The Time Freedom System | How to Make More Money in Less Time With Less Stress

Welcome to Real Estate Business Builders. I'm your host, Lars Hedenborg, the founder of Real Estate B School. Bottom line, the real estate industry has failed to create a clear path to financial freedom. Traditional brokerages and coaching are designed to keep you running on the transaction treadmill with no exit strategy. While I didn't have any sales, marketing or business building experience when I got into real estate, I was willing to bet on myself and figure it out because my family was depending. Having served over 5,000 families with their real estate needs, I've made every mistake you could possibly make in this business. Through Real Estate B School, I've helped hundreds of agents and team leaders realize their goal of true time and money, freedom and living a life without regrets. If you know there's another level of growth inside of you and you want.

To learn how to build a highly.

Lucrative lifestyle business, then you're in the right place. You won't find any fluff or hype here on this show. Just real world tools, systems and strategies that work. Let's grow together.

Welcome back, Real Estate Business Builders. Lars Hedinborg here, the founder of Real Estate B School. And today I want to get into something that I've called the Time Freedom System. Now, it wasn't always this way for me. For those of you that are new to the podcast, back in the day, when I got started during the Great Recession years, it was not freedom of Time of money. I made all the mistakes you can possibly make. But the subtitle to this episode is so it's Time Freedom. How to Make More Money in Less Time with Less Stress. And I realize this is a big, bold statement or promise I will say and be the first to admit that I've I failed more, more than most in this industry. So if you want to grab a copy, I put together a business productivity pack that goes along with this topic. You could head over to our free Facebook group. So it's Real Estate. Business Builders is the name of the free Facebook group. Just put in your contact information and we'll send you over. The Business Productivity Pack. So as it relates to time and money and real estate, usually those three things don't correlate or you know you have too much time but you're not making good money. If you have a lot of money in real estate and you're not properly leveraged, your hours are usually not your own. So there's this feeling of frustration that comes along with a traditionally successful real estate agent or anyone who's running a team and leading and managing others. Where you just hit a ceiling and you're ready to lose your mind. So this episode will help you with some of those challenges. And I get it. Because there's always going to be competing priorities. There's a group called C12 that I belong to. It's a Christian business owners group where our guiding principle is priorities are what we do. Everything else is just talk. And I don't say that from a preachy kind of standpoint, but when you look at where you spend your time, oftentimes we put things that matter most on the back burner. And this is gonna help you around that. When I got into real estate, this is 2007 was 10 months I was in the business. March 5th is when I left my corporate job. June 2007 is when inventory shot straight through the roof in my market. And I only knew this, looking back, obviously 2007, that 10 month, I sold 27 homes in those first 10. I sold 44 my first full year. I was instantly working seven days a week. So I understand I wasn't present with our newborn Anders at the time. I was constantly focused on work. And if I was home, I was working deals and I was sort of, you know, hardly present at home on top of that. So competing priorities, which I totally get. Husband, father, you know, trying to build a business, trying to. At the time, I was rationalizing, you know, to myself and I told my wife I was trying to build a lifestyle for them that we never thought was possible. I didn't come from any sort of privileged upbringing. A lot of chaos in my childhood, same with my wife. And so we just had these competing priorities on top of that. It's just an extraordinary time in terms of information overload.

Right.

If you look at like the news and Netflix and social media and being in real estate and trying to keep track of the dozen jobs we need to as a real estate agent, if you have kids and a wife, if you're trying to spend time with your creator, you know, and take care of your physical body and have friendships and be a good, you know, sibling or a good son or daughter.

Right.

It's crazy how much we have coming at us. And so there's a lot to do. So it's easy to slip in to this state of overwhelm. I, you know, that first full year, 2008, I did 44 transactions, got a little bit of leverage with a part time administrator that ended up going full time. Then I brought on my first buyer agent the end of 2009, because I had to get out of evenings and weekends. I didn't care what I was doing in evening and weekends. I just knew I had to get out of doing it so that I could show up as a good husband, as good father. So those. One of the early decisions I made was to sort of figure out that leverage point. So there's hope in all of this. So I don't want to start this out by being all doom and gloom. But the promise, the big promise, is not only, not only to increase the amount of money that you make, but to systematically increase your net worth with more time off so that you can put first things first. That's the big promise. And I know the question is, how do you get there? Easy to say, maybe not that easy to do. And there are three things that I wanna go through today to help you understand this whole concept of time freedom, which is essentially delinking time and money. So oftentimes, real estate, it's very much linear income where you have to do things in a certain order to get paid, right? So there's like a dozen things, probably a hundred things, things to do from the first contact with, let's say a cold buyer lead or a cold seller lead all the way to have a good ending where there's referrals coming in from the way you treated that client in the process, you know, so. And it's all linear where if you don't think about it from a system standpoint, you never have a chance of growing and scaling the business and having a business worth owning so you can live a life worth living and have something that's more sustainable. So this first point that I want to get across here is to know your worth. The first step in having this level of freedom is to know your worth. And what I mean by this, it's a concept that I didn't call it this back in the day, I call it the Business Freedom Index. Now, real quick, the Business Freedom Index, it's a very easy calculation where it's the amount of money you take home out of the business pre tax, pre, you know, so just pre tax income before you pay yourself, divided by the annual hours that you work. So let's say your adjusted gross income and your tax returns, that's like the pre tax number. Typically, even if you run a little bit of junk through the business, let's say it was 250 and you worked 50 hours a week, that's 2,500 hours in a year. Your BFI or Business Freedom Index is 250,000 divided by 2,500 hours is $100 per hour. It's a great equalizer because it allows us to measure and compare with each other, you know, how much money we're making in a unit of time in our businesses. So my challenge to you is to calculate what your current number is right now and what do you want it to be? When I first did this calculation, guys, I only netted 37,000 in real estate those first 10 months. I worked about 2000 hours in those 10 months. Do the quick math on that. 37,000 divided by 2000 is $18.50 an hour. I left a corporate job where I was making, let's call it right around 200,000, working 2,000 hours, which is $100 an hour. I left a hundred dollar an hour job to make $18.50 working evenings and weekends. Part of the problem was I was working too many hours and I was making a bunch of poor decisions. And in terms of how I spent that money, I think I grossed like 250. My broker, I didn't have a great deal with him, gave him about 75. And on the 175, I wasted a bunch of money. So the question for you is, you know, what's your number now and what do you want it to be? Back then I declared that I wanted to make 500,000 pre tax and I wanted to work 2000 hours, which is a BFI business freedom index of $250 per hour. Everything will change once you get clear on what this number is for you. So that's concept number one is to know your worth. Concept number two is you have to measure your days in terms of being productive, not necessarily busy. There's a really great definition of productivity. This is by Dan. Dan Kennedy. I was gonna say Dan Sullivan. Dan Kennedy, yeah. He says productivity is the deliberate strategic investment of your time to talent, intelligence, energy, resources and opportunities in a manner calculated to move you measurably closer to meaningful goals. So if you came out of every day and you gave yourself on a scale of 1 to 10, how productive was I today? And you used that definition as the measure, you'd very quickly get an answer right. Was I really that productive today? Deliberate strategic investment of time, talent, intelligence, energy, resources and opportunities in a manner calculated to move you measurably closer to meaningful goals. Most of the time we're just haphazardly going through our days reacting to stuff, and it's not in a calculated manner and we're not moving measurably closer to meaningful goals. So really good question to ask yourself at the end of every day. And we're playing a game that's a pretty straightforward game. We generate leads, we have conversations, we set appointments, we meet with would be buyers and sellers. We sign them as loyal clients. We do the whole process of helping them buy or sell, get to the closing table. If we do it in the right way, we'll have this virtuous cycle of a self sort of fulfilling, you know, engine of referrals.

Right.

And there's only five things in that process that get us paid. And this is worth writing down. It's P L A N S P L A N S so work your plans. Prospecting lead follow up appointments, which is the first time meeting with buyer seller, negotiating first time contracts. A house under contract, then systems. So that's it, right? I'm not going to get into all of those but how many hours a day are you spending in prospecting which is new conversations with buyers and sellers. Lead follow up is follow up conversations with buyers and sellers. Appointments is first time appointments. That PLA is all front stage activities to get to the point where you actually have loyal clients under buyer agency or buyer loyalty agreement under a listing agreement. Then you get this property under under contract and then someone else can handle the contract to closing, all the details, contract to closing and then building systems. That's it. Real estate B School we focus on a very specific structure in terms of organizing your business around four drivers. We call them a track, convert, deliver scale. We've got 12 accelerators. I'm not going to go through all of them. We've got some good training that we can send to you if you reach out to us on how to structure your business for growth. But for now let me move on to the third point I want to cover today. Freedom and structure. This one is a little oxymoronish if that's even a word. There's freedom in structure. I get to take as much vacation as I want. I get to block out anytime I want to do whatever I want. And if you look at my calendar you would be like man, he is busy every second of the day. I fill up the amount of hours I decide to work with. Extremely dollar productive, high impact, mostly one to many things at this point. So I've gone through a series of a few things that I want to teach you here. Number one here in this freedom and structure is to create your ideal week. I've created a week that I just love my schedule, it fits me perfectly. I work out first thing in the morning I've got some time with the family. I don't take appointments before 12. I only take calls Tuesday, Wednesdays and Thursdays, 12 to 5:30. Mondays is content day, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays are off. And Friday is typically a day that I have for myself. And that was over many years that I came to that schedule. And I'll probably take 12 to 15 weeks of vacation. Combination business travel, which is a lot of fun coaching programs, masterminds that I'm in and personal vacation. So I'm not saying any of that to brag just to let you know that this is a thing that we do in real estate B school every 90 days. It comes with a high level of mastering time blocking and eating that frog. If you haven't read the book by Brian Tracy, Eat that frog. It deals with procrastination. You have to be honest with yourself about where you are in your journey and where you're spending your time, right? So if you're not willing to look at where you're spending your time, I don't think you're really in the game playing the game of business at the highest level. And I think there's a good chance you will have regrets, right? You will realize at some point that you didn't play the game at the level that you were able to play the game. So we covered three points. Know your worth. I covered the business Freedom index, being productive, not busy. I covered that really good definition and work your P L A N S and then I covered freedom in structure which is all about your ideal week time blocking and eating that frog. There's a quick story I want to tell about Dave Friedman who I had the pleasure of working with for probably three or four solid years. His heavy growth years. The year before I met Dave he did 35 transactions and I think the year we started working together he did like 60 or so. And you know, fast forward to just recently he messaged me and he had, you know, just spent 30 complete days completely unless plugged from his business does hundreds and hundreds. I think last year he did 400 transactions. He's making 10 times what he was making when I first met him. He hadn't taken any vacation before I met him. His marriage and he shared this with me openly, publicly with his wife was strained frankly at the time that we met. And now he lives a life of complete freedom, has multiple businesses. I think he works less than one complete workday in his real estate business. So it is possible when I started with him he was set 70, 80 plus hours per week in that business and he just had this mindset shift and he was convinced and had a high degree of confidence that he could detach his time from the amount of money he took from his business. So it is possible. The only thing I have to offer you if you want to go further faster is a business Growth assessment. This podcast exists to enrich you and your chances increase your chances of building an amazing business. That's why it's called Real Estate Business Builders.

Right?

But if you want to go further faster, go to Rebs. That stands for Real Estate B School Rebs Growth Assessment.com these business growth assessments are 1012 minutes long. In that time, either me or one of my business coaches will give you a clear plan to profitably and predictably scale your business. There is no hype, no gimmicks, just the stuff that works. So rebsgrowthassessment.com we'll see you on the next episode.

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