 Oh, get five more deals with the future time you just got back that you don't have to get the listing sign, put the lock box on, set up the showings, deal with all the agents that didn't show up, send everybody information, get an offer negotiated. Well, we didn't get there. Second offer comes in, we negotiated, we got there. Now we're dealing with title company, mortgage company, inspectors, appraisers. How many hours are you putting into the deal? You just got all that back. The first thing I realized when my clients were still buying properties at the bottom of the market, I started, I then did further research and really looked through county records and really started to try to figure this thing out. And I realized something very interesting hit me like a ton of bricks. I realized, closings happen every day, forever, regardless of market conditions, okay? Light bulb moment, right? If you go back to 2000, if you go back to .com crash, 9-11, 2008, the pandemic, the worst, one of the scariest moments in the last 100 years, complete economic shutdown, never happened in our lifetimes, correct? Pretty scary, no human-to-human contact, guess what? 80% of the same amount of closings were happening during that 45-day period from mid-April to May 1st, from mid-March to May 1st. 80% of the same closings that happened that same 45-day, the year prior were happening last year during that complete shutdown. Does that not make you sit there and say, wow, I'm in an incredibly solid industry? What's even more scary is that 80% of the same amount of new pending deals, we can't even see people, but yet, somehow miraculously, buyers are making offers submitting to sellers, negotiating deals, ratifying contracts during that time. Does it not just make you stake one second and say, wow, it does me? Now, I've been preaching this for years. I've been preaching what happened during that 45-day period for a long time, because there's a buyer and there's two opportunities for each of those closings for you to represent someone. You can't do all the business. You're lying to yourself, saying the market's down, there's only so much, and what does that do? It prevents you from trying to reach out to more people to see what you can do to help them. When really, you need to be going more all-in at that moment. That's when you really need to turn up the heat. When the market gets so scary, agents leave the business, that's when you need to go all-in, because at that point, it's like taking candy from up, okay? And then we understand the business model behind it, how we can actually scale our business, then we can build that business of our dreams. Closings happen every day, business is unlimited. Now what? Now you realize competition doesn't exist. You can actually be friends with each other. What that worrying about if they're gonna steal your listing or your clients. If the client chooses the other agent, that's the client's decision. It wasn't because the agent went behind your back and did some weird stuff, even though they probably did, but it's still the client's decision of who they wanna work with. And if they did do some squirrely stuff, still a client, and if the client's that gullible to fall for that, I don't wanna work with it. I don't know if I wanna work with that client anyway. You see what I'm saying? Competition doesn't exist. Set your timer on your phone for five minutes to think about what went wrong, what could you have done better? Salt, cry, complain. When the buzzer goes off, never think about that deal ever again and go get five more deals with the future time. You just got back that you don't have to get the listing signed, put the lock box on, set up the showings, deal with all the agents that didn't show up, send everybody information, get an offer, negotiate it. Well, we didn't get there. Second offer comes in, we negotiated, we got there. Now we're dealing with title company, mortgage company, inspectors, appraisers. How many hours are you putting into the deal? You just got all that back. Now you can take all those hours and go get five more deals. You can actually take lost deals and multiply your business with lost deals. You guys need to go, where can I lose a deal? Where can I lose a deal? I need to lose a deal, I need to lose a deal. Because every lost deal is five deals in your pocket. If you think about it right, if you have the right perspective, this is how I think. I'm just giving you guys how I think. Just a glimpse into how I view things because every situation I can turn it around into a huge positive for me. Like when people hang up on me and I laugh and call them back. The biggest punchline. Of course, closing's happen every day. Of course, business is unlimited. Of course competition doesn't exist, of course. We're past all that. The biggest punchline for me was, first half of my career, when I got caught up in all that money and all that stuff, I was so focused on the money. I was so focused on the deals, the closings. I wasn't worried about the people. I cared about people, but they didn't really care about me either, right? They weren't really, it was a cold relationship. It was like, you can sell it, I can make 100,000 grade. Here's the listing, boom. Here's when negotiated, bam. We closed, bam, never talked to them ever again. Go do it again and again and again. That's how the market was at the time. You didn't have to start relationships during that two year window. But I got thrown, that's the market I got thrown into as a new agent. So I didn't know any different. When I realized my clients were still buying at the bottom, I realized, wait a minute, it's not about the deals. If I would have maintained the relationships with those clients, I would have been representing them at the bottom. And they were buying a lot of property. They sold all their bad assets and they bought all these really cheap assets. I could have represented them selling and buying millions and millions of dollars worth of stuff. But I didn't know all the stuff that I'm sharing with you right now. If you guys can just grasp what I'm saying, I didn't have a Ricky Careuth telling me all this stuff. You don't have to tell me again. That's it. I'm not gonna make the same mistake twice. When my dad showed me how to roof, how to lay shingles, he showed me one time. When people showed me how to do football drills or whatever I did once, I just needed to see it once. And then I'm gonna commit to that business model, right? Same thing, business model. The conversations were totally different. And I knew that I was onto something. Think about this. From 2008, 2010, we had the BP oil spill. The BP oil spill in my area was a mini recession. Prices went way down for a second. Agents were leaving the area. They were moving to Birmingham and Nashville. And you guys came here from Gulf Shores from the oil spill. During that time of the BP oil spill, I was like, this is my opportunity to test what I learned, what I thought I learned in a little recession. And we didn't know how big the recession was gonna be. It could have been massive, but I kept my cool and I said, I'm gonna do what I think works when markets do weird things. And I'm gonna test this thing out. There's one of three things that property owners can do. And you need to call every single property owner in your market and ask them which of these three things they wanna do. They either are gonna want to buy because things are getting cheap and they have a lot of money. They're gonna have to sell because they're in trouble or they're gonna hold and they're just gonna ride it out. They're scared, they wanna stay put. They don't wanna do anything. We'll see how this thing plays out. That's only three options. Call every single property owner when the market does anything drastic. Go through your database first and say, hey, how are you doing? You wanna buy, start a hold during this time. You doing okay? Everything cool? Which way you wanna go with this? Are you gonna be looking to buy if things really get bad? Or are you gonna be in trouble? Are you gonna need to sell? What can I do to help you through this? Meetings, showings, listings, six years. After I learned a lot about the business and how to build the business, still six years to get to that point I wanted to get to. I just want you to really visualize that timeline. A lot of people get in the business and they're three or four years in, they hadn't hit what they wanna hit. After I learned everything, it still took me six years. This stuff doesn't happen overnight. It can. I had a guy that sold 100 properties in his first year. I've had several people sell 50 plus properties in the first year. It can happen. Is it likely? No. Maybe I am a little extreme. Maybe I shouldn't have waited so long to do certain things, but that's how I am. I'm very conservative. I'm gonna make sure. I'm gonna make sure. 2017 was the year I stopped building my real estate business and started focusing on helping agents. Meanwhile, still closing 100 deals every year. This'll be year number eight. The way that I did this is because of my business model, right? So let's talk about working smart. Working smart is adapting a business model that is the most productive, efficient, and scalable. So if you think about the way that I put together over time, it took me so long to figure all this stuff out on my own, but basically it goes like this. If you have your choice of any kind of lead generation source that there is, there's so many different types of lead generation sources. What's the one thing that those lead generation sources always come back to? What's the one action? What's the one activity that all of them, here's all the lead generation sources and then boop, here's this one activity in the middle that all of them come back to. It's not necessarily phone per se, right? But it's a real-life conversation. The common denominator of all closings. I had one closing out of my 1,000 or so closings where I didn't actually talk to the person. It was all through email, they were out of the country, whatever. The common denominator of all closings is a real-life conversation.