The Turbulent Journey From $200k to $1 million in 6 Months w/Jess Lenouvel

What's up? Real estate business builders. This is going to be a fun conversation today with Jess Lenovelle pronounced it right. We practiced beforehand. She has made the journey and it's been a long journey. She's going to unpack it for us today to a seven figure agent without an assistant and then built a $3 million real estate team. And now she's doing, just helping folks do the same and which is awesome. So Jess, tell us a little bit about the journey like in two or three minutes. And then I want to really unpack the different stages. What worked, what didn't. The good, bad, ugly. So tell us a little bit about yourself.

Yeah, I mean I got into the industry at 21, got my license really young. My mom has been a realtor for 35 years plus. So I kind of grew up in the industry a little bit. Being kind of dragged around. When I came outta school, I really didn't know what to do with myself. My mom suggested I get into real estate. Did. I was, you know, a solid six figure agent for a while until I actually decided to take it a little bit more seriously. Really started studying the marketing side and digital marketing and what could be done with, you know, ads and social media and Google and all of these things. And my business grew faster than I expected. So the first time that I hit seven figures, I did it solo and it was probably one of the worst and most stressful times in my life. My, my phone would ring, I would cry, I would hand my phone to my husband and say, I genuinely cannot talk to another person today. It was just overwhelming. It was too much. I felt like I was constantly terrified of dropping balls and I realized pretty quickly that I needed help. So started building a team. I built a really like a small, lean team. I'm not a big like mega team person. It's not what we teach today. It's not what I did. Back then, our team structure was really simple. We had three agents and a full time marketing person and an admin. And the business grew. And it grew. You know, we were doing a couple hundred deals a year. Everybody was really happy. We had some, we had freedom. I got to travel a lot more, which is something that while I was building, I never got to do because it was just me. And then a couple years later I was traveling. I was in Hawaii with my husband. We're driving along this absolutely beautiful road right next to the ocean. It's everyone's most beautiful, perfect imagination of what, where you want to be. And I burst into tears and My husband looked over at me and he's like, right now, he's like, what could you possibly have to cry about right now? And it really was just. I had a bit of a crisis. I was going, I think, like, kind of like an adult growth spurt. I just realized that I was serving the wrong people and that I'd fallen into real estate as a 21 year old because I didn't know what else to do. I'd built what I wanted to build, but I didn't feel super challenged by my business anymore. And I really felt like I was surrounded by agents who were struggling. And so there was also this element of guilt that I had, you know, quote, unquote, figured it out, that I had. I built this thing that, you know, served me really well, allowed me the free time and the travel and all of the things and. And, you know, there was people in my office who were struggling to get a couple of deals done a year. And so I. I just looked at him and I said, I think. I think I'm serving the wrong people. I need to make a shift. So it was. It was a bit of a process. It's not like I came home and like, blew everything up, but, like, you know, started the conversation, started talking. Making a transition at the beginning of 2018 is when I actually did really step away from the team. The team continued to run without me, but I really put 100% of my focus into building the listings lab. And I moved to LA for six months to be around other people who were in the. The information technology, like, training space. I wanted to learn from people who had been really successful and who had built really great products and so lived in LA for six months, built the listings lab, which has now turned into retreats, live events, speaking. And, you know, we have three layers or three levels of product for people at different stages of their business. And yeah, I live in the Bahamas now, so I live on an island called Eleuthera. And we've been here since January. And it is, yeah, living my best life. Things have been great.

Awesome. So that is about the most succinct, you know, I don't know how many years.

Life story.

Yeah, life story that I've ever heard. So let's back up a little bit. So I want to hear about. I want to unpack this in because our stories are so similar. I exited, like, literally exited my real estate team in November 2020, started my coaching company in 2013, and then I sort of really gave up the team in 2016 when I took on a business partner and I was, got it completely silent. So getting out of that business while I'm really sort of ultimately serving the, the, the team builder community. Business builders unpack the journey to a million because, because most agents will be like that's going to be amazing when I can make a million dollars in gci. But, but that's the worst. That's like you're, you're imprisoned, right? You're, you're doing it alone.

I would never like, like I wouldn't be afraid.

So what advice would you give yourself and at what moment on that journey from zero to a million, when would you hire your assistant? When would you, you know, build better?

So yeah, I go about things a little bit differently than most people. I think that so many people their first hire is an assistant, like an in person, like full admin person. I don't teach that way. I tend to go the Tim Ferriss eliminate automate, outsource route. So I would have focused on my automations a lot sooner. I would have built out some better systems. I probably would have hired a team of VAs to take a tremendous amount of like the day to day off my plate and I would have brought on an agent sooner like another agent on my team for you know, taking over. And I'm not again I'm not a big believer in like listing agents, buyer agents, like things like that. I would have just been able to hand off some of those clients. Some of the running around, I may have hired a runner, you know, some of the, some of the lowest value stuff that I was doing on a daily basis that wasn't generating a tremendous amount of income but was they, they were things that had to be done, you know, signs and lawns, you know, like getting printing collected like all of that stuff. I was still doing all of it myself so I think a lot of that would have been, I would have looked at it a little bit more strategically from the beginning. But I'd also never had that volume of business before. So I didn't know what I didn't know and I didn't know what expect kind of going into it. We, we generated that seven figures in six months. So I went from you know, a $200,000 a year agent to a seven figure agent in six months. It grew really, really quickly because of the marketing. And I think that you know, so many people spend so many years just trying to build and compound their repeat and referral business without really realizing how much exponential growth is actually available. If you focus on the right things. So. So because it happened so quickly, I was scrambling. So I was constantly, you know, you know, in, especially in the beginning, hiring out of desperation. I got very lucky, and I will not like, mince words about that. Like, I got very lucky. I got great people very, very easily because I was, you know, I was, I had the quote, unquote success. People were like, oh my gosh, look at her production, look at how much she's doing. But without actually looking at, like, the toll that really taking. I was super anxious. I was, you know, constantly worried. I mean, I didn't sleep. I would lay in bed at night and like, my mind would race with. Did I remember to do that? Did I remember to do that? Because I also didn't have great systems, so I probably would have built out a lot more automation. But again, this was 2015, 2014. Like, we didn't have the tech that we have today. It's so much easier to scale today than it even was, you know, 10 years ago. So I really think that I would have looked at things a little bit differently. I would have educated myself a little differently. I really, I focused on the marketing, but I didn't learn how to build out the systems. And I would have asked for more help. I was not good at asking for help.

You know, what's crazy? And I think it just, you just don't slow down for long enough to even think about, like, I made seven figures, but I'm, I'm literally putting signs in the lawn like, yeah, we can, we can run an ad in my market. It's a major metro market for a runner at $10 an hour and get a hundred applications. Maybe, maybe not sort of post, you know, Covid and everyone getting paid more. But, but, but, but still, like, I, I don't think agents slow down and sort of knowing what's coming. Right. So now you can look back. All right, so, so that, so that's the journey to a million. So talk about, you know, to get from a million to 3 million. What?

That was actually so much easier.

Yeah, it is easier, actually. Wait, before I go there. So tease us a little bit. You mentioned you went from 200,000 to a million in like seven or eight months of one year. What were the main sort of lead gen levers that you used to.

Well, I mean, at the time, it's changed so much from, from, from, from then, like, none of the stuff that I was doing then, but there was a point when I think that I had like 40 landing pages up. We were driving Tons of traffic to different landing pages. We were collecting a lot of leads and then we were using different social media platforms to nurture those people. Email campaigns, things like that. Things are so much more sophisticated now. Like I would never drive traffic to a landing page for an agent today. But you know, at the time it was literally just using digital marketing. You know, I mean, I was in a big metro market. Nobody was, nobody was, was, was really driving paid traffic. Nobody was really using digital marketing the way that we were. And I think that that's, you know, that's one of the things that I really learned through that, through that experience was real estate agents for the most part are five to 10 years behind in general. Right. When it comes to marketing and tech and even just messaging. So many people are still doing the same things that they, that their brokers are teaching them to do from when their brokers were successful in the 70s and the 80s. So a lot of what we did was just look at what was working and what was successful in other service based industries that were not falling behind and taking that stuff, bringing it into real estate, you know, testing it, iterating it until it was functioning the way that it should in the real estate space and just running with it. And I think that, you know, that was really what differentiated us is I wasn't looking only in real est for what was working. I started looking outside of real estate to see what was working in other areas and brought it back into the real estate space. So it was, it looked like innovation I guess from the outside, from like the real estate space. But it wasn't, it was just being ahead of what everybody else was doing.

Yeah, that's awesome. And I literally had a conversation today with someone, I said, so what happened to the 180,000 of GCI that you generated? Right. You said you didn't take home. And one of the things she spent money on was best bus benches. Like that was totally like, that's what you should have done in 1987.

Yeah.

And it's just wild, you know, like shopping carts and like what are you doing? You know, like, is there any roi? Are you tracking anything?

I think that there is a misunderstanding in a lot of the real estate space that people think that exposure equals ROI and there's just too many agents out there and there's too many companies and too much marketing competing for your attention. That, that just doesn't work anymore.

Yeah, awesome. So let's talk about the journey from a million to 3 million where you shift your focus a little Bit. At what point were you phasing out of production or did you stay in production for the that time? What were some of the challenges to go through that tripling of the business?

Yeah, I mean, I stayed in production. I always stayed in production. I liked it. So I didn't ever. I was never that person who wanted that full path out of production. I wanted free time and I wanted to be able to travel and I wanted to be able to take time off. But I actually enjoyed the, I enjoyed the production. So. And I think that every person's going to be a little bit different. But honestly, it was just scaling what we were doing digitally. But the thing that actually made it more efficient and allowed us to actually not die in the process was, you know, getting some of that automation in place, getting our systems in place and getting the right people in the right seats. And I think that that really was the key was, you know, getting people that could do what I did, getting people to, you know, other agents. And I had great, amazing, smart people on the team that were that we're treating the leads and treating the clients the way that I would and we're able to take some of that production off my plate. And it allowed for a lot more scalability. It allowed for me to take a step back and not have my fingers in every single client, in every single email, in every single communication. We had systems around communication. We had ways that we communicated at what times, with what language, with what resources. You know, we had standard operating procedures for what needed to be done on a day to day basis. And it allowed me to kind of take my foot off the gas, not from a marketing standpoint, but just from a client service standpoint and create something that was a lot more scalable over time.

So what's, what's a piece of advice? Because I was going to ask the question, so what was different about you, you know, turning to your husband in Hawaii and like crying at a million, you know, and you're the only person on the island to, you know, to falling back in love with production, to scaling the team because it's not easy to get to a million and then even to endure, you know, some of the new skill sets that you need to adopt to be able to lead and manage people. So what are some of the challenges that you experienced there?

Well, I mean, I, the very first assistant that I ever hired was an absolute disaster. And so I'm not, I made mistakes along the way. She, you know, I believed, I believed the resume and I didn't send her test tasks. I didn't, I didn't really, like, dig in enough because I was hiring out of desperation. I didn't know how to hire. And so, right, like, right off the bat, I, you know, she didn't work out really well. She didn't have a lot of knowledge. She didn't respect me because I was so young. And, you know, I lent her $5,000 at one point so that she would focus because she was, like, short on money for something to do with her family. She took the 5,000 bucks and ran. Never saw her again. No idea what happened to her. So, I mean, I, by all means, like, I made mistakes. And so, you know, I, I think that I just. As you make mistakes and as you think about things more strategically, you change your approach to things. And I think that that's one of the reasons why I love doing what I, what I do so much now is because I get to keep people from making all the mistakes that I made. Right. They get, they get to skip the potholes along the way. But, but yeah, I mean, it really just came down to finding, culturally, I think that was a really big, big thing, is what, what are we building? We all want to build it together. These are the right people that we feel not only are on the same page, but also are similar to kind of who we are. And then from there being able to, like, take that scale it. We all had very similar work ethic, which I also think is really important. I didn't have anybody there that was just there to collect a paycheck. Everybody genuinely wanted to build what we were building, move it forward. And yeah, I mean, do I think that I, at the time, was the most inspiring person in the world? I don't know. I learned a tremendous amount about that, but I didn't feel like I had to micromanage anybody because I had the right people. And we also had really great systems and standard operating procedures that were repeatable. So I, I, I think that I did a, what I did a good job of was setting people up for success, was giving everybody on the team what they needed in order to do their job well. I think what happens with so many agents is they get really busy. They hire an admin, and they expect this admin that they're paying a tiny fraction of what they earn to clean up their chaos that they've never been able to clean up. They've never systematized it, They've never created operating procedures. And then they think that the, the, it's, it's the assistant's fault or the administrator's fault that it doesn't go well, when in fact, the personal responsibility actually lays on the team leader who didn't set that person up for success because they, like, they. They threw someone into their mess and expected it to go well, which is pretty much impossible. That's never going to. That's never going to work.

Yeah. Awesome. So let's. Let's end with this. So I want you to, as you're sitting here today, you know, you've done the journey. You've served like all of these fol, you know, in real estate, buyers and sellers. You've. You've built a team of ops people and agents and, you know, probably agents that didn't want to get out of bed and just suffering through all of that stuff we go through as builders. But now you're thousands of students, you know, and coaching clients as you sit here today. Let's say three things that you know now. So someone who has this unstoppable drive for growth.

Yes.

What are three things you would say, like, if they're earlier in this journey? Three words of wisdom from you and all of your experience.

So this isn't my quote, this is a friend of mine. But results don't take time, they take courage. And I think that that's one of the reasons why I was able to shift things so quickly is because I wasn't afraid to make mistakes.