Kevin Atto: Driven By Systems, Knowledge, Contribution, And A Motto In His Shower, This Entrepreneur Left Teaching To Build A Real Estate Brokerage Firm With The Happiest Team And Highest Quality Clients

I do really believe 100% from every part of me that everyone has the capacity to be able to do the things that they want and not to be held back by the mental baggage that's in our head that we want to push through.

Welcome to the do the Thing podcast. In each episode, we get down and personal with people who go after the things they want to make all their wildest dreams come true. Join us as we unveil and dissect a formula for what it takes to do the thing. Here is your host, Stacy Lauren.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the do the Thing podcast. This is your host, Stacey Lauren. So this is exciting. Today you guys are going to get to meet someone who is so cool. I actually met him last year, and he's actually the reason the podcast is even on right now, because pretty much I was telling you I was doing a podcast, and you're like, where is it? And so, yeah, so he's the one that pushed me to publish it because you gave me a date and basically then held me to it. And then I think I pretty much hit the date right on. And then I waited for the podcast to get going until I. Until I asked you to come on. So it was. It's really great when you have people that can challenge you and push you in different ways. And he's actually someone that does the thing with everything he does. He actually started and sold a cleaning company years ago and then became a realtor and then a broker. Now has his own brokerage firm. So I'm so excited to introduce you guys to Kevin Atto.

Hi. Good to be here. Wow, you really talked me up. I appreciate that.

Well, you know, I could have gone for longer, but I figured we got to get this thing going.

I was like, who's this guy she's talking about? I want to meet him.

That's so cool. Well, why don't you start off and tell everyone a little bit about your background and your story?

How far back would you like me to go?

You know, it's funny. I think it's like, so the podcast is about doing the thing. So it could be something that, like, you know, anything that's regarding that you could even start from.

That's really good.

Yeah.

Well, I'll just give the basics. I grew up in the Detroit area, and I went to University of Michigan. I got a master's degree out there also at Oakland University. And it was all an education. I never knew really what I wanted to do, and I decided to become a high school teacher. So I Taught high school math, and I coached boys and girls golf. And it was funny because in college, this one guy, his name is Casey, he told me, what the heck are you doing? We all know you're going to be an entrepreneur. And I was like, what do you mean? I'm not. No way. I would never do that. And he's like, all right, we'll see, we'll see. So it's a story of taking risks because basically in my first year of teaching, I was number one, a first year teacher, which is you're planning, you're prepping all your classes, you're making all your exams for the first time. It's a lot, a lot of work when you get a new class to teach. And then I was also coaching, and I was also doing my master's. And I went literally right out of a semester of finishing one class over the summer to starting teaching that fall. So I never really had a break. I just jumped right into it. And I was so busy. 5am out of bed, working till 10 every night. You know, it was a lot. And it was just so many things piled up. And I completed my master's in 13 months. If you just to give you an idea of like, how many, you know, how much time was being consumed. So all of a sudden, summer came and I literally had nothing to do. I didn't know what to do. I was. I wouldn't say I was losing my mind, but I was bored. So I started playing poker. And in Detroit at the time, they had just started opening some casinos. And there. There was this one casino that a poker room, and I used to go down there and I started getting good at it. And playing poker in a casino is a very different procedure than it is playing with your buddies. So it's. It's something you got to get used to. But I came out of the summer and I was like, man, I actually think I could make more money doing this than teaching. And this is definitely way more fun. And so I got this bug in my head that I wanted to leave Michigan and go out west and play poker for a living. And you want to talk about doing the thing? Man, I was so looking into it. I was researching it, I was talking to friends about it, and finally one of my friends said to me, dude, just go, Go do it. He's like, you're 24. What's the worst thing that could happen? You fall on your face, you come back, you have a degree, you have a master's. Like, who cares? Go try. So I moved out to San Diego. I was lucky enough to have a lot of family here and one of my aunts and uncles let me stay with them. And I started playing poker for a living. And I did it for about two years and I was doing okay. You know, you make 50, 60 grand a year. It's all cash, you know, I mean, for somebody in their mid-20s, that's a pretty good deal. And I just didn't like the people that were around me. This was, this is one of the, one of the very first times I realized how much of a difference it really makes to surround yourself with the right people. Because it's interesting. You go into a poker room and you play like I wasn't playing like mega high stakes, but I wasn't playing the lowest tables either. You see the most interesting cross section of people, but a lot of the people in there, it just wasn't for me, it wasn't ringing true to who I wanted to be. So I decided to go back to teaching. I taught for one more year at Morse High, which is in southeast San Diego. And I ended up working some part time jobs because the money in teaching was pretty horrible. And it led me to actually becoming a poker dealer at a couple different places around town. That was a good job, dealing poker again. Now you're making like maybe 60, 70 grand a year. If you're really busting your butt and you have benefits and you can sign up for retirement plans. It was decent again in my 20s, but I was looking for something else and through a series of events ended up starting this cleaning business. And I think that's where I found my calling. And it wasn't necessarily the specific business of cleaning, but it was being a business owner. Because I'm a very organized guy. I really am into making people's lives better. That's like my number one thing. If you ever want to talk about what brings you happiness, for me it's elevating somebody else or at least putting a smile on somebody's face at the very, very least. And you look around. One of the things that set us apart was our customer service, both in the real estate industry and in the cleaning business. Think about all the times now you call, you're lucky if you even get a live person to talk to you. And then when they do, a lot of times when I'm calling people, they either sound really stressed or they're not having a good day. And it was just tough for me. So the cleaning business was great. I built up to about 25 team members and then what I was starting to find with the cleaning business was for me particularly, that type of business had way too many moving pieces. You're in route servicing, you've got crews all over town, driving around every day. You have inventory, cleaning supplies. And in my opinion, it was a really detail oriented business for not enough money that you make. There's no margins here. It's a very labor intensive business and any business owner in California will tell you that it's very difficult to run a profitable shop with all the laws and very high minimum rate wage requirements. And it was just tough. So I was kind of looking around and I had found I had met these guys through networking. I did a lot of networking back then, not so much anymore. But they were real estate guys and they were named Tony and Trent. Those guys changed my life. They were. They convinced me that I had to be a real estate agent, that I'd be a great real estate agent. And it was a bug I had in my ear. I actually had gone to get my real estate license when I first moved to San Diego and I didn't pass the test. The first time I missed it by one question, I was so annoyed. And my uncle who had allowed me to live with him, he's a real estate broker and he said, what are you going to do with real estate license? You don't even know anybody here. And I didn't realize how true that was. You need to know people and they've got to trust you. It's a very big transaction to buy or sell a property. And he said, why don't you try something else and come back to this later once you get established here. And that's what I did. And it was great advice. So between that experience and these guys, this bug in my ear, I went and took my real estate test. I passed it this time. And then it was so serendipitous because Chrissy, I don't know. For your podcast, for the purposes of your podcast, Chrissy is the person who led me to meet Stacy. And Chrissy had. She had met this guy. You know, Chrissy used to have a cleaning company too, which is how I met her in the first place. And actually, ironically there, that company still cleans my home today, so.

Oh, wow.

Yeah. So Chrissy had introduced me to this guy who just moved here. His brother had a cleaning company in Michigan. They wanted to buy one here. They ended up buying me out. For me, it was a great thing. They kind of ran into the ground. It was a disappointing thing to witness. But I want to keep this positive because I was able to get out of it and get into real estate. And I started jumping around and actually started my own real estate brokerage is the same reason I started the cleaning company. I had people cleaning my houses and I was like, this is not being done the best way. There are better ways to run this business. It's the same thing with real estate. I got in, I worked at a few different brokerages and from each brokerage I saw things I really liked and I saw things that I really disliked. And it eventually got. There were a couple of situations where different people I was working for had told me, oh, you know, down the road we're going to hand this off to you, whatever. And it was all. And when push came to shove, it was what they were doing was I was getting used and abused and I was not this, these things were not going to happen. And so I finally said, okay, I'm out of here, I'm just going to do my own thing. So I went and got my broker license, which is a license that's beyond a real estate license. You have to have a couple years of business as a real estate agent. They look back at how many sales you have and talk to your past brokers and you have to pass a tougher exam and stuff like that. So I got the license, I went with it, full steam ahead. And then the fun part is that I opened the brokerage in January of 2020 and I hired a wonderful woman who's working with me still today. Her name's Isabelle. She's my right hand woman, she's my office manager. She's a licensed real estate agent. She helps me with a lot of stuff. She helps with the property, asset management services, stuff like that. Well, I brought her on a 60 day trial and then we got to the 60th day and I said, okay, I'm going to put you on salary. I put her on a nice salary, benefits, everything. Literally the very next week the COVID lockdown started. So I was, at first I was kind of freaked out about it. And in different parts of the country, real estate businesses were shut down for different times. In California we were only shut down for two weeks before the government luckily recognized what an essential business real estate is. And we were up and running and we were off to the races and I never looked back. Today we're a team of nine people. We have everybody except for two people are licensed agents. And I'm pushing everybody to get a license. I think it's important. But it's cool. I love the aspects of being able to better people. And in real estate, it's nice because there's enough cash flowing through the business where you can really pay people a living wage. In Southern California, especially San Diego now with how bad inflation is, I don't even know how anybody could survive here. And like under $100,000 a year, especially if you have like, you know, two of you in a family, maybe you want to have a kid or something. It's crazy. So I try to bring people in that I think are high achievers and I try to push them hard so that they can make really good wages and we have a lot of nice benefits. I mean, I don't want to get too into the details of the business. I'll let you guide this, but that's where we are today. It's a great company and I'm super blessed. It's been a fun journey.

Yeah, it's so cool. Kevin, because first of all, I didn't even know that you were a teacher. That's really great because I have a lot of listeners that are teachers and they listen, they want to side hustle, and then eventually move it into a full time thing. So I think it's really encouraging just to kind of see your path. Yeah. So I'm so glad. And then I love that you brought up when you quit the first time to go into the poker.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Because like, that's like a risk assessment that we talk about on this podcast is like, what is the worst that's gonna happen? Cause I think a lot of people, they get stuck in the fear of the uncertainty. But then when you actually say, well, what is the worst that can happen? You know, and then you used your education and you had that kind of like background.

Yeah, it's cool. Hey, I don't know if you ever watched that show Friends. It was around a long time ago.

Oh, yeah.

So there's this thing called the Fear.

Oh.

And it's when you. It's when you have a lapse in employment, basically. So, you know, I think it was Monica as one of the characters. If I remember correctly, she was thinking about quitting her job. She didn't like her job, but she didn't have another job lined up. And somebody else, I think, brought up this thing called the Fear. And they're like, you need to have the Fear. You need to jump off the end of the dock into the water and swim. And it's tough to get to that point. That's probably the most Significant point in a career where an entrepreneur makes the conscious decision that I am going to depend on no one but myself for my livelihood now. And I actually did it twice because I did it once when I quit teaching and then I did poker for a while, decided to get out of it, went back to teaching, went back to the dealing, and then I was dealing poker for a little bit and then I did it again when I started the cleaning company. I actually went into the HR office at the casino card club where I was working and I said, I just want to put in my two weeks notice, yada yada. And she said to me, well, you know what, we're actually like very overstaffed right now, so why don't we just do it today? Just call today your last day. And I walked out of there and I was like, holy crud, what did I just do? And you know, and actually, now that I think about it, I did. I actually leaned back on the dealing when I. After I got out of the cleaning company, I went back into it when I was very first, just for a short time, getting my real estate going. I wasn't even there for maybe three, four months. I hated it so much after I had been out on my own for at that point, about seven years at the cleaning business to go back in and have to punch a clock and people telling you what to do, people above me telling me unrealistic things. They haven't been in my shoes. They don't know what I'm going through in this job, dictating stupid stuff. In my opinion, you know, it was, it was brutal. And actually it's funny because then you're going to get to a point where after you make the jump now, you actually can never go back. You're going to, you're going to learn about skills that you have and you're going to learn about what a quality of life you can have and you're never going to want to go back. But it's tough because, you know, you would ask me to maybe come up with like a good, a good tip for people. And I mean, you know, how much time do you have? I could tell. The tips I've learned forever. Yeah, but the. But one of them that I wanted to mention I think is important is if you really want to survive and you want to thrive, then you need to find your why? Why do I want to do this? And it can't be money because money does not buy happiness. So I've been reading up. I love Gandhi. He has good quotes I saw one the other day where he was like, you know, happiness can be found in serving others. And that struck a chord for me because I love to serve other people. Happiness can be found by charity. Yes. I love doing things for free. We had. I don't want to advertise this, but we basically had a woman who, through a weird series of events, she was a buyer we were representing that was trying to purchase a house. We were like, at the finish line, some unexpected stuff happened, and she was unable to make the purchase happen because she needed about $20,000 more cash. And I always have a lead agent on each deal, and I'm kind of like, in the background on these deals. So I talked to my lead agent and I said to him, you know, I just am curious, have you calculated what your commission is on this deal? And he's like, yeah, it's $22,000. And I was like, well, how much does she need? And he's like, oh, my God, are we really going to do this? I was like, well, I'm asking you. I mean, it's up to you. And ultimately ended up just telling her, look, we will not take a commission on this deal. You go do this. Buy the house. And you know what? It's crazy because I can't. Like, when I think back to the most challenging times I had where I was, literally, I wasn't even living paycheck to paycheck. I was accruing debt. I was spending more than I was making. I didn't have two nickels to rub together. And to think about now to hand somebody $20,000, it's crazy. It's so crazy to me, but it's cool. But it's a good feeling. When we got to hand that lady her keys is unbelievable. And obviously you can't do that on every transaction. But whatever you're going to do, be willing to do it for free. Sometimes maybe just do something pro bono. I think it's a good feeling. But find your why. If you're going to go into business, you're going to face the most mentally excruciating challenges you have ever imagined in your life. When you make the jump on your own, and yet you were the only person to depend on just yourself. It is unbelievable. So if you don't have a strong reason why you are doing this, I just don't see that you are going to make it. So, you know, my why is I want to take care of my family. I want to have six kids. I want to have my husband and me Be able to do whatever we want to do whenever we want to do it. And he's a physician. He loves what he does. He thinks I'm crazy because my goal is to retire in the year 2030. He thinks I'm crazy. He's like, I would never retire that young. I spent all this time in medical school. Whatever. I said, well, then, you know what? Just keep working because you want to, but not because you have to. I want to be in a position where if you want to go to that job, go to it, please. If that makes you happy. I want you to be happy. My happiness is I want to take care of my kids. I want to play golf. I want to go sailing. I want to see the world, you know? And, yeah, money can help you do all these things, but you also have to establish yourself and help lift other people up to get there. And that's the important thing. So there's a good saying I heard for entrepreneurs. You can do anything, but you can't do everything. I mean, that sings to me. And you've got to, you know, don't be greedy either. Like, we have a really good mission, vision, and culture at our company. So the mission is that we provide expert real estate sales and asset management services to members of the community. You know, that's. We're real estate from. That's what we do. Our vision is to be the real estate company with the happiest team and the highest quality clients. Now, I had originally written that to say, be the real estate company with the happiest clients and the highest quality team. And I sat in front of one of my mentors who's a very, very wildly successful businessman. His name is Raymond. I love the guy. And he said to me, what if you switch team and clients? Because I was going through my mission, vision, and culture with him. And so I wrote. I was like, so, be the real estate company with the happiest team and the highest quality clients. And I was like, oh, my God, you're a genius. Wow. And then, like, the culture of our company, act honestly and ethically. Love life, be a fiduciary, Negotiate well, communicate effectively, stay ahead of the curve, be diverse and inclusive. Support environmentally sustainable business practices, and don't be an A hole.

Is that. Is that in there?

It's on here. Look. We go through this with every client, too. We read it. So here's the thing about the highest quality clients. If you're a business person and your client is not following your guidance, and I mean, I guess it depends on the business. But for me, I'm not saying that I'm a lawyer, but I think that a real estate firm is kind of. I just see sort of a mirror of a law firm where you're calling a consultant to guide you through a process that you don't understand. You want to deal with an expert to walk you through this. So in real estate, we get people who won't listen to our guidance or they think they can do it better than us, or they think they know more than us. We cut those people loose so fast, we will have a conversation with them about it first. And if they're not willing to follow our guidance, we're going to cut them out, because all they're doing is they're creating liability. It's like, why did you even hire me if you don't want to listen to everything I'm doing? You know, the. I just saw the most hilarious stat this morning. The average home sale price in the zip codes that we cover is just around $1 million. So we cover all the areas around Balboa park here in San Diego. And Balboa park is a big park. It's the largest city park in the country. It's bigger than Central Park. It's a very large park. So we got all those neighborhoods. So on a $1 million sale, let's just say that you're getting, like, a standard 3% commission. That's $30,000. So, Mr. And Mrs. Client, why are you going to pay me $30,000 if you don't want to listen to what I have to say? Yeah, and what you end up doing is you end up beating your head against a wall. You end up. I have laid in my bed at night, and I can't even sleep because I'm running through scenarios of what I could have done better with that client or what I could have said to make that person happy or whatever. And the fact of the matter is, I could have handed that person a silver platter of $100 bills, and that person still would have found something wrong with it. And so don't waste your time dealing with these D clients. Send them off to somebody that doesn't have the skills or that's really, truly desperate. Because even when you're trying to get on your feet, and you might be a little bit desperate. Yeah. You might take on a tougher client at first just to get some cash flowing. And I understand. But don't sacrifice your own knowledge and expertise. Don't let somebody make you think that you're a fool when you're the expert, you need to establish yourself as the expert and get somebody to come in. So dealing with a high quality client is a very, very important thing. I can't stress that enough. If you're thinking about going out into your own business and it's all about that culture. So one of the things that we did when we had, when we had our like new, we have an interview with new clients. So somebody wants to buy or sell a place, we set up a one hour call with them. It's not usually a video call since COVID started. And we go through everything and what we used to do is we asked, we used to say, I have a yes or no question, simple question. Are you a nice person?

I love it. That's so cool. And what do they say?

Well, they don't answer it. So they either laugh like you did, which they're nice. Or they get upset at the question.

Or they what?

Or they get upset at the question.

Yeah. You know what I love? I just listened to, re. Listened to Four Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss.

Oh gosh, I love that book.

And it was so good. He talked about something like this where it's like. And I wish I had done it when I had my company because we, you know, I won't go into it because it's, I don't want that out there. But it was definitely something that really picking and choosing who you work with because then your, your energy burn is less and then your, your opportunity cost is less. You're able to pretty much, you know, be more abundant that way.

So I love, yeah, you hit, you hit the nail on your head. It's, you're going to be, you're going to be working a hundred plus hour weeks to get this thing off the ground. I'm going to tell you right now, nobody ever said it was easy being a billionaire. You are going to work so hard to accomplish things and you're almost on this island and nobody gets you. But especially when you're leaving a job to go out on your own. I remember when I left teaching. Who are your friends? Your friends are the people usually that you've been working with. I had a lot of friends that were teachers and I started to see this gap forming between us because they never understood how come Kevin can't come out on Saturday night. Well, it's because, you know, I'm stuck in the office trying to play catch up because I can't afford to hire an assistant yet and I'm getting all this business coming in and you gotta train people and you've gotta do marketing and there's all these hats that you wear is crazy. So what I would recommend is try to try to find some other people that are like you. And then also try to find some people that are way, way ahead of you and spend time with them and just spend quality time. Sometimes you pick their brain, but sometimes you just spend time because there's a certain calming, knowing each other and knowing what that person is going through on a daily basis where it actually makes that time together so special. So you know what you said, Stacey, about the energy burn, you got to keep your energy up. That's where that why comes in. It's so important. And I got to tell you, getting a good client is important. You want to, you want to pre screen your clients, have a filtering system, have ways to tell if this client's going to be a problem. Have way to have ways to keep the wrong clients away from you. We have a few different groups that we market at our business. So we market the military because we found that military are some of the best clients and they have a VA loan option where they can buy a house with $0 down. We target lawyers because lawyers have traditionally been some of the best clients we've ever worked with because they're in the same business as us. They're in a trust business. If they trust you enough to hire you, they're going to follow your guidance and they know how to read a contract, which is helpful. We market towards what we call the urban nester. So an urban nester is an adult couple that either doesn't have any kids or want any kids, or they're pre having kids or they're post having kids. Their kids have grown up and gone away and now they're living in the city. Because we're, we're living in the city here, in the zones we cover. This is not being out in the burbs or farmland or anything. This is a very densely populated area that we cover. So these are, these are our targets. And then we also target folks who are downsizing their lives. So we work very, very well with older folks who are selling a bigger house to move into a smaller house. They want a simpler life. They can't handle taking care of this house anymore. So those are the groups we cover. In each one of those groups, we have created a specific avatar that says, this is how old this person is. This is what this person's likes and dislikes are. This is what appeals to this person. This is what this person wants out of life. And when we market to those people, we are specifically marketing to good clients. We have identified things that bring in bad people. And we. And we don't use that.

Just like all trial and error, then.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. It's all about testing and measuring you. So here's another tip on business. If you're going to open your own business, you have to be very data driven. Data runs the business. So we track where every single lead comes from, and then we also track our closed leads to see which ones are closing the best so we know where to spend our marketing dollars. In our business, we are almost 100% completely driven by a warm market. It's all our sphere of influence. People that team members at Park Metro Realty know we've added them to our database. We market to them and we tell them, hey, we're not just marketing to you. If you know anybody anywhere that wants to buy or sell real estate, please have them call us. So, you know, and it doesn't have to be. We do deals all over the world because we. Because we work with agents globally. Real estate is a global business, so your license is a state license, but we can refer business out to other agents. And we have a whole process of vetting and pairing an agent in another city with a client that needs an agent. So it's pretty amazing. But I think that one of the other things I kind of want to talk about is I saw this on a TED Talk once. It was shared with me by another entrepreneur. And they basically showed this chain going from left to the right. So you have character. That's the foundation. And then you take your character and you move over and you develop a process to do what you want to do, whatever your knickknack or your service is, and then you get a result, and you have to keep that character with you. That's why my high school motto, I went to a college prep school, and their motto was goodness, discipline, knowledge.

Okay?

And I have that hanging in my shower. I actually have my goals list. My husband and I update our goals list once a year, and it's in our shower in a Ziploc bag. And we read it every morning when we're getting ready for work. And goodness, discipline and knowledge. Goodness. Treat people well. Give them good customer service. Be a professional. Don't lose your cool if something doesn't go your way. Discipline. Do I have the discipline to wake up every morning and write my 10 thank you cards and go through my task list and do all my Follow ups and work on a system. Do I have a good foundation for making sure I do things? Do I have a routine? Discipline is so tough. There are mornings where I have a tough time getting out of bed because I know what a tough day it's going to be. And you got to have the discipline to do it and just stay the course. Because in business, you're just doing a tiny, tiny little bit every day to get to your goal. And then knowledge. Knowledge is power. If you're the smartest person at what you do and you can establish expertise with the general public or whoever your potential client is, that's key. And then you take those three aspects of character, put them into a process. So you guys sit down and map out your processes. We have workflows for different things. We have a workflow if we have a residential buyer, we have a workflow if we have a residential seller. Same thing for commercial buyer and seller. We have a workflow if we receive a new property management account where a landlord hands us a property to manage. We have a process for if the tenant wants to move out, you. And it's mapped out step by step so that if somebody comes in and doesn't know how to do this, that person can literally sit, just start reading the book and say, oh, okay, this is the next thing. This is the next thing. This is the next thing. You gotta map those things out.

How do you think you got that's like, so amazingly organized and systemized. And I just like, I like, want to geek out for like an hour about that. Well, I'm like, that just sounds so.

Yeah, I don't have a time for you, Stacey.

But I. Yeah, no, I. I totally am excited to see that. At some point I was wondering, like, did you get that from, like, having your cleaning business? And like, maybe it wasn't perfect. And then you were like, oh, I've got to get this done in this business. Or is it just a natural thing for you to. To figure that stuff out?

I got, I got this from a combination of places. Obviously, if you have a business, you want it to run smoothly, and I'm a perfectionist, so I tried to plug all those holes at the bottom of my jug. I don't want. I don't want to lose clients because we missed some stupid thing that could be systematized. But, you know, number one is actually that book you just said the. Or, no, excuse me, that's not it. The book that I read that got me that changed my life is the E. Myth.

Oh, Michael. Gerber. Yeah.

The E Myth is where he talks about systems and how important they are. And it never resonated with me until I started actually finding problems. And, like, why does this keep happening? Oh, maybe we should make a system, you know, so the systems, oh, my God, I would be nowhere without them. And, you know, you want to find a way to be able to give the same high quality of service to every client. And it's weird. In a business like ours, or in a business like cleaning business, every house is different, every client is different. But you can still put together a system that works, that's user friendly. You want it to be super, super easy for the client. You want, above all, you want the client experience to be flawless. Because in real estate sales, a lot of these people are making the biggest transaction they will ever make in their lives. And there's a lot of emotion that goes along with that. I feel like I'm lucky that I'm kind of well rounded because I have some psychology training. I'm a musician. I have all these things. I'm organized, I'm sympathetic, I want to serve people. It's all good. And the systems help you do that. So part of it was from reading the E Myth, and then part of it was from networking with other people in my industry. So when I was in the cleaning business, I was a member of the national cleaning chambers called arcsi. They were a great organization. I learned so much. I was rubbing shoulders with businesses, doing millions of dollars a year in sales, you know, as a startup. And you can imagine the things I learned. Same thing with real estate. I'm even a big proponent of networking with people in, like, people that are my quote, unquote competition. Because I'll tell you what, I don't care what your industry is. There's not that much good competition in anything. There really isn't. And I'm sorry to say that I hope I'm not, like, putting a dismal thought out there, but especially in real estate, I just feel like there's a low barrier of entry. And this even happens in medical. Like, you see these physicians who want to go out and open their own practice. Well, yeah, you know how to be a doctor, but do you know how to run a business? These are two completely different hats. So perhaps it might make a good idea for somebody that's wanting to make a jump out on their own. Maybe I would recommend going into the business. Like, that's what I did with real estate. I came into real estate, and I did it for about Five or six years before I went out on my own. Obviously, make sure you're not like stealing people's clients and ideas. I don't condone that. And I know there's non competing things, but you know, there's different ways to do it. The systems are key, they're absolutely critical. So maybe start out by doing it yourself and map out the systems and then start teaching people. And as a teacher, I always get better at things when I'm explaining them to people and just without those systems, it's amazing. And then, you know, to get a result, you've got to surround yourself with the right people. And I'm not just talking about the people that you spend time with, but I'm also talking about your team. Bring people into your team that buy into your culture. As a matter of fact, we lost somebody today who decided he wanted to leave the company. And what it came down to was he just didn't like the job itself that he was doing. And I gave him accolades for it. That was the position you were hired for. You tried it, you didn't like it. I really appreciate that you're telling me you don't like and you don't want to do this anymore. I wish he would have talked to me a little bit more. We probably could have made adjustments for him, but ultimately I could tell when I was talking to him it was just emotional, really weighing on him. Anyway, surround yourself with the right people and then if you're the leader, don't be greedy. Raise your people up with you. Because if you ever want to get that true independence, if you want to be a true entrepreneur, my opinion of that means that you're not doing any real like crazy work. You have put together the systems and the team to generate revenue for you while you sleep. And so raise people up, pay them a good living wage. Don't be greedy. It annoys me so hard when I'm seeing like, you know, these CEOs making like literally a thousand times what somebody makes at their company. How is that? I just don't see that as motivational if I'm the one working at the company. I found out my CEO made that and he's not like doing things for me or do things do value adds. We have a retirement plan where the company matches 4% of what the team member puts into the retirement. And then as a team, we've been talking about, once we build up a nice equity in that retirement account, the team wants to actually go into buying real estate together. And I think like if you can come up with some creative thing. Yeah, ask your team what they want. Be a good listener. You're going to get the best ideas from the people that are in the trenches. They're going to come to you and be like, hey, did you ever think to do it this way? And I always listen. And if you don't want to do it that way, obviously you have a good reason. So share it with them. Share with them why you don't think it's a good thing. Because through my trial and error, I've tried this and it didn't work because of X. And at least they know they're being heard. But more times than not, when a team member brings something to me, I am like all over it. And it's the same thing when you go to a convention. I really strongly am a very, very firm believer of being ahead of the curve in your industry. Convention is the way to do it. You go to these conventions, you're seeing the most cutting edge technology, you're seeing the newest ideas, you're around the most successful people who can actually afford to take four or five days away from their families in a different city, away from the daily tornado of your business to go learn and then don't be over, I don't know if the word is over presumptuous about what you can actually do. So whenever I go to convention or wherever my team members come up with a good idea, I always write it down and then I calendar it. And I found that sometimes I try to calendar a little bit too much. So in terms of your. When I talk about character process and result in terms of your process, you really need to focus on your time management. That's such a huge piece that gets lost when you see these people that are frazzled. They just don't have good time management. In real estate, I tell clients, look, there aren't really any emergencies in a real estate transaction. Yeah, there might be a couple times where something's urgent. For example, right now in the market we have today, if you're a buyer and you see a property that you like, it is urgent that you go view it in person because that property might be gone within 24 to 48 hours off the market. So when I see that you have texted me saying, I want to see this property, we're going to make that a high priority. But when you send me a text or an email or voicemail, please know there's no possible way that I could ever set the expectation that I can pick up that call. Or instantly respond to that text or email. There's no way. Because when I'm with a client, I'm giving that client my one on one undivided attention. So set an expectation. Even on my voicemail says, I will do my best always to get back to you within one business day. And I give them my email and I say, you can text me too. You know, I want you to know you're being heard and I've got the message and I will get back to you.

And then I love that you're like really just setting a boundary and it's helping you keep a better balance too.

Yeah. And I, I'm not saying that's a bad word, but I think a better word is that you're setting an expectation.

Oh, I like that.

Yeah. And when you're, and we do the same thing during the process, our clients, especially the buyers, they're so better prepared than I feel most firms because we set all the expectations up front. For example, we had a client that opened escrow today on a property that's scheduled to close on June 30th. It's a 21 day closing. That's a pretty quick closing. And I've never worked with this lender before. It's a lender that the buyer wanted to work with. So we told, we congratulated the buyer today and we said, look, I know that your closing date is scheduled for June 30, but we've just been seeing that lenders are kind of moving a little bit slowly right now. Everybody's understaffed and overworked. They might need a couple extra days, which then is going to bleed into the fourth of July week. So just so I can set a realistic expectation. Why do you plan that? You're probably going to have the keys in your hand around June, around July 11th. That's, that's such a different thing from the agent who tells the client, hey, the closings on June 30, so go ahead, you know, and then the client starts picking their movers to come in. They're backing up the truck the next day. Oh, wait a minute. This deal has another week now. And then what it does at the end of the transaction is it gets everybody all stressed out. Everybody's, the buyers are freaking out, the, the lender is getting stressed out, the other agents getting upset because, you know, you didn't set your expectations right. So expectations are good, but, you know, set the expectations and try to keep them. I always try to under promise and over deliver on timelines. If somebody calls me and says, hey, can you review this document? Today's Thursday. I'll tell them, hey, look, I have a busy rest of the day and tomorrow's packed two. Is it possible that I can review this document and get back to you by Monday? Is that reasonable? How urgent is this? I just want to know if it's more urgent. I can find the time, but I'm trying to keep my sanity here too.

I like that.

Yeah, just try to take a calm demeanor. Don't lose your cool. And by spacing out your time, properly managing it properly, you're good. When I look at my calendar, I have. Not only do I have a packed calendar, so one of my habits is I have this notepad that I carry around in the everywhere. I mean, I'm showing Stacy, I know you all on this podcast, can't hear me, my notepad or you can't see it on my notepad. I have.

I want to see it, though. You gotta show it, show it to me at least.

So these are all my calls, people I need to call and just follow up with. The most urgent ones are at the top. You know, you see, I've made a bunch of calls today. And then the other thing that I usually do is I map out my day. So I've got. I had my whole day. This is my last meeting of the day, so I already crushed it out. But I have my whole day planned out the night before. So what I do the night before is I go through, I calendar my day. And by the way, I'm kind of a hippie. I love to take the bus and the trolley and transit everywhere, which even further forces me to space out my meetings and appointments to give myself enough time to get between point A and point B. But also, I like transit because if you're on the bus for 30 minutes, you can whip out your laptop. It's like having your own. The cheapest ever personal driver. Well, it's not really a personal driver, but it's a cheap driver that takes you places. And I kind of get things done. So anyway, I like to go on tangents. I'm an entrepreneur. Forgive me, but the thing I was going to say was when I'm doing my time blocking, it's very easy as an entrepreneur to overbook yourself with face to face stuff with people. You're networking, you're getting out there, you're going to educational seminars, you're going to conferences, you're networking with other professionals, et cetera. But I really recommend that you take a Solid four hour work block every day. And you be holy about that work block where you're actually sitting at your computer getting work done. Go through work on some of your systems, get all your emails cleared up, stay on top of it. Because the fortune is in the follow up in business. I firmly believe that if you're going to create any kind of business, you must from day one have a CRM which is a client relationship management software. And you build your database and you market to them regularly and you stay in touch with the important ones. And on your database you go through, you rank people from ABC to D A for us in real estate. And a client is somebody who has closed a transaction with us or it's somebody who has referred a client to us who has closed a transaction with us. And furthermore, we would actually want to transact with them again. We do have people that we transact with where we red flag them in the system that we will never transact to that person again. For whatever reason. They didn't trust us, they lied to us, they did something stupid. It doesn't happen often though because what we do is we go back and market to that strong a core. Those are our avatars up there. Those are the people that are doing everything the way that we want them to do it. And we're doing everything the way that they want them, they want us to do it. And it's so much more of a flawless transaction if you're going through it. So anyway, I love the time management piece. I think that that's probably one of the biggest challenges for a business owner and you know, just you might be working a lot more than four hours a day on your computer in the first, you know, the first year or two. I really think by about year three of your business, if you're busting your hump, putting in 80 to 100 hours a week or more, I think by about year three you should be able to kind of tone it down. That's where I am right now, the real estate company. So I love to tell people, oh man, I had the best day. I only worked a half a day today. And they're like, you did? And I was like, yeah, 12 hours.

So I like, I'm loving this tactical advice. It's so, so valuable. I. So I've been writing down your formula for doing the thing. Do you mind if I. I'm going to read it back to you and then.

Yeah, okay, cool.

So number one, you have a huge value for service and contribution. And then so that's like number one piece for you to be able to do the thing number two. And I'm putting this different. I'm putting it. And I don't know yet if it's, if it's a separate formula piece, but I'm thinking it might be. And it's the why. Why do I want to do this?

Yeah, no, actually I was going to tell you. I think because you just read my why. So I would say. I would actually say those are the two things. You know, my formula is find your why. Kevin's personal formula is I like service. I want to be able to take care of people. I want to put a. I want to be able to support my family and give them everything they need so they can launch their lives. You know, that's. That's my personal why. The why is the most critical thing you could ever have.

Yeah, that's. That's true. I know. Maybe I'll combine them, but. Yeah, no, that's great.

And it's your podcast. I'm just along for the rest.

Yeah, no, it's good.

Yeah.

Because with the book that's part of the interviews is I'm finding the patterns with people and then, then the other piece is surrounding yourself with like minded people. And I loved when you gave that example of when you were poker player and you already recognizing that was not where you wanted to be because that's not who you wanted to be. So I loved that you were able to share that and how you're constantly surrounding yourself with people that are like minded and I know a lot of the people that you surround yourself with. So we're all good. No, and then I love the shower goals. So just having goals for yourself, that's another piece of doing the thing. You have a really powerful risk assessment and because I love the way that you reframe fear, being able to understand fear. I think that's another piece of your formula with each of the things and then also educating yourself with finding mentors and. Or you have that really successful businessman you mentioned as a mentor. But it sounds like you're also really open to going to conferences and, you know, being able to just constantly bring in new information for yourself.

Yeah, yeah, I have many. Well, not many, but I have. I can think of at least four different people that I consider my mentors who I can go to them and put a situation in front of them and see how they would address it. And the reason I like to go to them is because I see where they are in their businesses and I know that they're, they can guide me to that same direction.

Yeah, I love that. So I think I'm going to add another piece which is like you have no ego. It seems like with this stuff you're really open minded to be able to.

You cannot be a prideful person if you're going to be a successful leader. You have to be listening to those people on your team and trying to help make their experience better because that's how you'll get your result.

I love it. And then you mentioned self discipline, which I love. I've been actually kind of a little obsessed with that lady lately.

Yeah, yeah, we talked about it. Yeah, that's a tough one.

I know. And it sounds like. And I'll put on the. I have it on a separate section right now because this is specific to business. But yeah, like which I don't know, maybe it would be also part of the formula but I'll have to think about it more. But like, yeah, creating really good systems, building a great team because that's going to help you leverage more too. Like you said, like your team, you want them to do most of the stuff so you want to pay them well and treat them really well. Being a good listener. And then I was wondering, you didn't mention accountability. It sounds like you and your husband have a really good accountability together. And I was just wondering if you have anything else that you use for accountability.

Well, no, I think it's actually hilarious because Zach is, he holds me very accountable and he's somebody who, he has this very, very built in discipline to get things done that I just can't believe it. Now part of it is, you know, I'm not the guy who can wake up at 6am every day, but we do because that's when he gets up to go to his job. And it was interesting. Even when we first met, he had to get up at about 4am every day for work. It was actually cool. I would get up at the same time and this is from the, this is from four hour work week, you know, winner. When are the leaders working? They're getting their stuff done first thing in the morning before the tornado of the day starts. I used to, you know, get up with him at four in the morning and get so much stuff done by 8 o' clock it was unbelievable. I was so ahead of the game. So yeah, he's good with that accountability though, specifically, you know, if you set a goal, it's good to put it out there. For example, I'll tell you what, so Scott, who You know, he's an entrepreneur that I really look up to, and he's one of the guys that I've been totally gelled with since I first met him. We just get along so great. I met him maybe 12, 13 years ago somewhere in there. So when I wanted to become a real estate broker, I was talking to him about it. He's like, why don't you sign up for the test? And I was like, what? And he's like, just sign up for it. He's like, just set a date and do it. So I actually went on the Department of Real Estate website to select my exam date. And I don't know why this, like, seemed harmonious for me, but I. I found a test date that was on Halloween. So then Scott. So when Scott found out I scheduled on Halloween, he's like, you should dress up in a costume. Oh, my God. I was like, wait a minute. What? He's like, no, you should dress up in a costume. And I was like. I was like, well, what if I go there and I don't pass this test? I'm all dressed in costume. He's like, come on, man. You're going to pass the test. He's like, and plus, the costume will maybe hold you a little bit more accountable to make sure you pass the test. So the day of my test, I dressed up as Batman, and I went into the test, and there were probably about 30 people in the exam room. So it's very high security. They take you in this room. You got to turn in your cell phone. You can't take anything in your pockets. Then they give you a computer, like a mouse, and you go, it's got a number on. You go to that computer, you take your test, you take the mouse back to them, and then they give you a piece of paper, fold it up, says, if you pass or not. They're like, you have to walk outside before you read this. So I go there on test day, the ladies were cracking up. There were three ladies behind the counter that were checking people in. They couldn't believe that I dressed up in a costume. There was nobody else dressed up. There were, like, 30 other people there. And I was the first person done with the exam. And I walked out. I gave her my mouse, and she looks at me, she goes, how are you done already? I was like, ma', am, I don't know. I just didn't want to overthink any of the questions. And I ended up passing. And she's like, I got to take your picture.

Oh, my.

Gosh she took my picture and sent it to the state headquarters for the testing and stuff. But again, I'm going on my tangents. So when it comes to the accountability, if you share your goal with somebody else, that's a pretty good accountability. Now if you're a brand new business owner, I would recommend that you make an investment in hiring a business coach. And I would hire a business coach that is a full time business coach with a proven track record who lets you talk to his or her clients and find out the successes those people have had because of a result of the business owner. Don't just go find some random person, but research the heck out of them. And again, in the spirit of my tangents, same thing with your business. When you get into a business, don't try to be the jack of all trades. Be really, really good at what you do and then have what I like to call referral partners around you. We have, we have a few guys who do screen doors for us. We have a few cleaning companies, we have a few pest control companies we work with. You know, but go out there and research them first because you are going to ultimately be giving your clients a list and say, hey, these are the three companies we recommend in the spirit of, you know, just a good experience for the client. Right? Well if that company drops the ball, who does it look bad for? It looks bad for you. So do the research on your vendors, do the research on even your clients and stand behind it. These are ways of weeding people out. If you are a real estate company and you ask somebody to give you a copy of their ID before you meet with them for the first time and they won't do it, that's a red flag. Forget this person. They're not going to follow your system if they're fighting you on the first meeting. Can you imagine what it's going to be working?

I know, right?

Like work with this person for, you know, all this time. So anyway, I, but again, I like my tangents because I'm an entrepreneur. I go in a lot of directions. And you know, going back to that, the original topic of this, you know, I like business coaches. I think that they're a good thing. Even Tiger woods, who's like one of the best golfers in the world, guess what? He has a coach. He's got somebody that's looking in from the outside with a neutral third party lens that can spot you kind of veering off a little bit. And a lot of people have found that having a business coach is a good Way to have accountability. But if you can't afford a business coach or you don't want a business coach or something like that, at the very bare minimum, set your goals, write them down on a piece of paper and review them regularly. So actually, Chrissy is the one also who got me into putting my goals in a Ziploc bag in the shower. And she says it the best. She said, you know, there's just something about, you know, you're starting your day fresh, there's this water kind of going over your head, there's no phones or screens around you, and you just have that time to really gather your thoughts for the day. And you know, one of the things that I've been wanting to do is I've been wanting to try to recruit a couple of experienced, solid local agents to come onto our team. Because all the agents I've brought onto my team so far have been brand spanking new in the business, except for my commercial agent because I. Cause I know her and she's a great commercial agent. And I didn't know commercial and I wanted to bring that as a facet into my company. And so I found the best person. I bring her in and take her expertise and knowledge. So that's a goal that I see every day. That's one of my things that's due by the end of this month. I need to put up a posting. I've already kind of written a rough draft of the ad. And it's all because of my. I know all my threshold numbers that I need to hit this year and I have. So what I do on my goal sheet that's in my shower to keep myself accountable is I have all my goals from today until past the time that I retire. And these goals can change, but these are the goals that I had at the time. And actually what I do, I've already kind of edited it because a couple things I've adjusted. So I just take it out of the Ziploc bag, I kind of write with it with a pen and put it back in there. And I mean, when I'm ready to edit it and print a new one, I'll do it. But the top half of my goals list is kind of like either monthly or quarterly. It's my very short term, the next year. And then the bottom half goes now a couple years out, then a couple years after this, and it's a lot bigger, bigger goals. And so I know everything that I want to do from the time that I retire and beyond what I want to do. After I retire. And it's okay to change your mind on what you want to do, but at least have a roadmap. There was a guy who I got this really amazing full ride scholarship to the University of Michigan for being a golf caddy. It's called the Evans Scholarship. And today we have over a thousand students in school. I think it's like a $28 million a year operation if I'm remembering numbers. No, it's bigger than that. I think it's. I can't remember the numbers. I'll have to look them up. But it's a very, very big operation. Consider putting 1,000 kids through college. So each house there's. Right now there's about 19 chapter houses all over the country. You have a house benefactor who's an older person, usually on the board of directors, who kind of makes sure the house is being maintained properly. And then you also have a counselor from the university who specifically works with your house. And so we had our. Our. Our guy up there talking to us. Very good guy. His name was Ed Lawyer. He's passed a few years ago, but he was amazing, man. He said, I've got three rules for you. Rule number one, have a plan. And that's where that accountability comes in. Just have a plan. Rule number two, plans change.

Wow.

How important is that? To hear people think that your plan changes? And people literally think that if they have to change their plans, they're a failure. I say if you have the ability to change a plan and make a new plan, you're a success. That's what being an entrepreneur is. All you do is put fires out, try to solve people's problems all day, Right? You create a business or a widget or something that people want. They need it. So, you know, plans change. And then his rule number three was, you are one of the best universities in the entire world with every possible resource at your fingertips. Take advantage of it. And so I challenge everybody that's listening here today. You've got a great podcast with Stacy here. You have so many resources. Find what you want to do and then go find the resources because they're out there. In today's digital age, you have the Internet. You can find anything anywhere in the world. Find the best person, find the best forum, find the best mentor. Don't make excuses. Because at the end of the day, if you're a failure, I hate to say it, but you got to own it. That it might possibly more than likely have to do with something you might have done. Maybe you didn't put in the hours. Maybe you didn't study up on the knowledge. Maybe you didn't test the market data. Maybe you didn't track where your leads were coming from. And focus your attention on the best lead source. Go through. Look at all the things that happen. It's also. I also kind of use a similar thing if you're the person at the top. If you show me a bad worker, I promise you I can show you a bad manager.

Yeah.

I take it so personally today that that young man didn't want to work at our company and he quit. And, you know, we were trying to kind of fit a square peg in a round hole with this guy. I was trying to help him out. He's somebody I've known for a very long time. He was looking for a job. We had a position that was open. It wasn't exactly what he was looking for, but he came in and tried it. It didn't work out. I'm bummed out. I wish that he would have talked to me more, and I wish I would have checked in with him more. It's disappointing. You try to provide. I'm trying to provide for people, and he didn't want the position. It was real bummer. But in terms of accountability, hold yourself accountable. I have a funny joke. I go to these Realtor Caravan meetings every week. There's like, you know, there's like 40, 50 people. So in San Diego, there's two regions. There's the downtown region, which is the southwest corner of Balboa park, and then there's another region called Metro, which is everything else that wraps around Balboa Park. So these are two regions of real estate agents and brokers that get together on Fridays. The Metro people get together on Thursdays. The downtown people get together. And just an option to, like, if you have a buyer that's looking for something, you can go up to the microphone and say, hey, I have a buyer. Budget's 1.5 million. They're looking for XYZ. Does anybody have anything coming up? Or you can market your listings, and then there's like a Caravan tour afterwards. So anyway, I always wear shorts, and, you know, I. I let my team wear shorts. I mean, you have to know who your audience is. So we do deal with an audience of people that works and lives and thrives in the city. It's an eclectic group. It's a lot of free thinkers. You know, people that are a little bit casual. We don't really deal with, like, super snooty, stuffy people. It's just not our thing. But if you're going to wear shorts to work, guess what? You better make sure you are clean shaven, Your hair is done up to the nines, you're wearing a nice shirt and nice shoes. And you better carry yourself well. And you better know what the heck you're talking about when you open your mouth. Because you are now under a microscope. Because people will spite me for wearing shorts, but they're really jealous because they can't pull it off. They can't wear shorts to a caravan meeting and be successful. But what I tell people is, you know why I always wear shorts? Because none of my pants fit me. Since COVID I put on like £20. It's disgusting. So there's a really good book, if anybody who's listening wants to get into real estate. There's a good book called the Millionaire Real Estate Agent. It's written by Gary Keller, who started Keller Williams. And he talks about, excuse me, he talks about this accountability piece and he uses a really good analogy that I'm using right now because I have been slimming down. He says, if you're trying to run a business, but you're not going to put your time in, you're not going to work on your systems, you're not going to watch your budget, you're not going to track your numbers, you're not going to care about your team, well then you're just fooling yourself. What do you think you're going to accomplish? And so the analogy is, he talks about people that want to lose weight. If you want to lose weight, you know what it is? It is all about calories in, calories out. So you need to know how many calories you are burning every day and you can increase that. And then you also need to know how many calories of intake you have. So if you are saying to people that you want to lose weight, but you are sitting there late at night stuffing chocolate eclairs down your throat before bed, you are only lying to yourself. And this is what separates the mice from the women and the men. You have to be ultimately the one person who holds yourself the most accountable. Period. You could pay money out the wazoo for a trainer or a coach, or you could tell your friends and stuff. But ultimately, you know, every micro decision you make on a daily basis is a tiny, tiny little chipping away of that block to get to your final goal. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. You really have to hold yourself accountable. I, I'm really Glad that you asked about that question. I sort of. I carry my accountability and that sheet, I told you, where you have the character leading to the process, leading to the result. Oh, yeah. Because in the character, the goodness, the discipline, and the knowledge, I think that the discipline is probably the highest one that holds into that accountability piece, but also the knowledge, you literally need to know what are my goals and then what do I need to do to achieve them. So when I'm training my young real estate agent, I say to him, okay, how much money do you want to make this year? And he says, okay, I want to make $200,000. Okay, perfect, $200,000. So now let's break it down. What's the average commission that you earn on a sale? Well, in our region, you know, on average, it's about $25,000. That's what our office averages on a sale. Okay, $25,000. Okay. So now what's your commission split? While at our company, we do things very differently for most real estate companies. So for the first 150,000 in commissions that an agent earns, it's a 50, 50 split with the company because we have W2 employees, we pay for medical insurance, we have a full time marketing person, a full time office manager, a full time runner. We kind of take a lot off the agent's plate. And then we also pay for all their realtor dues, MLS fees, business cards, advertising, marketing, mailers, the whole nine yards. Because that was a problem. I saw in real estate, you have all these things you have to do. You can't be with the clients, you can't be selling. So we've tried to take everything off their plate. Okay. So if you're going to be taking in 12,500 on each transaction, and you know you want to make $200,000, that's 16 real estate transactions that you have to do in a year. Would you agree? Yes. Okay, well, how do you get a transaction? And the agent says to me, well, I need some leads. I say, okay, so how many leads? What's your percentage of leads that you're converting to closed business? At our firm, I think the last metric we looked at was like, it was something crazy. Like 72% of the leads that come in are closed business. Okay, wow. So, yeah, because we're getting very warm leads. We're not getting people from the general public finding us online and like, you know, shopping real estate firms. People that come to us are looking for a boutique real estate agency with a focus on a fiduciary Relationship and customer service. A lot of agents, a lot of real estate agents in the world don't even know what the word fiduciary means. So we're lucky. We have a high, high percentage. So, okay, so you want to close, you want to close 16 deals and you know that your lead closing percentage, about 72. So I'm just going to leave this really, like, vague. I'm going to say you probably would need to bring in about 30 leads. 30 solid leads would need to come to you in the year if you want to hit your goal. Okay, well, now let's talk about, how do you get a lead? Well, I get a lead by doing open houses. Okay. So let's just say that you get. I always tell it, even if you're the best agent. I truly believe that if you walk out of an open house with one solid lead, you've had a good open house. I don't really think that you can walk out of an open house guaranteed with one solid lead, but let's just say they get one lead. So now you've got to do 30 open houses in order for you to meet your goal this year, while there's 52 weeks in a year. And I gotta tell you, doing an open house is no small task. It is a five to six hour ordeal. It's almost your whole working day. So, all right, let's start scheduling open houses. And then you put. And then I always want to do more, so I want to go above my goal. But that's just a little classic example. You want to talk about the accountability. How accountable do you have to hold yourself to do 30 open houses in a year? That is a crazy number of open houses. It's a lot of hard work. It's exhausting. You're talking to people all day. You're dealing with the seller, you're protecting the house. There's so many things. But just get after it, you know, I love you.

Added another piece to your formula, reverse engineering your goal. So. And it helps, it helps you deal with rejection too. Right? Because when you know your numbers, you know, it's like you don't even feel like you're getting rejected for those 30% that you guys are that are saying no to you, you know, because you already know what your numbers are.

Yeah, yeah. And don't, don't feel bad if you're being rejected. You know, there you can always try to find out why they didn't choose you. You know, when, when we know somebody's interviewing a couple people and they and they choose somebody else. It's a good. Why. You know, one person told me the reason they didn't choose us was because in our presentation that we did for them, we didn't have enough statistics on how many condos. We deal with, how many versus houses, how many buyers versus sellers. And that's good feedback. It's. I like it. So we've started tracking that now. And now that's in our, in our presentation we let people know kind of what the breakdown is.

That's awesome. It's like you're learning from your, from your prospect, essentially.

Yeah. Don't be afraid to make mistakes. That's the only way you're ever going to grow if you know. And also the other thing that's kind of funny is sometimes people will be upset at you. So I'm glad that I'm calling out Chrissy so many times today. So I called Chrissy one time when I had my cleaning company and this guy called me. It was some really unrealistic thing. They weren't happy with their cleaning. We offered to send the team back. So the team went back and everything was still good. But he wanted a discount. So I said to him, all right, you know what I'm going to do? I'm just going to give you this cleaning for free. I refunded a hundred percent of his money. It was a one time job. It was like a move out cleaning. It was like four or five hundred dollars cleaning. You know, which when you're, when you're a young entrepreneur, that's a lot of money. And he still wanted to fight about it. And I said, sir, number one, you have told me we've completed this cleaning to your satisfaction. Number two, we've given you your money back. What more do you want from us? So I called and he didn't have an answer. So I called Chrissy and I was like, Chrissy, I can't believe this. And she told me some really good advice. She said if nobody's ever upset at you, then you're probably not growing fast enough.

Oh my gosh, I love that advice.

That's awesome. Isn't that insane?

That's so good.

My mind, I love that.

So good. Yeah, that's awesome.

So it's just interesting. There's so many challenges, so many challenges out there. And you know, I don't know, I don't know if this is appropriate. But if you ever, if you want to put out any of my contact info, if there's any listeners who are out there who are trying to make the jump or you just have any questions or whatever. I want to be up front. Like, there's no way I could ever commit to, like, being a coach for anybody at this stage of the game. But I love to give you an hour of my time and, you know, if you want to pick my brain, if you want to run your business by me. Any business I walk into, I'm always sizing it up. How is this business making money? How are they following up with their customers? Do I get a consistent experience? Do I think they're charging a fair price? Do I think this place is going to stay in business? And you wouldn't believe how many business opportunities people bring to me because they know I'm an entrepreneur. They know I've got the experience. I've been doing this now for.

For.

It was 2006, so 17 years. Holy crud. So, you know, it's. It's really. I mean, I would love to help people. Nothing would make me feel better than to help somebody. So if it's appropriate, feel free to give opportunity to contact me or if you want them to go through, whatever.

Yeah, I'll add it to the show notes, but why don't you. Yeah, can you say it on. On here so then they. They can do that?

Oh, yeah, sure. So my name's Kevin Attu and my company is called Park Metro Realty. You can find us online atpark metro realty.com or you can. We have a few different domains. It's kind of fun. We have keeping sdclassy.com that'll take you to the same website, kevinatsu.com. my last name is Atto. That takes you to the website. So just reach out there, just submit an inquiry. Just, you know, say that you found me on Stacy's podcast, do the thing, and we'll set up a time to talk. I would love to help.

So cool. Well, you are awesome. This has been so amazing.

If I'm awesome, then what the heck are you? You blow me out of the water. I'm nothing. I'm just a spec.

Oh, my God. No, it's amazing. It's so cool. It's so cool to even get to know you better on this. It's really awesome.

Yeah. Thank you. Same here. This is awesome. I really appreciate that you wanted to chat with me, and I hope the listeners take things out of here. I hope that there are multiple pieces that you take with you, and I hope that you put them on your calendar, and if you just take one new idea or system and you put it into your business. Think about it. In a year, you'll have 12 systems that are saving you time, effort, energy. They're making you more money. So, you know, think about how many systems I have. I've been doing this 17 years. I'm very religious about it, putting systems in place. And I just wish everybody the greatest success just by being here listening to this. You're already on the path. You are trying to find the right guides, the right advice, the right information. And I wish you nothing but success. You can do anything, anything that you set your mind to.

Oh, it's so cool. Thanks, Kevin, for being on the show. I appreciate it.

Oh, yeah, thank you. This is awesome. I appreciate it, too.

Thanks for listening to the do the Thing podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show. But even more, we hope you'll be inspired to do the Thing. Do you have a burning question on Doing the Thing that you'd like answered? How about an inspiring do the Thing story of your own that you'd like to share? We'd love to hear all about it. Just leave us a voice message at dothothing callcast. Co or email us at hello at dothingpodcast. Com.