The Challenges of Becoming A Father and a Real Estate Agent At The Same Time

Have you ever felt like you were in over your head in business? Or maybe have you felt like you were in over your head as a parent? How about both at the same time? When I got into real estate, it was 2007. I left a cozy corporate job. I had just been married in 2006, and I became a parent the end of 2007. So I was getting my real estate sales career off the ground, not really realizing what. What I had gotten into. And it was a challenge, to say the least. I didn't know what I was doing as a dad, and I'd never had a sales career before. I'd never built a business before. I had never managed anything or anyone before, never had built a system for a business before. And here I decided it was going to be awesome. If you're looking to build a real real estate business, make sure you stick around to the end of this video. I'm going to make sure I let you know how to grab a copy of the book that I wrote, Scale or Die. If you like the video, please hit the like button, subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications and also leave comments. So I can challenge you and you can challenge me to bring you even better content that's going to help you in your business growth journey. So in real estate, why is it that there's such a high failure rate and nobody really talks about like that. They just, you know, it's like this burn and churn sort of business. 82% of licensees by their second anniversary, they're not in real estate. And so is it because we're not training people properly, you know, people that come into the industry, Is it the fact that it's just a really hard career and. And we don't set folks up to be successful or when they achieve traditional success like I did in my early days, that success is the thing that forces us to not show up in the areas of life that are really important. For me, it was being a new parent. I vividly remember, like, holding my son Anders and looking at him. This was in 2007. This was before the end of my first 10 months in the business. I sold 27 homes in 2007 in 10 months. Anders was born November 22nd on Thanksgiving in 2007. And like, I just remember thinking to myself that the pressure was on. This had to work. And the reality was that it wasn't working. You know, I was instantly a top producer. So everyone was, like, scratching their head in my office and in the industry. Like, how did this guy go from, you know, newly licensed to. In my first full year, I sold 44 homes. That's a lot of real estate. That's like the top percent of a percent in my market. And I was working every bit of seven days a week. Anders was turning one. So he went from this sort of generally useless sort of blob of like moving skin and not giving a whole lot back to me to like really wanting to engage and start starting to walk and starting to smile. And I was completely torn at that point. The motivation for me to build this business, even, you know, everyone calls it a business even if you're the only one working in it, but to take it from like that solopreneur status to a legitimate business that helped buyers and sellers at the highest level without me having to do it. The motivation was that one year old boy and just thinking about, you know, how I had it as a kid, my dad wasn't there for me. You know, he was sort of grinding in his business. He moved from Sweden to the US to start launch a hair salon and he was doing every bit of every part of his business. He was working 70 to 80 hours a week keeping that business alive. The business never really succeeded and he suffered in that. He lost his marriage, he lost his children, and he didn't have anything to show for it financially. So I had that in the backdrop and here I was like everything was on the line in my real estate business and I hired a full time administrator. Well, I hired her part time and then she demanded a raise and demanded that she go full time. And then I decided like, man, if I'm going to have any freedom, if I'm going to be sitting at the dinner table consistently with my new child and my wife, I had to get out of working with buyers. So I got to work to build systems that allowed me the freedom to not have to work evenings, to not have to work weekends. Right. So where are you failing to show up in your personal life and how is your real estate business taking you away from those things? I want to go through a few strategies, tactics that you can employ right now to give yourself a little bit of freedom so you can move from just overworked, super stressed out real estate agent to more of a passenger in your business to a business owner instead of just grinding it all day long. My first word of advice is just to slow down and think about how you want things to be. Very rarely do we ever slow down to plan our future, you know, so if you're overwhelmed right now and you really can't see, you know, the, like, where you want your business to be and you're just stressed out and you're failing, maybe personally or with your spouse or, you know, you're not seeing your children the amount of hours you want, or maybe you're just sort of falling flat physically or emotionally, you're down. Just slow down and give yourself some grace and spend a little bit of time just thinking about how you want things to be different in the future. You know, when we set these goals for ourselves, the second word of advice is be careful about never living up to this ideal that you've set for yourself. I did that a lot in my early days. It's called the gap versus the gain. Where we have this ideal, this future version of our business or ourself that we set for ourself when we put it out there. It motivates us on the one hand, but we never quite achieve it. And we're always left feeling discontinued, discontent, and unfulfilled instead. You know, maybe you're not where you want to be, but you're surely not where you once were. So give yourself some credit for moving forward consistently in your business. And the last thing I would say is just pay attention to, you know, the things that matter most in terms of setting your schedule the right way consistently. There's no real rocket science around just making better choices with your time. So you've slowed down, you're now honoring your achievements. But are you doing the right things during the day to move closer to where you want your life to look like? It's one thing to sort of feel like you're failing as a dad or as a husband, and maybe you feel like you're failing in business. It's another to start making better choices with your time. So use the fuel of the, maybe the heaviness of where you are right now as the motivator for digging yourself out of, you know, wherever you're falling, falling flat right now. So it may mean a morning routine. It may mean just honoring time blocks. It may mean, like, having standards around your time and shutting it down, you know, and being consistent and saying, I'm not going to work, you know, these evenings I'm going to be home. I'm not going to work Sundays, I'm going to work only mornings on Saturday. Right, and then making sure you're making time to work on the business. It's one thing to just do the job of a real estate agent, but are you showing up as the business owner? Are you building systems in the business that'll allow you to sort of set this foundation that you can grow the business from. You know, doing real estate as a solopreneur is painful. There's no freedom in it. Even if you're a top agent, you're making good money, your time is in your own and you're super strong all the time. You know, I think of one of our members, Dave Hook. He was that guy where his wife Jenny was pregnant when I met them. He knew he was going to be a dad soon and he was working 70 hours a week and he was the top producing agent on his small team, two agents, an administrator and himself. And he was doing like 80 of the hundred transactions they did as a team. And there was no freedom and he was super stressed, cranky all the time. And they knew that they wanted to build a family together. And he just trusted that I had this roadmap that I was marketing. Right. It's one thing to say you have this path, it's another to help someone achieve the thing that you say you achieved. So he suspended disbelief and he trusted the process and he leaned in. We went through this three year vision, one year plan, 90 Day World, you know, weekly commitments, daily, all of that and one system at a time we put in place. You know, last year he did 240 transactions. Just four years later, he's been out of production for over two years now. He went from 70 hours a week to 35 hours a week. He has the freedom to take time away from the business. They have three children under five years old now. And so he went from like no kids where he had a little bit of liberty to work more hours than he should, maybe you know, hurting his relationship with his wife Jenny at the time to now he has the freedom to show up as a dad, as a husband, first and foremost, and honestly, first and foremost as a man of God. He's challenged me in my faith over the years, as a mentor in that area of my life. So that's what's important. And it actually shows up in his calendar now where when we first met, his priorities were his faith, his family and then his work. But it was flipped. It was all work, very little time for family and hardly in the written word. And so where are you missing out right now? You know, when you look at where you are in your business growth journey, maybe like this whole conversation around time, money and stress, it's really not making sense. I have written a book on the whole thing and it's scale or Die book. Go to ScaleOrDiveBook.com or click on the link below. I'll take you through step by step. I've written out the entire journey, the Good, the Bad, the Ugly, and also our most successful members. What tools, systems and strategies they needed to employ, what you know at the right time to make sure they went from just struggling to living a life of freedom. You know, if you liked the video, give me the thumbs up, hit the like button, subscribe to the channel, and also turn turn notifications on so you're the first to know when a new video hits. And also leave comments so we can go back and forth and challenge each other to live bigger lives through a better business. We'll see you on the next video.