The Reality of Traditional Real Estate Success

Alright, so let's talk about the reality of traditional success in the real estate industry. No matter where you are in your business growth journey, if you haven't hit the point where you're a top agent and you're just hustling and putting up a lot of deals and working a ton of hours doing it, or if you're already starting a small team or you're running a midsize or large team, traditional success really is tough in our industry. And I want to kind of give the backdrop of all of this by going a little bit deeper into my business growth journey. So I got into real estate in 2007 after leaving a corporate job where I was doing acquisition, acquisitions and strategy for an aerospace company. So pretty cool job. Got to travel around the world. I think I hit like 25 countries along the way. We probably looked at 200 companies. We bought 42 of them. I think in the time that I was there and I just didn't see the path to time and money freedom. I was just on this search for. I wanted to basically make my own way in the world as far as my income goes and not be a slave to a corporate entity that required that I move geographically around the world or, or, you know, have to travel every week. I travel quite a bit at my corporate job. So that's why I was attracted to real estate. I'm like, this is going to be great. You know, I was already I had invested, I think I bought nine or ten properties here locally in my market. And I love the process, I love homes. I'm like, what would be better? You know, being a real estate agent and getting to do this work would just be awesome. So I got licensed. Nobody told me what the job of a real estate agent looked like. And very quickly I became a top producer. I figured out one thing early on. I figured out how to generate leads. I geeked out on direct response marketing, and I figured out how to get buyers and sellers to raise their hand and give me their contact information. And all I needed to do was follow up with them. It's some of the same principles that we follow today in real estate B school and in my real estate business. And the challenge though was that in 2007 I only worked 10 months and I sold 27 homes with just figuring out the marketing side of things. And I instantly became a top producer. So I was instantly successful as far as the industry told me. The challenge was that I had gotten married in October 2006. We had our first child in November 2007. And I was working seven days a week. I was working evenings and weekends. And that year, 2007, I think I grossed 254. I think I took 176 from my broker. My splits, even though I generated most every deal on my own, splits weren't great. I spent like 75 grand on my broker and I netted like $36,000. And so I spent a whole lot of hours. I was working 70 plus hours a week, and I had nothing to show for it financially. I think I made 18 bucks an hour that first year. And the feeling of overwhelming stress, you know, knowing that I was doing this on the one hand, I was doing this to create a life for my family that they couldn't imagine being any better. That was like my wake up thought. And then I was working so much that it wasn't translating. And, you know, so there was no time freedom, there was no money freedom. And I was overwhelmed and stressed like beyond belief. And the drama of the deal. So every deal I was working on, whether, you know, it was a buyer I was showing homes to or a listing I had on the market, or if a buyer seller were under contract, all of the drama, all of their personalities and all of the stuff that comes up in real estate, I took all of that on. I was new to sales. I didn't know how to separate myself from things that went wrong in those deals or just difficult personalities. I just took all of it on and I was like a 10 out of 10 with respect to my emotional wellbeing. My stress level, my anxiety and overwhelm was like through the roof. And that carried on into 2008. Even though I hired my first administrator, that relieved some of the pressure. It was still seven days a week. So I went from 27 homes to 44 homes. I was even more traditionally successful. So I went from top 2% in my market to top 1% in my market. And I was still working, you know, so even though I offloaded 40 plus hours of work per week to a really solid licensed administrator who ended up being with me for seven, eight years or so, I was still instantly back up to 70 hours a week because I just took on more transactions. And so this traditional success was just like, I just didn't want any part of it. I didn't want any part of it and I didn't want to go back to what I was doing. And so it was this realization that what I was doing surely was not sustainable. You know, I had figured out the front end part of the business. We Call it the front stage. I figured out how to attract high quality, high quality buyer and seller leads into my world. And I figured that forced me to figure out to how to pick up the phone or send an email sequence or, you know, text sequence or whatever. Forced me how to get them to have a conversation, to sit down, to let me interview for the job of being their buyer agent or their listing agent. And then I had to figure out through administrative help how to deliver on those services and showing agents and all of that came after it. And so I just knew that if I was going to do what everyone else was doing in the industry, it was not going to work. Like no part of it was going to work. It was going to be unbearable. And the collateral damage that it was going to have in my personal life, not only in my marriage, but as a father, in my physical life, I had gained a lot of weight. I had in. During that time period, I think it was during that time period where I had like a. Yeah, it was. I don't know when it was. I had a. Basically a psychosomatic. It's sort of physical manifestation of stress was that I thought I was having a heart attack and I had to drive myself to an emergency room. You know, it got that bad. So the physical side of stress and I wasn't even making that great money. And so it was this realization where I had to build this thing to do the job of a really good agent without me working in any of it. And it was this concept of detaching time and money that I became obsessed with. And, you know, when I think about my journey as a business person, you know, since 2007, I left the corporate life where, you know, some weeks I worked hard, some weeks I didn't work hard. Some weeks, you know, I traveled and I added a ton of value for the company. Some weeks we acquired a business that instantly made millions of dollars for my company. And I got paid nothing more. You know, so there was no really time and money was. Didn't have the same effect that it could have as a business owner. Yet as a real estate agent. The only way I could make more money is to sell more homes, to put more hours into the business. That's really what happened when I went from 2007 selling 27 homes to selling 44, where even though I hired an administrator and I instantly offloaded, not only did I offload some of my time, but this administrator did a whole bunch of things that needed to happen that weren't happening, like client care and you know, creating some systems and processes that can sort of live and have lives of their own and have more of a business approach to the thing. I instantly, you know, just sold more homes. That was the reaction to having more time and it gave me no more freedom. So I was more successful. And everyone's like, man, what are you doing your first full year in real estate? You're selling more homes than people that have been in the business for 20 years. And so my market, they were like scratching their head. And I was like, I was scratching my head not because I was proud of myself for selling a lot of homes, thinking, this sucks, this is so hard. And nobody really, I mean, I had coaches at the time. They weren't giving me the roadmap, the blueprint to get out of this thing I had created for myself. And so I want you to know, no matter where you are in your journey, this shift, this mindset shift has to happen where you have to stop seeing your business as you and you have to start seeing your business as the thing that helps buyers and sellers. Like, how could I design? And it doesn't mean you need 20, 30 person team. Could be three or four folks and just a lot of really great systems and leverage through processes and marketing systems and some cool stuff we do with technology. So it's not the point that it has to be this big business in terms of people. It just, you have to contemplate it in such a way where, yeah, I could set it up in a way where I don't have to be the one providing like this amazing service and there will be loyalty to the business and not the individual person. That's a big fear traditionally successful agents have or folks that are just coming up in real estate, they think that, of course I'm going to be the one to do every single job of a real estate agent. A dozen jobs that, you know, some of them just don't pay a whole lot of money and it's just not worth it. You know, I'm spending a lot of time now, you know, I'm at a different point in my journey where I'm able to reflect and think about, you know, the legacy I'm building and, you know, really through real estate. B school. It's this, you know, how can I help folks that come into this world, whether it's through free content or, you know, the podcast or in our different programs, how can I help them to construct their business in such a way where they're not going to have regrets in other areas of their Life as a result of their real estate business, Whether that's their relationship with their spouse, their relationship with their children, their relationship with their creator, their physical body, their emotional wellbeing, their time to have hobbies and just enjoy life, whatever it is that is. The real estate business is the thing that holds you back from, you know, enjoying other areas of your life that really matter more than the business. And we get caught up in the business so much because if I can just get this thing to work out, if I can just sell another home, if I can just. And then we get all wrapped up in all the dozen jobs that a real estate agent does, and we never really go through the dissecting of the different jobs of a real estate agent and how you can build a system, you can build a process, you can, you know, build out a project and get a little bit of leverage in the form of a person to. To help you start to figure out how to lay out the framework, the foundation of a business versus just slinging a bunch of homes, responding to emails at all hours of day, texting your clients on a Friday night, sneaking out of dinner with your spouse, holding your newborn and texting on your phone, going to the zoo and, you know, having this moment with you and a giraffe and your child and having to take a phone call in hand. These are all the things that I did in those early days. Going on your first vacation, three years into your real estate career, where you're working the biggest deal of your career, and you're just. I get goosebumps in a bad way thinking about this one where, honey, I just have to. I just have to get my cell phone, drive down to where I can get reception, and I've got to talk to this client. As a doctor at that time is my biggest deal. $850,000. And this was back in 2009, 10, maybe. Ironically, it's. This house is in the neighborhood that I live in now, so I get to run past it pretty much every day and get reminded. And I love it. I love when I come by this house because it is the reminder of the thing. And it still hurts my wife. She still remembers that vacation. Me being on the computer, me doing work and taking time away from the family and the pain that will forever be there because I did that to the family. Her parents were there, my parents were there, and just a pain that I can't ever take back. The thing that got me through, though, is that I promised her that all of this was leading to something, Even though At the time I didn't know exactly what it was. I was still, even the early days of starting a team, I was caught up in, in all of it, you know, so when you start a team, you're still doing production, now you're managing a few people, you're still building systems, you're still the head of marketing, you're still running your finances, you're still putting all these things in place. So you're doing even more work and more effort and you're still hoping it's all the right stuff and you're hoping you're going to scale the business. And so I love the reminder of passing this house because it reminds me of the, not only the commitment I made to my wife to do it differently, but the commitment I made to myself that I could do it differently. In a sea of real estate agents where even most team leaders, big team leaders, are heavy, heavy in production because that's the only way they're making money. They never set it up the right way from a system standpoint with empowered people and just an eye toward creating a business that provides a world class service and doing it without them in the middle of it. So I want to encourage you to stay tuned for part two of this series. It's going to be a three part series and I'm going to go deep into the different activities of a real estate agent and how you start to dissect the activities and delegate tasks off of your plate and time blocking and how important that is. And then one thing that I've done for a long, long time is to be honest with yourself about where you, you are spending your time. And if you're willing to do that level of work, the other side of this is just really, really awesome. I tell our members all the time it's going to suck either way. It's going to suck either way. Being a traditionally successful real estate agent, you know, a top producer, quote unquote, selling 25 to 30 homes a year, working seven days a week, never being able to go on vacation and free up from the transaction work. That's a hard life and there's no financial freedom or time freedom as a result of also is really hard to build a business that sells hundreds of homes per year where you work one day a week. And that may not be your goal, but that was my goal and it was really hard. And so on the next part, in the next part of this series, I want to dive deeper into how do you begin to kind of look at your business even if it's just you. How do you begin to look at it, the different pieces and start to construct in your mind and then on paper? How can I separate this thing out into the different jobs and get a little bit of leverage? Maybe a little technology here, a system or a process here, maybe a part time person here, maybe a closing coordinator, maybe a showing agent. How do we, you know, break up the job of a real estate agent where you can grow your business and have time freedom? Traditional methods do not allow you to do that and so stay tuned for part two. We'll see you there. Thanks for listening to the Business Freedom Podcast. If you're getting value from the podcast, would you please leave us a five star review and share it with others who might benefit from the content I'm sharing? And if you're ready to scale your real estate business sustainably and profitably, there are a couple options for you. If you're doing under 500,000 in annual GCI, our business foundations Program is for you. Head over to getbusinessfoundations.com that's getbusinessfoundations.com and learn how you can make the shift from overwhelmed real estate agent to true business owner. If you're doing more than 500,000 in annual Team GCI, there's our graduate program designed for top producers and team leaders who want to grow their team and scale their business. If that's you, go to realestatebschool.com and apply for a free Business Growth Strategy session. Strategies, training and coaching to get you where you want to be. Remember, only you can create your future, so take action now.