The Good, Bad & Ugly: What Are You Giving Up To Be In Real Estate?

Hey there, everyone. Lars Hedenborg, founder of Real Estate B School. And welcome back to another Good, Bad, Ugly edition of the Business Freedom Podcast. Just the other day I did a webinar and I led off the webinar with a question. And I want to kind of unpack this question as it relates to me and my journey in business and to hopefully challenge you to think about what a business is, but also what you're giving up to be in real estate and, you know, take real estate out of it. You know, basically we're all trading a big part of our lives to earn money to pursue other things outside of, you know, our professional endeavors. And the question I challenged to the group and let me want to pull it up here. Pull it up here. Yeah. All right, so if you're, if you're watching along here. So the question was, yeah, am I making the amount of money I want in real estate? Working reasonable hours with a level of stress that, that is manageable. So I want you to think about that. If you're driving, don't take notes, you're not driving. This is something that I want you to write down and I want you to put a recurring appointment in your calendar for the first Monday of every month. Right. At the end of a weekend. Right. Weekends are tough if you're in real estate and you're grinding it out. Once you ask yourself, am I making the amount of money I want in real estate, working reasonable hours with a level of stress that is manageable. And if you've listened to the podcast for any period of time, you've, you've heard me talk about my journey and why I'm, why I did what I did and why I'm doing what I'm doing. And back when, you know, for me, the motivation, I left my corporate job and the motivation was to be a good dad. And I left a cozy, multiple six figure corporate job and got into real estate. People thought I was crazy and got married in 2006, had our first child in November 2007. That was just six months in or so, let me think, March, eight months into real estate, that next year. The end of 2008 is when everything hit the fan. It was the end of the financial world as everyone knew it, right? The Great recession that was October 2008 took four years. It felt like maybe even, yeah, better part of four years to bounce back from that. And then in July 2009, my father had a major stroke. Took a guy that did like karate, like kickboxing workouts twice a week he did salsa lessons, he had drove a Harley. We had a somewhat strained relationship growing up. He was an alcoholic. Drank until I was 15. And so it was just a weird time to see a parent go down and then have to care for that parent. Took five years, sort of a five year slow death. And in a lot of ways, I mean, he was a business owner. Not really a real business. You know, just like most real estate agents. He was working six, seven days a week, did whatever it took to keep that business going, had nothing to show for it. Never really built a business asset, didn't have systems. He would sweep the floors, he would order supplies, he would count the money, he would do payroll, he would wash hair, he would cut hair, he would do the hair coloring, he would run out to get supplies, you know, so he was a real sort of mom and pop shop, do it yourselfer. Really served as a motivation for me to get the fatherhood thing right, to get the, you know, being a husband right and to get being a business owner right. My mom left my dad and started her own business eventually. And so I had, I did have a good model of work ethic to look up to and to really learn from. My motivation though was, you know, in April 2010, our second child, Kendall was born. And it was after two miscarriages. So there's some tough stuff in between November 2007 and June 2010. That was my motivation. And I did whatever it took. I was the typical agent all the way into really most of 2010. So that was three and a half. Yeah, three and a half years. Probably a full four years. I worked seven days a week in the business. And when I look at the journey and I think about the question that I just posed at the beginning of this, you know, it's a time, money, stress, trade off. Right. For agents that don't know what to do to get busy, they may actually have time. They don't have any money and they have stress because the money's not there and money isn't the end all, be all. So it's not to say that that's the only score that matters because it literally isn't. When my father passed away, he had nothing. So it's not the true measure of a man or a woman. And it does make life easier, right? You can provide for your family, you can spend time with your family, you can give to others that are less fortunate than you. And so time, money and stress. So for me, the journey was, this is a 10 over a 10 year journey. So a decade of building the business the first four years, barely hanging on, working six, seven days a week, and then ultimately going from seven days a week to five to three to one. And for the last six years or so, I've been working one to two days a week in my business. Low six figure net worth. When I got started in real estate and made good decisions. Part of what we do in real estate B school is really just teach our members how to move money around systematically. So increasing your net worth is a byproduct of doing this, doing this work and putting your button on the line every day as a business owner. So multiple seven figure net worth. And I don't see that in any ego kind of way, just as encouragement that no matter where you are right now, with your time, your money, stress when you're in deals, right, it's intolerable, you know, And I was able to basically build the business in a way through leverage, through technology, through automated marketing pillars to generate business without heavy lifting all the time. And so the stress, you know, there's not a whole lot of stress for me in my real estate business now. And so really that's, that's what I want you to think about here. I want you to think about for you, you know, what would it mean if you could answer this question in the positive? Am I making the amount of money I want in real estate? Working reasonable hours with a level of stress that's manageable? If you could answer that with a hell yes or heck yeah, right? What would that, what would that look like for you? What would it look like for you and for me? It means a bunch of travel, right? So I get to do fun things with my family. I take my wife on an annual honeymoon. Last six years I've taken on a surprise week long trip, honeymoon worthy. I get to do an annual trip with my daughter, a daddy daughter trip. I get to do a father son trip with my son. Every year we go to Hilton Head in the early part of June. Every year for a full week. We basically would do a Disney cruise. Every year we go to Universal Studios. We take long weekends away. I do an annual ski trip with a couple really good buddies of mine. We do Thanksgiving in Tennessee, Pigeon Forge. We'll do long weekends. We just went to Asheville. We do an annual trip to Turks and Caicos. They've got an amazing, what is it? Breeze, no sandals or breezes. Something like that resort there. That's a week long trip, you know. And the question for you, what would true time and money, freedom do for you? That's the question. That's really what I want you to ponder here is what would time and money freedom do for you? What's missing from your life right now that having more time and more money would solve? And I want this to ground you and motivate you and inspire you to do something different. Right. Obviously I've got, you know what I think to be a solution to most of the problems I see in the real estate industry. Six years in helping real estate agents, top producing agents, team leaders, build their businesses in a way so they're scalable, they're sustainable. It's not a genius with a thousand helpers where our members have their hands in everything. But it's a true business that doesn't depend on the owner. And if you don't have that path right now, you've got to make a decision about how you want the future to look like. What I challenge our members to look at is, you know, go back three years. You know, this is our when we talk to them for the first time, let's go back three years. What was time, money, stress like then two years, what was time, money, stress, one year time, money, stress. And how does it look today? And looking back over the last three years has that time, money, stress equation. And stress can show up physically in your relationship, with your kids, your spouse. It's not just sort of typical, just kind of stress like headache, like you're going to explode, you know, physical, if your physical body isn't where it needs to be, that can be stressful. And then when you look forward, so look back three years, when you look forward a year from now, two years from now and three years from now, how do you want that equation to change? How do you want your perfect week to look your time? How do you want your financial situation to be different? Is there debt that's sort of weighing you down? Do you want to own your house free and clear and have you made steps to do that? And then for stress, do you want to worry about money? Do you want to worry about taking time away from your family? Or maybe you're not spending enough time if you're a believer, you're not spending enough time with your creator on a daily basis. All these things add up and the equation gets off kilter and it takes a reset every once in a while. So the challenge here today is that this is your wake up call, this is the reset button. And just think about these things. This was the real motivation for me building the business that I had and this is not about me. So I gave examples of what my life looked like before I was able to build a business, scale my business in a way that was systems driven. And then I seemingly bragged about all the cool trips I'm able to do. That's not the point. I want to inspire you to come up with what are the things that you're going to do when you build your business the right way. And so take the challenge. Right. All I'm asking you is to put in your calendar the question, am I making the amount of money I want in real estate, working reasonable hours with a level of stress that is manageable? Had a conversation with Dave Hook yesterday. He's one of our boardroom members. His business has increased two and a half times. He left me a voxer message recently. He's looking over his financials and he is hitting income. He used to work about 70 to 80 hours a week. This was three years ago when we had this exact conversation. This time, money stress conversation. He was doing under 100 sides, but most of the sides were his own. He'll do almost two. Well, yeah, just under 2.5 times more volume. But he's been out of production. So he went from 70 plus hours a week down to less than 40 hours a week in his business. And he's fortunate where he built it in such a way, using our tools and systems, to not have to be in production. And he'll make more than double the income working about 80% less hours or. Yeah, 50. Well, yeah, 50% less hours. So about 40% less hours, making double. More than double the income and the stress level. Because he's not. He's built his business in a way where it's systematically driven, you know, where he doesn't have to get involved in every detail and the stress is greatly reduced as a result. So it is possible. It doesn't matter where you are today. It doesn't matter if you're selling two homes a month, one home a month, 20 homes a month. If the time money stress equation isn't working, we've got to address it. And so that's the challenge. Think about how you can move the needle in those areas so it's different for you in the future. That's pretty much all I have. It's just a bit of a challenge here, going into the holidays where time is. It's just a special time to be able to spend with loved ones and just to make sure you have the bandwidth to do it. And when you do it, your business isn't suffering. So I will say that a lot of real estate agents do take off, you know, Thanksgiving to after New Year's when they do their business shuts down. And so that's not the kind of business I'm talking about. You know, a lot of agents will say, I have so much freedom, I can do whatever I want, whenever I want. And I'm not talking about, like, just deciding to when you want to work or not. I'm talking about, like, can you actually make money when you're spending time with loved ones, you know, and if you're the one showing homes and you're the one, you know, doing price reductions, you're the one going on listing appointments, evenings and weekends, doing whatever it takes to make, make, make money, make deals happen, then it's not a life of freedom. So take the challenge. The first Monday of every month, ask yourself that question, am I making the amount of money I want? Real estate working reasonable hours with level stress that is manageable. We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Bye.