The 7 Questions Every Real Estate Agent Must Ask Themselves… If They Want to Scale

Do you have a plan in place to do it? Just wanting to do it is not enough. The industry has proven the stats show 16 year veterans in real estate are making less than a hundred thousand gross commission income. That's before you take out expenses for the brokerage and for marketing. They're probably, you know, 16 year veterans are making 60,000, take home 70,000 if they're lucky. And if you're putting in, you know, 2,500 hours, you're making 25 to $30 per hour. That is not a scaled business, that's not scalable. You just gotta do the work. If you are struggling to scale your real estate business, meaning you can't put any more effort into the business without working like crazier hours. So maybe you're not making the kind of money you want, maybe you're sort of out of bounds on the time you're working in the business and you don't have the money or transactions to show for it. In our industry, this is a little known fact and obviously the industry isn't beating our chest that 16 year veterans are making less than 6 figures in real estate. I think it's like $92,000. The average agent is making 56 or 58k of gross commission income in a year. And that's before they pay their broker, before they pay any expenses whatsoever. Two year agents are doing about $10,000 of GCI. So as an industry we have not proven to produce like using traditional methods, agents that are making a ton of money. And my mission is to help agents that maybe you've hit a deal a month or a deal every other month. You also could be doing a lot of business, but maybe you don't have the systems installed to help you scale your business. Today though, I'm going to dig into seven questions that every agent has to ask themselves if you want to scale. So when I talk about scale, scale is very different than growing. So you could grow to two or three transactions per month and you will grow into working seven, eight days a week, you'll grow into working every evening and weekend, you will grow into, you know, working on vacation when you should be just focused and decompressing and spending time with loved ones. So you can grow your income in real estate, but you're going to grow your hours, you're going to grow your stress. Scaling is quite different. So scaling is almost disconnecting time from money, meaning that, that you can start to make more money in less hours as you start to think about your business differently. And that's what I want to get into today. Seven questions that every agent has to ask themselves if they want to scale. The backdrop to all of this is that I've been doing this for you know since 2013, real estate B school helping agents not only grow their income, scale their businesses, achieve true time and money freedom they that is the claim to fame specifically we've got a 13 week program if you ever want to look at what we do just go to milliondollaragentmethod.com There's a seven minute video that explains it all and book in a conversation with us. This is not a hardcore closing type organization or environment we're just going to have a conversation what's working in the business, what's not working and off we go and if we're a fit great. If we're not that's great as well. So let's jump into it. So seven questions number one are you taking advantage of low cost high impact lead gen levers in real estate B school specifically in million dollar agent method this is a 13 week build out where we've got four pillars that we work on. The first pillar is called leveraged lead generation and we have 12 lead gen levers. Two of them are our database touch blueprint that's one in our agent brand authority builder how to use your database people that know like and trust you to add value and in return you get lots of referrals and then how to use your online your digital footprint agent brand authority builder to build a brand and some authority online where the natural you know you're having conversations online and you're actually generating business from your presence online. So many agents get this wrong and there's really no business to show for all of their sort of mind numbing you know they're just on their phone, they think they're in social media but they're actually just consuming they're not making a ton of money using social media. So those are two of our 12 and then we have 10 others and if we were to work together we would help implement those two. Like you've heard of database touch blueprint but we have members doing seven figures a year on that one lead gen lever. So you know it but have you actually implemented it and is it helping you scale your business? Same thing with agent brand authority builder is your digital footprint generating business at scale where you're not having to put more effort into a thing but you're getting you know a disproportionate amount of income out of the Hours or time or effort that you put in something and then we've got 12 total. We implement those two plus two additional. So and these aren't a lot of, I mean these are like 20, 25, 30 times return on any money you would spend. Little bit of money for some, you know our expired direct response system is coming back like crazy. Our for sale by owner direct response system as well, our new construction system and we've got a whole bunch of others that work really, really well. We even have an open house system where you can generate 250,000 a year in GCI just from running open houses using our system. So when you look at your business, just answer the question. It could be like a sliding scale. Maybe all of these are a sliding scale. One is like I have nothing coming in right now. You talk about low cost, high impact lead gen levers, I've got nothing that's a one. Five is like man, I've got four lead gen levers installed, my database touch blueprint, my agent, brand authority builder and two others and they're generating more leads than I can possibly handle. And I'm closing four or five transactions per month and it's a 30x return on investment to where you one to five. Are you taking advantage of low cost, high impact lead gen leverage? That's number one. Number two, are you using marketing and technology leverage at the highest level? So when I talk about scaling and again all of these seven questions are if you want to scale, meaning you want to make a disproportionate amount of money versus the hours you put into your business. I was able to go from $100 per hour, my first, my first full year in real estate to over 3,000, I think even close to 4,000 an hour, you know, a handful of years later because of this approach, you know, looking at systems and how can systems automations and delegations really do the heavy lifting my business. So are you using marketing and technology leverage at the highest level? Simple question here is that is everything is your whole business organized in a CRM which is a customer relationship management tool. There's a couple that we, we're technology agnostic at real estate B school in general. But there are a couple that our members have had success with really on every platform. But there's a couple that we would recommend if you don't have one that you're using and we would in a D W y fashion, done with you fashion, make sure you're building out your lead management protocol, your lead nurture sequences, all of your processes into a technology platform, a CRM, a real estate CRM. Is your marketing producing massive leverage for you? So when you produce a video online, you know, are you getting hundreds of views where it would take you, you know, a long time to have to share that point with a hundred, 200, 300 people? Right. Are you using leverage in your marketing or even in your client care? Are you recording videos around, you know, a step in the process where you've had, you have to explain the same thing over and over again, record a video and embed that video in an email and put that email in your closing sequence. Right. So we think about your business as a system of systems. Okay? That's number two. Number three, are your lead nurture system set up properly. This is the not so sexy part of real estate. Here's the thing, a full 90% of folks that come into your world as a lead, so we talk about leads coming in and then the 90% that aren't ready to earn you a commission check in the next 30 days. Most agents have nothing set up to nurture them in a way where they're going to be predisposed to do business with you when they're ready in 30, 60, 90, 180, even 365 days where all of it's set on autopilot. You build out the email sequences, the lead management protocol, the text sequences one time and they run forever. I mean there's tweaking involved to make sure their messaging is relevant. But you can even put your seller and buyer leads into your database. Touch blueprint on the different touches that are at scale, the emails and the value add things that you send out on a monthly basis. Do you even know how to handle someone, what to send them, what to say when you follow up if they tell you they're six months from moving or putting the house on the market? Right. So that's number three. Number four, do you have a system? This one's key. Do you have a system to offload low dollar productive activities? We had a member come through million dollar agent method. It's a 13 week implementation. We built out the database Touch blueprint agent, brand authority builder, I think the expired program and I think even the for sale by owner program. So four lead gen levers built out. We also were able to, and we don't have an affiliate relationship with this company, but we were able to basically outsourcing your administrative tasks to a company where the folks that are working with you are in a lower cost economy. So, so there's there's, there's this just arbitrage opportunity where you could pay, even have someone manage them and train them and onboard them. You could still pay $10 per hour for a high quality admin to come into your world where you could offload all the things you do and it's full. 80% of the activities that a real estate agent does is lower level in terms of dollar productivity. Meaning there are things that you do every day that are a thousand dollars an hour and then there are things that you do that are like 12 or 15 an hour. We want to offload and have a system for offloading all those lower dollar productive activities still critically important, but you can't be the one to do them if you want to scale your income and make hundreds if not a thousand plus dollars per hour in your real estate business. All right, so that's number four. Do you have a system to offload low dollar productive activities? Where can you cut expenses in your business without hurting the business? Right. There are times in the business where things are going, maybe deals are running a little bit easier and you tend to sign up for this monthly recurring thing or, or spend, you know, I've had members come into our world after spending 50,000 on a YouTube system for a year that generated nothing. 36,000 on a luxury farming direct mail system that generated nothing. Right. So you don't want to get into this habit of thinking when there's money there, you're going to spend it. Where can we cut expenses in the business without hurting your business? Most everything we do, it's definitely on the lower cost side or no cost side in terms of generating business and then even just hiring a virtual assistant in a lower cost economy. Super smart, super driven, there's no sort of degrading their skill set. But you can bring in just one virtual assistant to take over 30 to 40 hours of administrative work so you can double down on the dollar productive activities so you don't need to spend a lot of money. So let's eliminate the things that we can eliminate. Are you working too many hours without much financial upside? So we've got a concept in real estate B school and we, we, we measure this, it's called the Business Freedom Index which where basically you're going to look at the amount of money you make. And I still do this exercise. I take my adjusted gross income on my tax return and I divide it by the estimate of the hours that I worked in that year. Let's keep it simple. Let's say you made your AGI was 250,000 and you worked 2,500 hours or a 50 hour workweek times 50 weeks, two weeks vacation, that's $100 per hour. 250,000 divided by 2,500 is $100 per hour. More likely it's 125,000 if you're a traditionally successful agent, divided by 2,500 is $50 per hour. Or you're netting like let's say 50,000 net and you're working 50 hour work weeks, which 50,000 divided by 2,500 IS $20 per hour. So that's the spread. And when you, when you run that calculation, you know, you want to work a reasonable amount of hours and make an unreasonable amount of money. And so that is critical. Like when you ask yourself, am I working evenings, am I working weekends? And be honest with yourself about the true input in terms of hours into your business and is it financially worth it? Right. If we can take you from 50 to 100, you know, take home to 250 to 500 and get your hours to stay the same. Right. We have agents that come in at a hundred. They go to 250, 500 and a million in GCI and their expenses increase, but their hours don't increase and they're taking home a lot more money in the process. I did a video, I think it was like the four stages of growth where I actually went through the exact numbers that you'll experience and the different questions that you'll ask yourself at each stage of the growth. How to scale your real estate business from a hundred thousand to a million. Go back and watch that video. Just go to my YouTube channel, Real Estate B School and watch that video if you want to. And it's me on the thumbnail with Honor the Struggle and this hundred thousand, two hundred fifty, five hundred and a million where I go through exactly what you'll experience at each of those different stages. So those are the six that I wrote down. The seventh question is, if you want to scale your business, do you have a plan in place to do it? Just wanting to do it is not enough. The industry has proven. The stats show 16 year veterans in real estate are making less than a hundred thousand gross commission income. That's before you take out expenses for the brokerage and for marketing. They're probably, you know, 16 year veterans are making 60,000, take home 70,000 if they're lucky. And if you're putting in, you know, 2,500 hours, you're making 25 to $30 per hour. That is not a scaled business. That's not scalable. Do you have a roadmap in place where you could in the next 90 days install the systems so that you're setting yourself up to disconnect time and money to disconnect the level of effort that you have to put into your business versus the systems doing the heavy lifting. The video before this is another really good one. If you want to sort of get like a little bit of an idea of what the difference between grow and and scale. So that last question, if you don't have a plan in place, my encouragement is just to go to million dollaragent method. Com, that's million dollaragent method.com and just look at that seven minute video exactly me laying out exactly what the million Dollar Agent method is, who it's for and book in a conversation with us, a strategy session just to look at your business, where you are now, where you want to be in the future. What have you tried? What are the challenges you've experienced? If there's a fit, we're going to talk about it. If there's not, that's okay as well. So go to million dollaragentmethod.com and we will see you over there. Much love.