Real estate agents often work far more hours than they realize. The speaker shows how to calculate your actual hourly wage by dividing AGI by total work hours, then shares how Tara Lindbergh and others doubled their income by building systems and delegating instead of doing everything themselves.
Is the money you're making in real estate versus the hours you're working and the stress you're enduring worth it? Let that sink in for a second. So we're all trading time for money, and we all experience a level of stress in our work that either make it bearable or not so bearable in real estate. Oftentimes we're not making the kind of money that we want. We're working hours that are unsustainable. And the stress we endure because we take on all of the drama, all of the emotion of all these transactions we do, we internalize them and they come out whether we're kicking our dog or we're talking not so sweet to our spouse or we're, you know, numbing with alcohol or food or tv, you know, our emotional well being suffers, our spiritual journey, our physical bodies, we. We get out of kilter in all these areas. So make sure you stick around to the end of this video. I want to give you a free report. It's called the Real Estate Business Growth Navigator. It'll take you through every stage of growth to go from agent to owner, to go from working an ungodly amount of hours and enduring so much stress that it's not bearable and you're just a grump to becoming a true business owner in your real estate business. If you liked the video, give me the thumbs up. Subscribe to the channel and make sure you turn notifications on and also leave me comments. I've had the pleasure to work with Tara Lindbergh out of Bentonville, Arkansas for about five years now. When I first met Tara, she was a busy, busy agent. She was like eyeballs deep into production. She had already started her real estate team. She was doing good business. Challenges, it wasn't sustainable. She was working way too many hours. She was doing way too many jobs. She's working with buyers, with sellers. She was coaching her agents. She was attempting to build systems. She wanted to start other businesses, but she didn't have the capacity to do it. And so we broke down. The first thing we did was break down. What are the things you're currently involved in? Right. What jobs are you doing in your real estate business? You know, that was the first thing. Just get an honest assessment of where you're spending your time. You know, oftentimes we don't want to really see the reality of where we're spending our time. You know, Tara could play the game of business at a level where she could make $1,000 an hour. She was only making about A hundred bucks an hour. So she was a top agent with a team in her market, doing everything right, everything that traditional methods taught her to do. Yet the byproduct of that was about a hundred bucks an hour in her business. Fast forward four or five years where we identified the things she was working on, but also how do we go through a process of delegating things off of her plate, Building systems that could do the heavy lifting, right? Building a recruiting system, an agent onboarding system, an agent retention process. Make the business a fun place to go where agents can succeed and she can delegate things off of her plate. And so she was able to more than 5x what we call Business Freedom Index. It's this measure of the income you bring in. So the amount of money you make versus the hours that you work. So I mentioned $100 an hour. That was about what Tara was making when she first started with real estate B school through a series of building systems, delegating, elevating, bringing the right people into her business, training them properly, getting, getting them into a cadence, a culture of success was allowed her to do less in her business, so make more money, working less hours. And the byproduct was less stress and the ability to launch two other businesses in that timeframe. So as you look at where you are in your business, you know, honestly assess the amount of money you're making for the hours that you're working. It's a simple calculation. I do this calculation every single year. I go to my tax returns and I looked at its AGI, adjusted gross income. I run pretty clean books so I don't put a whole bunch of junk into my businesses and I lower my, you know, income. I don't really play that game. So my AGI, my tax returns is a pretty good measure of the amount of income I was able to earn in a year. Then I go through my calendar. I literally go through my calendar week by week and I count the amount of days. I just work 8 hour days pretty consistently. So if I took a long weekend, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday off, I'll take three days that week times eight. That's 24 hours I work that week. I'll go through my whole calendar. I'll exclude weekends I didn't work, I'll exclude vacations I didn't work. And I'll calculate the exact hours that I worked. And so I take my top line, which is AGI divided by total number of hours. When I first got into real estate, this number was $18. My BFI, business freedom index was 18. I think I made 37 grand. And I worked a crazy amount of hours, like 2000 hours in 10 months or something like that. And it works out to 18 bucks an hour. Aspirationally, I decided I wanted to make 500,000 working 2,000 hours, which is $250 an hour. It took me about five years, but I took that $18 an hour. And one year I made $2,300 an hour in my real estate business. I worked 42 days that year and I made close to seven figures in that business. As you think about where you are, are you closer to $18? Are you wondering what it could look like to get to $501,000 an hour in your real estate business? You know, early on I talked about getting access to a free report. I literally wrote down the six stages of business growth. It's called our real estate Business Growth Navigator. It going to take you through the mindsets, through the money you can make, through the systems you need to build out, the questions you need to be asking yourself. Right. What's coming next? At the next step of the journey. It's these six stages from, you know, struggling real estate agent to completely free business owner. Just go to realestate business growth.com, that's realestatebusinessgrowth.com or click on the link below. As always, if you like the video, make sure you give me the thumbs up. Please subscribe to the channel. Please subscribe, Turn on your notifications and make sure you leave me comments. We'll see you on the next video.
