Today on the Listing Agent Lifestyle podcast I'm in Toronto, making my way through our world tour here, I'm back from London and Amsterdam, and we're going to continue our series on 10 money getting ideas for your real estate business.
You're going to really love this episode because we're talking about a topic that can have a tremendous impact on your business. That topic... always looking for leverage.
There are a lot of things we have the opportunity to do as realtors, as business owners to free you from the day to day things that take up a lot of your time.
Today I'm going to share some really cool ways to think about leverage and get yourself some freedom, so you can think bigger, and execute bigger.
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Transcript: Listing Agent Lifestyle Ep082
Dean: Number three on my list is always look for leverage. Always look for leverage. I look at things that basically five leverage points that I look at. I look at them in this order. The first place of leverage is ideas. If you just have a better idea for something that you're already doing, if you can just implement a better idea, that's sometimes a win.
For me, one of the things that was a big idea for me, and towards the end of when I was selling real estate, I made the decision that I was only going to sell houses in Georgetown, just in that area, because in our area, Georgetown was an area where people would go into Halton Hills, which is the surrounding countryside, into Erin, into Caledon. I made a decision that I was going to just focus on Georgetown.
To get into Georgetown, you go down a hill and up a hill. It sits up on this little thing. It's almost like an island in a way, so I called it the island that I wasn't going to leave the island. Those last two years I made more money in real estate in less time, focusing on that particular thing, because there was so much efficiency in that. I had that idea of dominating that as opposed to doing as much as I can in that portion rather than trying to disperse myself.
So often when people set a goal, they set that they want to make more money that often the first thing that they think about expanding is their territory that you start, Joe Schumer, thinking about four or five states that I could go into where when you start looking at narrowing, what if your real estate license limited you to selling real estate in the city limits of where you live that you couldn't go outside of the boundaries of your city? You would all make more money. I guarantee it. I mean, because you would find a way to be more mindful of what's available there, right?
So, expansion is not necessarily the fastest path to growth. It's concentration and all the efficiencies that come with that, that make things easier, so that's one idea to leverage. I'm always looking for ideas that you can leverage. If you send postcards into a farm area, but you've been doing personal promotion, and you're spending the money, a better idea is to send the postcards that we use in getting listings to identify people who are going to be selling their house. That's a better idea that doesn't cost any more money than what you've already been spending on an idea that is not as effective. So you look at looking at the return on those things.
Those ideas, making the decision that you're going to build your business based on direct response, advertising versus personal promotion advertising is an idea that gives you leverage, because you're multiplying dollars rather than thinking and spending, hoping to get top-of-mind awareness that sometimes builds business just from being there. Then the next leverage point is money. So, I look for ideas first. If I can just make a decision or change something with an idea, a new strategy or a new thing, that's the first thing.
Then if there's something that money can leverage, if you can do something, replace something that only requires money. That's a better thing. If you're replacing cold-calling with spending money on Google AdWords where you just put the money in and that you get the result, you get the visitors to your website, that's a thing about leveraging money. If you're using money to generate leads or generate visitors to your website, and that's generating leads, and you're converting those leads into dollars at a multiple of what you're spending.
We've had lots of academies where people have come and they've been used to spending $10 a day on their AdWords, and then they sit beside somebody who is spending $20 a day, $600 a month and is making twice as much as they did from their website, and some of them I've seen those light bulbs go on, and they immediately go, and they spend $600 a month and go from making 50,000 to 100,000 from the same thing, and it's just leveraging money. Whenever there's an opportunity to leverage money, you want to see if that's something that you can do.
If you're doing very profitably an area of 1,000 homes or 2,000 homes with getting listings, and that's working for you, leverage that up. I mean, Chuck Charlton's been the perfect example of all of these. I talk about him a lot because I work closely with him. He lives in the next town over from me in Georgetown. He's just got this great spirit of being willing to do all of the things. He's fully implemented everything that we do, and he's just gotten great results. He's gone from zero to nearly a million dollars, and they're on their way past that, implementing all of these things.
So now, we just, a few weeks ago, had a conversation. It was the same thing about, "Well, let's just turn this knob a little bit," and now even more coming from that. So, it works out that if you deploy money in a way that it multiplies itself, it's so valuable as a leverage tool. Then another point of the leverage that I look for is technology. If you can have a tool or a technology or a service that will do something for you in lieu of you doing it, in combination with the money. So, if you have an idea, and you put some money towards the technology to get that idea out, it takes less of your time. It's leveraging what you're doing, and it gives you an advantage.
I would call AdWords a technology like that. You have the idea that you're going to use direct response. You use money to deploy through the technology of AdWords to get that result, and it's all things that are happening like push-button type of things. Then the next one is people, and I put that down below that list, like I'd always like to look and see if you can maximize the leverage available with those first three before you get to number four, which is people, and the people to operate a system can often have the biggest impact on you timewise, and really what it gets down to is people are just another way of deploying money too, because that's really what it takes is you just have to pay people the money to run the system that you've set up.
It's an incredible freedom, but you have to think that way, think that that process from the very beginning. You have to design something. You have to build that in that you're going to be willing to let go, and that you're going to be willing to have other people do that. But knowing that you can architect it in a way that it's going to be done the way that you would do it, and that's why when I described Project Cyrus, I did it the first two times the way that I would do it. Then Nikki came in and modeled exactly what I do, and now she does that whole thing and has been doing it for two years, so that's a wonderful use of an example of people running a system that you create.
Then the last is you. Your time is another piece of leverage, but I always like to save that one for last as the last thing that you want to do. Now, some of these things have to look at what your available resources are, because often the time and the money are on a scale that usually if you have more money, you have less time, or if you have more time, you have less money. Sometimes that's where you have to start. You have to start with what you have.
If you have time, but you don't have money, you have to really think how can you leverage the time that you do spend. So, often, it seems counterproductive to invest the time that you have in creating a system that's going to continue to work without you. So, if I look how that works, when I started out in real estate, I got all of my business from cold calling. I would call people on the phone and do that for two or three hours a day. When I would call people, I would get business, but then I'd get busy and any other thing would take you off track of that.
I had the idea of rather than trading my time in that one-to-one relationship of making those phone calls, it really was like a hamster wheel that when I'm on there and spinning, the wheel's going, and it works. But as soon as I step off, there's nothing happening there. There was no residual value of the work that I was doing other than that I made contact with somebody who may sell their home at some point. The idea that I had was what if I invested some of my time in creating a system that can work without me?
The big turning point for me in that was reading The E Myth by Michael Gerber, the book about the franchise prototype about going to work on your business instead of in it. So, what came out of that was this, looking at the resources that we had, and the things that were available was I created this guide for first-time homebuyers and had decided to create a direct response ad, a postcard that I could send to apartment complexes offering this guide to buying your first home.
So, I was using this idea, using my time to actually create this, which was time that I was taking away from what was my main source of new business. I was taking this away, and I'm not getting paid for this now. I'm doing something that I realized once I did it, once I invested this time in it, I would have an asset that would be able to continually work without me.
So, I sent out 1,500 of these postcards to apartment complexes, and I mean I still remember the feeling the day that I drove into the office that our office was in old houses that were side by side and then built an atrium in between it. So when you pull in, you could see in the window, and Joanne was at the front desk, and she saw me coming in, and she was smiling, and she had something in her hand. She was just waving it like this. I didn't clue in as to what it was, but I walked in, and she handed me this little stack of apply cards. I'd use that business reply card where people could fill it out and send it back, postage paid.
So she had this little pile with a rubber band around it, and there were 11 of these this first day that these responses came in. I'm looking through them, and people had handwritten, filled out their name and their phone number and their address to get this guide, and I was going in to make my cold calls that day, like that was on going to do those calls. But then I got these, and I said, "I'm going to call these people." Instead, I started calling them, and I mean I still get giddy thinking about it because the feeling of, like I knew in that moment that I would never make another cold call again.
I mean, you can imagine what that is like an exponential improvement in my life. So, I called these people, and every one of them was what I would, if I was doing cold calling, would call an A, B, or C prospect. I mean, they were friendly. They knew who I was. They knew I was calling about the guide. The postcard wasn't about me. I was calling about the guide that they had asked for, and they were all friendly, and they did want to buy a house, and they all wanted to talk to me, and nobody hung up on me or yelled at me.
I mean, I would have to call 100 people to talk to the six people that I talked to that night that were that type. I talked to them back to back to back to back, like you'd have to go many calls in a row before you got to one of those. It was life-changing for me. So, being able to leverage that then gave me the freedom to really start exploring those things of looking at creating the guide to Halton Hills, to creating the guide to Halton Hills real estate prices that that became a major pillar, and that became what ultimately became money-making websites, all of that whole philosophy there.
But thinking about leverage. Once my eyes were open to creating things that are going to do work on my behalf while I'm sleeping or while I'm doing something else, that was intoxicating to me. So, that kind of thinking about investing in something that you're never going to have to do again, like Barb, you're saying, thinking about, "You don't want to manage people." But if you thought about, "Well, what is it that I would like people to do?" And you took the time to lay out exactly how you want it to be done, creating it as if it's going to be duplicated, like creating the checklist for it or the outcome for it or whatever that little piece is, and breaking it down.
We've got the whole client experience timeline that we talked about in the during unit of breaking it down into the chunks. If you get a call to go over and see somebody about selling their house, you've got that chunk of getting ready for the appointment, the pre-listing thing. What has to happen there? That's where we are now. That's what we've been doing this last couple of weeks with Lillian, working on creating all of those systems for Julie and Cindy. So, just take all of the stress off of that to make it that it's push-button, something magic about that. That was easy.
Joe: Was that effective advertising or what?
Audience: Yeah.
Dean: Yeah. Well, that whole thing, when you start thinking about not only in your business life, but in your personal life, looking for that leverage too, because a lot of these things, growth and change requires time. It's always been interesting to me to see how people make the distinctions between their business time and their personal time, like they understand the value of delegation in their business, but yet they don't understand it in their personal life, or they seem there's some kind of block or some kind of that they don't value that time as much as their business time.
I've always found that really fascinating because time is time. You only have that 24 hours in the day. Whenever you're doing things that somebody else could do, or that you could be supported in that, it opens up your time to do something else, to redeploy that time into either something that you enjoy more or something that is going to create more revenue for your business because often, when we start down that path, the thing that is the limitation is that you're so busy.
In the during unit, you're so busy with your business that to take the time to do something to create a system seems counterproductive because it seems like, "Well, I could just do it faster myself," because you're doing it on an as-needed basis. You're not consciously taking the time to look at it and architect it ahead of time. You're doing it like you've got this listing appointment coming up tomorrow, and then you have the thought maybe of teaching somebody else how to do it, but you're in a hurry.
You just think, "Well, it'd just be faster if I just did it." Then it never gets high enough on your list until the need is there again. You get into that perpetual thing where it never gets replaced. So, part of that is always looking for and having a calendar really of the leverage things that you can use, like having an awareness. If you think about it like you're architecting this vision of how your business is going to work without you.
I mean, if you can imagine yourself out of it, could you imagine a scenario, Audrey, where all you do is go on the listing appointment and then all you do is negotiate the contract and everything else about the listing stuff is done? But you can imagine that, and you're almost there, and you have to be. In order to get to higher and higher levels, you have to be able to remove yourself from those things. Sometimes, even just doing that where hiring a showing agent is a big thing.
I mean, that's what we did with the Julie Matthews' group is hired a showing agent who all she does is show homes, and that's like if you're in a situation where that might be one of the potential time freedoms for you. You probably work with more people if you didn't have to actually show the homes, and when you start thinking about that, often when people start leveraging, they first start thinking about referring leads to people. "So, I'll just run the website, and I'll refer the leads, and I'll take a 25% referral," and that's the first place that people start.
Then maybe they think about, "Well, I'll bring on a buyer agent, and I'll take 50% of it," and then you've got to manage that whole thing there. Then what we discovered, and John Duncan was really the one who we implemented this with, hired a showing agent just to show properties and paid them hourly for showing homes, and it was like 20 or $25 an hour to show homes, and they got paid on Friday for any of the hours that they worked that week.
Now, the thing about it is that John had to front that money. He had to pay the money out ahead of time because they're getting paid even though nobody had bought the home yet. Before the first transaction, he was $1,800 that he had put out in paying the showing agent. But from that $1,800, he generated an eight or $9,000 commission. So, he was now way ahead on that, and at the end of the year had his total cost of those buyer transactions was under 5%.
So because he was willing to put the money up front, he was able to drive that cost way down, and when you think about that, but there's less risk in doing a 50/50 with somebody because you're not paying unless they do a transaction, but there's more reward from having a showing agent and paying them. They're getting paid for today's dollars, and there are so many people who are happy to work on the hamster wheel who’d just be happy to go out and show homes for a few days this week and get five or $600. That's just a fact. You're surrounded by them. There's lots of those people who would love to do that. Yeah, Joe, let's get the mic for you.
Joe: How was his retention on that, with that agent after a year? Do you know?
Dean: Well, John is notoriously and belovedly known as a catch-and-release kind of fisherman. That's his favorite thing. If you're listening, John, we love you. But he's an avid fisherman, and he loves to fish. He loves to catch, but he likes to try out new lures, and he likes to try out new stuff much like our beloved Zack here, but there's the thing. As a long-term strategy, that's a great thing. Especially if you're looking to free up your time, that's one of the most time-consuming, lowest leverage things that you can do is show homes, and you can still be involved in the pivotal parts of the thing and the consulting with the buyer, helping them narrow down what they really want and then selecting and then a worker shows homes to the buyer.
Yeah, exactly, and then they come back, and you talk about them, and when they find one, then you put the offer together. It's a fantastic thing.
Joe: But hiring somebody for X dollars per week, not a whole lot. Maybe $500 a week, and then they have to be. Because you're now paying them, you can say, "Okay, you need to be in at nine o'clock, right?"
Dean: So, Penny is paid 30 hours a week for being available to show homes, and yeah, because we had to do that because Julie started her own company, Julie Matthews, where she didn't have a pool of other agents to choose from. John was at Keller Williams and could just pick any agent from the pool. "Hey, does anybody want to show houses this weekend? Here's the deal." People got to know that he would be willing to do that, and they were lined up to have him do that.
Now, he's doing that now. He's doing more of that now. He just emailed me, and he loves when something works. That's his favorite thing. When we talk about something, he gets an idea. He tries it out. "Yeah, that really worked great. I'm going to do it again," and then he does it again. "That really does work," and then he's like, "What about this?" I mean, it's funny, but it's entertaining, and that's the thing. If you get to a point where you can match the difference between treating your business as entertainment or sustainment.
It's like, "Are you in business to entertain yourself or to sustain yourself?" Because real estate, there's so much cool stuff and so much fun stuff that you can try, and it's your little playground that it's fun to try all these new things. But if there were some adult supervision of this, that would actually set up something that there's a residual value of this new stuff that you're doing. That's the winning formula. That's what you're really looking for. I wasn't looking at you, Zack.
Joe: So, are you saying the amount of practice is not my hobby?
Dean: That's kind of what it is. Yeah, exactly. It is a hobby for some people.
Joe: Yeah, I've looked at it as a hobby.
Dean: Yeah, it's their social life. It's their entertainment, their hobby.
Joe: Keeps me busy. Well, I just hired an assistant for my four buyer agents, and she starts in May, and I've got to figure out how to pay her. Do you know any other models besides the hourly?
Dean: Well, so with Rita Casey, we've started to go down that path of having a-
Joe: Is she back?
Dean: No, she does all kinds of stuff for, I forget the name of the company now, but all the athletes in the management company. But this was when building the team that the money was split up that the 100% of the percentages that the percentages were broken, but this is how it goes that 5% transaction coordination, 30% to the agent that showed it, 20% to the lien coordinator, and 50% to the company. You set it up however you want. You did the distribution amount or set up-
Joe: Well, half my buyer agents are pregnant, so I have to figure something out. No, one's due in four weeks, and the other in six months.
Dean: Like a cavalcade of new babies.
Joe: New babies.
Dean: New babies, yeah. That's funny.
Joe: I've had a few showing assistants. I haven't used them a lot, but I've used them on occasion, and I've paid them according to John's model, and that has worked. What I think I need to do better is I need to train these showing assistants a little bit more thoroughly in how to show homes because it's not just getting them in, showing them the home. What I'm doing before I show homes typically is I'm having a buyer consultation, so I have a real clear idea of what they're looking for so that when I get them into a home, I can help them discover that this is what they're looking for or maybe it isn't. The showing assistants often aren't a part of that. Do you have any other ideas on-
Dean: The solution is to make them a part of that, to introduce them as part of that, so that even in the languaging that we, Penny's the showing partner, and that's all part of that transaction. Part of the thing and working with this buyer is having figuring out what they want, what's ideal for them, and then going to find it, you know?
Joe: Right. So, I let my clients know that, but it's letting the agent-
Dean: So you're saying are you passing them to the showing assistant before you've had that consultation?
Joe: No, no. Afterwards.
Dean: Okay.
Joe: Afterwards, but I think where I'm failing is in transferring.
Dean: Transferring that knowledge.
Joe: Yes.
Dean: Yeah, so you got to have a system for that where you either have a brief that describes, or you have a conversation with them that transfers that to them, so that you know ultimately what's important to them. That's where something like that ultimate scenario letter of describing to them what they've said in that. I mean, just so they understand that you heard them, and that you're on the right page. That's a good benchmark because if they hear back their words, if you're feeding back what I heard you say.
Joe: Sally had the same system, and I think that's the point that you're making is the key thing is that that buyer agent does need to have some sales skills. They need to know, "Okay, this is the one that really works," because I'm presuming you're still picking out the properties that they're going to be shown, right?
Female: Yeah.
Joe: Yeah, same as Sally's. She would do the consultation. She would pick the properties. The showing partner would do the showings, but if they don't know enough sales technology to be able to close the sale and recognize that this is the one even though the person might not recognize it, then you're actually slowing yourself down. In fact, we found that sally was doing less sales with the showing partner than she was on her own.
Now, it did give her more time off. No question about that, but the sales numbers were down. So, it's a thing that you really have to work at.
Dean: That's interesting, but that kind of thing, like when you've got that situational role where if you're going to invest in somebody in that role that that's exactly what they need to know, and that's leverage in itself. It's spending time and money teaching that person those skills. That is leverage that you're deploying. I mean, I was talking with Mike Hardwick just yesterday, and he had a great quote because he was saying how everything changed for him when he understood what management really was.
The definition he wrote of management was the allocation of limited resources for the highest return in capital, people, and facilities. Those are really the three things that what you're managing, and that was pretty interesting. That was in the cards. We were having a whole, I don't know what the source was, but he says, "Management is the allocation of limited resources for the highest return," and those guys, Churchill Mortgage is blessed to be in a position where they are faced with the complexity of abundance.
They have so much business and so much opportunity that they can't hire people fast enough to do it, and it's really testing the limits of his management abilities. That's where he's really had to grow his skill set in that.
Speaker 6: Remember when he had that video?
Dean: Can you give the mic?
Speaker 6: He had this video that would tell people about the philosophy of the way that he liked to help people, business at Churchill. So that might help your buyer showing agents if you had a little video or even a page that your buyer showing agents read through with clients, "What's important to you about the house you're finding?" If there are something systematized a little bit because Mike had a video that went through, "This is who we are at Churchill," and this is how we want to help you.
That was the video. If you don't want to take it to video format, but your showing agent, you're giving them the growth to go through a buyer counseling session with these buyers before they went out. Then you don't have to do the buyer counseling session, and you don't have to transfer the knowledge. The buyer's agents finding that knowledge out or the showing agents finding it out for themselves.
Joe: But then she's stuck because then she can't pick the properties because she has now the buyer counseling session with them.
Speaker 6: Can't the buyer showing agent find the properties?
Joe: Then you're more into a buyer's agent as opposed to a showing agent.
Joe: Yeah, exactly. The showing agent is intended to save her time. The buyer agent is making their own money on a split with you and the team, right?
Speaker 6: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Joe: So it's a different person. If you delegate all of that, then they're going to become a buyer agent, and then you're still stuck with showing.
Joe: What I visualize I'm going to be doing is the buyer consultation. We'll include the buyer agent and the showing partner, and then when the buyer comes in to look at properties each time, the buyer's agent, the showing partner sit down with the buyer and go over the properties. Then the buyer agent needs to be in the office when they return to discuss what they've seen. So, the buyer agent still is putting a lot of time into it, but the hours of showing property are left to someone else to generate more buyers.
Joe: Or when the showing partner's out on showings, they use Evernote. They have all of the properties in there. The client types in their comments as they're going through the property. Then you take pictures of the highlights of a particular property or properties as you're seeing them. At the end of the showing, the showing partner can email from Evernote to the client what they've done, and they can also Evernote or email to you. So then you're up to date, the buyer's up to date, and everybody's up to date that way without having to meet personally and spend everybody's time that way.
Dean: See, that's an idea. That is a way to deploy some technology that is going to be a win. That saves some time. It creates a better result.
Joe: I like that.
Dean: Yeah, that's right, but that's the kind of thing that when you start looking at this, when we're looking at all these leverage now, the first idea that creates some leverage is the idea of dividing your business into three units of your before unit, your during unit, and your after unit. That right there is a leveraging idea because you understand that the during unit is the core of where everything happens. Everything else is in service to the during unit because the only place that you make money is by selling people a home, finding them the home or getting a listing.
So, the only time that you get money is when the closing happens, so everything else is in support of that. When you realize that the before unit, the deliverable of the before unit is to deliver people who want to buy homes, and the deliverable of the after unit is to deliver people who want to buy or sell homes. It's just a different approach, so everything that you do like that makes that leverage that much easier to see when you really get clear on what the purpose of those are.
So, you start with looking at Evernote? So that, when you start looking at and adding all of these things and layering them on top of each other. You set up these contexts. We've got before, during, and after. If we take the during, you've got that client experience timeline that that's the runway that you're running on. The timeline starts when somebody calls up to say, "I want to start looking at homes," and it continuously moves along as you reach these benchmarks till they come in for the initial consultation. They get their home loan report. They go out and look at homes. They find one. You make an offer. They get it accepted. It goes to escrow. They come to closing.
All of that is like a moving timeline, and you can layer all of these leverage points along the way by replacing yourself in it with a system, by improving the way something happens, by deploying a new technology in that system, and that becomes like the great art. That's where you get to put your thumbprint on things. It's where you get to really be that creator, be the architect of that and realize that just with an open eye that there's really very little of it that requires you when you really look at that.
So one of the great contexts around that is that that Robert Kiyosaki wrote a book called Cashflow Quadrants where he talks about the progression of going from being an employee in quadrant one to being self-employed in quadrant two, which is what most real estate agents are self-employed, but then making that leap across the line into being a business owner. Let's say you're starting to get into that territory when you start building a team, and you're employing other people. But often in that same side is something that's under/over-looked, which is the investor category where you're investing money into building this system or to building your team or to freeing yourself up from things.
That's probably worth noting just the mindset towards capital allocation whereas an investor in your business because this was something that was a conversation I had with Julie Matthews about this idea of investing money in something without seeing, like get a mean return on it. So many times, when people start investing in raising their budget, or they're investing money in the before unit, they're putting then pressure on their business to immediately go up to accommodate the extra spending that they're doing.
It was very interesting the mindset change, like the shift. So, I talked about how they've got these small houses, low-priced houses. Well, she had found a house in Lake Wales that she had bought for $9,000 like a two-bedroom locked house that was a dump, but I mean-
Dean: Right. So, anyway, this $9,000 house that she was excited about it because she was going to put $11,000 into it and be able to rent it for 650 a month. As an investor, as a real estate investor, that is like a win, right? By the time you take out taxes and insurance, she'd probably get $5,000 net at the end of the year on that $20,000, so she'd get a 25% return on that and was stoked about that. That was a find. Yet in the same thing, it was very interesting because at that point, we were starting to spend between the postcards, just the getting listings postcards and AdWords about $1,800 a month. It was very interesting that that was starting to get at four months in.
The revenue hadn't come up to match what she was spending, yet plus the expense of hiring team members and her new office building and all this stuff. She was starting to feel a little pressure. She's still doing all of her business, but it was a different mindset, and I said, "It was really interesting because I know the things that we talk about and the things that we're doing are investing in things that are going to multiply the money." We're going to spend an amount of money, and it's going to multiply itself, but it's not going to happen immediately.
I said, "Imagine if that rental property, how would you feel about it if you couldn't put the money up front, and you had to pay $1,800 a month for that property, and you were renting it out for 650." You'd feel like you were losing money on that investment, but it's the same exact thing. I mean, it's that distancing. You're throwing that money out there and knowing that in four years, this house is going to pay for itself. I'm going to get that money back, and here we're talking about you're going to spend that $1,800 a month. You're going to spend $20,000 at the end of the year, but it's going to be 40, 60, $80,000 in return, and it's just this mindset.
I've had that conversation with other people, so that's why I was seeing that pattern of the mindset of thinking about digging a hole, which was like, "Well, it feels like I'm digging a hole," like I'm getting behind on that versus feeling like you're building a ramp, which it's a whole different thing. When you're digging a hole, it feels like you're getting behind, but building a ramp feels like, which is in essence what you really are doing, building a ramp that's going to create a capability to go in a higher direction in here. So, it all wins at the end of the year, more than double, and just there's a real learning exercise for me even just to see that that mindset.
But thinking about those independent units of your business and where the leverage points are in each of those is a big thing. There we have it, another great episode, and if you'd like to continue the conversation, you can go to ListingAgentLifestyle.com. You can download a copy of the Listing Agent Lifestyle book, the manifesto that shares everything that we're talking about here, and you can be a guest on the show if you'd like to talk about how we can build a listing agent lifestyle plan for your business. Just click on the Be A Guest link at ListingAgentLifestyle.com.
If you'd like to join our community of people who are applying all of the things we talk about in the listing agent lifestyle, come on over to GoGoAgent.com. That's where we got all the programs, all the tools, everything you need to get listings to multiply your listings, to get referrals, convert leads, and to find buyers, and you can get a truly free, no-credit-card-required trial for 30 days at GoGoAgent.com. So, come on over, and I will see you there.