The 4 Non-Negotiables to Become a Million Dollar Agent

I prioritize like nobody that I know. I'm in a Christian business owners group called C12 where really the purpose of that group is how to set up your business as a ministry. And because we have just an amazing ability to impact so many people inside our team, our clients on the content that we put out. And the heart of this group of business owners is this conversation around priorities. And the tagline of this organization is prior to priorities are what we do, everything else is just talk.

The real estate industry has failed to create a clear path to time and money freedom. Having helped over 5,000 families in my real estate career and coached thousands of agents to scale their businesses, I know what works and what doesn't. And my goal on this podcast is to share it all with you. The good, bad and ugly of building a highly lucrative lifestyle business so you can focus on what truly matters in life. You won't find any hype or fluff on this show, just real world tactics.

And strategies that get results. You just got to do the work. What's up Real Estate Business Builders? All right, let's get into it. These are the four non negotiables if you want to become $1 million agent. Pretty much all of my time and focus these days after being in the real estate industry as an agent. Got licensed in 2006, went full time in 2007, launched Real Estate B School in 2013. Everything I'm focused on now is helping agents become MDA's million dollar agents. So the backdrop of this conversation are four things that are absolutely non negotiable if you want to earn that million dollar agent status and if you know you want to take another step with us, go to million dollar agent method.com that's million dollar agent method.com you can book in a strategy session. There's no obligation we'll go through to see if you're a good fit. Really just dig into your business and see if you're a good fit for what we do and what we teach. It's an implementation program. It's only 90 days. We install everything into your business to achieve this MDA status. So let's get into it. So four non negotiables. The first thing if I look back on my journey and 1000 plus agents have been through Real Estate B school in our various programs. The first non negotiable is your relationship and understanding of of time and money as it relates to maximizing the money you make and minimizing the hours that you put in. Traditional methods will have you making more money and ultimately you're sacrificing your life. So you're putting in those 60, 70, 80 we'd have, we've had clients come in, you know, doing lots of production, but they're working 80, 90 hours, 100 plus hours a week. And it's not sustainable. And even if you could pull it off, something will break in another area of your life. So there's a dance here. You know, we ultimately at real estate B school we teach six stages of growth. MDA status, million dollar agent status is our third stage. So the whole industry lives in stage one. That's sub 100 GCI, 100,000 GCI. Stage two for us is 500,000 GCI. And then stage three is a million dollars GCI. And it is 100% required, non negotiable that you understand that 80% of what real estate agents do is critically important. Like these things have to happen. Generally though they're not very dollar productive. So pick any administrative task. If you're installing a sign, a lockbox, if you're pushing paperwork, taking pictures or loading pictures into the MLS or writing MLS remarks or all of this stuff like negotiating repairs or scheduling photograph or like all of the, the job of a real estate agent, traditionally none of that stuff pays really well. And it's critically important. It has to happen. But really understanding, like, okay, if I want to make, you know, $500,000 take home and I want to work a 40 hour work week, do the math on 2000 hours work per year, that's $250 per hour. You cannot spend your time doing anything administrative in your business. So this relationship between time and money and just having a conviction that your time is worth 250, 500, $1,000 per hour, that's the journey that I went on. It took me a few years to get to $250 per hour. Making that 500,000 take home and only working just a 40 hour workweek, no evenings and weekends. Took me three to four years to figure out how to do that. But then it went from 200 to 500 to 1,000 to 2,000 to over $3,000 per hour. And you may not want to go to stage four, five and six, but life gets really good at stage two and stage three, that 500,000 or the million dollar agent status, so that's number one is the relationship between time and money and just understanding that there are trade offs. Right? If you want to do everything in your business and you're the only one that can do Whatever, pick a thing, then you're not likely going to make an unreasonable amount of money in a reasonable amount of time. So that's number one. Number two, and this is kind of pivoting a little bit is positive inputs. So there is much fear, uncertainty and doubt in our industry right now. Right. With the NAR settlement and even the national association of realtors, which is NAR, they're even saying that they're estimating that 600,000 real estate agents will get out of the industry in the coming two to three years. I think was the time timeframe that they, they quoted. Now part of this is that we have been on a crazy run in terms of, of a real estate cycle. I study economic cycles and macroeconomic cycles a little bit and, and I'm not like an economist or anything like that, but there's something called an 18.6 year real estate cycle. So and they're estimating that we're going to pivot here, 26 or so where every market, you know, has to sort of recalibrate and we'll probably see that in the real estate market. In my market anyway, I'm in a major metro market, top 20 metro market in the US and we've only been up since 2011. And if you measure sort of bottom to bottom, if the bottom in Your market was 2008 or so, 2009, and it's an 18 year cycle, that's 2020, 26, 2027, that we will see a shift. My point in saying that is that there will be lots of reasons that you can feed off of that negativity as it relates to the real estate industry specifically or as it relates to just what's going on in the world. Right. If you're constantly caught in the 24, 7 news cycle and you're worried about, you know, what's going on on this university campus, or the tension in the Middle east or the Russia, Ukraine or politics and who's going to get elected this year while those things. There are people suffering in all of that and that's not great. And you could pray for all of those situations, but if you're in it and you're consuming it and you're waiting for the next bit of information around it, the chances are really high that you're not going to achieve or have the mental clarity or I say mental rack space to be able to kick butt in your real estate business and also show up in your family and those important relationships and also take care of your physical body, work out and eat well have your stress levels come down so you don't stress, eat right and take care of your spiritual part of your life and your faith walk. You're just not going to have the capacity to do those other things if you're constantly triggered by the 24. 7 news cycle. Another positive input, unlikely. An unlikely positive input is social media. I was just texting a, a three way text with one of my business partners, actually two of my business partners and two of us are maybe on the other side of realizing that 99% of what's on social media does not lead me any closer to meaningful goals in the areas of life that matter to me. And he's trying to convince us otherwise. And it's just this like. And he's, he's younger than we are. I've just made a concerted effort to exit out of the social media platforms almost 100%. Now you can send me a link if it's a funny video of cats or, you know, he was actually sending us something really uplifting. There was a sermon or a pastor that was speaking on a specific point and he wanted to share that with us. And it was on TikTok and neither of us are going to get into that platform and we were having sort of a debate as to why and talking about freedom and whatnot. The point is, is that I protect what I'm taking in. So, so be aware of what inputs. So that could be the 24. 7 news cycle, it could be social media, it could be others around you. Right. Are they supporting the vision for growth that you have? Are they kind of cutting you down and maybe saying that, you know, it's not worth it or there's always that challenge with relationships and there are some relationships you'll likely have to move away from in order to achieve goals in business, in your family and your faith walk. Because there's only so many hours in the day. That's the reality. So that's number two are positive inputs. Number three is really more so just an extension of number two. It's eliminate noise. So when you look at your waking hours, you know, I'm at the point in my journey where I still have big goals in my marriage, in my relationship with my daughter, with my son, my physical body, my, you know, spending time with my creator, having, you know, friendships and nurturing those friendships, having time to just decompress and be there for my family and to be able to do all of those things and run two successful businesses in order to do all of those things. I prioritize like nobody that I know. And when you really kind of think of this, even a better way to say number three is be clear on your priorities. And there's a saying, I'm in a Christian business owners group called C12, where really the purpose of that group is how to kind of set up your business as a ministry. And because we have just an amazing ability to impact so many people inside our team, our clients, on the content that we put out. And the heart of the this group of business owners is this conversation around priorities. And the tagline of this organization is priorities are what we do. Everything else is just talk. Number three, make sure your priorities are in line. Like if I were to ask you what are your priorities? You'd probably say if you were a believer or you had some sort of faith, you would say, well, God is number one. And then my family and then, you know, my business and then I want to, you know, take care of my physical body. And then if I were to deconstruct your calendar and see where you actually spend your time, you, that's probably not the priority. Most successful, quote, unquote, traditionally successful real estate agents, they spend too much time in their business, you know, so that's their priority as measured by their calendar. They're doing, you know, stuff on their phone, they're on their phone texting or whatever, when they should be with their kids or with their family or whatnot. A lot of agents will say that their health is priority, but they get stressed and they run out of hours in the day and they're not meal prepping or they're not, you know, getting their workouts in or whatever. And they're not surely not investing in relationships the way that they want to. And so really think about like, if your priorities are to, you know, whatever they are, list out your priorities and then I guarantee that there's no extra time in the day or for anything but your priorities. And those are the things that like when you get clear on your priorities and you put that into your calendar and that's really when priorities take take hold in your actual day to day is just getting them in your calendar. So if you were to look at my calendar, I have quiet time with my wife in my calendar on a daily basis. 6:30 to 7:30. I have 8 to 10:30am Monday through Thursday blocked off. That is, I just put no, no calls, no appointments during that time. That's when I'm getting the kids out the door and I'm getting my workout Monday through Thursday. That's when I'm like hyper, hyper focused on moving the two businesses forward. And then I've got daddy duties Monday through Thursday, Fridays are off but I'm spending. I get my two hour massage on Friday so that's self care. I've got a time block in the afternoon where I'm generally doing nothing take my daughter for to ride her horse. Saturdays I do a few things, you know, sun, you know, Saturday, date night is in there recurring. So my calendar represents my priorities. So just ask yourself and it's not not something that happens overnight. So you're not going to go to a 20 hour workweek if you're working 60 hours a week now. But over time you can make decisions to eliminate things time block better and get your priorities in your calendar and just eliminate things over time. Maybe put notifications on your phone they have the the app like you can do it by application. Where when I was on Facebook I would have just a 15 minute timer that would shut me out of Facebook on my phone when I hit 15 minutes. And now I don't go into social media but that could be a limiting factor that, that could be a tool for you Just look into your social the one that you use the most and and start by just realizing how many hours you spend on that every week and it's likely you could reclaim at least 80% of that time into things that matter. So that's number three. Number four is and this is a non negotiable if you want to make an unreasonable amount of money in a reasonable amount of time that's what we call million dollar agent status is to have a clear vision. The reason I was able to do all of the stuff real estate is hard. There's so many things you need to put together. You need to be so focused, so skilled, you know, have the 20, 25, 30 plus meaningful conversations every day. Never been a cold caller. That's not my thing. Not, not a door knocker. But we would generate leads. That's how million dollar Agent method is set up. Generate leads and always have an unlimited amount of leads to follow up with. So but you have to have the conversations. There's no way out of it and you need to know what to say and all of that. But the reason I was able to do all of the stuff required in the day to day when I was just getting started in the business is that early on I still do this process once a year. I look out three years and and what do I want to be, what do I want to see different in my business three years from now, what money do I want to be making? How many vacations do I want to take, what hours do I want to be working, you know, three years from now and then with that vision in place. And that same goes for your financial, the debts, your net worth, the relationships you have, your physical body, a three year vision for all the areas of life that matter to you, not just business. Then you chunk that three year vision down into a one year plan and then into a 90 day world, then into a weekly plan and then into your dominate your day. So we bring the three year vision to a one year, to a quarter, to a week, to a day. Even the decisions we make on the daily with the time blocks where we spend our actual time. So my hope is that this is massively, this one was a little at the 30,000 foot level. I know there's not a whole lot of like really tactical information here. My, my, my prayer is that this hits you at least in one or two, maybe three of these areas that you can run with something that I shared today. Like I said earlier, if you know you want to dive deeper into what your business looks like today and what's possible in the next 1, 2, 3 years, just go to milliondollaragentmethod.com this is not a long drawn coaching program. It is a very highly structured implementation program where we focus on most agents struggle with systems implementation. That is what this program is. We will come alongside you done with you implement systems in your business. So you can stop paying for leads forever. You can stop paying referral fees on lead sources. You will not have to succumb to another entity. That's just be a better marketer than you are and getting in the way of you and the buyer and the seller. Right? That is not lead generation paying the Zillows or Realtor or pay per click or you know, paying the home lights or Sharper agent or whatever. That's not lead generation paying 30, 40% for someone to do the job of marketing for you. We can generate leads for oftentimes less than 5% of your overall gross commission income. 5 to 10% or so. So milliondollar agent method.com if you know that's you, there's no obligation to jump on a strategy session. There's a few questions to fill out. There's a seven minute video on that page as well. You can just take a look at that and we'll talk to you on the next training. Be good.