The Pain-Free Way to Grow a Profitable, Sustainable Real Estate Team From Day 1

Welcome back to Real Estate Team Builders. Lars Hedinborg here, founder of Real Estate B School. And the title of today's episode is how to make the shift from agent to owner. So my journey in business and in the real estate industry specifically was one of I just figured out really early on how to generate a whole bunch of high quality leads. I learned very simple scripts and I learned how to sell a lot of real estate. But I didn't know how to run a business. I didn't know what systems meant. I'd never hired a person before. I didn't know what culture meant or core values or how to run like the ongoing cadence of a business or I didn't know any of it. And we just had the pleasure and the honor of chatting with Veronica Figueroa who closed over 2,000 transactions last year, the number one team at exp in terms of transaction sides. And she kind of unpacked her journey, as you know, got into the business, sold over 50 homes in her first full year and then kind of like everything kind of goes, goes from there. We figure out a way to get busy enough where our business and then our life becomes unmanageable. And, and so there are three things I want to have a conversation around today. And this, this really fits in well into the conversation we had with Veronica. And if you missed that, I really want you to go back and listen to that episode. And if you are wondering like how to unpack these different stages of growth in terms of making this shift from agent to owner, go to Real estate business growth. Yeah. Realestate Business growth dot com. Let me just, I'm going to triple check that real estate business growth.com it the real estate Business Growth Navigator is a report that I put together that is really just a pure give in terms of what it looks like to navigate the different stages of growth from like new in the business, you know, under 100,000 of GCI to sitting in the owner's box in your business with 3 million plus GCI. The questions you should ask yourself the the tools and systems you need to implement, what the hours look like, how much money you'll be making, what the team structure looks like. It is nuts, nuts, nuts. The nuts and bolts of what it takes to build a profitable sustainable real estate business, which is everything we are about here at Real Estate B School. So go to realestatebusinessgrowth.com and let's dig into this conversation about how do you really make this shift from agent to owner but do it in a way where you minimize the pain and suffering, right? My journey was painful. There was plenty of suffering, there was plenty of unclear moments, a lot of second guessing if it was even worth it because I didn't have a roadmap. I had lots of coaches. You know, I have spent over a million dollars in coaching and different training programs. And I've gone all in, in terms of wanting to achieve at a high level, not just in business, but in all the areas of life that matter. But there really wasn't this step by step guide. And now looking back in my journey, my first full year in real estate, I sold 44 homes, then 58 homes. That next year I launched the team, did 118, 178. The year 2012, we did 248. I did one transaction. So I had this intention of becoming the owner and then 312 and 400 plus, and then hundreds of homes per year ever since. And the first thing looking back and now having coached hundreds of real estate team builders on their journey from agent to owner, the first thing is. And I bucket them together. But it's a mindset and vision for me. You know, having just gotten married in 2006 and we had our first child, Anders, late 2007, you know, I instantly felt the pressure of being a top agent. Selling 44 homes in 2008, my first, my first year full year in real estate. And that was seven days a week. And it was, it was not manageable, it was not sustainable. I couldn't be a good husband, a good dad. I couldn't show up in the areas of life that like my priorities, if you were to ask me, my priorities are like my family and my wife and my one kid and we wanted to have multiple children, but real estate doesn't allow for that. You can't sell a whole bunch of homes, three, four or five homes a month as a solo agent and have a good life. It's just really challenging. And for those agents that have figured out a way to do it, it comes with a ton of sacrifice. And it's, it's most evenings, most weekends, and you're out of bounds all the time. And the standards that you set for yourself are typically, they fall to the wayside because you're chasing the next deal. And it's this constant scarcity mindset. So I wasn't willing to go down that path. And so my mindset and the vision I had, it was a mindset around like, how, what would it look like if I could sell hundreds of homes per year, but without Me having to work at the time just evenings and weekends. Like I want to sell hundreds of homes per year, but I don't want to work evenings and weekends. And so that mindset of more like, of what a true business would look like in the real estate space. How can I help buyers and help sellers way better than just me alone and do it without having to sacrifice all the things that we sacrifice and how can I make a lot of money doing it? So not just selling a lot of homes because there are traditional teams that are set up in a way where they're selling a lot of homes, but there's not a lot financially and typically loosely sort of formed teams with low standards, low accountability, they have low profits and it forces the team owner to stay in production. So it was this mindset around like I'm going to take the mindset of business owner and I have a very clear vision. In late 2009, I hadn't even started a team yet. By the end of 2012, my three year vision was just to work SOI listings and my goal was to sell 240 properties. So I missed it because we sell 248 and I only sold one transaction. It was one listing. And then I was out of production for forever. And 2013 is when I launched Real Estate B school. And we've been refining and working these systems. So that's. Number one, is that you have to be clear on where you're going and then own that mindset. Even if you're in the daily grind of real estate today, you've got to own the fact that I'm a business owner. It just so happens that I'm stuck right now at this point. Not stuck, but I'm just, I'm working on my business in this way at this time for this season. But my mindset truly is that of a business owner. So that's number one is mindset and vision. Number two is, is leverage. And Veronica talked to this. But leverage comes in the form of, of anything that you can use in your business to do more in less time. Any repeatable task or role in the business, like, you know, running signs around town or, you know, designing brochures for listings or entering listings into the mls. Those are all little systems, things that have to happen that are critically important. But they're typically you can get someone to do them at a lower pay grade and you can design the system and have someone run the system. So leverage, you know, is anything that helps you achieve this goal of growth without sacrificing Quality of life. And typically those two are disconnected. In a lot of the real estate teams that we coach and that we work with, even if they join us at exp, it's a disconnect, right? You figured out a way to sell a lot of homes, but you're sacrificing your physical body. You're sacrificing time with quiet time or time with God or prayer, whatever, that your spiritual life looks like. There are sacrifices that are made because you are not, first of all, you don't have the right mindset and vision, and you are not truly understanding leverage. I will give you an example of leverage that I think will serve you. And this is an exercise that we go through. Folks in my world go through this exercise regularly. It's a cross section, so it's looking at where you spend your time, but it's a cross section of passion versus pay. So what are the things you're doing all day long? Potentially evenings and weekends, seven days a week, way too many hours a week? Where are you spending your time in business and the things you're spending your time on, Are you passionate about those things and do they pay really well? Meaning, like, let's say that you think you're the only one that can take photos of a listing, and you're the only one that can write MLS remarks, and you're the only one that can design, like a marketing brochure for a listing. And what I mean by you think you're the only one is that you have high passion for those activities, but they're low pay. So I'm in a major metro market where a good administrator that can take over all of those tasks at a very, very high level is like 20 to $25 an hour and 20 to $25 an hour. If you want to work a normal workweek 40 hours a week, that's 2,000 hours a year. If you're making $25 an hour, that's $50,000 a year. If you're a real estate agent and you have this vision of being a business owner or making $500,000 a year, let's just say you want to make $500,000 a year, you want to work a normal work week, $500,000 a year divided by 2,000 hours is $250 an hour. And you're going to tell me that working on those things that you're passionate about are going to help you get to the kind of income that you want to get to. It's just not possible. So leverage, you can create the system and the standard by which a marketing brochure is done, MLS remarks are done, you know, photographs the way they're done, and you can outsource that to really good photographers and then you get someone to run the system. And that kind of brings me to. So that's leverage in the form of systems and people. And the third thing when you get people involved is culture and ultimately cadence. And when we talk about culture, we mean core values. And Veronica touched on some of that. But I wanted to go a little bit deeper where one of the main things I see go off track for a team, and Veronica spoke to it as well. One of her challenges, and there had to be some difficult conversations and some necessary endings, is just letting people into your world that without any thought for who they are and how they operate and if they're a fit with how you want to build the business. And that's what we call core values. Two core values that we've had for years are, you know, we hustle and work hard and we embrace accountability and discipline. If you were to look at the general population of real estate agents and even administrators and put them through just those two lenses like, hey, legit, do you hustle and work hard and do you embrace accountability and discipline that weeds out like 99% of everyone in real estate or every administrator, right? So, but if you want to build a high performing organization and a business that provides a differentiated service, which is the only way to succeed and stay relevant and even exist in real estate, with everything that's happening in our industry, the only way to do it is to succeed through others. And the people that you're surrounding yourself with are going to play the game as you set it out for them with the systems that you've built and even that they've helped you build or they built with your guidance, they're going to play the game the way you've described it and you've kind of laid it out for them. And so core values aren't this sort of hyperbolic, if that's even the right word, you know, set of sayings that hang on a wall and they have no active meaning or they're not sort of in the business. These are like, you're actually asking questions like, hey, Jimmy, give me an example in real life right now how you're holding yourself accountable and how you're embracing discipline. And it's like, well, I don't do that, right? I stay out whenever I want to, I sleep late. I don't, you know, I Don't work out. I don't play any sports. I've never had another job. I'm coasting through, you know, life. You know, they are not going to tell you these things, but you can decipher and look for actual patterns in this person. Life versus, you know, we want to see potential. My pastor, Steven Furtick with Elevation Church. If you go to YouTube and you Google Steven with a V. Furtick. F U R T I C K Relationship advice. There was a sermon series, I think it was called the Power of Potential, where he was giving advice to the ladies, the women in the room, saying, like, women like y' all want to see the potential in these men, but they have debt, you know, you know, massive amounts of consumer debt. And they're living at home in their 30s, and they're, like, addicted to porn. And, like, there are, like, red sirens going off around how this guy is not a guy that you want to align yourself with, because we want to see the potential in people. And when I heard that message, and this was years and years ago, it instantly clicked with me, and I've never forgotten it, that we do the same thing in our business. We sit down in front of someone and we want them. You know, we need leverage so badly that we're willing to sacrifice the obvious. We're willing to look for potential in someone, and we ignore the patterns. You know, we need to look for patterns that give us hope that this person can step into our business and be an impact player. And there are just specific things that we can do to identify those people before they enter into our world, but then also have ongoing conversations with folks where maybe something has happened in their personal life that takes them off the rails a little bit when it comes to maybe showing up that the way the they used to. And so we're always guiding people back to the core values. So, my friends, I hope there's some value in that. I feel like in my business journey, I continue to struggle the most with some of those aspects around even slowing down to build systems and then properly training someone on a system and then really being intentional about who we are as an organization and. And who you need to be in order to hang with us. And just knowing that sticking to core values and that culture and even a cadence in business in terms of how we operate and the standards that we set for our team members, you have to lean into those things. I've made all the mistakes that you could possibly make. It feels really uncomfortable to hold someone accountable. And Veronica, I think, said it best where she said, you know, accountability is, is an expression of love. You know, it's pushing someone to a new standard where they might not push themselves. So my friends go to realestatebusinessgrowth.com that's going to be the real estate business growth navigator. It's going to detail those six stages of growth. Everything from that 0 to 100k start stage to the 100 to 500 ramp and build and lead and exiting production and ultimately sitting in the owner's box overlooking the beauty that is a well run, super profitable, sustainable real estate team. So we'll see you over there. Be good.