A first-person YouTube reflection recorded from Aruba in which the speaker recounts building a leveraged real estate business while prioritizing marriage and family. He describes starting in 2006 (real estate license and marriage), early hard work as a solo agent, building systems and delegating to gain freedom, key milestones (rapid early sales, scaling to hundreds of transactions), and invites viewers to book a 45-minute business growth strategy session.
Questions this video answers
June 2006.
October 2006.
November 2007.
About 70 homes for roughly $500,000 in GCI.
Over 300 transactions in 2013.
Hey there, everyone. I'm coming to you from Aruba. This is my annual honeymoon trip. You can see we are at a ridiculously nice resort. So once a year I surprise my bride and we get away for a trip. This year was Aruba. Actually, last year was Aruba too. It was one of the destinations that was really intentional with their Covid precautions. And so that's why we're here again for a second year. And I wanted to touch base with you this week just to kind of reflect on my business growth journey a little bit. Every year, I take my bride away and we have time to reflect on our marriage. And, you know, 14 years ago, the year I got married was the same year I got my real estate license in June that year. And I got married in October 2006. And I had this vision for real estate that was a life of freedom. And, you know, so the life I have now, there was nothing easy about achieving it. And really, quite the contrary. In a lot of ways, you know, staying in our comfort zone is almost an easier path than getting out of our comfort zone. And I think I'm wearing a shirt. Yeah. Comfortable. Be comfortable with the uncomfortable. It's sort of the mantra of business if you're gonna challenge yourself to do things a different way. And for me, it was building a business. The water just came up. It was building a business that didn't rely on me. And that took a lot of intention, like laser focused intention, on getting out of all of the things that I knew someone else could do just as good as I could do. You know, that sort of mindset carried through really, in everything in my life. There's just certain things that others can do better than I can do, and then certain things that you can't delegate. You know, for me, the important roles in. When I got married, it was to be a good husband. And working seven days a week was not going to allow me to achieve that most important thing. And then in late 2007, November, we had Anderson. And then now the next important thing was me being a great father. And again, working seven days a week was not gonna allow me, on top of wanting to be a great husband, to also be a great father. And it didn't happen right away. You know, 2007, 2008, I was a solo agent. I think that 20 months, my first 20 months, I sold 70 homes or so for about 500,000 in GCI. And it wasn't pretty. You know, I worked pretty much every weekend to do, yet I was committed to the outcome of Being a business owner and not just simply selling homes. And so the question I have for you today, and I want to unpack it a little bit, is what are the things you're holding onto in your business that are keeping you from a life of freedom? What are the things that you're holding on to in your business? Hopefully the water is not too loud in your business that are keeping you from a life of freedom. And so for me, in those early days, you know, it's a combination of things that I can build systems around, you know, use technology or even some. Some systems don't even require a whole bunch of technology, just a little bit of, you know, thinking ahead of time that, hey, I find myself doing this thing over and over and over again. How can I create a little system and then either get a piece of technology to run that system or get a person to run that? And that's been my approach in business forever. It's not all that much more complicated than that. So when you look at the things you touch every day, every week, every month, every quarter in your business, maybe just take a moment after watching this video to write down the things that aren't all that complicated that you do repetitively, that if you can get them all off your plate, you can elevate the things you do in your business, which hopefully is, you know, meeting with more potential buyers and sellers, or if you're running a team, you know, potential recruits, what's keeping you back from doing those dollar productive activities. And if you're not. If you're not thinking in this way and you just sort of put your head down every day and you let your day unfold in front of you. The chances that you'll get any leverage in your business or life, the chances are pretty low because you're not bringing a lot of intention around, even just thinking about what's possible. There is a movie called the Founder with Michael Keaton, who. He's Ray Kroc in the McDonald's story. And he's actually not. Not really. He's not really paint. The picture painted of him in the movie is not great one yet. The scene, if you go to YouTube and you type in the founder parking lot scene, you will get a picture or a vision of what my vision was for my real estate business. That book E. Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. In the book, he talks about the McDonald's story and Ray Kroc and Ray Kroc's vision for that little burger stand. Exactly the approach I took to my real estate Business. And I was maniacal and obsessed with just delegating the things off of my plate, building a system and getting someone else to run the system. And that's what Ray Kroc did in that. In that movie, right? He envisioned, you know, having 10,000 different locations and what that would need to look like. And so if you want freedom, you know, I'm not saying this out of any kind of bragging or ego or anything like that. The fact, though, that I get to travel the way that I do, and I get to, you know, do the things in my business that I'm good at, which it's not that many things. That's the beauty of. Once you do get obsessed with this intentionality around leverage, you'll realize that you're not really good at that many things. And if you can get yourself doing the things that you're really good at for at least 80% of your time, your work week doesn't have to be 50, 60, 70 hours. If you're working that many hours and you're not making the kind of money that you want, it's a failure of vision, which breaks down into leverage, which is systems and people. And so that's my message for you today as I report to you from Aruba. Hopefully, there's some inspiration, you know, around my story and the fact that I didn't have a business building background. I didn't have a marketing background, I didn't have a systems background. I'd never really sold anything before I got into real estate. So I didn't come into it, you know, with this feeling of, you know, confidence around what I had done in the past and how I could leverage that into what I could do in real estate. It was just this. What does it say here? Be comfortable with the uncomfortable. It really was like, my first six years. It took me six years to go from grinding it out solo agent to completely free, you know, the team doing what? 2013, we did like over 300 transactions. Then 400. In 2014, 2012, I sold one home out of 248. So it took me about five, six years to build a fully leveraged real estate business. And every day for five, six years, I was uncomfortable because I was constantly pushing myself into the next thing that brought more discomfort into my life. And so that's my encouragement. Hopefully there is some encouragement in that. You have to be really uncomfortable if you want to live a life of freedom and have the opportunity to spend time with loved ones and not be so caught up in the grind of Real estate. So my friends, if you're at the point in your journey where you wish there was a sort of a roadmap or a guide to help you along this path, you know, I didn't have it back then. I had coaches, I spent a lot of money on coaches and mentors. There wasn't this straight line path, this roadmap to freedom. And so real estate B school was created out of, out of me doing the journey. Like, it wasn't this like, man, I'm going to start, start a coaching company. You know, when I figured this out, it was like, man, this was hard. It took me a lot of kind of getting a whole bunch of things together from, you know, over a million dollars spent in coaching and personal development and trainers and all of that. And now I know the path and I have to share it with others. So that was another discomfort point for me was getting up in front of people and, you know, sharing what I had learned in my journey as a way to make the journey easier for others. And so if you're in this sort of tough spot, not, you know, maybe you're selling a lot of houses, but you don't have a lot of time or freedom to enjoy any of it. Let's just have a conversation about it. Let's see what it looks like. Just go, well, there should be a link here on this video and just book in for a business growth strategy session. It's literally a coaching conversation, 45 minute call about where you are right now in your business and, and where you want to be in the future and what's holding you back. Three parts to the conversation. If there's an opportunity to work together, we'll talk about it. If there's not, that's totally cool as well. So take action right now. Book in a business growth strategy session and we will see you soon. Be well.
