The Ultimate Guide to Systems for Real Estate Agents That Want to Scale

It's a myth because you have no freedom whatsoever. If you stop doing the thing, the business doesn't do anything. So it's, you don't own a business, you just have a high paying job for the most part. There are three different people inside of us. There's the technician, the manager and the entrepreneur. Most agents live in the technician role, meaning they're just doing the stuff they're in the daily right, they're doing nuts and bolts, they're. They don't have a grand vision and they don't have any systems. The one man operation, the one man painter that he's got to sell the job, then he's got to get on the ladder, buy the paint, do the paint, fix up the holes, but then he can't get his next job because he's doing the, the stuff you just gotta do the. If you're like most real estate agents, you struggle with building systems. 100% of agents, when I ask them, do you need systems in order to grow your business in order to scale your business? 100% of agents would say emphatically that I need systems in order to grow my business. What they think they need oftentimes isn't what they really need. Most agents, you know, really think they just need leads. Give me leads, I just want to pay for leads or I'll pay at closing. It'll all work out in the end. Where really there's about a dozen core systems that you'll need in order to grow your sales in order to scale your business. And when I say scale your business, I mean detaching the hours you put into your business and the money you make from your business. The real fun starts in business and real estate sales when you can figure out having these systems automations, perhaps delegations, marketing systems, client care systems, lead generation systems, lead nurture systems and conversion sequences. Having all those systems set up in your business so that you can focus on the things that only you can do, right? So today in this video, I want to break down all the things real estate agents do and which of those things could you build out in terms of building sustainable systems so that your business runs more like a business and you don't have just a highly paid job, you can actually have freedom from your real estate business if you build it right. So I'm going to share something here. I went on the CHAT GPT and I asked this question, I said, please give me a comprehensive list. If you don't use ChatGPT, if you're not getting up all into AI. It is unbelievable what's happening. I asked the question. So please give me a list of all the tasks a real estate agent does in their business, broken down by different skill sets. So the point I'm going to make here is that one person couldn't possibly be able to do all this stuff on the daily, on the weekly, on the monthly, consistently enough where they're not going to be in the roller coaster, the real estate income roller coaster. Um, that's the, that's. The inherent underlying challenge of the industry is that 85% of agents don't have any systems built out to the point where they can hire even a virtual assistant. And we hire virtual assistants for less than $4 an hour and they're fully batteries included, right? So a lot of these things, you build a system and you can offload it to someone making $10 or less per hour and they're still doing the tasks at a very high level. And there are automations and there's technology that we can employ. So it's not necessarily about bringing people into your world, but identifying the things that you're doing that maybe you don't have to do. So this is what chatgpt told me. Number one, client relationship management, right? Prospecting, cold calling, direct mail, email drips, hosting open houses, network events, social media, client consultations, buyer seller consultations, discussing financing options, needs and preferences, ongoing communication, right? Calls, texts, emails, regular updates on market conditions, client concerns, answering questions, sending client gifts. That was number one. Number two, marketing and branding. Digital marketing. You have to be a digital marketer. As a real estate agent, 100% you have to be a social media marketer. Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, video marketing for listings, client testimonials, educational content. You have to be a video marketer, you have to be an email marketer and nurturing campaigns. You have to manage a website or a blog. Paid advertising, we don't recommend paid advertising, but ChatGPT things, it's a good idea. Traditional market marketing, we do really well with direct mail. Targeted direct mail, door knocking in neighborhoods around open houses, perhaps hosting community events, content creations, listing descriptions, blog posts, educational content. You have to be a graphic designer too. Managing photography by the way, in million dollar agent method, every one of our templates for marketing, your database for social, for your consultations, your packets is all done, built out already and you get the swipeable canva templates or the Google templates. Photography, videography, that's number two. Number three is lead generation and conversion. Lead nurturing, setting up, maintaining CRM for managing leads, follow following up with leads through calls, text emails, blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah. Let this sink in. The reason you're not scaling your business and the reason you're not making a ridiculous amount of money in a not so ridiculous amount of time is that the industry is stacked against you. The industry doesn't teach you how to build systems and perhaps hire a virtual assistant or maybe a junior agent to show homes on evenings and weekends so you can get your life back. Right? So it's really not your fault. The, the industry does not teach this stuff. Sales and negotiation, listing properties, market analysis. You have to be an expert marketing analysis. You have it to be a stager and, and no home improvements and marketing materials and enter. You have to be data entry specialist, buyer representation. You have to do home search stuff, scheduling, attending negotiation. You have to be an expert negotiator by the way. And some of this stuff is. It's really good stuff, right? Let's say 20% of the things I'm reading are like highly dollar productive and you probably can't get out of at this stage in your journey. At some point, depending on what stage you go to, you may be able to leverage your way through automations, delegations and just not doing things. You may be able to get out of all of it. Transaction management, whoa. Really important but not doesn't pay you know, 500 bucks an hour which is the kind of money I wanted to make in real estate. The offer process inspection and due diligence. Right. So once the property's under contract, closing the deal, financial and administrative, managing income expense. Hopefully you're tracking your numbers. We have a proprietary tracking tool for our clients legal and compliance. And yeah I guess you do have to be a legal expert. You have to understand your contracts and comply with the laws. Right. Technology and tools, real estate platforms, CRM. You gotta manage your CRM communication tools. And then you need to do personal development and training, continual learning, networking prep. Oh and then you need to do post sale relationship. Right. So clients for life program. You have to maintain that. We call it database touch system, client satisfaction. You have to ask your clients on a scale of 1 to 10, how did I do right. Net promoter score referrals and testimonials. You have to get your clients on video, you have to get them just recorded a Google review, YouTube as well. You got to get those right. Time and project management, scheduling and planning, weekly planning. We have a calendar system that we follow delegating. Right. Okay so those are the things. The point I'M trying to make here is that it is absolutely impossible for one person not only to get all of those things done in a day or a week, but to be good at all those things. So all you need to be good at is creating the system. There's a book that I read by Michael Gerber. It was implanted in my being when I read this book. The E myth is the entrepreneurial myth. It's this myth that just because you're in business for yourself, you're like an entrepreneur. It's a myth because you have no freedom whatsoever. If you stop doing the thing, the business doesn't do anything. So you don't own a business. You just have a high paying job for the most part. So there are three different people inside of us. Most agents, there's the technician, the manager and the entrepreneur. Most agents live in the technician role, meaning they're just doing the stuff. They're in the daily, right? They're, they're doing nuts and bolts. They don't have a grand vision and they don't have any systems. They are the one man operation, the one man painter that he's got to sell the job, then he's got to get on the ladder, buy the paint, do the paint, fix up the holes and you know, but then he can't get his next job because he's doing the stuff, right. So your business will be this just roller coaster. And we see that in real estate. And that's why, you know, the average agent sells what, like five, six, seven homes per year. I was in the number one before exp. I was in the number one KW office five years running in the world. Out of 850 offices, five years in a row, our average productivity was seven deals per agent, right? It's because we're doing all this stuff. So you're stuck in the technician role. You're entering listings, them less, you're showing properties, you're doing your social media, you're doing all, all this stuff. The manager, so that's the technician. The manager bridges the gap between the technician and the entrepreneur. So I'm going to cover the entrepreneur first. The entrepreneur is envisioning what the future could look like. So I call this Newco and I think in the book they call it Newco. New company, right? So the future version, what's possible, lives in your head first and you can put it on paper. And I was good at that. I always have a three year vision. I still have a three year vision. I review it daily. The entrepreneur though is this Visionary, dreamer, innovator, lives in the future, craves change. So I don't love what today looks like. I love what's in my brain about what's possible for the future. And they can drive the vision of the future helps drive the actions to bridge the gap from where you are today to where you want to be in the future. The manager sits in the middle. A typical agent spends no time in the visionary entrepreneur role and even less time as the manager. The manager builds the systems and the structure and the cadence in order to go from where you are today to actually realize that future vision, that new co vision that you have. So if you were to rate yourself, you know, look back the last week or two and you were to give 100% of your time and divide it up in these three buckets, what would you say the percentages are? My guess is if you're just doing it, doing it, doing it, as Michael Gerber would say if you ever. He never really launched a platform and doesn't have a lot of content out there, but he does that expression like you're doing it, doing it, doing it. And the book, in the book, I think maybe be Ray Kroc that did that. Ray Kroc met with the McDonald's brothers. They had a single location. He had the idea like, what if I figured out a way to basically build a system that I could duplicate. And not that selling real estate is like flipping burgers, but this concept, when I read the book e myth, the concept of building the thing to run without me, essentially, even though every part of it ran 100% with me. When I read the book to start, I started thinking about, okay, what could I get out of if I had to get out of something. And then I hired a part time administrator and the part time administrator was able to take over marketing coordination. So I would build a marketing system, but she was able to run it listing coordination. So I could go out and kill the elephant, take the listing, drag that elephant back home, and then she could run with all the listing, get the photography, the remarks, whatever, all that stuff, home inspections, pre inspections, all of it. And then she could do closing coordination and she was licensed. And so that's a ton of things I was able to get out of. So I would build a system of how I wanted those things to run and then someone else would execute the system. So that's essentially when you watch the movie Founder and you watch this scene, this is essentially how I want you to view your real estate business. It's like, okay, so when I consider all the things that have to happen in my real estate business and I can look at here game we are playing, when I look at all the things that have to happen, these are all the legion, all the combos, the appointments met set, clients close and then clients for life in this virtual cycle. What parts of it do I really need to be involved in? That's really the question you need to ask yourself when you consider these different personalities. If you're 100%, back to my question of what percentage are you spending your time? If you're 100% in the technician role and you're never thinking about what this thing could look like in the future, my challenge to you is to take an hour or two in the next week and think about what is possible. I don't care if you sold 10 homes in the last 12 months and you want to sell 100 homes three years from now. What would have to happen for you to go from 10 to 100 to 10x your business while working reasonable hours, which is less than 50 hours a week, five and a half days per week. That's my challenge. Nine hours per day, Monday through Friday and then five hours on Saturday. I ran that schedule for two of my heaviest lift years and then no time on Sundays. What would have to happen, right, what would have to happen is first you need the vision. So that's the vision. You're going to work 50 hours a week or less, selling 100 homes per year. Do the math. On your average commission check, you'll take home about 70, 65, 70% of it. Net. Net. So if it's a 10,000 average commission check 100 sides, that's a million gross. You'll take about 700,000 home and your work about 2,500 hours and you'll make about what, 275 an hour. I forget what the math is. So that's the future vision. And you know how crappy selling 10 homes is, right? You're even probably working 50 hours trying to figure out how to do all that. And the money that you're taking home and your net worth probably isn't increasing. So what has to come up in the middle there is the manager and that's the person that builds out the structure, they build out the systems. Now the shameless plug is that we have built all of this out already. Million dollar agent method literally just helps you install when you look at even just lead generation, database, touch blueprint, we have all of everything you will need to be able to implement every one of these systems into your business and all the documents associated with that, the agent brand authority builder and everything associated with that. And whether it's any of our other Legion levers, right. In Million Dollar Agent method, we build out your database, touch blueprint, we build out your agent brand authority builder, which is your digital footprint, and then we build out two other Legion levers in 13 weeks and all the lead conversion systems around it and also the sales frameworks. And you get access to all of it. There's four pillars. Lead management, lead nurture, all the scripts and objection handlers and how to qualify appointments. Buyer consultation framework, Listing consultation framework. You might say, I know how to go list, you know, list homes. I'm talking at scale, so I'm talking about putting the systems in place where you can scale this thing to whatever level you want to. And then if you need leverage client care, we've got all of those, whether it's hiring an agent, an admin, a virtual assistant, a showing agent, whatever you need as your next step. And also how to manage the client care process so that the natural byproduct of working with you is getting referrals. So that's a little taste of what it looks like in terms of working with us in the implementation level. But these are the pillars that you need to focus on. Leverage lead generation, the appointment setting process. Let me collapse these. Leverage lead generation, the appointment setting process and leverage consultation frameworks and leverage client care. And then you will have to build out all of these systems or all of these different templates. Consultation frameworks. On the listing side, we've got our pre list packet, our home equity evaluation, our listing packet, all the documents associated with the listing packet and how to present it. Same thing on the listing presentation, editable stuff or flexible fee menu. How to run consultations, even in terms of just the playbook, in terms of how to like literally at scale, take listings like clockwork. You might say, well, I already know how to do that, but I promise you haven't done it at scale, right? Or if you have, maybe you're working too many hours. All you need to do now is just think about where you spend your time. If you're not spending any time thinking about the future and then you don't spend any time as the manager building systems, cadence and structure, you're not in the game of business building. And that's what I want for you because I know you get to a point in your production where you can't do anymore and you're giving away too much of your life and you're not getting the reward for it. So consider where you are in your business growth journey. If you're at the six figure mark and you've sort of hit a wall and you don't know how to build out marketing systems we call lead gen levers, the next step for you is just to have a strategy session with us. Shameless Plug for million dollar agent method.com go to million dollaragentmethod.com there's a seven minute video there. It walks you through exactly what we do and if it resonates with you and you want to look at what even just have a conversation about where your business is right now, where you want it to be in the future, we'll go through this exercise of helping you bridge the gap. What are you doing now in the business? That's the technician. Are you thinking about the future? That's your entrepreneur and and what's in the way? That's how those strategy sessions are structured. So go to milliondollaragentmethod.com watch that 7 minute video book in a strategy session and I look forward to seeing you on the next video. Much love, much respect.