The Time Freedom System ... Dramatically Increase Your Income by Increasing Your Focus

Alright, let's get started. This is the Time Freedom System. This is a part of our ongoing masterclass series. Once a month, it is my intention to get a training out there that will significantly impact your business, your world, especially if you're building a business and you want to let go of the days of just being a real estate agent. So this is a quote from a book called Atomic Habits and I want to read it to you. It sets the stage for the training that we are going to do today. Becoming the type of person you want to become, someone who lives by a stronger standard, someone who believes in themselves, someone who can be counted on by the people that matter to them, is about the daily process you follow and not the ultimate product you achieve. That is a book worth getting. Atomic Habits by James Clear. And it really kind of grounds the conversation that we're going to have today about time and how to make decisions on what to do with your time to maximize the amount of income you're able to make and minimize the amount of stress that you endure. Our agenda today is pretty simple. I'm going to have you at probably close to 60 minutes. I don't think I'll go 75 minutes, but I'm hedging my bets there a little bit. I will ask that you're just present and that you just, you be here. It is my dream that these masterclass trainings, you know, provide you with the opportunity to just dig into an aspect of your business or maybe you personally in a way that you can really take some actionable stuff from here. So I encourage you to take notes, grab your journal and start writing. As I go through here, I'm going to cover kind of three main areas. I'm going to cover something that I've been working on that's called the Business Freedom Index. And I'm going to also talk about the fact that the struggle with time is real. And then I want to talk about how to kind of put it all together and really what are the actionable things you can do to take control of your time and increase the amount of money you make in less hours? That's the goal here. So the question I have for you, and this is a question that I've asked myself over and over and over, year after year after year, I'm constantly asking myself this question, am I making consistent progress toward meaningful goals in the areas of life and business that really matter? So when it comes down to time and money and this concept of a time freedom system, what does that even mean? I know you're sort of curious. The time freedom system. I believe that there's a way to structure your calendar to give you the freedom to do what you want, when you want and have the income to support it. And for you to bring your stress level way, way down. If you've been around me and anything I've covered for any length of time, you know, I geek out on time, money, and stress. Now if I'm having a conversation with someone about their business, I'm getting into their time. I want to talk about their calendar. I want to talk about the amount of money they're making, the stress they're enduring. I had a conversation with someone today who, by the outside, you would think this person has got it all together. They've got five locations. So it's an expansion agent. Five locations. They did 305 transactions. And this person's actually a coach, a business coach, maybe a productivity coach. They're a coach, and nobody knows that. This person's super stressed. They're not spending time with their family. They only took home $300,000 on 305 transactions. And they're in five physical locations. So the amount of stress they're enduring with all of those lives that they're worried about, it is not worth it. It's not worth it. So I really want to dig in here. For me, I'm not going to tell the whole sort of long, drawn out story of why I got into real estate or why I was. Why it wasn't working. I did get in the same year we had our first child. And thinking to myself that this really has to work. I left a cozy corporate job where I was making about $200,000, working 2,000 hours a year. So do the math on that. I was making about 100 bucks an hour. That number will come into play here in a little while. The truth about it was that it wasn't working. This is Anders, our first child. Same kid is here, a little bit bigger. And I was glued to my phone. I was working seven days a week. It sucked. Our first family vacation. Another data point as to why it wasn't working. I don't know why. Julie, my wife, took pictures of all of these things. I had to work a deal while I was on our first family vacation. This is in 2009, I think. Julie was pregnant with Kendall, our second child at the time. And deal fell apart. Never got paid on it. And I really hurt my wife in the process and took time away from our family. I had an example of how not to do it my dad owned a business for 33 years. He was the E myth. If you've ever read the book E Myth, he was the entrepreneurial myth. He didn't he owned a business, but he really just owned the place that he worked. He was the first one in, last one out, cleaned the floors, took out the trash, did haircuts, hair colors, washed hair wash, order supplies. On the one hand, it's admirable that you're willing to do all those things. On the other hand, I helped him with his taxes probably the last 10 years of owning that business. And he wasn't even making five figures of net income. And so working 50 to 60 hours a week, stressed all the time, had people that he was trying to support and never really turned the thing into a business. On top of that, he wasn't. He had an addiction to alcohol, so he drank actively for the first 15 years of my life. So he wasn't a great dad. My parents got divorced when he was 4, when I was 4. And so he was really a model of how I didn't want to show up as a business person, as a father and as a husband. And for me, I was going to make a run at this. This is our daughter Kendall. She was born in 2010. And I can't say that any part of it was perfect because it wasn't perfect. The thing is that it was really intentional. And this training that I'm going to go through, what I'm calling the Time Freedom System was probably the most important part of my success. I really look at it the most important part of my success. Real Estate B School was born out of the simple fact that the journey was really hard for me. My last. The year we did 248 transactions as a team, I had a single closing. So it was my goal to get out of working with buyers and sellers. It's not everyone's goal, but it was my goal that next year is when Real Estate B School was born. And it was out of that fact that it was really hard. There was not a straight path for me when I did it. I just failed fast a lot and I failed forward a lot. It's funny. A quick story on the first client about Real Estate B School Everest, Stacy Peterson. She reached out to me in 2013, close to when I was launching Real Estate B School and asked for help. She was working with buyers and sellers. She had a small team. She was working 60 to 70 hours a week. She was doing everything in her team. Within six months of working together Stacy was able to step out of production and just manage the operations side of the business. They did the year they did 226 transactions, it was just her and one administrator. So extremely profitable and systems driven. And went on to almost sell 300 homes. Sold her business, joined real Estate B school. She really runs the entire company at this point. I get to do webinars, I get to do a podcast, and Peterson does everything else in our business. She had a seven figure valuation on a real estate team in a market where a brokerage or a team had never traded before. So a really awesome success story for Real Estate B school. So why does this training specifically matter? So when I talk about time and freedom and having a system around that, why does it matter? So the cool thing about business is that time is finite. We all have the same amount of time. I think that is the coolest thing ever. I think the fact that we're able to look at a calendar and make decisions, see where we've spent our time, but also make decisions about where to spend our time in the future. I think the fact that I can look at someone's profit and loss statement, I can look at their bank accounts, I can see what their net worth is, I can see what they've done for themselves financially, and then I can ask them questions about if they're stressed or not. That time, money, stress equation that I was talking about, that equation, time, money and stress, is typically out of whack for most people. We all have the same amount of hours in the week. The question is, what are you going to do with those hours? I know we are living in extraordinary times, especially in real estate. There's this fallacy that it, it can be a lifestyle job, you know, that we can come and go as we please. And you know, if you're a busy, successful real estate agent, that is just not the case. You are working seven days a week, whether you like it or not. If you're selling a lot of property and on top of being a real estate agent, if you're starting a team, you have those lives to worry about. You likely have overhead that you have to worry about things you're spending money on. And then you still have to be a great spouse and you still have to be a great parent. You still have to take care of your physical body or your spiritual journey, right? So it's extraordinary times and I honor the struggle. I have been there. If you're in the midst of it now, I feel your pain. I know exactly where you're At I think it's beyond frustration, honestly. I think you can get to a point where you fall completely out of love with your real estate business. And yeah, I just don't think there's, I was going to say it's a business not worth owning and it leads to a life not worth living and depression, failed relationships and a level of frustration and stress that can have really bad implications in your relationships with your creator in your physical body. So it could really lead to some bad things. And here's the cool thing, people joke. There's a guy on my team, I think he may be on the webinar. He saw my calendar for the first time today and he's like, whoa, forget what he said. It was really funny though. And I made the comment if it's not in my calendar, it's not going to happen. So things like that I say are important. And the decisions that I make with my time, I have to get those in my calendar. So if I want to spend time with God on a daily basis, that has to be in my calendar. If it's not in my calendar, I'm not going to do it. If I want to get a solid hour to fill my kids love tank and to fill my love tank in the morning before they go to school and to support my wife to get them out the door in a way where they're not going to kill each other, that is time blocked. And I'm laser focused in that time block. You know, I've got 15 minute buffer to get into my day where I've got a startup ritual. In my business day, I have a morning routine personally, I have a shutdown process that I go through in my business day and then same thing at night personally. And you better believe from 5:30 to 9:30 every day is structured. And so to me, if you want to show up at a high level in different areas of your life that you're telling me are important and you're not willing to take the steps to make those a priority and get them into your calendar, then I think you're just lying to me and you're definitely lying to yourself. So this concept of structure holding you back and you don't want to have a structure calendar, it's pretty much bullshit. I've just seen immense freedom and structure. It's allowed me to take 10 to 12 weeks away from the business every year. It's allowed me to make decisions to get out of the pieces of the businesses that I don't either. I'm not great at or I don't love doing and I can find someone whose unique ability is in that area. So just suspend disbelief for now that there's not freedom, it's restrictive structure. Structure is freedom. And here's the thing, when I get into the tactics of this time freedom system, just know that there are no secrets. And also just know that I have failed in all the ways you could fail around time and overextending yourself and working on things that you think you could do better than anyone else because it might feel good. And just know that that's not a real thing. That's something, excuse me, that's something that we have to work through. And I say that because I don't want you to dismiss a teaching that I'm going to go through that might really help you. So here's what you should know. So this is the teaching part of it. And then we're going to actually do this work. I'm going to actually challenge you to go through your calendar and to put together a perfect week that we can stick to the first point here. And really what you should know is that you have to commit to the journey. Real Estate B School we exist for a singular purpose. It's to help real estate agents become business owners. And there's all these things you need to do along the way. The mission is to help you grow your real estate business through the use of sustainable systems and empower people so you can make more money, enjoy more time off and experience less stress in your life. That is the reason we exist. And the implication of this work is that we are helping families, we're helping relationships, we're giving our clients more margin back in their day to take care of themselves physically or spiritually. Right. There's other areas of your life that matter more than freaking selling homes. And so that's why this mission is so, just so beyond passionate about it. I want to go through a tool that we use internally that will help you sort of identify where you are in your business growth journey. We call this the business growth Navigator. We've identified six distinct phases of growth. You know, to go from struggling real estate agent to full on business owner. The first phase is what we call the start phase. Most of the industry lives in this phase. It's survival mode. You're not making enough money. The second phase is called the ramp phase. This will take you from about 250 GCI to about 750 GCI roughly. This is where you're doing it all. If you're not building the foundation Building the systems out in the ramp phase, you have no shot of gracefully entering the scale phase. This is where you're anywhere from, you know, 750 to 1.5 million. You get into sort of leading and managing and empowering others. This is where your systems are built out. And now you're just sort of managing people to run those systems for you. You may make the decision to exit production. This is real, where real freedom of time comes in. I actually moved, I sold my house in 2017. We moved into the house I live in now. And I wasn't my own real estate agent. And these are not small price points on the sale and the purchase yet. I knew that I had already made the commitment to never practice, you know, work with a buyer or seller again, including myself. And so the freedom of time you get, if you can build this thing the right way, to be able to make that decision is profound. And then the last step is pretty much where I am in my real estate business. I'm more of an owner in that business than I am an operator. I still go to that business one day a week. It's still a super profitable business. It's very tight knit. It's built on the right economic model, high culture, tight cadence, world class service to buyers and sellers, really building that business the right way. So hopefully this model here, this business growth navigator, allows you to see where you are in the journey and don't judge where you are by where you think others might be. Y', all, I've had folks come in with the numbers to support that. They might be at level six on this, but they've set the thing up entirely wrong. There's no profit in what they've set up and they need to sell a ton of real estate to make even a little bit of money. So this is how I would take someone through if they were starting with us. You know, in the start phase, there are things you need to put in place before you take the next step in the journey. So really do a good job of keeping your blinders on here. And you just don't know what other people are going through when you're looking at the kind of production that they're doing. All right, one more tool I want to go through. And this is kind of the. A big part of this training is this concept that I'm calling the Business Freedom Index. So I want you to do this with me. Really dig in here. So the Business Freedom Index. And I'm going to challenge you to do an actual calculation. You don't have to share it. An actual calculation of what it was for 2019. And aspirationally, where do you want to be in 2020? Well, this year, whenever you're going through this training and then three years from now. So it's a simple calculation. It's your total profit before taxes and what you pay yourself divided by the total annual hours that you put into the business. So the Business Freedom Index for me in my Corporate job was 200,000 divided by 2000 hours is 100. When I first came up with this concept I was coming out of this was like 2007, 2008. I decided I wanted to be at a 250. So $250 per hour. I wanted to make $500,000 pre tax and I wanted to work 2000 hours. Simple math. 500,000 divided by 2000. It took me five years to get there. So it was not, you know, an overnight thing to just snap your fingers. Because at the time came out of a year where I think I made like $16 an hour, I was overspending, I was working way too many hours. It was like, it was really, really bad. So if you're not making a lot of money on the top number and you're working a lot of hours, those numbers are working against each other. So we need to increase your income while decreasing your hours. That's how we work this number in your favor. And so let me talk about the Business Freedom Index in action. So if you remember those six phases of growth. Start, ramp, scale, lead, exit, own. This is not perfect. Generally it follows this level of trajectory where at the start phase you're overworked and underpaid. This was me in 2007. I sold 27 homes. I think I netted 36,000 and that was only for like 10 months. So I probably worked 60 hours a week or 240 hours a month. So I was making $3,000 a month working 2,400 hours. It's like it's less than $15 an hour. So overwork, underpaid, you don't know what you don't know. Then at the ramp phase, you're starting to make a little bit of money. You can actually get into 20 to $50 per hour. And there's nothing wrong with 20 to $50 an hour. But it's likely you're putting in way too many hours. So your stress is through the roof and you're missing out on other areas of your life. The scale phase, this is where you could be doing from six to 12 transactions or you know, 750 or so to a million, 250amillion five. Money's decent, but your time is not your own. The systems are the thing that's going to get you out of being the main cog in the business. And then once you get to the lead phase, this is where you have the chance to go from 50 to 100 to up to 250. This is. It took me about five years to get to this point in my business. And well, January 2012, I exited production. That's the year we did 248 transactions. So I actually exited before I made $500 an hour. But basically the numbers held true for me. Each one of these phases for me is about my years in the business. So my first year was start, my second year was ramp. Then I hit scale lead and exit was my fifth year. I did 248 size and I only closed one of those transactions. And then ever since then I've been down to one day a week. So I've been an owner in the business and I've been making more than $500 an hour with that sort of approach. So at the exit phase, it's all about your operations and sales leaders. It's likely your just elevating someone in the business to run those functions. And then ownership is all about team cadence and structure and this is where it is a good life. So I want to challenge you to go through the calculation for 2019 or the year before. You're going through this training. This training is timeless, I promise you that. But right now it's early in 2020. So 2019, you should have a good idea of what you took, what you split with the government. So whatever that number for me, I always look on my tax return, it's adjusted gross income, that number divided by the hours that I worked. And I actually go through my calendar, I have my time off blocked out in my calendar and I add up the actual hours that I worked. So the question is, what's your number historically? And then what do you want your number to be? So I started out in real estate. It was less than 20 bucks an hour. And the next year I think is we went to 44 transactions and I had a part time administrator that probably was decent money. I was just working. The number of hours I was working was not sustainable. So that drove the number down. Then we went to 118, no 58 transactions. My first buyer agent hire was late in that year, 2009. Then 118, couple more buyer agent hires. Probably wasn't five years in until I was able to hit the $250. 250 per hour. Here's the thing, I see though, I see you will not be able to hit the 2505001000 by doing it all yourself. It's impossible because by definition it's like 80% of the job of real estate agent can be hired out for anywhere from 15 on the low end dollars per hour to $100 on the high end. You know, you can get a salesperson that can close better than you on listing appointments for $100 an hour. And I live in a major metro market, so I know it can be done. It's just the mindset of approaching that way. So the next point here is to stay focused. I love this quote by Brian Tracy. The ability to discipline yourself to delay gratification in the short term in order to enjoy greater rewards in the long term is the indispensable prerequisite for success in his book Eat that Frog. The truth is we all have frogs. We all procrastinate in doing something that's the most important thing we can do. And it really just takes a practice of stopping and thinking on a regular basis. Is how I've structured my day. Is that the highest and best use of my time or am I wrapped up? Am I getting too involved in things that are way below the business freedom index that I want to achieve? If you're at $25 or $50 now and you want to get to $100, you know, let's say by this year you want to do 100 and then three years from now you want to get to 250, you better be going through a practice every 90 days of getting things off of your plate that aren't going to lead you to that higher number. And the next point here is there's a difference between busy and productive. It's a really good definition. This is by Dan Kennedy, who I thought died by the way, but he didn't die, he almost died. And he. I don't know if he's doing well health wise, but his definition of productivity is the deliberate strategic investment of your time, talent, intelligence, energy, resources and opportunities in a manner calculated to move you measurably closer to meaningful goals. So productivity, deliberate strategic investment, time, talent, intelligence, energy, resources and opportunities measurably closer to meaningful goals. So when you measure, you give yourself a 1 to 10 for the day. How productive was I today? It doesn't mean you checked a Bunch of things off your list. It doesn't mean you ran by the office to pick up a check or you went to the attorney to deliver a check. You put out a yard sign, you entered a listing into the MLS or even, you know, I showed homes to buyers or, you know, there are so many things that you're doing throughout the day that aren't moving you closer to meaningful goals. And so just think about that and be honest with yourself what that looks like for you. I want to take you through what I call the business freedom blueprint. And this is how everyone that wants to build a real real estate business needs to look at their business. There's four drivers and 12 accelerators I'm going to go through here. If you haven't figured it out, the goal in the work I do is to help you make more money, have more time off and experience less stress. We do that by building sustainable systems and empowering team members. It doesn't have to be a big team. My team does about $3 million a year, very, very profitably. No production from ownership and we had 12 people on average last year. And so it's not a real big team. What is that over? I would do the calculation of GCI per person. So what, 3 million? For some reason I can't do the calculation in my head divided by 12. So about 250,000 GCI per position on the team. And some of those positions are like a $12 an hour runner, $15 an hour transaction coordinator, assistant, a $30 an hour transaction coordinator, you know, so these aren't folks that are making anywhere close to $250 an hour. We've just divided up the job of real estate agent into specialties and tightened up the systems and processes of all of that. And this is the framework you'll use to do it. So four drivers. Sorry, I've got a little tickle in my throat. Four drivers that must be mastered and focused on so that you can build an actual business and not just own the place that you go to work. The first is to be able to attract high quality buyer and seller prospects into your world. Notice it's attract. It doesn't say Pay Zillow or PayRealTor.com or you know, you know, go to a referral lead source, an instant offer referral lead source. It says do the job of a marketer and get people to get excited about doing business with you. And there's all bunch of things that we teach around that the second driver is to convert. So you get leads coming in high quality, low cost leads, you have a process in place to convert them to face to face and then into clients and then you deliver on the promises. So you help buyers, you help sellers, everything that's involved there. And then once those other three drivers are really humming, you have the opportunity to scale your real estate team. There are three accelerators associated with each of these drivers. So with the attract driver, there's three things you need to get really good at. Number one is database marketing, number two is listing marketing. Number three is buyer marketing. And we've got systems in place. Again, this is not about buying pay per click leads. We don't spend any money on pay per click. We don't spend, we don't buy any Zillow Leads or any realtor.com leads. So you can imagine, you know, I think we're at 6% or so spend against GCI that we're spending on marketing. On the whole attract driver, database marketing is so many cool things we can do with social proof, social media there that costs nothing. So with convert, it's about lead management, appointment setting and the consultation process. Imagine a world where you had to convert buyer and seller prospects into face to face consultations and get them to become loyal clients where you couldn't do any of it. You may still be at the point where you have to do some of it, but you have to think about the convert driver in a way where you're going to eventually not be a part of it. And that's just a healthy way to look at business. Even if you plan to forever, you know, be a lead converter on your team and sit down and do consultations with buyers and sellers, you still need to build it out in a way where the systems are pretty tight. And then when it comes to deliver, it's about buyer and seller client servicing, transaction coordination, which is contract to close, and then the critical technology tools that you'll need to be able to build an actual business and then scale. It's all about, you know, beginning with the end in mind by creating your future, you know, knowing your leading and lagging indicators, knowing your numbers, becoming the CFO of your business and then grow your team. You know, how do you identify, attract true talent and onboard them onto your team so they can be successful. What's the culture and the cadence of your team where you encourage, you know, this, this culture of productivity and that's really what real estate B school focuses on. It's the four drivers for and beyond these accelerators. So these 12 accelerators that you See here there are, I think that we're up to like 48 tools and systems that you'll need to install in your business to do all of these, you know, to really do an accelerator and a driver justice. There's a bunch of things you need to build out in your business. One of our members, Dave Friedman, who sent me a vox message before our last intensive, he said, you know the first intensive which our intensives are twice a year and they're two day event where we get together and we just, we work on ourselves and our businesses. He it was his second year in the business and he was doing okay. He was a solo agent. His takeaway from that first intensive in August 2014 was to hire a buyer agent. He did 3.5 million in 2019. So five years later he's been out of production for over three years. And when I think about Time Freedom System, he just spent two weeks fishing in like off the, like in the Galapagos or something. Just some insane trip. And he was real time sending me pictures before real estate b school he didn't take any vacation for three years in a row and his marriage was strained. Haley was not, was not really loving the amount of hours he was putting into his real estate business and she was taking a second seat to the business. He consistently takes 15 weeks or more vacation for each of the last at least three years. And his income now, you know, talk about business Freedom index. He is $1,000 or more per hour he puts into his businesses. He's launched two other businesses and he does all of it manages like three businesses now in less than 40 hours a week. So just an awesome case study. So question is how do you you get there? I love this quote, same book. You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your system. So this is going to get real tactical. And I hesitated to put this in a masterclass training to non members and I decided just to do it because I want to show you how simple this actually is. Number one, it requires a calendar number. I know that's sort of rocket science. The question is just like the reaction I got from Brent on our team when I showed him my calendar. Are you actually using your calendar the way it's intended to be used? If you want to achieve at a high level in multiple areas of your life, that's the question. That's number one. Number two is to establish your hours. Decide when you're going to work and when you're not going to work and when you're working, decide what you're going to do and what you're not going to do and when you're not working, decide what you're supposed to be doing and how you want to spend that time and pre populate your calendar with those things. And that's our third point. Master Time Blocking. Who here by raise of hands? I'm just kidding, don't raise your hand. Who here hasn't heard of time blocking? It's easy to dismiss this and say that I can't be constrained by a calendar. I can't be constrained by a calendar man. I just think it's, I think it's honestly an excuse. No matter what your how you're made up, if you want to achieve at a high level, you must make decisions on where you're going to spend your time during the day. And the things that get that want to get into your calendar, but they're not that important don't matter. I plan my day out in half hour increments. Before the day starts, I have three top priorities for the day. I've decided ahead of time the three things I have to get done this week. And so I'm like really intentional around my time blocks because I do want to be an amazing husband, I do want to be a great dad, I do want to make time to have a relationship with God, I do want to take care of my physical body. I do want to have some community outside of business and my family friendships. And I do want to kick ass in multiple businesses. And if I'm not intentional about my time, there's no way I can get there. And so it's all about planning your work and working your plan and focusing on dollar productive activities. Determine the things that are dollar productive and focus more of your time on those things and less of your time on the things that aren't dollar productive. Taking out 90 minutes in the middle of your day to run a sign, pick up a check, drop off your dry cleaning and go to the supermarket. There is nothing dollar productive about that. And again, that's okay if you don't want to achieve at a high level and you don't want to build a seven figure income right? It's okay to play that game if you don't want and there's nothing wrong with it. I'm not here to convince you to want to play life and business big. If you do, then you must focus on dollar productive activities. And we use activity chunking. We use a system called dominate your day to maximize your productivity. Again, it's just going into the day, into your week with intention about where to spend your time and to really be intentional with those different time blocks. And then there's a really good video. If you go to YouTube, it's 1% better everyday. James Clear. I think it's. Yeah, you should find this. I think it's 24, 25 minutes. It's worth watching. And then number five is the Eisenhower matrix. There is a way to prioritize the onslaught of tasks that are coming at you. There's a good quote. Dwight Eisenhower is the 34th president of the U.S. he says what is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important. So if you look at this grid that came out as a result of that quote, this will help you make decisions about how to react to something that comes into your world. So if something is urgent and it's really important, you do it. Now. It doesn't matter if you planned to do it or if it messes up your time blocks. Hopefully you'll get into a habit of not having those things be urgent, but they're important, but not urgent. If they're not urgent and important, those should be scheduled into your calendar. So working out is not urgent. Really, really important. Doing meal prep for the week is not urgent. You could easily miss meal prep, but how important is it for you to eat the right foods throughout the week? So let's go on to urgent, not important. These are the things that are like, ah, there's a fire, but it's not important. Like, what's a good example? I don't know, something that you can hire a runner to do. In every market there's people that will run errands for you personally and professionally for like 10 to 12 bucks an hour. Think of all the things that you're focusing on that you could delegate that are seemingly urgent. Like, I just had a closing and now I've got to go pick up the signs because it'll piss off the buyer of the home because it's. There's my signs are there that you shouldn't be doing. It's urgent, but it's just not important. So those things are delegate activities, the things you could delegate. And ask yourself the question who can do it for you? And then this is going to be the sting part of this, the not urgent, not important. Think of some things that are not urgent and not important. I'm not going to make you type them in because it'll make me seem holier than thou. And I have done plenty of these things I would say watching any news whatsoever, doing 99% of social media, anything you watch on Netflix, gossip, you know, you could just. You could make a list of the things you spend time on that just don't need to be done ever at all. I would argue for some guys, you know, it's easy to make the argument, like, let's say you're a husband and a dad and you're spending all day Saturday watching football, or you're watching two football games on Sunday. It's not urgent, and it's not important. The comfort may feel good, right? So I'm not going to say you can't watch football. I'm just saying if you want to be a great dad, a great husband, a great business person, carve out time for your faith and take care of your physical body and have your financial life in order. There are some things you have to delete from your world. There just are. And so be honest with yourself about what those things are and how that will look like. And then schedule into your calendar every week. There is a planning session once a week. So you are looking at the next week. I call these clarity breaks. Basically, you are planning. You are seeing how you did last week, and you are planning the next week, and you are asking yourself the question, what is working and what is not working in the areas of my life that I say matters? So what is working and what is not working in my finance? What is working and not working in my spiritual journey? What is working and not working in my physical body? What is working and not working in my business? What is working and not working in my role as a dad and my role as a husband? And then what can I do next week to move the needle on some of those? This is for every human being that wants to improve where they are in different areas of their life. It has to be done. I love this quote by Thomas Jefferson. He says, if you want something you have never had, you must be willing to do something you have never done. And for most people, this is it. I don't know if I'm gonna have time. Let me see if I can find. Let me stop here a second here. I want to see if I can find a calendar that I built out. I cannot find it. Oh, no. Maybe I'll just. Yeah, I'm gonna. I'm gonna take a crack at man. Where did. Where did I do it? I did this for our members, and I want to show y' all the perfect week I would put together, but for some reason, I can't Find it on my calendar. Ah, I should have teed it up ahead of time. Remember, call schedule, ribs to do. All right, I'm just going to do it. I'm going to do it in real time. So let me share my screen and we're just going to see how this goes. All right, so no matter. So you're a real estate agent wanting to be a business owner. You're running a team. You don't have the leverage. Your time isn't your own. That's who I'm building this for. I will show you my calendar so you can have the same reaction that Brent did. Let me go out in a week where I'm here for the whole week and you can kind of see what's embedded in my calendar automatically. It's going to be a little bit different if you're in new business development. So I'm going to build one. An ideal week for you. But you could see every morning, seven days a week, Bible study. My intention is to get up at 5:45 and I've got an hour where I'm alone, then I'm with the family for an hour. Got a little bit of buffer time. You could see the content creation I need to do weekly team. My Tuesdays are pretty set. Thursdays is all content creation and Fridays are off. Breakfast with kids on Saturday mornings. I do a men's Bible study on Sunday. We go to church as a family on Saturday nights. Weekly planning session on Sunday nights. Family time is in the calendar. The yellow are the workouts. Lifetime workouts, the classes that are at lifetime. Every Wednesday, there's a weekly specialist training. So y', all, this is. Look, I'm in June. Well, June, I'm taking a sabbatical. So last week of May, it's pre baked. I don't need to like, figure out what I'm going to be doing. And so I want you to get into this part of the training with that intention. Like, I want to build out something that I can stick to. Let me think of. I forget how I did it last time. I think I probably went. Did I go here? Settings here? I think it was here, yeah. So let me just create a new calendar. So time freedom calendar. All right. Create calendar. Oh, actually might be on here. Bear with me because this is going to be super valuable. I wouldn't be fumbling through this if I didn't think it was going to be helpful for y' all to. To see this. All right, so it should be on there now. All right, so time freedom calendar. So I'm in this calendar. So if this were me, and I were really in any, you know, in any. This works for everybody, I guess, is what I'm saying. So this is your quiet time, your morning routine. It's the power hour. Call whatever the heck you want. The most important hour, Guy Buck Jacobs. The most important hour, whatever you want to call it, this bad boy is probably the most important part of. So it would repeat and I would do that daily. Boom. And then you got to decide what you can do for that next time block. I think it's, you know, family, help out with kids, that sort of thing. That's my next time block. And to me that's probably just for simplification. Let's put it in daily. Then I'd go to like, what's the non negotiable around my time, Family time. So you may have different days that you take late appointments or whatnot. To me, this will probably, probably be, you know, I'd probably start this weekday weekdays. Then I would do date night. If you have a spouse, you should figure out a way to have a weekly date night. It doesn't need to cost money. Weekly. On Saturday, I probably color that one like red, that sort of thing. Most folks that have a faith are probably going to church in the morning, you know, so church and lunch, more options. Repeat, repeat. On Sunday, weekly, we do a thing with my mom. If I click back to my calendar, we do a thing. This family dinner we were doing out on Sunday so we can get together with my mom, who's 77, 78. I want to make it a family tradition that we get together once a week as a family with my mom so she can see our kids. We can spend time together while she's still healthy. So you may have something like that. You may be at a point in your journey where you do. You know, I had 9, 11 and 1pm appointments when I was the main listing agent in my business. So maybe those are appointments. You know, this is by appointment only. And so if I could, if I could stack up three really good and I would do that weekly and maybe one of these, you know, maybe Wednesdays are your late night. So maybe you. I probably have to go in and I'd probably have to customize this. I'd have to go to custom. I'd have to say, well, so that custom occurrence I'm not going to do on Wednesdays. So this and following events. So this Wednesday, you know, you have late night at work, if you must, and you put more options on this weekly. On Wednesday you get your spouse to buy in on it every week. Monday through Friday, new business development. This doesn't, I don't care if you're calling expireds or you're calling your database or you're recruiting. This is the. Everyone has a frog to eat every day. And so this one is probably Monday through Friday. We do all our team stuff starting, you know, on Tuesdays, starting. This is team meeting and personal development. Personal development. So this, you guys get the picture. I'm going to go through all of it though, because now I'm definitely into it. So you also have like check, you know, probably here. This is what I would do. 11:30 to 12:30 is lead, follow up. So new business development is not following up with leads. You've already talked to different activity. So let's do a custom on this. Let's do it with skip Tuesday because that's our team day. All right, so that's that. And then you're probably, you know, one. Just for simplification purposes, I'm going to do appointment one. I should call it appointment Open. And now you're creating appointments in your calendar that are to be filled by something. So that's appointment open. Appointment open. So this is part of making your hours. When you look at your calendar, see when you can connect with somebody for, to show them homes to do a listing consultation. It's not guesswork, right? We've got 10 openings there, plus a late night, plus maybe a Saturday and Sundays. Oops, you know, Sundays are, it's just a family day and that's repeating weekly on Sunday. So so now you roll into a week. So in, in here you have enough buffer to get, get email, you know, so this could be, you know, this is, this is probably just a buffer time. You're probably getting to the office. I have this actually in my calendar. So buffer time. This is daily Monday through Friday. You know, this is check email, make sure nothing's on fire. So this is weekly Monday through Friday. And this is probably, you know, check email, comma, office work. And then you have business hours. You have business hours. You're, you're gonna, in your calendar, get home to family is in there. You could do everything you need to do with the schedule that I put together here. You know, when somebody asks you it's Wednesday and you're looking at your calendar, you know, and you're talking about appointments you have open. I have 1:30 on Friday, 3:30 on Thursday or 1:30 on Friday, which works better for you, you know, obviously There are clients who will want to look at homes, buyers, specifically times where you, you don't want to work. And that's why leverage through a showing agent is critically important. So anyway, hopefully that, that's helpful. That's as complicated as this is. And this is what I've done over the last 12 years to get to the point where I've got a shot at $1,000 an hour. It's not because I'm any smarter than anybody. I've just made different decisions with my time and what to hire folks to do that they can do better than me anyway. And if I can build a system around doing it, then they get to do what they love to do, get paid really well doing it. How can this calendar work with Calendly? So, I mean, Gersha had a question about, you know, we use acuity. I've used Calendly. I guess if you're letting your clients book into your calendar or you're letting your agents, you know, book into your calendar. I'm trying to think as a real estate agent, why you would want someone to have access to your calendar. You know, it could only be to meet with a client, but I would, I probably wouldn't want to have them have free access to my calendar. Yeah. So that, that may, that may work for a season. It may. Yeah, it works. I mean, Gmail integrates with, with basically everything. So all you would do with these, with these time blocks here is you would say, you know, you would say open for clients, and then you would just put rules around it. You would. The only change here, you would put this as free, so you would know that it's blocked out. And you would put this Monday, whatever time block you wanted. And then you would, you would delete these here. So this one is. I bet you're showing as busy. So you'd have to make sure it's just showing as free. That's, that's the way it would work. So I'll. And we've. You. I've used all of that, you know, all of those different services. Yes, you need the free. That's, that's the key there. So that's it. Let's. Let me, Let me head back to the. I'm going to finish strong here. And hopefully that was helpful because that's all that it is. That's all that you're really doing, is you're making these decisions around your time. All right, I've only got a few more things that I want to share with you, and then I'll open it up for questions. The question is, you know, my journey was my journey, right? It wasn't Perfect. Close to 4,000 families served in 12 years. I did make the decision to get out of production in 2012. I did one out of 248 transactions that year. We did three 12 over 400. And we consistently do, you know, a few hundred deals per year, super profitable. I still work just one day a week. And so the question is, how do you get there? You might be asking yourself like, how do I actually get there? The question is I have for you is why did you show up today? You know, like Ashley, there's usually there's five reasons why someone will sort of come into our world and be interested in a teaching that we have. The first one is that you need to change. Like you're for this training, like your time isn't your own. When you hear time and freedom put together, you're like, that is not what my calendar looks like. I don't have time, freedom. And so something has to change. The reality is being a business owner, we're fighting the odds that everything is stacked against us just being a business owner. In real estate, the odds are stacked even more against us than general business ownership. The third part is that there's just these gaps in your skills and knowledge, things you don't know to grow your income and decrease your hours. That's likely one of the more important reasons why you showed up today. The next part is I didn't put it into calendar, but there should be three. Well, let's say two 90 minute time blocks in your calendar where it just says work on business. A lot of times you don't know what that is. In real estate B school, we have 48 systems that you'll install into your business so you'll know exactly what you're working on, exactly when you're supposed to be working on it. But most folks don't even know what it means to work on, on your business. They say it, they don't actually know how to do it. And then probably the most popular reason, the most prevalent reason why someone will come into this world is to go further, faster, right? To align yourself with someone or community of folks that are doing the thing you want to do so you can get there faster with less mistakes, less wasted money, less stress, all that good stuff. And maybe it's just that you read our case studies and you want to be the next case study. You want to go from wherever you're at to 10x in your business and working 30 hours a week. I've got three questions for you, and I really want you to consider these carefully. Three critical question and when you're thinking about scaling your business and achieving true time and money freedom, it is these three questions. The first question is when you think about time, stress, your health, your relationships, your, your business, you know, the plan you're following, the people that are in your world, your ability to attract and convert, all of that, where are you now? Be honest with yourself. Business and personal. Where are you now? Second thing is, where are you going three short years from now? Where do you want to end up in the areas of your life and business that you think are important? This was something that I got really good at really early in my career was so clear on where I wanted. You know, there's roughly 12 areas of business and life that I track, but I was just really clear on where I wanted to go. And you need to be really clear where you want to end up three short years from now if you have a chance of getting there. And then just ask yourself, what's holding you back? You think about where you are today, where you want to be in the future. What is holding you back? What are the obstacles that you see and what strengths do you bring to the table? Well, God made you uniquely and you're good at something. Are you spending as much time as possible on the thing that you're really good at? The only thing I have to offer you is a conversation about your business. It's rebstrategysession.com the goal of a business growth strategy session is to give you a clear plan to profitably and predictably scale your business. There's not a gimmick at all in that conversation. And so a few words of caution. As you consider where you are, where you're going, and how to get there, there is going to be sort of this natural fear that wells up inside of you when you're considering going down a path that is contrary to what is taught in our industry. Your mindset really matters when you think about delinking time and money, where everything in our industry tells you that the only way to make more money is by doing more transactions. To do more transactions, you need to be with buyers and sellers more often, which means more hours, more drama, more stress. Your mindset matters in terms of being able to build a legitimate business that provides buyer and seller services, not be the agent that does all of it. And then just to realize that change is hard. It's going to be hard either way, if you stay in the path you're on, you know, and you kind of just keep grinding it out, that's really, really hard. It's going to be hard to get into a world where you're building systems or installing systems, doing the work to become a better manager, leader, systems builder. That's hard work. I've got a great story about a guy that was actually on my real estate team. Got his license to join my real estate team. I met him through a friend. He left to do his own thing and I fully supported him. When I launched Real Estate B School, I'm like, let me show you how to do it. He wanted to build a business versus be an agent. He resisted for a couple years. I finally got him to commit to Real Estate B school and he did $2.7 million of GCI last year. He's been out of production for 18 months. He took eight weeks, 60 days off when Charlotte, their first child, was born. And he runs an awesome business, exactly on point with the economic model that we teach. And he works, probably works over 40 hours, less than 50 hours a week, pretty consistently, you know, he did. He went from four paid lead sources to one paid lead source. When I first challenged him, he went from 65 to 105. We added back second paid lead source. He went to 175. We went deeper on that. Those two lead sources, we went to 225. And then last year he did 275 or so. And so it doesn't mean you need to complicate your business to be able to build an amazing business. And so again, all I've got to offer you is a conversation about your business. Go to rebstrategysession.com There's a short application that you'll fill out just a few questions about the business to see how we can help you best. And then I have a little bit of time for questions. If you have any questions, feel free to send them into Q and A. So let me see. Got one question here. Yeah, so I get asked. So the question is about, you know, as you're making this transition from, from production to like bringing people into your world. So how'd you, how'd you manage those. Those times where you were still a real estate agent, but you were bringing people into your world. So you have to be a manager and a leader and a vision caster and a CFO and all of that. You, you know what's coming. If you're interested in growing your business, you know, what's coming and so you prepare for it. You make sure the systems are built before you get a good example is if you're going to build a business, if you're going to bring agents into your world, you better make sure that your agent onboard system is built before you let someone into your world. I can't tell you how many team leaders or even making your first few hires, you bring an agent into your world and you're just training system isn't even built out yet. In real estate B school you can literally swipe what we built. It's 90% built for you. You just install it. But that's a good example of not being prepared for that next phase of growth. Question is, I just moved to my area when I got my license. What would you tell someone that has no SOI or database tap into that hates cold calling and door knocking? So I would really figure out what. I never cold called, I never door knocked. I didn't work my database, my SOI until a good two and a half years into the business. Expired and fizbos. We've got an amazing system around expired and fizbos where this year my real estate team will do in the first quarter I think we're going to close like 250,000 GCI just on expired and fizbos. Combination of direct mail, a little technology bit that we use and calling and any agent can do that. FSBOs are less cold calling than expireds. I didn't cold call expireds when I got into the business but I did a really good job direct mailing them. And this little bit of technology that we use and the scripts that we use in that bit of technology are working really, really well. I mean you can get to 250 on expired and FSBOs without having to call them. They reach out to you and you call them back. So you do have to get on the phone with somebody. Open houses are probably an easy way to get busy. We've got a phenomenal open house system. You can have 20 to 50 conversations with a single open house with little capital outlay. That's one of our lead gen levers for agents on our team. But they can that they can use. I wouldn't advise buying any leads or anything like that. I think all those lead sources have become impossible almost to generate a decent return on. So that's all I've got there my friends. That's about all the time we have today. So if you're at the point in your journey where it's not making sense. And you can't really make. You can't justify the amount of time you're working for the money that you're making with the stress that you're enduring. Just go to rebstrategysession.com fill out the short application, and let's get on the phone and have a conversation about your business. If you want more information about real estate B school, just go to the website. It's realestatebschool.com the B, if you haven't figured it out, is business. So this is straight up business school for agents that want to become owners. And that's as simple as I can put it. So go to real estate bschool.com or if you know that you need our help, go to repsstrategysession.com we'll see you there. Be good.