the time you put into your business. So essentially how much money you're making per hour in your real estate business. And if that number is not what you want it to be, you have to do things differently because chances are you're doing the wrong things. You're doing what the industry tells you is the job of a real estate agent, which is driving around and maybe dropping off a check or picking up a lockbox or entering a listing into MLS or designing a brochure or posting a social media something on social media. All of those activities may be critically important, but you can have someone do them that can do them for some of them for four bucks an hour. If you take part in GEO arbitrage with virtual assistants. But even most local assistants will work for 12, 15, 20, 25 bucks an hour. And if you want to make that kind of money, then you should keep doing those things. But I'm assuming you don't and just know that there's hope. You know, I have been at this for a long time. 15 plus years in real estate, 10 plus years fearlessly leading real estate B school to help agents increase their net worth, take more time off, put the things that matter most in their life first. I have struggled. I have done all the things wrong, I've made all the mistakes. So there's no preaching in any of this. So let's get into the three models specifically. So in terms of what you should know when it comes to scaling your business in a team model. And there's more to it than just the structure of these teams, right? There's the economic model, which is probably a totally different episode. But the first point before I even get into the three models is that you have to do the work. There are agents out there that are thinking about like hiring an isa, like an inside sales agent and you know, hiring an admin and they're calling that person their integrator because they read the book Traction by Gino Wickman and you know, they're not actually doing the work and they're not like committing themselves every day to doing the things that most agents don't want to do. They're not putting in three, four hours a day of new business development. So before you even think about growing your team, you have to make sure you fall into the normal discipline of making the calls, doing the follow ups, building out your, you know, your business as a system of systems. So that's kind of the caveat to all of this. So let's talk about this specific models. The first model is the lead agent model. This is where you are the lead agents. Your, your lead agent. You're focusing on listings, you're the marketing person, you're managing a very, very, very small team. There's one administrator and maybe one or two buyer agents that double as your showing agents. So for me this is when I had one admin. I brought one agent on in 2009. We did 58 sides that year. I did 54 of them personally. And then we did 118 sides in 2010. Very simple structure, not hard to manage. Everyone's sort of running and gunning doing their own thing. There's not a lot of structure. It's still pretty stressful. The money's really good and there's not a lot of freedom in it, you know, but you have to unfortunately get through the lead agent model to kind of learn how to lead people and learn how to manage people and Kind of cut your teeth on a small group of people before you bring in a few more people. So the second model is the team leader model. And it's actually not that much different than the lead agent model. So this is where I went from 118 sides in 2010 and that was one admin and like two or three agents and I was doing mostly listings to 178 sides in 2011. And that's the year I hired my first listing specialist. We went on to do 248 transactions in 2012. And I think that's when I hired my second listing specialists, maybe a couple other buyer agent and maybe one more administrator. But everything sort of stayed the same. We just sold more homes. Everyone was doing their new business development on a regular basis. Everyone was, you know, if you were on the sales side, you were trying to stay out of the admin side because we had admin people taking that off of your plate. We were reporting our numbers. The sales team. I was still, you know, at least in 2011, I was still in production. 2012, I only did one of those 248 transactions. And so again, not a complicated structure. This is the team leader. You know, they're leading the sales team and they're still leading the admin team and they're sort of have your eye on who's going to step up and lead the sales team, who's going to step up and lead the admin team. So the only difference from the team leader model to the team owner model, which is the third stage here or third model that we work on in real estate B school, is is that the team owner actually has a sales manager and an operations manager and they're leading and leading those two individuals and they're in the day to day and they're providing the energy, enthusiasm and cadence on a daily and weekly basis. And essentially you're able to succeed through a couple of people. I've seen much more complicated and much more admin people, heavy organizations that don't work as well as this simple model. And this is where we were able to go from, you know, the 178 to 248 in 2012. That's when I stepped out of production. I promoted couple team members into the sales lead seat and the operations lead seat. And we went on to do 312 and then 453. And it's the same stuff. There's transaction coordination, there's listing management, there's marketing coordination, there's a field coordinator. We had an office assistant only One inside salesperson. But they were more of an appointment setter, you know, not a hardcore. We were always attraction based marketing. And still that's what we teach in real estate B school. We're not much for cold calling. And then buyer agents, you know, one showing agent and maybe a listing agent. So maybe four or five buyer agents, one or two listing agents, one inside sales, maybe one showing agent. You know, this is 10 or 12 people on the team, but you're doing, you know, two and a half, 3 million of GCI. And it's on the right economic model. So the money is really, really great. The year we did 453 transactions, I worked 42 days and I think I made like somewhere between $2,800 and $3,300 per hour, depending on, you know, the estimation of how many hours I worked each day while I was there. But really good money. And so those are the three structures. It's the lead agent model, the team leader model, the team owner model. And let me give you just a few points here in terms of how to think about this. No matter where you are in your journey, there's just three things I want to tell you in terms of how can you get there and how can you make it happen. The first thing is to begin with the end in mind. And this is a three year vision. So this is just you spending a little bit of time with yourself and your journal, thinking about where you want your business to be three years from now. This is the thing I have done right every year is that I'm always looking three years out. I've made all the mistakes you can make, but I've always had a clear three year vision. And that's been the guiding light for me in making decisions. Is like, is this leading me closer to achieving my three year vision? What I'm doing, you know, this year or this quarter or this week or today, right? So you begin with the end in mind, three year vision. The second point here is that you have to have a clear plan. This is your, an annual plan. You break the three year vision down into a one year plan plan and then you break that one year plan. The point three here is in sprints, 90 day sprints, you're going to stack quarter after quarter after quarter after quarter to crush that one year plan and then you're going to stack three years to achieve that three year vision. Now technically the three year vision is sort of a moving target. Not in a, you know, discontentment, striving kind of way, but it is something that is going to guide your decisions today. So three year vision, one year plan, you focus 90 days at a time. In real estate B school, we have a proprietary planning system called the Business Freedom Planner that plugs in exactly what you do every 90 days. You structure your ideal week, you go through a passion versus pay exercise, a time study exercise. You pick the rocks that you're going to focus on and there's a process for everything. It breaks it down into weekly and daily and how to sort of make sure that you're working on stuff today and this week that fit into the 90 days, that fits into the one year plan, that fits into the three year vision. That is the way we do it. I want to tell you a quick story about Andy Mulholland. The first conversation I had with Andy, you know, picking up on this three year vision, he said, Lars, three years from now I want to be in an RV with my family and spend 90 days on the road. I'm like, okay, that's a first. I have not heard that one before. But we got to work. He was probably already running the lead agent model. And so I think he was doing maybe 80, 90 transactions, one admin, maybe one agent eyeballs deep. 90% of the transactions were from him. We actually, in a three year period, we doubled his production, put the necessary pieces in place to build out the team leader model and then ultimately the team owner model. So he had that key sales leader in place and the key ops leader in place and he hit his goal to be on the road for 90 days. Four kids and I think a dog or two and a wife in an RV for 90 days. And eventually he was able to exit that business and spend I think even longer than 90 days in an RV. So this stuff is possible. It does work. Hopefully that's inspiration for you. Like I said, get over to the Facebook group Real estate Business Builders and grab that. Need an admin start here hiring guide. That is the hire, even if it's part time, that is standing in the way from you doubling, tripling, quadrupling the amount of money you take home and decreasing the amount of hours that you work. Now if you want to go further, faster, there's no hard sell. There's just an opportunity to jump on the phone. I still do these business growth assessments. We've got another one of our business coaches that do these business growth assessments. Just go over to rebsgrowthassessment.com we're going to figure out exactly where you are, exactly where you want to go. We're going to figure out what you've done, what's worked, what hasn't worked, what are the obstacles that you've seen to your growth. And our goal is to help you become our next case study. So go to Rebs Growth Assessment. Com and if you know that you want to be in our world and you know you can be our next case study, just go right to our EBS Case Study program and you'll find out all about the Foundational business building. It's kind of our flagship program that everyone gets through. It's got a 10x guarantee on the investment, double your money back. It's a ridiculous program. You definitely want to check it out. And bottom line, you've got to do the work. We're here to hold you accountable. If you opt into our case study program and give you the step by step to make it happen, we will see you on the next podcast. Much love, much respect.

Thanks for listening. Would you please take a minute to share the show with other agents who may be struggling? And if you love the podcast, please leave us a five star review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform. And make sure you visit ScaleOrDiebook.com to get a free copy of my book. It's a nuts and bolts guide to building a real estate business that gives you true time and money freedom so that you can live your life without regrets. Thanks again and see you on the next episode.