What To Do If You're Following The Wrong Business Model | Real Estate B-School

Welcome back to another edition of the Business Freedom Podcast. Lars Hedenborg here, founder of Real Estate B School, co founder of High Performance Real Estate Advisors out of Charlotte, North Carolina. If you haven't heard of me and you're new to the podcast, I've been in real estate for 12 years as a team leader. Coming up on 4,000 families served, although I've only sold about 220 homes personally. And I built the real estate team on a really profitable, sustainable, systems driven, empowered people model. And six years ago I started Real Estate B School because my journey was freaking tough. And lately, and what I want to talk about today is I've been having a lot of strategy sessions recently with folks that have gone down a path and it is the anti path that I would love to see all of us go down if we want a sustainable, profitable, systems driven best in all the land at helping buyers and sellers real estate business. That's what Real Estate B School is about. The premise behind Real Estate B School is that in the future it's going to be hard to compete unless you're consumer focused. And so I see a lot of these quote unquote teams that are closer to brokerages than anything else. They're looking to scale their businesses in more of a brokerage setting. And I want to cover sort of three things. If you're going down the path, let's say the spectrum of scale of 1 to 10, 1 is you're really running a brokerage, you're calling it a team. And at the end of the day, you don't really have a sense of any of how any of your salespeople are doing your agents on a daily basis. You don't hold your expenses accountable, you're buying leads and you don't know how those leads are being handled. So there's not a lot of accountability in your business for people or for expenses. And as a result of that, you're having to sell homes most likely to to make any money or the kind of money that you want. So your time money stress equation, that's something that we really focus on a lot at Real Estate B School. The time you're putting into your business for the money you're able to take out, not just to live, but including expanding and increasing your net worth and then the stress that you're enduring as a result of all your business activities and how that impacts areas of your personal life. All right, so what do you do if you're going down this path where time and money freedom are not a thing to you and your stress is through the roof. And I would say the last 10 strategy sessions, I have about eight to 10 strategy sessions, which is just a two way conversation just like this. If you're watching the video of this podcast, it's over Zoom, where we just dig into what your business looks like today, what you want it to look like in the future, and what's been holding you back. We talk about time, what money and stress. We dig into the four key drivers of a sustainable, profitable, systems driven real estate business, which is attract, convert, deliver and scale. And we just have a good conversation about your business and what needs to change for you to unlock the time, money stress equation in your favor. All right, so what to do if you're following the wrong model? So there's three things I want to cover. Number one is to get clear on what you want. This is a tough one. Most of the folks that are in this trap, I'll call it a trap, where they've surrounded themselves with a bunch of agents, they're taking on a bunch of expenses and overhead. And the business part of it that their operations, their sales, what they're spending, their overhead, their lead generation costs, their buying leads, all of that is not running smoothly enough or profitably enough. And as a result, it's keeping them in production for the most part. So you need to get really clear on what you want in your life from a time perspective, from a money perspective, and be honest with yourself about how much stress you're enduring as a result of the business that you've set up and how that, what the implications of your decisions, these are your decisions, what implications those decisions are having on areas of your personal life. And that's often a tough thing to come to grips with because ultimately maybe you didn't know better. So when you decided to build a quote unquote team, you, you didn't really know better. And now you're kind of stuck in a situation where all you know to do is put your head down and just work more and work more and work more. And you're in production. You have administrative staff depending on you, you have salespeople depending on you, you're spending money on leads, and it's kind of a shit show, to be honest. So get clear on what you want. For the most part, every real estate team leader, typically we're entrepreneurs and we're mostly visionary. And this is an easy thing for us. It requires you to slow down a little bit and just get some clarity on what you want for the future. So let's get clear in the areas of time, money and stress. Let's look at what your situation looks like today and what it what you want to look like in the future. Be really honest with yourself about how many hours a week you're putting into your business and how many hours a week you want to be putting into your business. I'm giving you some time to literally think about it right now. And then with respect to money, are you able to provide for your family, for yourself and your family at a very high level in the now? And also are you setting your family up to be able to provide for them in the future? So are you increasing your net worth? Are you setting up yourself for a really awesome retirement and what does that timeline look like? And then the stress you're enduring. Be honest with yourself about the stress that you're enduring as a result of the business that you set up and how that is impacting those around you and yourself. And of course that brings in a bunch of questions about your personal life. Are you taking care of yourself physically, emotionally, spiritually, relationally? So this is just a moment of reflection and it's in these moments of reflection. And I've had lots and lots and lots and lots of these. I sit here from a different perspective, a different position today because I've done lots of this in the past, right? My first few years in real estate, these were not easy questions to answer. My time was not my own. I was trading time for money. And for the first three to four years the money wasn't great because I was very unclear on my path. I was getting guidance and counsel from folks that hadn't actually built the thing I wanted to build. And so I was just running and gunning, selling homes, adding agents, buying leads. Not all of it was coordinated very well. My first two to three years, years three and four is really when I, I buckled down and I got clear on what I wanted. And then years 5 and 6 is when I really scaled from 250 to 310 to 400 plus transactions and I went from 5, 3, 2 to 1 day a week. So those were the acceleration years. I failed really quickly and miserably in my first two to three years. Alright, so get clear on what you want. And I like to think of this in terms of a three year. So it really doesn't matter what you have today. The scary thing when I'm having these conversations, these strategy sessions with folks that have set up something that is not ideal, it's not serving them the thought of Changing it is, it's terrifying. So if this is like a terrifying situation for you to think about unraveling what you've built, it's going to be hard either way. So if you build something that's not sustainable, it's going to be hard. The way you're going is going to be hard. It's not going to be any easier being a brokerage. Essentially a loose collection of people with not a whole lot of accountability on expenses, not a whole lot of a process driven customer experience. Right. If your marketing is not actually marketing and buying leads from somebody that's not a legitimate business, I would argue paying Zillow or realtor.com or even paying Google for forced home search registrations is not really marketing. You're not really doing a good job of attracting business. So really be honest with yourself and think about three years from now. What would I want my business to look like? I'm always running a three year picture in both of our businesses in multiple areas of my life. I'm always looking out three years. And so when you can get clear on what you want three years to look like, very specifically, what does my business look like? Am I doing production? How many agents do I have? How many units are they doing? Do I want 30 agents doing one home a month each? Which is a lot of these teams, you see, they just have a completely autonomous bunch of agents doing whatever they want during the day and with the leads that are generated for them. That's called a brokerage. And the risk with that is that you're not, that's not a consumer focused entity. And so the winners in the future are gonna be those that are really focused on buyers and sellers making sure that they get a great experience. And that great experience is the thing that in this virtuous cycle leads to more business. There's always going to be a market for those that want to be well cared for. Then the last point here, so once you think of the three years out, we call that the three year picture. You need to bring it back into a one year plan. I've covered the 319013 before. I think I forget what episode it was. It really is that ability every year to cast a three year picture, bring it back to a one year plan and then you've got 90 days at a time to go to work on it. And there's 13 weeks in every 90 days. So it's this three year picture, one year plan, four quarters in a year, 13 weeks and a quarter. And that's how you're able to actually achieve the thing that you want to achieve. So the context of this conversation is around you sitting in a thing that you've built that isn't sustainable, it is not profitable, it is not systems driven, it is not consumer focused. Those four things are. That's like the epitome of what I know. I know as well as I could know because it's predicting the future. That's what I know in my heart and where I'm putting all of my efforts in both businesses own in terms of the future. So three years from now, I want to be the real estate team that has the highest customer satisfaction index, where we are just going above and beyond for our buyers and sellers and we're paid as a trusted advisor versus a transaction person. There's going to be lots of solutions. You can go point and click on a computer screen to buy a home, right. And not have to pay a buyer agent or not have to pay a listing agent. We don't want to be that. We want to be the premier provider of buyer and seller residential real estate services. All right? So if you're in something that you built that feels like you don't have time, freedom, you don't have money freedom and you have a whole lot of stress, you've got to just take a break, just take a break and breathe. That's the first step. And then consider what life could look like three years from now without any judgment around what you have today. And then just bring that back into the next 12 months and then just bring that back into the first quarter and then just bring that into one week at a time. What could you do this week to move your business forward? So if this is you, I'm talking to you and you're like, yes, I don't have time freedom, yes, I don't have money freedom, yes, I have a whole lot of stress. I. You've got to take a different approach. And the only thing I can offer you is a 45 minute conversation about your business. I call it a business growth strategy session. The only agenda on this call is digging into what you've built, what you want for your free future and what's holding you back. It's just an open, honest, authentic conversation about what life is like in your business today. And then let's talk about what's possible. If, if a conversation around real estate, B school makes sense, we'll have it. There is no pressure to do anything. We have launched what I'm calling a pilot program. And if you qualify. I'm providing 30 days of completely free training to get baseline systems up and running in your business. And we can talk about the pilot program as well. So go to realestatebschool.com and right on the top there, you can basically apply for a business growth strategy session where you'll talk to me for 45 minutes. It'll be an awesome time. I cannot wait for it. So if this hit you right between the eyeballs, make sure you take action and go to realestatebschool.com we'll see you there.