The Hard Easy Principle in Action!

What's up Business Freedom Podcast listeners? Lars Hedinborg, back for another edition of the podcast. Founder of Real Estate B School and co founder of High Performance Real Estate Advisors in Charlotte, North Carolina. I've been at the real estate team building side of things since 2008. I hired my first assistant, my first buyer agent in 2009, got into real estate in 2007, realized that it was not what I thought it was. I started Real Estate b school in 2012. 13 and so I've got this experience of what we're calling this episode is the Hard Easy Principle in action. And so I have a lot to pull on from my personal life and from a couple businesses that I built into multimillion dollar businesses. So what is the Hard Easy Principle? Before I get too far into my take on it, my experience with it. So the Hard Easy principle is anything in any area of your life where when you do something that's hard, it makes things easier later. So a good example is one that's near and dear to my heart. And this is essentially due to my dad. If you followed me for any period of time, you may have heard me talk about my dad. He drank until alcoholic drank until I was 15 years old. My parents divorced when I was 4 years old. So I just had one of those childhoods that wasn't like the Cleaver, Leave it to Beaver type setup. Not that I loved all of it because I didn't probably it was really hard being a kid and growing up in that. Now I can look back and appreciate that all of that hardship made me who I am today. So the Hard Easy, the reason I even mentioned my dad is he was just a guy that didn't take care of himself physically. So he stopped drinking when I was 15. He passed away when I was like 40 or 41. So he was sober for 25 years, but still didn't take care of his physical body and just the drinking. And he smoked for probably 40, 50 years or something crazy took a toll on his physical body. He had stroke in 2009 and he passed away in 2014. Died a slow death over five years. So I bring up that sort of sad story as, you know, my number one motivator in my physical body and the reason I'm willing to do the hard work is that I'm betting on the fact that life will be easier than in my 60s, 70s and 80s if I take care of my physical body in my 40s and 50s. So do I love working out five times a week? Do I Love a plant based whole food diet 95% of the time. Do I love drinking a gallon of water a day and peeing every 45 minutes? I don't love any of that stuff. But the hard easy principle when it comes to my physical body is that I'm willing to do those things that are hard, quote unquote now, because I want things to be easier for me later. Alright, so that's the hard easy principle. I want to take you through the hard easy principle in action when it comes to my real estate business growth journey. So being a real estate agent sucks for a couple reasons. And even being a real estate team leader sucks for a couple reasons. If you don't set the thing up the right way, traditional success in our industry is really, really tough. You heard me say it a hundred times. If you heard me say it once in all of this stuff I put out, whether it's a webinar or our case study, our masterclass training or a podcast episode, or if you've been to one of our intensive workshops as a client, I just talk about it a lot. So when I started in real estate, this is 2007. 2007 to 2012 is sort of the first phase of. Yeah, kind of like the first phase of me figuring out business. Took me a full five years to build that business in such a way where it didn't depend on me. And 2007 was my first nine months. I was solo. I hired my first assistant 2008. That year was really, really hard. But I had a focus toward, you know, there's got to be an easier way to do this. Let me sort of focus on getting good at marketing. So leads came in more sustainably and systematically and predictably. And I built sales systems and processes that I use myself personally. So on the one hand it was really hard, but I followed a system. So I knew that if I had someone do this thing like a buyer consultation or listing consultation for me, it could be easier if I wasn't doing those appointments and we could do more of them if I had leverage through other folks on my team. I worked a lot of hours on my business, even though I was working 50 to 55, 60 hours in the business where I was doing the job of a real estate agent. And I probably worked 15 to 20 hours, usually late at night that I worked on the business, building out marketing systems, building out a system for sales scripts around different things in my business, even scripts for my contractor closing person to make that process run smoother and more predictably in Terms of predictably getting happy clients so we would get more referrals. So all of that was really, really hard. 2000, 7, 8, 9 and really most of 2010 we did 118 transactions. I did more than half of them. Really hard to sell. I think it was 66 homes to sell. 66 homes. They got four agents at the time I had an administrator. I think late in that year we hired our second administrator. I had never really managed anybody before. I'd never cast vision before. I never owned a business before. So all of it was hard. And doing it with an eye toward this thing running without me being in every piece of it was honestly the only thing that kept me going. And so that was really hard. But I got to a point where it became really easy. So in 2011 was the year I sort of committed to getting out of production. 2010 I got a buyer side. 2011 I got out of listings. January 2012 was the last closing I've ever had. And I won't even represent myself anymore in real estate. So I don't ever represent any client, you know, since January 2012. So that that business became a little easier and it still has its challenge. You know, we still fight in the same fight that all real estate teams and top, top producing real estate agents are fighting. So that's, that's the hard easy part of that journey was that 2009, 10 to 2011, 2012, and you know, since 2012 to the present, it's been a whole lot easier in my coaching business, same journey. The hard easy was 2013 is when I formally launched probably 12 months before that. I was building out the tools, the drivers, the blueprint that we teach to the accelerators. All of that stuff was being even though we're on the fourth generation of all of that stuff, it was still sort of, that sort of work was hard. So when I the real estate business became easy, then I put myself right back into building and systemizing and I got back into production in terms of one on one coaching. I was now doing sales calls. I was doing strategy sessions back in 2013, 14 and 15. And so it became hard again. The thing that keeps me going still is the fact that we have this big mission. There's a lot of brokenness in our industry. No one's talking about the real issues as it relates to a team leader or top producing agent. I think the conversation is just completely amiss in our industry. So the hard is building out a sales process for a coaching company when I've never built A coaching company before building, doing those calls, doing the one on ones, coaching someone when I've never, nobody ever taught me how to be a coach. And yet I'm entering to someone's life and they're placing their faith in me and what I'm building, even though I'm building the plane as I'm flying it. Same thing we do in real estate and just having maximum impact, being willing to do whatever I need to do to get the result for somebody that came into real estate B school, even back in the early days. Now the process, the onboarding process, how we coach folks, the step by step, you know, blueprint that we use, all of it is really sort of elegant and way more graceful than it was back when I got the thing started and up and running. So the hard in that business was 2013 to 2015, 16. And now we're sort of in the easier phase of that business where we built out the system. Systems, they're sustainable. I've got empowered team members that are phenomenally awesome at what they do, that are helping our members get predictable results quicker than if I was doing all parts of it myself. And so now this business, it's easier for me and it's easier for everybody because everybody knows the piece that they need to focus on to get the result for our client. And. And so there's no easy way to do this. I guess that's the punchline here. And it's, you know, hopefully it's not a gut punch. I see folks that want an easy path and I see folks that have taken an easy path and it's led them to a business that's not worth owning. I'll give you an example of the easy hard. That's the flip side of this principle. So let me spend a little bit of time there. The easy hard principle is someone that, you know. Yeah. I'll give an example of a team leader that we work with. So someone that's built a team that's selling hundreds of homes per year. This is a specific example. I'm thinking about hundreds of homes per year on the wrong economic model. And they need to remain in production with massive overhead. And they're not making more profit than their personal production. They're not holding their agents accountable. They don't have a lead management process in place. They're spending money on things that can't possibly return for them because of how much they cost. And the tracking is not where it needs to be. There's not a definitive culture on the team. So it's easy, honestly, it's easy to put. And they're working twice the amount of hours that they should be working. And they're super stressed working 80 hours a week, super stressed. Not making more than their production in profit for a multimillion dollar GCI real estate team. It's really easy to build that, right? If I want to build something that makes me no money, has massive overhead, I don't track anything. I don't hold my team accountable. Admin or sales. There's not a culture to adhere to. So it's come and go as you please. Did I mention not make money? I think I mentioned that I have to work two times the normal amount of hours. That's actually easy to build because it's not worth owning. In the end, there's zero value. If I were to come in and sell that real estate business, there'd be zero value. I spent eight years in acquisitions and strategy for an aerospace company. I spent a year and a half doing valuation consulting for a small consulting firm. And then I spent two years on Wall street as a financial analyst around acquisitions. And so I understand how to calculate value of businesses. That's all. All that to say I wasn't. That's not an ego statement. I just have a deep background and where's the true value in a business? And so I traveled to like 25 different countries and I looked at 200 different companies and my job would be to really bring a team for four or five of us would come in marketing, sales, legal operations, a financial guy. We'd come in and we just assess the value. So a business like that, that was easier to build because there's no accountability, there's no, there's no tracking. It's loose. And I'm going to make up for it with more hours and just my own personal production. And the industry is going to put me on a pedestal and sort of, you know, everyone's going to look at me like, how do you sell hundreds of homes? My answer is like, it's not even worth anything. When you value a business, you have to extract the owner and their participation. And we would spend time in the work I used to do in acquisitions, really figuring out how much this business depends on the owner. When we take out the owner, can we even replace them? So are they the main cog in the middle of this business or are they a little cog on the outside? The only way to have value in your real estate business, not that everyone wants to sell their business, but the only way you have value is to be a little cog on the outside of the wheel, so you're not the cog that's running the whole thing. If you envision, like, the gears where there's one gear in the middle that runs like six gears, that runs like 10 gears, you need to be a little gear on the outside of the 10 gears so the business runs and it turns you. You're not the main thing turning all of the different cogs, so there's no value in it. So how hard is it to build a business that has no value? It's not hard, but now that person's a slave to the business. And so that's the easy, hard principle. It's easy to build that, and now it's really hard to own that business. I've got twice the amount of hours in it. I'm super stressed all the time financially. I'm not where I need to be, and I can't pursue other areas of my life that matter because I'm putting so much into the business. So I prefer the hard, easy way. Like, I know it's a cheesy quote, but entrepreneurship is living your life for a few years like most people won't, so you can have the rest of your life to enjoy. Like most people will never be able to enjoy it. If you build this thing the easy, hard way, you're going to have something that is just more stressful than being a solo agent. And so that's not what we want for you. So, and honestly, it's not that hard. You know, there's, there's, there's mindset issues around scaling and growing a business. You know, from our members come in, you know, at the low end, 3 to 500,000 GCI, 750 to a million, sort of in that ballpark where they just don't know how to get to the next level. So it doesn't depend more and more on them. So as they grow and they serve more families with their real estate needs, they're doing less of the work and their hours are scaling down and their stress is scaling down as their income scales up. The hard, easy principle. If you're hiring a bunch of agents and it feels too easy and you don't have a culture and you're not tracking your expenses and you have no cadence every day with your, with your team, and it's just this sort of loose thing, you're on the easy, hard path. It's easy now, but it's going to be really hard in the future. So as I'm Saying this, this does not sound like a great commercial for real estate B school. The good news is that we have failed miserably at this. And what I mean by that is, you know, I was the first student of real estate B school back in 2007, 2012, doing this all on my own and getting to the point where the business ran without me. And now we're seven plus years into real estate B school, serving other clients and failing in all the ways you could fail as we're getting better at what we do. So that's the good news, is that this is built out in a way now where it really is a sort of come in and a lot of swiping and deploying. And we still push you on mindset. We still, you know, struggle to have you not chase squirrels and all the typical things real estate team leaders get distracted by. So if that's you, and this is really sort of hitting a chord, maybe you're in the process of building a team and you're not doing it the right way. We've got to have a conversation. We've got our pilot program. Just go to realestatebschool.com or go to rebspilotprogram.com R E B spilotprogram.com and we'll be able to just have a conversation about your business. We've got a really brief application to make sure that we're a good fit to talk about our pilot program. Then we'll get you in there where it's 30 days. You work with us for free. There's no obligation whatsoever. And we help you build, really get clear on the three years and help you build that one year plan. And we go through your business soup to nuts in terms of what you're doing really well and what you might not be doing really well. And we'll come up with a custom plan for you to move your business forward, to grow your top line and your bottom line, but to not grow your hours and not grow your stress. So go to realestatebschool.com, we'll see you over there.