The Good, Bad & Ugly: Why It’s So Hard for Most Teams to Implement Their Growth Strategy

Hey there, Business Freedom Podcast listeners. Welcome back to another episode of Business Freedom Podcast. And today is our good, bad, ugly version of the podcast. This is where I talk about just maybe some of the good things, but mostly the bad and the ugly parts. How I've messed up in building a real estate team to make your journey more pleasurable, more profitable, and just way less stressful. And so today I want to chat about creating lasting change. And you know, it is easy as I reflect on really, really any part of my life. I will pick on my health for a second here as I kind of look back with the roller coaster of health. So I'll be all in training for a marathon, eating, you know, 99.99% clean. And then I give up running and I have an excuse to indulge on snacks or whatever. 10:30 at night, sitting in the pantry, eating a half bag of chips, if not a whole bag of chips. And so how do you build? How do you first of all set up a vision for your business which serves your life right? So kind of cast that three, five year vision, but then get to work and consistently do the things you need to do to be successful. And so that's what I want to chat.

I really want to just spend a.

Little bit of time unpacking what that would look like. And let me just share something here so there's no hard sell ever on the podcast. You guys know where the tools are that I go through. If you go to getbschool.com, you've got a resource there in the Revs toolbox, same tools that our higher level and highest level clients use to crush their business. So let's talk about creating lasting change in ourselves. How do we create change in ourselves? So here's the thing. I just mentioned the Toolbox. So every business tool, system, Strategy, Tactic document, 175 training videos, 300 documents listing presentations, buyer presentations, scripts, trackers, one year plans, three year plans, all the people documents, all the financial documents, all the marketing pillars, every single thing I do in marketing my business, all of that is in there. So we can know the best business practices, but far fewer actually embody them in their businesses. We know what to do. For 197 bucks a month, you can grab the Toolbox and you know what to do but change, right? That's where we need, we need to shift you from where you are today. So maybe you're heavy in production, right? You have this production mindset and it's all about working with that buyer, showing them homes or getting a listing and selling that listing. So maybe that's where you are right now. And the shift and what real estate B school. The reason we exist is to help you make that shift.

From production mindset.

Even if you're a team leader, but.

You'Re still in production.

From production mindset to business ownership mindset. And it doesn't mean you have to give a production. We just got to build the business so that it would actually run without you. And many teams don't. The team leaders don't actually have a business because if they were to step.

Away for a couple weeks, business would suffer. It wouldn't be profitable. You know, they've got their hands in too many parts of the business. So change, this process of change is a process that happens over time and it is difficult. Resistance is common. But remember that long lasting change doesn't happen overnight. So what I see a lot in team leaders is that they throw quick fixes into their business. Right? These quick fixes. Like what's a good example?

Yeah.

So maybe a deal blows up and they have an assistant. Instead of training the assistant, letting that assistant fail, they jump in, they give the quick fix and then next time it happens, they're back into it. So quick fixes often backfire, waste your time, energy and resources.

We've all been there.

I've been there. Examples of those quick fixes, maybe you're just dying to get out of buyer production and you hire a buyer agent. So it's bad agent or staff hires. Right. You're just so busy with paperwork that you hire anybody. You interview one person, you hire them. Right. Outsourcing, lead conversion. I see that as a quick fix. That's failing in a lot of instances with solo agents and teams alike.

Ineffective team management.

So not having that clear cadence. Right? The structure of how do I run a weekly level 10 meeting with one of my buyer's agents? How do I run a quarterly conversation with one of my team members so that they really are part of the growth journey of the business and they're truly engaged and crushing for us. How do we do an annual performance review? How do we run a weekly team meeting? Right. What numbers do we track for our company? And then agents doing their own thing. Right. So a lot of teams are not going to be successful in the future because agents, they're not following any procedure. They don't have the right tools and resources to succeed.

And here's the thing, you'll never be.

Finished with the process of change. It's a journey. Just yesterday we had a tough, tough situation. We had to release a team member. Biggest heart ever. I just wasn't able to produce in the position that we had him in. And I don't think it was necessarily a bad hire. It turned out, you know, mostly a core values fit. And then when it really came down to did they really get the position, did they really want it? Did they really have the emotional, physical time capacity to do the position? There was more of a miss on that than there was the core values. But it's never finished. That's my point. Here's the thing. You get what you focus on. So I want to go through three areas or three places you'll go if you don't have a plan.

So I am the planner, right?

The last episode of this, I Talked about my 2009 plan. And every year since, I've had a.

Very intentional plan and usually around a.

Tactical one year that we break into quarters, a three year, and then we have this sort of big, audacious goal, which is a 10 year, not even a plan. It's just a sort of a Mount Everest sort of target that we're running toward and making decisions toward. But in the absence of a plan, three areas consistently demand our focus. Number one is fear. So if you're taking notes, write this down. Fear. We will avoid anything that we believe has the potential to give us pain. When we focus on something, we fear. We feel it today as if it already happened, right? So the anxiety, the worry, you know, a lot of our clients, I'll break it down, break down the reality of what they're telling me, and they have this fear of, you know, financial fear. And I'll just run through their finances and you know, they made $20,000 last month and they were expecting to make 30. It's like, really, like that's your fear. Maybe, maybe you're living a lifestyle that if you can't live your lifestyle on 20 grand a month, then we've got a different problem. It's not your business, you know. So that's an example. Pleasures number two. Most people live in constant stress that they simply long for a sense of relief. Little things that make us feel good immediately. What are some examples of those little things that make us feel good immediately? I can think of two. Anything that's on the cell phone, right? Social media, the instant sort of dopamine or endorphin or whatever, that hormone that's released when you get that quick sort of hit of getting a like or liking someone or scrolling through. And that's an example. Food. I've been there. I haven't let my health go terribly. You know, I've always sort of. I lost the same 20 pounds probably 10 times in the last five years. That's sort of my deal. My roller coaster is not very dramatic, but I'll go to food. You know, it's a little hit of pleasure, you know, when I'm stressed, I'll go to that. A lot of worse things, right? Alcohol. Alcohol is that thing if you're having a couple of drinks a day to take the edge off on a consistent basis. That's something that may not be serving you at the highest level or your family at the highest level. And then number three is other people's demands. So we don't want to disappoint people and we recognize that we must meet their needs. This can happen in our team with agents just coming to us and asking for help. This can happen with friends, potentially. Your email, right, whatever ends up in your inbox is someone else's agenda. And so I put a sort of unrelated topic. I put an app on my phone and on my laptop called Rescue Time. And it literally tracks where. So your desktop versus your mobile on a daily basis. I'm actually looking at it right now. So Wednesday, October 3rd, I have got in my working hours. So it tracks when you're. You put in your business hours and it tracks when you're not working, when you. When you said you're not gonna be working, but you are. Um, so. And it tracks apps and productivity and so it's pretty cool. But when you're in email, you're in other people's demands, right? And so let's talk about the balance between strategy. It's easy to come up with a three year plan, but how do you actually bring it down and get that traction on a regular basis? And as a leader, so you're listening to this podcast because you are either thinking about starting a business, building a business, or you're already in the mix. The messiness, the grind of that. As leaders, we have an incredible responsibility to ensure that the great plans, dreams and visions we steward translate into consistent action. Huge responsibility, right?

As a leader, it means you've brought.

At least one person into your world and you're taking responsibility for that person's livelihood. So now this three year vision, right, you convince a solid agent or two and an admin to come on and join you in this ride, this roller coaster ride, huge responsibility, and we will be held responsible and it will be held accountable for the effectiveness of our stewardship. I do believe there's a level of accountability. We think as the team leader, the owner, that there's no accountability. And I think that's the wrong way to look at it. I come at this from more of a faith. I'm ultimately accountable to something much, much bigger than me. To me, I'm Jesus follower. So to me, Jesus is the owner of my business. And it makes it sort of easy. Even if you're not a believer or you have a different faith, you should have something outside of your business that you're accountable to. Maybe it's your family, maybe your family is the CEO of your business. And the decisions you make about where to spend your time during the day or the things you focus on or giving up lead gen time or spending money on things that don't translate into a return on investment, Be accountable to something for those decisions.

We have to be zealous in our.

Pursuit of disciplined execution. So disciplined execution, that is a writer downer. And despite this responsibility. So there's some stats that I pulled here. The sobering reality is that 90% of strategic plans are not successfully accomplished. 90%, 67. So 2/3 of failed plans attributed to a breakdown in execution. So it's not that the plan is a bad plan, it's that it's a. It's a question of failed execution. So why don't we just do it right? Here's the plan. Why don't we just go out and do it? I'm part of a group called C12 and it's Christian business owners. We kind of serve as a board of directors for each other. And one probably my favorite sort of principle is we say priorities are what we do, everything else is just talk. So think about that. Priorities are what we do and everything else is just talk. So you can talk about treating your wife better and doing date nights and thinking of her and using softer words and encouraging her dreams and giving time to, to connect with her every night. You could talk about those things or you can make it a priority and you actually do it. You can talk about growing your real estate business and you know that you need to focus on new business development for three hours a day and make X number of contacts and you know, have X number of set appointments met, sign all of that stuff, talk about it. But if you don't make a priority and you actually do it, it's not going to translate into anything meaningful in your life that will serve you and your family. So it takes an uncommon commitment and it's hard work. I joke, although it's not a joke. Real estate's hard. Any path you take in real estate is hard. The harder path is the path and I think it's, there's a lot of.

If you go down the path of.

Being a solo agent, that's precarious. Like the future of the solo agent is. It's not a path that I'm going to consider. The team we're building, we're building a team that is delivering higher level of service than Ritz Carlton. And that's what we coach to that we coach for you to be on the side of the line. The line is going to be technology discounters, different business models, lead aggregators, Zillow, I home, all of these different things that are coming in to play, you know, Redfin, all of that stuff. And then there's going to be a slice, a big slice of the market that wants a solution for the real estate services that is differentiated, higher level and the results improve it. Right? That's hard work and it's super fun and super rewarding. And so we call that a high performance real estate team. Hpret strategies are sometimes simple to state but not easy to implement. Winning teams must commit to a planning process that yields clarity, alignment, teamwork and accountability. So all, all of that, right? Clarity, that's the three year plan. Alignment is that one year, you know, breaking it down. A year at a time, a quarter at a time. Teamwork. Everyone has a number, a measurable, a rock, a project that they're working on to move this business forward. And ultimately you're accountable to each other and the plan in a way that doesn't feel like a lot of people like to say accountability feels icky. They don't like to do it. Accountability is love. It's love for the business that's going to have a big impact in the world. You and your team must execute, track and assess your goals regularly. And the process we break down in real estate B school is this. It starts at 10 years with that big heritage goal.

We break it down to a very.

Very tactical, tangible, describable, three year picture. The three year picture, we go to one year. So the first year has four quarters and there's 13 weeks and a quarter and there's five business days in a week. So we call it the 3, 1, 4, 13, 3 year picture, 1 year plan. It's this quarterly 4 quarters make up a year and then it's 13 weeks and a quarter. We have all of it laid out and that's basically the basis by which our members are successful. You have to think about your business that way. We must escape the gravity pull of Great plan, poor results, destiny. That destiny is so common in businesses, right? Great plan, poor results. That is not why we're doing this work. Okay, so priorities are what we do. Everything else is just talk. So if you have any interest whatsoever in taking a look at what the toolbox looks like. So it's everything you'll need to scale your business. Just go to Rev Get b school. Sorry getbschool.com.

This is my life's work.

And so I put everything into this toolbox. Not. Yeah, I'm a capitalist for sure. This is a for profit business and this toolbox will serve you at the highest, highest level. So take a look. I'm going to continue to give as much content and help and open, honest, authentic about what I really sucked at, what I was great at, where I still struggle, where our team struggles. I'm going to continue to bring that to this, this podcast. And if you ever want to take that next step with us, grab the toolbox, which is a month by month deal. All the updates are included. Or you can always jump onto a business growth strategy session with me or one of my business coaches and we'll take you through that 3:1 vision. Basically three years. What do you want it to look like? What does it look like now? How do we bridge the gap? How do we get you there? So, and that's rebstrategyssession.com or you can go to realestatebschool.com so much love and respect. As I always say to our members, this is not the easy journey. You know, so nobody, nobody said this is going to be easy. And I promise you, it is about the most fun you'll ever have in your life. Building a business worth owning and just figuring out all the moving pieces to be able to do that. We'll talk to you guys soon.