 I just wanna share a few things about my business. And I wanna talk about closing 40 million years as a single agent every year. That's the volume I've been doing for the past three years. I think you need to realize that every single one of you are walking million dollar a year real estate agents right now. Now, I wanna share five things about my business. I do business a lot differently than most people. I don't buy leads. I tried buying leads back in maybe 2012 or 13 or 14 whenever they first started doing it. Did it for about three months. I recently tried Facebook leads, just testing it out. I'm always testing things out. I don't have a CRM by the way. I'm not saying I'll never not have a CRM. I may at some point. I may change my mind at any moment. Right, I'm always trying to figure out how I could be more efficient and do things better. But with leads, what I realized was this is what I believe. I want you guys to think about this because I really wanna help you become more efficient and scalable, okay? What I, the conclusion I came up with is that these companies that are selling leads are basically selling you random people's contact information in your market. Just random people in your market. Oh no, they're motivated. They're looking for, they're looking to buy or sell. Why do you think that? Because they were scrolling, looking at houses. Everybody looks at that, looks at houses. You may not be interested in doing anything for a year, two or three, but you're just curious what's sold in your neighborhood or what's on the market in your neighborhood. Oh, they're motivated by our seller. No, they're not. But they sold it to you for hundreds of dollars. I think this is something that you have to think about really hard because where we allocate our money can be the difference in us surviving, failing, succeeding. Why would I spend hundreds of dollars on a random person in my market's contact information when I can just get people's contact information for less than three cents? Targeted people that live in a certain neighborhood. They're the highest quality prospects anyway. They already own the property that I wanna sell. Why don't I want some random person's contact information? Now, the reason why you're buying leads is because you're scared to get the contact information and then just call those people. And what you're doing is you're just lying to yourself. You're saying, I'm gonna spend all this money so I don't have to make this call. I'm gonna wait on the lead to get to me and when it gets to me, then what do I have to do? Call them. So what I'm saying is, is don't lie to yourself and say, okay, these buyer leads are motivated, these are motivated leads. I'm gonna pay all this money for these motivated leads. In reality, they're just random people in your market. Instead, I want you to trick yourself in the opposite way. I want you to get random people's contact information in your market for less than three cents and pretend like they're motivated leads, right? Let's move to the second part, best intentions. It doesn't matter to me if my prospect or someone that I'm calling wants to buy ourself property today, okay? What I care more about is, is there anything I can do to help them? I don't really care what I can't do for them or what they don't wanna do. I wanna know what I can do for them, okay? Nothing? Oh, cool, is there an agent you would work with? No, well look, I'm sure at some point down the road you're gonna do something. Would it be okay if I just stayed in touch? Cool, what's your email? Boom! Now I'm sending them a weekly email every week. Now I'm using that email to target them on social media and now I'm building my brand with this person that I talked to and they trusted me enough because the tone of my voice and my body language, even though I'm on the phone, they can hear your body language. They felt comfortable enough with me to give me their private information. Why? Because I didn't ask them if they wanted to buy or sell something. I had dinner after the VIP night with my buddy that lives in Dallas. He's not a real estate agent. And we were talking about this. And he was, I haven't talked to him in years and he was talking about, we were talking about me speaking and how I'm coaching for free and how it all works and all this stuff. And I was telling him the dynamics of the whole thing. And he said, you know what, that is interesting because there's a homeless guy right around the corner here and he, I was walking past and he came up and he asked me where I'm from. He didn't ask me for any money. He just asked me where I'm from. And then he said, they kind of had a little conversation. He said, oh, I'm from Alabama and stuff, Mobile. And the guy said, oh yeah, I know Mobile, the underwater tunnel and all that stuff. And they had a little conversation. The guy never asked him for a dollar. My buddy said, see you later and left. The next day, he saw the homeless guy and he gave him some money. Why? Because the homeless guy didn't ask him for money like all the other homeless people. He was actually curious about my buddy and he created kind of a little relationship with them. And my buddy knew that he needed money, he's homeless. So next time he's seen him, he's like, I like that guy, I'm gonna give him some money. So what I don't want you guys to do is sound like every other real estate agent. How he didn't sound like every other homeless person begging for money. I don't need you people, you agents, acting like every other real estate agent begging for deals. This is something that I realized through the crash. It's so abundant, okay? And here's the problem. Let's say hypothetically there's a market that has 20,000 agents and only 5,000 transactions a year. You look at that and you think, it's not unlimited. There's no way. There's only so many, there's not even enough for one transaction. That's 0.25 transactions per agent on average. But I guarantee you that there's an agent out of that 20,000 that understand this, they're probably doing several hundred of those deals. Okay, what I want you to look at when you're looking at a market is not the opportunity of transactions. I want you to think about it in terms of the opportunity of relationships in the market. Remember market share. It's the percentage of property owners in your market that you have a relationship with. What agent has the most real relationships with property owners in the area? Okay, so when you think about it in that perspective, there's no way in the world ever, in a million years, that you can talk to every single person in Dallas. Never. So there's an unlimited potential of relationships for the rest of your life forever. You'll never even get to them all. Okay, transactions come from a conversation that got converted into a relationship that was then converted into the transaction. We're focusing on the transaction when this is where the magic is. It's the conversation that got converted into the relationship. And then from there, the prospect either wants to do a deal today, next month, next year, five years, 10 years, it doesn't matter. And then it goes back to, okay, how many people are we contacting per day? And out of that, how many are we connecting with? You can't do all the business, ever. But you gotta think about it the right way. Not transactions, it's people. Which brings me to my next key point about my business is that I learn closings happen every single day. You can go back through the worst of the markets through your MLS and recognize that there were closings that were happening every single day. So what does that tell us? It tells us what I have to worry about the next crash. If it ever happens, when it ever happens, it doesn't matter. Because closings are gonna continue to happen every single day, okay? So think about this. When a market transitions, this is what happens. I want you guys to really pay attention to this. This is important. When the market's going up, like it did from 2012 to 2017, 18. When the market's doing this, okay? The people that are buying and selling when the market's doing this, they put the brakes on when the market does this. Which I don't know about Dallas is where my market is and I know a lot of markets in the country, they have, it's a different market over the last, say 18 months than it was the previous five years. So when the market transitions, the clients that you have that you're working with, all of a sudden put the brakes on. Because the market shifts, right? The prices, things are staying longer on the market, inventory goes up, things are changing. They're like, oh, I don't know what to do here. And it scares agents out of the business. Because your clients that you're working with, right then currently, stop, they just put the brakes on. And you're like, oh no, I need money, ah, go get a job. Here's the reality of it. Here's how you transition with the market, okay? Number one, you don't freak out. And you understand that closings will continue to happen every day. The people that buy when it's going like this, not the same clients that are buying when it's doing this. Two different kinds of clientele. The ones that buy when the market's going down or transitioning, they were kind of dormant as the market was going up. Okay, now they're coming out of the woodworks when the market transitions, why? Well, the buyers when the market is down, they want to buy right now before it goes up. And sellers that sell on the crash gotta sell right now, they're in trouble. So there's all this urgency in the market. Now right now, we're not in a down market. The prices haven't plummeted, so we're not there. But what do we have to do? As the market transitions, we have listings. Well, when we get caught in the middle of a listing when the market transitioned, now we have to go back to our seller and say, hey, we gotta go down on the price because the market transitioned. And they think, yeah, right, you're not gonna pull that one over on me. I heard that a million times. So you get caught with some listings of some sellers that don't wanna believe that the market is shifted, okay? And so you start freaking out, you really start freaking out because your buyers put it on the brakes and your sellers won't reduce the price where it needs to be because the market chains all of a sudden. Now what we have to do from here is now that we know where the market is, now all we have to do is consult our sellers moving forward. We're gonna get maybe half of our current listings to reduce the price because I need to sell, okay? But moving forward, the new listings that we get moving forward, we need to consult them on this new market and we need to be more aggressive on our prices with them because this is why, Mr. Seller, oh, you wanna price it here? Well, your neighbor is at that same price and it's been sitting there for 200 days. Do you wanna sit there for 200 days? I didn't think so. This is where we need to be. It's up to you, Mr. Seller, but this is where we need to be because the market has changed over the last six months, three months, year, 18 months, whatever it is. You see what I'm saying? So the new clients coming in are gonna get a different consultation with you moving forward. So there's gonna be a lag. Your business is gonna suffer temporarily. I don't care how great of an agent you are or how bigger production is. When the market shifts, you'll have a temporary slowdown in your business. You won't be slowed down because any downtime you should fill up making phone calls and contacting people and helping people. You should never have a moment of downtime ever. But as far as your transactions, that's gonna slow down temporarily. But then this is what separates the good agents and the great agents. The great agents understand this. They transition with the market. They get right back on track where they were. That's what's happened to me. My business slowed down earlier this year. Spring and summer, it's kind of dead. Now I'm right back to where I was or better because I understand this philosophy because I've been through it and I'm trying to tell you so that you don't have to, so you have some kind of idea that way when it happens, you know how to handle it. Make sense? The fifth thing is personal brand. I think this is the way of the future in all sales. This is what's gonna protect you from you know, something taking over industry which will never happen. But this will separate again, the good agents and the great agents. When people see you everywhere, they feel like they know you. This is gonna help you be more efficient and scalable because when you go to listing appointments, they're already gonna know who you are. They're gonna feel like they know you. Now how did I build my brand over the last 17 years when I got back on the business? 2007, right at the end, that's when I got back in real estate, I started a weekly email. I heard it over and over and over again from my prospects telling me to send them a weekly list of foreclosures. So I started out a weekly list of foreclosures because there's so many foreclosures. Well, I started sending it and I was like, you know what, I'm just gonna send this to everybody. So I started sending it to everybody. Eventually in a couple years, the foreclosures went away and morphed into a market report. And it's went out every single Wednesday since 2007. Regardless of market conditions, hurricanes, me changing companies, vacations, doesn't matter. This is the single most important thing in my business. And what it does, and this is true with social media and any form of marketing that you do, this is the reason behind it. The consistency of it and the content of it is what's gonna prove to them that you are dependable, that you are hardworking, that you are consistent, that you are knowledgeable, that you are professional. If you post on Instagram every day and your clients see that every day, it's a professional post. It's knowledgeable. It's good content and it's consistent. They're gonna see you as consistent. And that's what my email did for me over the years. So I don't care how you market, it has to be consistent, it has to be frequent enough. A lot of people say, you know, every week is too much. That was not, it's almost not enough. Every two weeks, they kind of start to forget, I don't know if I remember who this person is. Every month is no good at all. So I want you guys to really put some thought into personal branding, making videos, Facebook, Instagram, email, however you wanna do it. But you have to put a plan together to build your brand of the customers that are in your market so that they know who you are forever.