The Hope Cycle - Making it Through the Suffering

What's going on? Business Freedom podcast listeners, another edition of the podcast. This is Lars Hedinborg, founder of Real Estate B School co founder of High Performance Real Estate Advisors. I've been at the Real Estate Business building game since 2007, right before the 2008 Great Recession. And I've been doing the B School business building since 2013. So today's podcast episode is going to be a bit of a risk I'm taking going out on a limb today as I'm going to quote scripture and even if you don't share my beliefs, please hang in and listen to what I'm going to say as it relates 100% what I went through in my business journey, not only in my real estate team building, also building this business, real estate B School, what most of us are going to go through again as this thing we're in right now unfolds. I'm going to do a separate podcast on another week of multimillion jobless claims. So my next podcast I'm recording is on that, my take on all that. And for now, though, I'm calling this podcast the Hope Cycle, Making it Through the Suffering. So the Hope Cycle Making it Through the Suffering. So here comes the scripture part. Just take this. If you don't share my beliefs, take this as just a story from a guy, Paul, writing a letter to the Romans about his take on this. And so bear with me. Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand and we boast in the hope of the glory of God. Here is the good part and the part we're going to dissect as it relates to business. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings because we know that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance, character and character hope. Let me repeat that. We also glory in our sufferings because we know that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance, character and character hope. So I want to break that down and I do this because I just, I'm reading the book of Romans and this I don't know if God would have had it come this way, but for me, a lot of times I'm thinking about business applications for everything I read and consume. And so some of it may not be like on point with what God wants. For me, the takeaway for me as a believer and for you as just a business person, if you don't share my faith is that 100% over and over again, anywhere, anytime I've gotten to a place of hope, it's come exactly with suffering, perseverance, character. And. And then the hope comes. You do not get to a good place in any aspect of your business or life if you don't go through that cycle. And so for me, and I mean, we're close to 4,000 families served in a little over 12 years in real estate, and seven and a half years, you know, with the training, business, real estate, B school, and none of it came without suffering in my marriage. You know, I'm hopeful that we'll be together forever only because we went through this suffering to really get to know each other and how we can serve each other. And I do the tough things in the marriage. It's the hard, easy principle. I did a whole podcast on that. I do the hard things so that we're together forever and it's an easier relationship. So the suffering is there, the perseverance, right? You need to persist in anything if you want to be successful. So many folks in our industry are looking for the easy way out and the easy button. It's just not possible. And then 100%, when you go through suffering, you persevere, you develop this will, this grit, this character about you that will do what it takes to get to the destination you want to get to. And therein lies the hope. So I'm going to break this down in really practical terms. I got into real estate the worst or best year ever, depending on how you look at it. It's when everyone was getting out of real estate, and here I am, you know, I'd never done sales before, never built a business before, never marketed anything before, never hired or managed anyone before. And I'd only been married a little over a year, and we had our first. My wife was pregnant when I got into real estate, and I left a job where I was making a couple hundred grand a year, and I was flying first class around the world. I was helping acquire companies for an aerospace company called Curtiss Wright. And I left that to enter into a business where I was showing homes like an hour away from my home. I was leaving my family, my newborn son, my wife of a year and a half to go show homes, like $85,000 homes, like an hour and 15 minutes from my home. I was willing to do whatever. I was willing to go through the suffering and everything I did in the business, it was a stepping stone to something better. So when I was showing homes, I was thinking of, like, how long do I need to do this where I can hand it off to somebody, and it could be part of a system now that runs in my business. And that's where the perseverance came in. I worked a lot of hours in those early years. I went from, you know, 27 sides in my first 10 months to 44 sides my first full year. 58 the next year. I hired an agent late in that year. Then I brought on four agents in 2010 that had a combined experience of over 20 years. Here I am, what, eight, nine. My third for a full year in real estate. I'm bringing agents onto my team that had seven times the combined experience that I had. And I only was able to do it because I was willing to suffer and to do what had to be done in terms of persevering. And it builds up a character in me and a confidence that I was going to be the one that would step up in this crap show of a market. Back then, 2009, 2010, was really, really bad in real estate in most markets around the country. And I was the guy that had built up the character. And I was super hopeful because of the cycle that I went through. And then I was willing to do it over again for this business where I got right back into production. I was willing to suffer, you know, through figuring out how to speak to agents now to help them build a real estate team that runs without them. So to cut the story short on that, you know, once you go through that suffering in any part of your business. So I went through it in multiple parts of the business to be able to get to a point where I had the confidence and I had built up the hope, and it wasn't so hard anymore. And so, to me, no matter what you believe in terms of your faith, there is just truth in that. You will not have, like, we are not going to get to the other side of this crisis without going through some really interesting times. You know, economists are smarter than I am, and they're calling for all types of recoveries, like, V W U L Check, Mark. Like, there's just a whole bunch of stuff that folks are calling for. And I don't know anything about all of that. I just know that it's almost 30 million people have lost their jobs in the last six weeks. And so my next podcast episode is going to give you a debrief on all that and how I think it's going to impact the market. So my sentiment here is that the business I built for the last seven years, I've worked one day a week in my real estate team. It did not come without suffering. And the only way you can get to the good part is to persevere. And in the perseverance, you build up just a grit about you and you just get more confident. And so the character, you need to be able to get to a point where there is peace and there is hope for something greater because you have proven to yourself that you could get through something that was hard and get through it. And that just gives you more confidence to be able to do the next thing. So if you are at a point where it is hard right now or you are fearful and and there is suffering, you could respond in one of two ways. You can absolutely push through and do the right things in your business, align yourself with the right folks that are going to help you get through it, or you could retreat and you could really just give in to the fear and anxiety and consume everything that's out there in the market. I hope you don't choose that route. If you're at a point in your journey where you've achieved conventional success, the only thing I could offer you is a conversation. As of the recording of this podcast episode, I am doing business growth strategy sessions for folks that are at a point where they're just struggling pretty bad. So if you go to realestatebschool.com and you click on resources, you can apply for a business growth strategy session. So I'm going to get on the phone and I'm going to just really break down exactly where you are right now, where you want to go and what might hold you back, especially given the crisis that we're going through right now. That's all I ever knew in terms of building my real estate business. And almost 4000 families served, probably about 2, maybe about 1500 of those families were served during the Great Recession years. You know that 2007 is when our market shifted a little bit to 2012. Ish. You know, a lot of those families were served during those years where everyone was getting out of real estate. We're getting ready to see that again. You know, our roster in Charlotte was 15,000 down to 5,000 in 2011. 2012. Now it's back up to 17,000 with no more homes sold today than was sold at the peak back in 2007. And so that's getting ready to happen again with this, the massive jobless claims. I don't see a way to quickly recover from this. I think it's going to be multi year recovery and not this quick. V and I might be wrong. Maybe I'm just not as smart as some of the economists out there who are predicting a quick recovery. And I'll talk more about jobless claims and where I see this this virus going and all that good stuff here in the next podcast episode. So just take faith that if you're suffering, you're in a good place, you're surrounded with good by good company. And if you need help, go to realestatebschool.com, click on the orange button. Submit a brief, just a couple bits of information about your business, and we'll jump on a call and we'll help you get through this time. Be good, we'll talk to you then.