Top 5 Things to Focus on Right Now

What's up business freedom podcast listeners. So I want to dig into the top five things to focus on right now. If you are a top producing real estate agent or you're a team leader, this 100% applies to you. If you were a struggling agent before this hit, it doesn't mean you can't make it. I started in real estate in 2007 part year. And then 2008 was my full year. First full year. And just you need to really double down on just. I think the third thing I'm going to focus on. Well, 1, 2 and 3. But not all of it's going to be relevant to you if you were struggling before this hit. And so this is interesting times. I can't pretend to understand what y' all are going through. I have my own reaction to everything that's going on. I was off of news, I was off of social media. I was out of some of the non productive things before any of this hit. So I've done a good job keeping up those disciplines. So let me just get into it. Number one. First thing you have to focus on and figure out is your mindset. The reality of what we're seeing right now is that when I got into real estate, there were 15,000 real estate agents in Charlotte, North Carolina. This was 2007. Interestingly, inventory shot up in 2007. Nobody saw it in Charlotte. End of 2008 is when everything hit the fan publicly and then it was the end of the world, great recession. And anyway, I went from 58 to 118 to 178 to 248 sides in all of that. And the reason, the number one reason 80% of me doing it was that I just protected my mindset and I only did the things that I can control. Got really creative with my marketing. I'll do podcast episodes on probably all of these things over the next few weeks. Number one, I just, I cleared every out all the noise I started back then. This was back in 2007, 2008. I wasn't listening to the news, I wasn't letting anything negative get into my mind and take me off of where I needed to go. And so that's number one is mindset for me. I'm going to get into my morning routine here in some of the self care stuff. Actually, I'll probably do a podcast episode on it. My morning routine is my savior. It's the thing that allows me to get my head straight and move forward. So I'm going to make a note, I'm going to do a morning routine special episode and I'll get that out here in the next few episodes. So number one is mindset. And it's really what you put in is what creates that fear. So just guard your mind. Number two is physical body. If you weren't taking care of your physical body before all of this, there has never been a better time to start. I've increased my workouts, I've increased my sleep, I've increased my hydration, I've increased. If you're watching the video version of this, two green salads a day I'm currently eating. Plus look at this bowl here of a bunch of oranges for vitamin C. So increase your intensity around your physical body every day this week pretty much, I've done a 60 to 75 minute walk on my peloton tread and I've been filling my mind with good stuff. I'm just diving deep into stuff that I've been wanting to work on and I've got a focus there. Hydration and sleep. We talked about that. Number three is new business development. So number one is mindset. Number two is your physical body. Take care of it. Number three is new business development. You've got to double, if not triple down on your new business development efforts. When I say new business development, it's generating buyer and seller consultations, generating appointments to meet with buyers and sellers. This is not the time where you check out. This is not like Thanksgiving to Christmas where, you know, our most agents just check out of the business and they don't do the daily activities, they don't put in the, in the miles and they expect to be in good shape come the spring. Right? This is the time next, 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24 weeks, whatever this is going to look like. The only thing you can control is at 8am you're going 50, 10 for 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 hours. However long it takes to set enough buyer consultations, enough listing consultations to have the kind of business you want to have, knowing that there will be, you know, less opportunity in the market. You have to set more appointments than you were before. And if you weren't setting enough appointments before, this is your opportunity really just to triple down on those activities. I'll talk a little bit about virtual process here in just a second. So every day you start at zero and it's all about new business development. What can I do today to generate a consultation with a buyer or consultation with a seller? It could be that you have to take a step back and you're not doing the things with your database that need to be doing. You're not doing the things you need to be doing with expired and FSBOs. It could be that you have some work to do. If you have listings out there, you couldn't. Maybe you don't have the right yard marketing strategy in place. There's some other things you might have to get in place. You've got to have enough opportunity people to call fizbos. If you don't have a FSBO program in place. We do direct mail. We do some cool things with technology. Door knocking, fizbos calling fizbos with the right script, this is the time for that. Number four is to eliminate expenses. I say the word expenses. Not everything you spend money on is an expense. So there are investments in your business that are worth keeping. I mostly for selfish reasons. Not in a bad way. I think coaching is an investment that everyone must have a coach that is going to lead them through what we are going through right now. If you are investing in a coach and they are not doing that for you, of course I want the opportunity to talk to you. I don't care who you get coached by. Someone that has been through this before and not just survived but actually thrived. That's the person you want to align yourself with and that's an investment. Investing in your database. Right? We've done some awesome low to zero cost things with our database. Two years ago we spent I think it was like 98,000 on the database. We're about a $3 million GCI team. Super tight. 12 of us, 11 of us. So it's not a massive team. Super profitable. The right, right economic model and all that good stuff. We went from about 98,000 or so just on the database to I think we cut out about 50% of it from year to year or in a two year time period. So we're just doing some cool things. Smaller events, a lot of digital, custom audiences on Facebook, those sorts of things. So that's an investment that we're going to keep. There are some expenses that haven't proven themselves yet. If you're spending money on a bunch of paid home search leads, you know, if you haven't heard me talk about those in the podcast, you need to go back and listen to those episodes for sure. So eliminate expenses. Go through your personal and your professional and eliminate the things that aren't driving your business, especially in the in on the personal expenses eliminated. Eliminate the things that you just don't need to have. There's A survival. I need this to survive. There's a lifestyle, expenses, and then there are things that you're spending money on that are just unnecessary. I just spent a couple hours going through our accounts. I was better at it, you know, years ago, and I just doubled down on it again. I went through all of my accounts for the last four months, and I went through that process just three buckets. You need it, you want it, and you can eliminate it. Those are the three buckets. And then number five thing that you should be focusing on right now is a virtual process for buyers and sellers. So we have a completely virtual process now where we can send someone to a link where they can watch a video, they can answer a seller survey, and they can also answer questions to make sure they actually watch the video. We get that form to confirm that they watched our presentation. Then we get on and we do a virtual consultation with them. Same thing on the buyer, same thing on the seller side. Have all the packets loaded so they can actually retain our services without physically meeting with us. And I think what we're going to find is that the folks that can adapt to this process quickly and pivot around all this are most likely going to change the way they do business forever. Forever. So that's it. Mindset, physical body, new business development, tripling down there, eliminating expenses, keeping investments. And I would argue that, you know, leaning in on your investments, going deeper on the things that, you know, work. And then number five, come up with a virtual process for buyer and seller consultations that's even more awesome than the way you met with them before. You know, think about a seller consultation. How can I make a virtual seller consultation even better than it was? When you would go to their house, you would disrupt their, you know, probably show up at dinner time, their dog would sniff your crotch, their kids were running around. You know, how could you make the process even more appealing to a seller? So maybe once all the dust settles here, your process for seller and buyer consultations is 100% virtual. And your sign rates and you're getting under contract rates have skyrocketed as a result. So look at this from a mindset perspective as an opportunity to reimagine the way that you do business. I used to hate when people said, yeah, I'm redefining myself this year. This is one of those times where I don't like the word redefine because it means you didn't know who you were before. This is a reimagining of how business is going to be done and I think this is the most exciting time ever. Yeah. So I'm going to cover episodes on marketing. I'm going to cover a lot of different things that are relevant to what we're seeing right now. Just keep in mind that all this is doing is triggering a shift. A shift is something that you should have been preparing for if you weren't. We've got a hustle to help you there. This is just some people are going to get hurt financially and as a result we're going to see a standoff between buyers and sellers and the market is going to slow down and days on market, it's going to go up. All the ibuyers have come out of our market already and so this is going to do a lot of good things. Our roster is at 17,000. It went from 15 to 5 over the Great Recession up to 17 now and it's going to go back down to 6. My prediction is 6 to 7,000 here in the next 12 to 24 months and that's a good thing. It's sad for those that want to be real estate agents. Building a team though now is super, super awesome opportunity and I'll cover some of that. I've got so much stuff I want to cover. The stuff that we're taking action on that I think will benefit all of you. If you're at the point where you're running a good sized business, you're already over 500,000 GCI up to a million and a half plus we go up to, we have members at 5 million. You just don't know what to do. Everything seems like chaos. You don't have anyone coming into your life and kind of giving you the moves you need to make. All I can offer you is a conversation. So go to realestatebschool.com and just hit apply now. That is just a really short survey about your business and we'll jump on a phone call and, and do a deep dive in terms of what's real for you right now. Where do you want to go and how can we bridge that gap with you? Like I said, I grew my real estate team in the worst economy that we had seen in for a long time. They called it the Great Recession because it was just like the Great Depression. It was bad. And so this is game time for me, Wartime general here. And if you need to talk to somebody, make sure you take action on that. Just so go to realestatebschool.com hit apply now. There's a bunch of cool stuff on the site podcast episodes, different reports and stuff you can get. So case studies and all that good stuff. I'm speaking to someone who's suffering right now that you've already got a pretty big business and you need to protect and pivot pretty quickly and you don't know how to do it. So if that's you, take action and we'll talk soon. Sam.