The Good, Bad & Ugly: Are You Looking for Patterns or Potential?

Hey there. Welcome back to another episode of the Business Freedom Podcast. This is Lars Hedenberg, founder of Real Estate B School and I'm a co founder of High Performance Real Estate Advisors, Charlotte, North Carolina. Today I want to talk about really every mistake I've ever made in recruiting talent into my world in multiple businesses has come down to this one thing I'm going to teach you today. And this is the Good, Bad, Ugly edition of the podcast. And what I mean by that, this is my ability just to talk openly about, mostly about the things that the bad and the ugly, the things that I've done wrong in business so that you don't have to suffer the same pain I suffered. And when it comes to people, I want you to open up YouTube. In the search bar, type in Furtick Relationship Advice F U R T I C K Relationship Advice. It's about a one minute clip from my pastor. And if you're not a believer or Christian, still watch this video because it gave me, it just opened up my mind or it really zeroed in on the fact that every mistake I've made is when I look for potential in people rather than patterns. And the relationship advice. The context of this little excerpt from a sermon that my pastor Steven Furtick gave, it relates to a potential relationship that you're going to enter with a buyer agent or an administrative hire. So if you're looking to scale your real estate business, yes, you have to get your systems right first and foremost. You don't want to scale a business on shaky systems, on a lead management system that is not working, lead follow up procedures, email, text sequences that are not dialed in. So all of the contractor, closing, client experience, all your marketing has to be systemized so you're not throwing bodies at problems and your business is doing the right things before you add people to it. So I will say that I will preface all of this with that statement. But to really scale your business, you will need talent. So we have part of our toolbox is what we call harnessing talent. And your ability to harness talent is everything when it comes to scaling a business beyond yourself. And so patterns are the things that the person you're sitting in front of interviewing for an administrative job on your team or a buyer agent, let's take buyer agent for example. That's the most common hire that a team leader will make. Or if you're solo and you have a part time admin and you're scaling beyond yourself, it's the next hire. Once you get a full time admin and you're getting 40, 50, 60 deals and you've leveraged that one admin. It's time to get out of working with buyers. And so let's pretend that that's the person you're sitting in front of. If you're a visionary and you're really sort of an entrepreneur, a business builder, and you have that sort of futuristic view and you're positive and you're just going to get after it, it's likely that you're going to want to see and not want to. You're just naturally going to see the potential in people because you see potential where others don't see potential. And that's why, you know, for me, I was able to go from 27 sides to like 58 sides to 118 to 178 to 248 families served to 312 to 400. Plus the year we did 248. January of that year was my last closing. That was about six years ago. I've been working one day, two days a week since, and it hasn't been perfect. I've had, you know, major people issues on my team, really all the time. And if you don't have people issues, you're kidding yourself. You're not running a real business. If you don't have people issues and even great people in the right seats, if you're not serving them at a high level, you have people issues. The mistake I made though, is that I always looked for potential. You know, so you're sitting in front of a buyer agent, they just got their license, they had never done anything in sales before. They had never did anything, any new business development, never talked on the phone before. You know, like, let's take that as an example. That's a pretty typical applicant for a position on a real estate team. You look at that person and you really want to believe that they're going to be the right fit because you're at the point where you're able to step out of buyers or you're so desperate your spouse is pissed off at you, you kick your dog every night, your children never see you, you're 40 pounds overweight. You know, I'm being dramatic. And those are the things that really do happen when you're working more than you should or you're at over capacity. And so you look for potential. And they say the right things. They act like they want to be a part of a team. They say they need to make the money. You probably ignore the fact that they're. If you know The DISC personality profile test, they, they're more S and C than they are D and I or id. You ignore the fact that their values, part of that assessment shows that they're low economic, they're not driven by money. A true salesperson is someone who is absolutely 100% driven by money. So you ignore these obvious flags. You ignore the fact that they hadn't really achieved in anything prior, any prior career. You ignore the fact that take any area of their life and they haven't shown a pattern of being successful. You know, so you look for potential. Once you shift your mindset around patterns versus potential and you look for patterns and you interview with that lens. So let's, let's take an example of a buyer agent. Again, I'm sitting down, I'm interviewing and we have core values. These are things that are non negotiables to be on our team. Our first core value is that we hustle and work hard. So if I'm interviewing a buyer agent, I won't simply ask them, what do you think of hustle and work hard? Like, yeah, I'm ready to hustle and work hard. Okay, great, let's move forward. That is, you know, that is looking for potential or hoping for potential. The next question would be, give me an example where you've hustled and worked hard for a sustained period of time, like six months, nine months or 12 months. And I don't care if they're like two years out of college, but they give you the example of, well, you know, I graduated in three and a half years from college and I worked average of 20 to 25 hours a week in these two jobs. Okay, and how long did you do that for? I did that for the last three semesters. Really wanted to move on to whatever. That to me is demonstrating that you hustled and worked hard. Great. Then you may even push them further. Ask for it. Give me another example of where you've hustled and worked hard for sustained period of time. And then they give you an example. Okay. In high school, you know, I, in order to, you know, get my parents to pay for my car insurance, I had to hold down a part time job where I work 15 hours a week or I played two sports at the same time. Or you're going to identify real patterns of hustle and hard work. Our next core value is that we embrace accountability and discipline. So, Mr. Buyer Agent, this is an important core value here, is that we embrace accountability and discipline. Is that okay with you? Oh, yeah, sure. That's Great, that's going to be great for me. Okay, great. Let's move forward and hope that everything is going to be great. No, the next question has to be, give me an example, a concrete example recently where you've really had to embrace accountability and discipline. You know, and the example could be that I played sports in college and our head coach was really, he really wrote us hard on by position that we to weigh a certain amount and, and I struggled with that. And you know, but every Monday he would weigh us and we had to be between 248 and 250 because I was, you know, whatever, a linebacker or an offensive lineman and he would make me pay 50. This is a real example. John Coughlin and Michael Strahan from the New York Giants. You know, that's a great example of embracing accountability and discipline. Or you know, they achieved, say they worked in a different industry and they didn't have a great manager, but they held themselves, you know, accountable to, you know, 25 no's a day before lunch, you know, and they were in a calling environment. You know, that's a good example of how even though they could kind of skate by, they were able to achieve maybe at a high level because they held themselves accountable. Health examples are great. Give me an example of I ran a marathon and I wasn't a runner and so I was highly accountable to another guy that I chose to do the marathon with. And I was super disciplined because I followed like this 20 freaking week training program and I had never run before. And so that's a great example for me of how I embraced accountability and discipline to get to a goal that was important to me. So hopefully you get a flavor of potential is like this person has not achieved the thing that you need them to achieve for you or any semblance of it. And even beyond that, if you dug deeper, you would see that they're lazy, they're completely tied up in social media. They haven't, you know, they don't have real goals for themselves. I mean, push deep to really figure out what is their pattern rather than just making the same mistake that I made and trusting this potential that may or may not be there. Look for the patterns and go deep with. Just don't even look at the questioning process as really scientific. Just search for the patterns, know what your core values are, know what's important in order to really have an impact on your team and then get after the answers to your questions to identify their, their patterns. The patterns are already there. You just need to discover them. So you're not going to. Your training program, if you even have one, is not going to create the person you want to create. They already are who they are. And your job is not to save everyone that comes to your team. This is such good advice. It sounds harsh because as real estate agents, there's a part of us that we're attracted to the industry because we want to help people. We have this heart of service and we want to help people. And when you make that shift from production where you're doing, you're working with buyers and sellers to business ownership, this part of you, the potential patterns part of you must shift as you scale your business. And you need to do it profitably because you have to hold your expenses accountable. When you spend a dollar, you need to hold it accountable to make $10. When you hire an administrator, you need to hold that dollar of payroll accountable to make you $10. When you bring a buyer agent on, you need to make sure that they're going to treat your leads and your gimme opportunities with respect and they're going to work hard to service them at a level that is in line with what your clients expect from you and working with you. So hopefully this is really helpful. I've made all the mistakes you can make with hiring, so this, if it sounds preachy, it is not preachy. This is the bad and the ugly part of this edition. Good, bad, ugly that I'm not really that proud of. Over 100 folks that I've hired and this is going back. I mean, we're over 3,000 transactions that we've sold over the years and our industry has a bit more churn, I would probably argue, than most industries. And I think if you did this right and you hung onto this one nugget here, patterns versus potential, I think it'll serve you well. So we'll talk to you in a future episode. Go out there and apply this stuff. Much love and respect. We'll talk to you later. Bye.