What Does True Real Estate Business Freedom Look Like? (And How You Can Have It!)

Do you think it's possible to make $500,000 a year in real estate working less than 2,000 hours, no evenings or weekends? In today's video, I want to unpack that for you and tell you the step by step process that I took and our members are taking to do just that, to detach time from money. You know, I'm not saying it's an easy process. And once you figure out the code to not only generate more leads, but to convert those leads at a higher level, to service clients at a higher level, to put your business on autopilot so that you can go from making 25 bucks an hour to 250 to $500 an hour. That's the game that I've been playing for the last 12 or so years. If you're at the point in your journey where you just want to be involved with this challenge around time and money, make sure you stick around to the end of this video. I want to tell you how we can spend 21 days together in our Time Freedom Challenge. If you like the video, hit the like button, subscribe to the channel, make sure you turn notifications on and leave me comments. So I'm motivated to do more videos to serve you more and more. All right, let's dig into this concept of like time and money. And the game I've been playing in business is different than most anyone I know. I got into real estate and I was grinding. I was working seven days a week, the 10 to 12 hour days, some weeks, 80 plus hours. Right. There was no balance whatsoever. Here's the thing. If I was making a lot of money doing it, I may have actually not challenged myself to think about business differently. The challenge was that in 2007, I sold 27 homes in 10 months. I worked like, on average, I did the calculation recently. It worked out to $14 an hour. Here I am, top agent in my market. You know, theoretically, I'm supposed to be like this trusted advisor. What trusted advisor do you know that makes $14 per hour? And it was like when I first did this calculation that today I call it the Business Freedom Index. Back then, it was a chapter in a book that I had read that challenged me to look at what I was making per hour. And instantly when I saw the $14 number, I was like, screw that. I'm not going to do that for a whole lot longer. In my mind, I said, I'm going to make $500,000 and I'm going to work 2,000 hours. There is no top agent that is working 2,000 hours. Just think about that. It's 50 weeks times 40 hours per week. What top agent do you know working 40 hours or less in their real estate business taking home $500,000? I actually didn't know any at the time. This was just a calculation that I made up in my mind. There was no like book about real estate teams and the money you could make. Right? This was me failing forward and just setting a vision for what was possible. With the time I put into my business, the money I was able to get out. So it really started with just this concept that now is the Business Freedom Index. So here it is. And I want you to go through this exercise. Looking back maybe the last full calendar year. What was your adjusted gross income on your tax return? You know, for me, back in the day it was $37,000. So I left a $200,000 corporate job to make $37,000 in real estate. Alright. And then the number, I think it was like 40 weeks on average I was spending 70 hours. So it was 2,800 hours to make 37 grand. And do the math, it's really bad. 13, 14 bucks an hour. So what do the numbers look like for you? Maybe it's you cleared 100 grand or you split 100 grand. This is pre tax money. So 100 grand. And you worked on average, you know, 50 hours a week. So 100 grand divided by 2,500 hours. Your business freedom index is $40 per hour. Now where are you now? The shift I made was this aspirational view of what was possible. I actually didn't even know if it was possible. I just did the calculation. $500,000 divided by 2000 hours is $250 per hour. I was making $14 an hour. How do I bridge the gap between making $14 an hour and to $250 an hour? To me, the trade off having left corporate America, the security of a corporate job. Well, looking back, there is no security in corporate America. At the time it felt very secure compared to the business that I got in, where there was no guarantee around where my next paycheck was coming from. There was. I didn't have sales experience. I'd never built a business before. I never learned how to market or generate leads or like brand advertising or image. Like I didn't know any of it. I knew nothing about nothing. And I was willing to just draw a line in the sand and say I'm going to make 250 bucks an hour. It changed the way I Looked at everything, you know, what jobs does a real estate agent do that make them $250 an hour or more. Just think about it for a second. I've been through the process. There's probably three dozen things that a busy real estate agent will do in the course of a week, in a month. Like the things you have to do to be successful in real estate. There's like four things that make you a lot of money. It is new business development. It is lead follow up. It is consultations with buyers and sellers and negotiating deals. Outside of those four things, you have zero shot at making $250 or more per hour. In fact, those activities are $500 an hour plus activities. So if you can just identify the parts of your calendar, the things you're getting your hands on that aren't those things, and just going through a process, even if it takes you 3, 4, 5, 6 quarters, 7, 8 quarters, 2, 3 years to just continue to delegate off of your plate the activities that aren't dollar productive. Most of a real estate agent's job, you can pay someone else to do for less than $50 an hour. Some of you are like, $50 an hour is amazing pay. I will happily work 3,000 hours a year making $50 an hour. It's $150,000 an hour. $150,000 in a year, right? That's not the game I wanted to play. Right. I had already committed and I was like a dog on a bone. Like I was going to make 500,000 working 2,000 hours and it was 250. That's a different game, a different way to look at business. And so the shift I had to make was like almost everything had to come off of my plate. In fact, I got to the point where even those four activities that I mentioned, I was able to shed those from my plate. So now I can focus on recruiting talent to the team, coaching our team members. Instead of working like 10 men, I can teach 10 men how to work. The year I made the most amount of money in every unit input, every hour I worked was the year we did over 400 transactions and I made $2,300 an hour that year. And I don't say that to brag. I just say that to impress upon you that I started out at $14 an hour and this was six years later. So I went from $14 an hour to $2,300 an hour in six years because I was just playing a different game. People thought I was crazy. I would ask people, so you're you know, I would ask other team leaders that had big teams that were set up the wrong way, were not systems driven, the wrong economic models and all of it just a loose collection of people. I would ask them like, hey, are you still in production? Like, are you still working with buyers and sellers? Like, yeah, I'm working with buyers and sellers. I would ask them like, hey, how much, you know, some of them would actually be honest with me, with me about how much, you know, money they're making versus the time they're putting into their, into their business. In fact, we have someone in our Time Freedom Challenge right now, a 90 million in volume team. So about 2.7 million top line. His BFI business freedom index is $120 per hour. Good money. Like I'm not going to say that that's not good money, right? This guy's making 350 to 400,000 pre tax in a given year. He should be making 750 to 800. He's still in production. In fact, he's not making more profit than him than his individual production. So he never quite grasped the concept early on that he had to shed the activities in his business that didn't lead him to financial freedom. And now he's working too many hours. The business is not set up the right way and he hasn't really committed to a process of making things right in his business. When I think about, you know, as complicated as this journey is, I think about. One of our early members is Kirby and Christina Skurat out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. They were doing pretty good business when I met them. I think they were doing 192 transactions the year we started working together, the two of them with a licensed administrator. There was no freedom in terms of how they set this business up. Right. They were working every bit of 50 hours a week, which times two is 5,000 hours a year. And so they were making about a hundred bucks an hour when I first met them. You know, we committed to building systems out where they weren't doing the heavy lifting, where Christina could lead the team, she could teach others to sell at the rate she was selling. She did 150 transactions the same year she gave birth to their third child. That is not a life worth living. Right. And they just had to tweak the, the way they approach the business. They went from making $100 an hour in that business as a couple. Fast forward three years after working together, they made $400 an hour. He went down from 50 hours a week to five hours a week in that business. She went from 50 to 40 hours a week. So they cut their time in half, they doubled their income, and their Business Freedom Index quadrupled in three years. A different game. They just committed to playing a different game. So here's the thing. If you're at the point in your business where, like, you can't make sense of time, money, and it's all wrapped up together and you're stressed, you're kicking your dog, you're disrespectful to your friends, and you just don't have any bandwidth or margin to enjoy life at all. Join me for 21 days. It's our Time Freedom Challenge. Thetimefreedomchallenge.com or click on the link below if you like the video. If I challenge you, hit the like button. Even if you don't like it, even if it makes you feel like, man, I don't have my stuff together. I'm doing this to serve you. Subscribe to the channel, Turn notifications on so you're the first to know about new videos and leave a comment so we can have a dialogue back and forth. And I can be motivated to bring you more content, to push you more in business and more importantly, in life. You know, I will see you on the next video. I'll keep showing up and I'll keep serving you and at the highest level possible.