 Every deal on the market is going to sell. It's going to go pending. You should be stacking as many listings as you can before January because when January comes, you're not going to have time to do anything. Ladies and gentlemen, make some noise for Ricky! Garoo! He is an investor, a speaker, and soon to be remembered, in my opinion, as a legend in the industry. The cool thing about what he was doing was he was documenting everything. Like he would post his calls, his work he was putting in, the strategies. He was sharing everything. A lot of people think 100 deals, oh my god. It's two deals a week because when more people know how you are going into the next selling season, you make more money than you did the last selling season. You push yourself in the best position possible. Our job is to push every situation as far as you can push it. But you got to get them moving in that direction. You're like shut them down before they started moving towards the pen to sign the contract. Like give me contact information of people that own the property this person wants so I can try to put a deal together here today. Every post you see on Instagram, I wrote the copy right before I posted it out of my own brain. Alright, let's do it. Ricky, thanks again for hopping on. For those of you who don't know Ricky Karuth, which is probably the few and far between of you, I'll kick it over Ricky if you want to kind of take it your way at the start here. We'll go from there. Hey, what's up guys? No, I've been a real estate agent for 22, almost 22 years now. Back in 2002, I got in and made a bunch of money, lost it on the crash, came back and crushed it. It was the number one rematch agent in Alabama. 2017, I wrote a couple books, started coaching, speaking, writing, and built one of the largest brands of real estate agents on the planet. And now I just travel and speak. My dad handles the day-to-day sales and just help agents double their volume. So that's my God-given talent to the world, as I can sit down and dissect your business and show you where those inefficiencies are. And I decided to kind of run with that since I really enjoy that side of it. Right now, December 2023, we'll go down as the most opportunistic moments in history for real estate agents. January is going to be the busiest January we've ever seen, bigger than 2021. Just because of the sheer amount of historic pints of demand that is knocking out the door. And if you look at a chart of pending deals, it always spikes first second week of January, followed by a spike of closed deals for a second week of February every year. And when you add in the historic pints of demand, it's just going to be, I mean, we just have the lowest amount of pending deals ever recorded in a month a couple months ago, lower than 2008. And I wasn't even accounting for lower rates. Now we've got lower rates in the mix, which just kind of creates now a perfect storm. So every deal on the market is going to sell. It's going to go pending in January. So really December was the biggest opportunity because you actually have time because the market's a little slower to actually stack inventory. You should be stacking as many listings as you can before January because when January comes, you're not going to have time to do anything. You're just going to be showing property, negotiating deals, closing deals, et cetera. It's going to be a busy year, ladies and gentlemen. So buckle up. The worst is behind us, you know, the real estate recessions over and to the moon. So you guys just tell me what problems you're having in your business. Like I say, I'm really good at helping you guys become more efficient. That's really the name of the game. I sold 100 properties a year as a single agent. Just by myself with one assistant doing admin. I was the listing agent, buyer's agent, you know, everything. I went to all the closings. I did everything. A lot of people think 100 deals. Oh my God, it's two deals a week. If you can't do two deals a week, then what we need to get into your back end and see what, where are you going wrong with being able to scale because two deals, not a whole lot per week. But if you realize it's two deals a week, if you realize that it's not going to happen year one, like you're not going to close 100 deals off the cold leads you get in a year. You're going to close 100 deals off the cold leads you got that year plus the last four years of cold leads that are now warm leads. As long as you have a system in place for nobody ever forgets who you are, which I did really effectively with the weekly email every Wednesday, where I give my opinions on stuff, not just generic stuff that goes out that people don't care about that most of you are sending. And then on top of that, taking advantage of the market cycles, right? So when the markets down every year, you take advantage, you switch from servicing to building, building your brand, prospecting, making calls, emails, you know, letters, whatever, social media. You got to, you got to, you got to be able to flip that switch throughout the year. You can literally look at a chart of your local market and see when sales slow down every year and get it down to the date. Okay, on this date, I'm going to switch over to building my brand for four months because when, when more people know who you are going into the next selling season, you make more money than you did the last selling season. And every year you can stair step your income, but there's two cycles. There's the yearly cycle, then there's the decade cycle where we're just in the low of the decade cycle, the greatest opportunity you've ever seen. And a lot of you just kind of pissed it away, chalked it up to nobody's doing anything. So why should I try right now? I'll just wait till it's busy again. So that's average agent thinking. You're never going to, you're never, you're never going to crush it. If you don't crush it, right? If you're going to crush it, you need to crush all the time. So yeah, feel free, man. I'm, I'm, I'm an open book. You guys tell me what problems you're having in your business, what questions you have, and I'm happy to, you know, help you guys scale. Sweet. Awesome. Yeah. So we'll kick it to the floor, you know, just for, you know, you guys that are on the team right now, you know how I'm always emphasizing prospect, prospect, prospect and then retarget to the database. This formula didn't exactly come from me. You know, you're talking to the king of it all on that side of it. So we'll open the floor. We'll keep pushing it. Anybody have questions at heart? Go for it. Hey, Ricky. Um, yeah, I was a curious on what your take is with people that in Jersey, I'm sure everybody has somebody there, right? Whether it's like a calling or an agent or something and you've got these people who can't. They have got like decision paralysis. What's your thought on approaching that? How do I get you to go from? Hey, I have all this shit in mind in my face. Let me move forward with the listing and get it up on market and stop entertaining the BS. So like a property owner that's considering to sell and they just won't move forward because they got a bunch of people hitting them up. I have like a probate lead, right? Three people making the decision. Um, a lot of, a lot of cooks in the kitchen, right? They can't. It doesn't, it's like there's no moving forward. Um, whether that's for a lot of probates, right? Um, I mean, I'm sorry, repeat the question. That's pretty much the case for a lot of probates, right? It normally ends up being a lot of cooks in the kitchen. Yes and no. I mean, I've done some probate where there's a decision maker and people move, um, but it feels like specifically this situation. Well, I mean, even in a regular deal, you're always going to have these deals pop up where there's, you know, two families that own the condo or, uh, you know, an LLC or you're going to have this from time to time. Listen, bro, my best advice is to realize that whatever's going to happen on that deal is going to happen. You put yourself in the best position possible. Our job is to push every, uh, situation as far as you can push it. All right. And then just let the chips fall. It's not always going to fall in your direction, but whatever it's going to be is what it's going to be. The problem is we let up, we let these deals take up too much mental capacity, worried about what's going to happen and how we can make it happen when it's really out of our hands and not enough time trying to get more deals going. And then this is where I'm just talking about like scalability, efficiency, volume, crushing it, doing more. If we're going to be stuck on one deal, how do we convert this one deal? Then we're right back to average agent. Right. It's got to be about volume. So that, that's like my just knee jerk reaction answer. Um, my approach was we had listening presentation went down the whole route. Um, they want a number. It's a little bit higher than I expected. I said, Hey, look, we're ready right here for you at 525 when you're ready. We're here, right? Reach out. What do we think? Like, I don't want to be, what did they want? 599. They have an investor. I would have listed it yesterday. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's what I'm saying. They're, they're bullshit. They're just like dragging their feet. But I was, I don't feel, I don't want to be passive and say, you know what? Hey, look, we're here for you when you're ready and, and feel like that's the best effort. But if that's your suggestion, like detaching, right? Pulling away and say, this is where we are. Take it or leave it. Um, yeah, I would, the 599 would have been on the market yesterday. Okay. You're saying you're scared to take an overpriced listing? No, no, I would take it at 599. It's just, it's, it's, there's something holding them up. And my, my contact with the three is saying the family can't decide. They have an investor offer. They have other people calling them so they haven't, they haven't done anything. Okay. Um, well, listen in that, in that instance, if they have like, they're still trying to figure out what they're going to do, you can't force them to make the decision quicker. Like some coaches and trainers will try to tell you how to like, how to like, you know, close them right now kind of thing. And, um, I'm not like that. So there's two schools of thought. There's the closing right now, you know, like hardcore, like close. Um, and then there's the way I do it, which is I'm going to let them do the deal on their terms. Cause again, again, bro, I'm talking to 15 other people today about buying and selling. You think I'm going to sit around and wait on them to make a decision? Dude, there's closings happening every day. You think I'm going to like not take advantage of these deals up here that are happening because I'm worried about this deal, you know, and what they're going to decide. I can't make people make decisions. They're going to make the decision, whatever they want to make. If they want, if, if, if I can get them to commit to 599 right now, I'm going to get it on the market. Like, did you walk away from 599? I'm unclear. No, no, um, I was clear with them. I told them I thought it was worth less, but that we were ready to work at it at 599. Uh, another agent, they said just overvalued. It said they would probably get over six. When you say, listen to the word you say, I think it's worth less, but we can try it at this, right? That's the wrong thing because you're literally telling them it's not worth what they think it's worth. You have to frame it in a way where, where, where they were right, right? Like this is what I value to that five and a quarter. This is what I think it's worth. You fill it out there and see what they say. Then they're like, well, we kind of want to go 599. You want to go to 599? Let's do it. That's it, man. Get it on paper right now. You saying, I think it's worth less make put, like it starts to backpedal the whole situation. Now when you say, let's get it and you start to get it in writing and everything, you know, you are going to set expectations with them. Right? But you got to get a moving in that direction. You're like, shut them down before they started moving towards the pen to sign the contract. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I appreciate that. I don't know, man. Like, I'm always just like, what are you guys looking to do? How can I help you do it? You know, if they're not ready to make a decision right now, great. What can I do to help you make that decision? What can I do to help you? Hey, Ricky, I got a quick question for you. Where is there an echo? Yeah, but it's, it's all right. Where are you seeing the opportunity right now with? I know you're not actively selling this much, but I know that you work with a lot of agents and stuff like that. I'm on coaching calls literally eight hours a day. One-on-one, group calls, everything. So, so dude right now with, with, um, with, uh, the, the property owners that are sitting on like this three and four percent, like they don't have to sell. They don't want to sell. They can't sell. They're not going to buy into a six and a half percent rate and stuff. You got to be real intentional. You got to, you got to talk with real purpose and, and urgency right now. Right. You've got to be calling with situations. The days of circle prospecting, what can I do for you? You know, get their email thing is really dead right this second. You've got to call with situations happening. So like, for example, man, I could give you a lot of different situations, but, but like you're, are you working with a buyer that you can't find something for honey? Are you actively looking for off market properties for them? Not as active as I should be bingo. See right there. We're not squeezing that for every little drop that we can like, dude, you could take a buyer that's not even serious and turn it into like four listings tomorrow. Right. But you're looking on MLS to see if something pops up. You're doing half the job. Like the, the buyer, you have the buyer. Now you're waiting on another agent to list the property or you get the listing. You wait on another agent to find the buyer. Fuck that. If you have the buyer, go find the seller today. Dude, there's thousands of properties that fit that buyer's criteria. Right. In my mind, I'm like, am I a real estate agent? Like give me contact information to people that own the property this person wants so I can try to put a deal together here today. You know what I'm saying? Like it's situations, you know, like, okay, we got 500 houses that fit that criteria. Boom. Handwritten letter to all of them. Followed by a phone call, followed by door knocking, like just hit them. Right. So that, that's one thing. Um, but to answer your question, like expires are really good. I like like two week to two year old expires. That's been gold. I like the new ones too, but like, I don't like six month a year, whatever three month old, like they're gold. Um, I'm not big on for sale by owners, but they're converting right now. I'm not a fan because you have to really babysit them, but I don't, I don't really like them, but they're converting and absentee owners. Right. So like you got a buyer, like find the criteria, filter out the absentee owners of their criteria, people that don't live in the house you're calling about. Right. And like that, like just carving out situations and calling with purpose behind the call a real reason of a possible deal happening. That's the way you have to be right now. No, it makes perfect sense. And just to be a little bit more specific, is there kind of like a, like a 90 day cadence that you're suggesting? I like the handwritten letters followed by the phone call. Are you putting them into some sort of system that's targeting them or? Weekly email. Okay. Weekly email every Wednesday, same day of the week forever. No matter what do, when you do it like that and you give your opinions on stuff, you're not letting some dipshit write it for you. That's what most of you are doing. You got some companies sending generic information. It's crushing your brand because they're not getting any Tony in that email. You know, like, did you show property in the last week? Yeah. How many buyers? How many different buyers? Um, well, representing the listings, but to as many buyers as I could find. I'm trying to go direct to buyers often as I can. Whether your listings. Yeah. How many showings on your listings? Total. Well, one of them is new as of today. So none, none yet, but hopefully a few before the end of the week. Did you show any property in the last week? No. Okay. That was the first question I asked. Sorry about that. So you just got a new listing though. Yeah. Okay. Bingo. In your weekly email, I just listed this property. Here's a story behind it. Two sentences. Right. I've already gotten a showing on it. Like that kind of the market that like our market insights, we take it for granted. Even if you're a brand new agent, right, and you show property three buyers after the last over the last week, and they didn't even buy anything. The fact that you wrote in there, like, you know, hey, it's going good. Um, you know, I'm weak, you know, I'm weak, like 30 in the business. And I showed three buyers in the last week. They're looking for this particular house. Like those little stories, people really appreciate that because it's inside information. They can't get on Zillow. And it's coming from you. And now they're following your storyline. You know, and your opinions on stuff. And then as you develop as an agent, these stories become much more, um, like high level in terms of like market, you know, opinions and stuff. Right. And they just like they've been, they've been getting your email for like two years now and they've seen you develop as a person and as an agent, you're self-promoting deals that you close, you're self-promoting listings that you've got, nice restaurants, new restaurants, articles, deals of the week, stats, you're keeping them up and informed and giving them your opinions on stuff. You see people, people know when you spend time on the email. People know when you don't spend time on it. When they know you don't, number one, they're going to quit opening it and they think you're lazy. Even though you're probably busting your ass, that's why you can't write it yourself. But they're going to get the impression that you're lazy. Dude, spend the time and do a weekly email on the same day of the week every week. Dude, 90% organic reach. Social media has like 5-10% organic reach. Do social media but sprinkle it on top of the foundation which should be the email, right? And then that's it, dude. It does all the heavy lifting for you. Dude, you show buyers, they ghost you. Four years later, they call you and you have them in your phone as a buyer that goes to me and you answer and you're like, hey, and they're like, hey, remember me? You're thinking, yeah, I remember you. And they're like, hey, I've been getting your emails. I see this house. I want to go buy it. You know how many buyers that ghosted me came back and bought stuff from me five years later because of the email? It's the glue, man. It's the safety net on the back of your business. It gives you a really good possibility of doing a deal with this person because they feel like you, they know you through this thing. So when you say to have a system that I put them in to like make sure like, what's my thing? That's it, man. And that way, guess what? Super simple, super scalable, same email to everyone. I don't have all this stuff happening. No crazy like CRM, weird, you know, time consuming activities. It's just 30 minutes a week. Bam. It doesn't matter if there's 500 or 5,000 or 100,000. It still takes me 15, 20 minutes a week and people know how I feel about stuff and they appreciate my information. That's how you stand out, man. Spend a little bit of time on that kind of stuff. You got to know where to spend your time and where to delegate, right? And people are delegating the wrong stuff when it comes to like their brand. And like, I mean, hired a company to post the most generic stuff on social. I mean, come on, gets two likes and like nobody cares. I mean, it's something, I guess is better than nothing, but I don't know if it does more hurt or good. Go ahead, Christopher. I just want to say thank you and jumping on this call with us. I just wanted to know how if, if you are, how are you leveraging AI, if any? I don't. So I, if you will notice a pattern with me, I'm late to everything. I was late to hire an assistant. I was late on social. I was late to charge for coaching. I was late to everything. I'm going to be late to AI. But guess what? When I get there, I'm going to crush it. Right? But I mean, like you tell me something I need to do, need to use AI for. I'm not sure. Maybe help create content ideas or I'm not really sure. That's why I asked. Yeah. And some people may want a little help with that, right? You use AI to kind of give you a push in the right direction and then you kind of take that as a rough draft and, and kind of turn it into your own thing. You know what I mean? I personally haven't had any problems coming up with content ideas. You know what I mean? Some people may have more of a roadblock and they need a little help moving in the right direction. Great. You know what I'm saying? I write this stuff. Every email you guys see that I do, I wrote it right then right before I sent it. Every text message, my text platform goes out to 7,000 people. I write it. I respond to everything. Every DM that I answer when you guys DM me, it's me answering every post you see on Instagram. I wrote the copy right before I posted it out of my own brain. It pops, man, like people want you. You know what I'm saying? Now my assistant, I think uses it to write real estate descriptions, stuff like that. You know, that's fine. Nobody reads those things anyway. They're looking through the pictures and looking at the price. That's it. You know, so it definitely has its uses. AI is getting better and better. What's real fascinating about AI for me is the communication, the AI phone call thing. I think it'll get outlawed before people really go mainstream with it because of the do not call list stuff. The text messaging, the SMS texting that AI is doing, I think is incredible and the stuff that you can do, do there. So again, love it. Not fully there yet. I'll be late to the party and when I get there, I'll crush it. Well, so question more to help the team and myself. I'm a big circle prospector. It's how I built my business, grow the team, et cetera, et cetera. One issue that I'm coming up on more and more, and especially over the past year or two, is getting directly to the property owner. You know, Mojo back in the day, 2017, 2018, 2019, you hit the list. You're at a 15, 20% contact rate just like that, right? Easy, simple numbers are going through the roof. What are you doing? What do you think about? Like, how can you get to that consumer, the property owner at a similar clip to get their info to then do all the cadences that, you know, you were just speaking about. We're still getting a 10% pickup rate. Where are you getting the numbers from Red X? Yeah. Okay. And are those in metro areas? I haven't had any agents to have any problems. Okay. I mean, New York, where are you guys? Chicago and Jersey, New York. So, yeah, I've had some people like Manhattan have some problems with it, but outside of that, I haven't had anybody have any problems with it. Yeah. These bigger cities definitely at least tougher with all these call blocking and stuff like that. And I think that just more dial up a little bit further. Another reason why, like the whole coaching program now has been focused around handwritten letters. Handwrite the envelope, handwrite the letter. One question, would you consider selling to a prospect of mine? And we're crushing it. And we followed that up with phone calls. So the handwritten letter, do 200 a week, 800 a month, we follow up with phone calls. So we'll do 201 week, call in the next week, do 200 more, call in the next week, do 200 more that week, call in the next week. And like, I've got agents get picking up like 20 listings a month. It's been working really well. So, you guys can, we do a listing challenge every month, every, you know, we do December, we do January, we do February, we do it as a group. We do a call every Monday. I'm running all the calls and y'all, you can find that at zero to diamond.com. You guys can join the new platform and get on those calls if you want. Well, I'll get an email out to everybody with that, with that link. Yeah. Sweet. Thank you. Got a couple minutes. Anyone else got a question? New, I'll ask one. Ricky, you're a new agent. You're going after listings. What are you doing? Um, never sold a deal in your life. Who asked it? I asked it for the team. Um, well, you know, there's a lot to it. Um, there's no cookie cutter. So it's like, how old are you? What was your previous job? Are you 18? Are you 50? Um, you know, what's your database? Did you use to own a restaurant? Um, or your hair, did you own, or your hairstylist? Do you, you know, like, you may have contacts already, if you're 18 year old kid, you know, like there's different stuff. Um, what market are you in? There's so many variables, right? That I would have to break down all the way. You want more of a generic answer. So like I've been doing this, the coaching thing for seven years now. And literally what we found works the best is handwritten letter followed by a phone call. It's just crushing it. And like anybody can do it. It's so easy. The handwritten this makes them open it. The question is very urgent, you know, oriented and, uh, it makes the phone ring a and then B it's easier to call those people because it's like, hi, I'm Ricky. I wrote you the letter. How are you doing? I just want to know if you got it, what you think it's, it's not a cold call at that point. Right. And so it's kind of like nicks the whole cold call thing got it out of there, gave people an option to get listings without cold calling. If they just want to send the letters and pick up, you know, a couple, but when you follow with phone call, if the agents that take it the next step to make the phone calls, they are rushing it. Right. And again, it's not a cold call anymore. It's, it's a warm call. It's a follow up call. Um, so yeah, I would, I would crush that if I were a new agent. Um, and then, you know, I'm making 200 calls a week there and sending out 200 letters if I can afford that but expires. I'm just like all in with, Hey, I see you were trying to sell this house, whatever happened with that? Let them tell me the story. I mean, what they got going on. You know what I mean? That's a whole like all these little conversations, these subset conversations that I'm like mentioning, um, are so deep. Like if we got into like actually talking to a prospect or, you know, certain situations, um, you know, let me just dive into it for a second. Like, let's just have a hypothetical situation. If, if you got a seller that says, I want to sell in June or I want to buy in June, right? And you're like, why? Well, they're going to sell. Okay. Um, a lot of agents are kind of like, okay, I'll call you in May or I'll call you in April or whatever. Right? That's average agent stuff. What a professional does is like, why are you selling? You know, you know, you're going to buy in June because you're selling. Why are you selling? Okay. If you're selling and then buying or you want to close on your new property in June, if you want to close your new property in June, that means we got to start the process to sell your place, you know, like three months before that, you know, which that puts it at, you know, March, um, maybe even February, like it's right around the corner. So like understand in like, and then go and just continue. Okay. So they want to sell because they, uh, you know, their kid's going to graduate college. Okay. What college? Like dig deeper there. Then say, why do you want to move here? Do you have friends over there? Like you keep digging and digging and digging and digging into their like personal life and like why they're actually making these decisions and having meaningful conversations. That's when you start to really stand out. And they're talking like three or four agents and you're the one that's like really trying to talk to them about their life, what they're trying to do, why they're trying to do it. You've got way more of an opportunity to be their agent than these other guys that are just saying, okay, I'll call you back in April. Just keep digging away. When people say, I might do this at this point, say, cool, what's got you thinking about selling in April? You know, when they tell you why I say, okay, well, why that they tell you something else say, oh, why that? And you just keep on going as deep as you can. A lot of agents are scared to dig. They're just playing on the surface and then you just look like the rest of the agents just trying to get a listing versus actually caring about them like their family. Samuel. Yes. Thank you, Ricky for being on. I just had a question regarding the handwritten letters. Who are you sending those to? And could you just owns a property that I have a buyer for? Okay. You got a buyer right now? Yes. Pick all the homes that fit their criteria and send them a handwritten letter. Would you consider selling your house that property address to a prospect of mine? Sincerely sign your name, put a business card in there, handwrite the address, the return address, the whole nine yards. They got to feel like this was specifically for them. When they call you, make sure that they feel like you specifically have a buyer for their house. You're not, you don't work with a bunch of buyers. The market's on fire. You know, our company has a bunch of buyers. No, they're going to think you're on a fishing expedition. You have a buyer for their house. Do they really want to sell? Right? You do great. When can I come take a look? Well, go ahead and bring your buyer or make an offer. No, I can't do that until I see the property and have a price and commission agreed on with you before I can even tell my buyer about it. Otherwise, I'll know what we're doing. When can I come take a look? Never present a property until you have a price and a commission agreed on. Okay. So they're all centered around a buyer. Your buyer that you actually have, not a buyer, not an imaginary buyer. Right. Your buyer. You can, you're not squeezing your buyers for every last drop that you could actually expand into the market with. You guys are sitting around waiting on other people to list the properties your buyers are going to buy. Why? Create your own market. Like you've got your own demand. Go put the work in. Like create your own market. Find the buyers and the sellers. Our job is to connect buyers and sellers. We're doing half the job. You got a buyer. You wait on another agent to bring the seller. You got a seller. You wait on another agent to bring the buyer. Why? Especially in this market, there's no inventory. And if they do away with buyer agent commissions, this is really going to be the case. Hey, Ricky. Uh, I guess my question is cause you keep, you were talking about digging, digging, digging, getting personal. That's worked for me a lot, but it's also turned people off. Like to the point where, you know, I'll call. Hey, you know, how's Timmy? How's, how's he doing at you? I didn't say to call them and ask them how their family is. I'm talking about on the initial call. Okay. I'm not calling checking on people and seeing how their dogs are. I'll never do that. So give me a scenario. So for instance, I have a client who basically said, you know, my kids go into U of I, he graduates in three years. I'm going to sell my house. It's a $1.5 million house in my neighborhood. I want to keep at it, right? So I'll call him once a quarter just to remind him that I'm there. And I think the last call, he was like, Hey, man, I know what you're doing. Like when I, when it becomes, when it comes time to sell the house, I'll think about you. Basically. Yeah. So why I say do a weekly email. I mean, I sent him an email. He doesn't open. Yeah. Okay. Doesn't matter. He sees it in his inbox. Doesn't matter if he opens or not. He's not ready to do anything, bro. Yeah. He's not ready to do anything. When he becomes ready, if he appreciated you, if you gave a great first impression, if you're consistent with the emails, when he gets ready, he'll start opening them and then he'll call you. What you need to do is forget about him and continue on to people who might do stuff now. And when you run into people who aren't going to do stuff now, you put them in your weekly email and guess what? Forget about them. Keep going and find people that want to do stuff now, run into people that want to do stuff now, do deals now, find a lot of people that want to do deals later, put them in their weekly email and forget about them. And you keep stacking and stacking and stacking all these people that you get great first impressions to. The thing is, bro, when they meet you for the first time, they decide right then and there if you're the type of person that they would do business with or not, not because you called them every week and checked on their kids. That annoys people. They, they're like, damn, I, when I met him, I was like, wow, I got a good feeling. And then I get an email every single Wednesday forever and he never bothered me. He just provided great value. And look, if that model doesn't win them over, that's okay. No model will, but I guarantee you win more people over than calling them every week, month, quarter. People are busy, man. They got time to talk to you, especially since he ain't even ready to buy or sell real estate and you're calling shoot the shit with him like really wasting his time. You know what I'm saying? Dude, the reason why Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, all these companies were so successful and are and are will continue to be dominant is because of one thing. They save people time. You got to think about that in your business, man. How do you save people time, but give them the most value per time that they spent with you, whether it's a conversation, whether it's an email, whether it's a piece of content. How do you compress the time that they actually spend with you, but maximize the amount of value? That's what you have to think about and there's no system that's going to win everyone over. Right? So you kind of have to be, you have to be okay with the ones that fall through the crack, the cracks, right? It's okay to lose some deals for the sake of volume and for the sake of people who appreciate you because plenty of people will appreciate you, but you can't bug the shit out of them. Hey, first off, thank you for your time. Thank you to the EXP team for inviting me to jump on the call. I'm kind of just flying the wall, but I hope this question is useful for everybody. So when you're talking about adding value for these people, I've heard people before they talk about segmenting out their newsletter campaigns, right? This is a buyer campaign and investor campaign. Can't scale it. You can't. It's just one message universally every week, every Wednesday. Everybody gets it. Screw them if they don't want it. That's how it goes. Why would they not want it? It's the most incredible information period. That's the way to approach it. Fair enough. That was really the extent of it is how are you scaling if you're diversifying, but you're not. It's just one. Here's the thing. If you cater your emails to people who might unsubscribe or not find value in them, then you're not catering to the people who love the emails. Right. Right. For example, if you don't send the email because you're worried about people unsubscribing, you're literally doing that and you're doing what's best for the people that don't even want to do business with you and you're not even staying in touch with the people who will do business with you who want the emails, right? Later to the people that want your stuff, man. Number one, number two, segmenting it out and doing like 15 emails or five emails or even three emails. You just can't get yourself. You can't scale, man. Like number one, you can't even keep up with the different people that where what group they go in. Some people are going to be in two groups, right? Some people are buyers and sellers. Some people are over here, over there, like you can't even keep up with all that. Dude, simple, scalable to the moon. If it's not simple and scalable where you could literally have a million people and and and still take you the same amount of time, then you, you can't like if it's not scalable, you can't scale and I would imagine everybody wants to scale. You know, you want to get to a million a year. You want to get to two million a year. You can do that in today's market. You can get to two million bucks a year as a single agent. That can happen. But you have to have these very simple, scalable processes in place. It almost brings me to the point of. The, the amount of people who, you know, do social media really hardcore and they get all these buyers. It's like people that run their business on YouTube. No, you guys tell me like 95% of their business is buyers. Why would I want to do that? Right? I literally have a choice. I can work with sellers or I can work with buyers, you know, with listings. I'm leveraging every agent in my market with a buyer. I'm the only agent. I have to go and do all the work. You know, it's just little efficient ideas that you build your business around. And Fresca, like drink a lot of Fresca, right? Every time I take a sip, I get a new listing. I just got a two for like an angel goes wings and I got a listing. All right. What else we got? Well says questions. Definitely speak up. What's going on in your business? Dan, I'm putting you on the spot. Yeah. Under it. How I'm a new agent and I'm still I haven't had any deals yet or anything, but I feel like I'm not confident coming across like I know what I'm doing, but I feel like I hesitate that myself. What can I do to kind of get past that? Well, all you can do is put yourself in more situations where you have to break out of that, right? And grow personally, right? But what are you scared of? Myself, I guess, when you ask it like shadow, like you're scared. No, I think the unknown, like making a mistake with the unknown. It's totally number one. It's totally common. And like you shouldn't feel like you're the only one that, you know, feels this way or that this is weird or that you're you may not be cut out for that. This is how everyone feels. Number one. It's also the modern day boogie. It's also the adult version of the boogie man. It doesn't exist. Everything you're scared of doesn't exist. Your shadow is not there. Nobody's going to hurt you or get mad at you. You're not going to make any mistakes. It's not going to happen. And number three, you should you should hide behind the confidence in yourself that you're there to help people. Right? Who cares about what you do and don't know? All you need to know is that you're here to help. You don't have to know anything to help people. Right? It's just like, Hey, I'm a real estate agent. What can I do to help you? Oh, you want to do this thing? Well, let me check on that. I mean, you might have to do a let me check on that and get back to you kind of thing in the beginning, maybe, right? But if you're running to something you don't know, you just go to your broker, go to your team leader, go to wherever and get the answer and come back to them really fast. And they're going to appreciate that. You're going to be like, Wow, he didn't know, but he went and did this and got back to me in two seconds. You know, they're going to be like, Okay, this could be, this could be a relationship that I could get into and work with this person. I like the way he moves. Some people aren't going to like the fact that you didn't know the answer right then. Who cares about them? You know what I'm saying? Listen, the top producers, this is stages. Okay. Like, for example, cold call cold call. The first stage is you're scared. You don't call. The next stage is you made the call. You didn't die. The next stage is, Okay, I kind of like this. It's not as bad as I thought, but what do I say? The next stage is, Okay, I know what to say, but how do I say it? Then the next stage is reading people on the phone, but the top producers, they bust through those stages. They don't get stuck in any of the stages. They just go pop up all the way. Same thing here. The confidence thing that could stop people in their tracks. Okay. This is a stage. Everybody gets to this stage where you're at, where they feel scared. The question is, are you going to stop? Are you going to be a future top producer? Just pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, right through the stages. Right. Don't even think, man. Just put yourself in weird situations where you're in front of people, where you're forced to deal with these anxiety issues and you're going to find, man, that it's really fun and that these people love you. You're going to have people that don't like you and stuff. That's part of the game. Who cares? You know what I'm saying? Like they're mad at you because you're working hard. Shit. Okay. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. I think that's a great. I used to love it when people got mad at me for like cold calling and sub divisions. They thought that they owned or something. Um, people, when people get mad at me, I'm just like, all right, you mad at me for out for being out here hustling and working and trying to succeed. Who gets mad at somebody for trying to succeed at the highest levels? Haters. Go ahead, Marine. Hey, thanks for having me on the call. Um, so I'm about nine months in as like a newer agent and I was just wondering nine months pregnant. I was like, but I'm just wondering like what ratio you would recommend for, um, working on the business versus working in the business because nine months in I've done three sales slash deals at 39. And if you count rentals, I've done 39 deals in nine months and I could not have done that had I not spent the first month setting up my softwares, my resources, my branding, all of that before doing any deals. Um, and as far as like knowledge, confidence reaching out to people like that's all fine, but I don't want to reach out and start doing external marketing before I'm ready to handle the business coming in. So I guess like what ratio would you recommend for someone in my position? Well, it's different for everybody and everybody has different like, uh, tolerance levels. I refer to it as your cup. Um, everybody has a different size cup. Your cup represents how much you can handle. So like when I was running at full capacity, um, a real comfortable place for me was 20 to 30 active listings and 10 to 10 to 20 pending deals at all times. I kind of lived right there that I got up to a point where I had 39 pending deals at one time, which was getting base basically to my breaking point, but consistently I was between 10 and 20 pendings and, uh, and 20 to 30 actives and like, uh, I could have pushed, you know to, to take that up a notch. I could have pushed higher. Um, but I was comfortable right there. I mean, I was making a million a year. I was a single agent. I'm doing, I'm closing to a week. Uh, me and my assistant are just like handling it like it's nothing to it. Um, and that was kind of my cup. Some people have like, like two pending deals and four listings and their week is shot. Like I don't even know what people do for 40 hours. Like it literally takes me like, took me like 30 minutes to an hour a day to just go through all my deals and see what need, what fires you need to be put out so that could go chase more business for the other seven hours. Um, so I don't know. It's different for everybody. I can't really answer that for you. I don't know enough about your business and stuff, but I will say that you own your own business, right? We're an entrepreneurial situation and everybody's different in that capacity. And all I can really say is that you're always going to have a, um, a level of uncertainty about what you're talking about. But you just got to go with your gut. You know, like you said you don't know if you're ready to take on more business. You're moving at a nice pace right now. You did a lot of upfront work in the business in the beginning. You're kind of riding this phase out. You'll know when it's time to kind of take it to the next level, you know what I mean? You just got to, for me, there's this book called Blink that I think is really good by Malcolm Gladwell. And it's about making really quick decisions based on your intuition. Um, and what they found was there was a lot of decisions that were made really quickly by people. Um, whereas those, those same scenarios, there were also like scholars and different like scientists and different things who literally looked at all the data for like months and months and months and came up with basically the same, the same conclusion that the person that literally went with their gut came up with, right? And that gut intuition, I think is something that we should all tap into a little bit because people that sit on decisions and take a long time to make decisions, um, they can, they can, they can hold theirself back big time. Um, so to answer your question, I don't know, but it sounds like you're crushing it. I think I would transition out of rentals and focus more on sales at this point. Like you did the rental thing, you know, you, you got a bunch of business and hopefully some of those people turn into buyers, but I don't know much about your business, but I would say go all in on property owners, man. They're the best buyers, the highest quality prospects. Um, they normally sell and then buy something immediately. It sounds like you have all the tools. Um, it might be time to level up and maybe do some marketing and stuff and focus on property owners. Thank you. Yeah, I've got one. Um, I want to talk about sphere. I'd say for the agents on the team, most biggest hesitation for people to reach out at those that they know, right? They don't want to fuck up that relationship, whatever it may be. Do you know what you're looking like? I agree. That's my point. Well, I mean like anybody like, how would you mess that up? Or what are you guys scared of in that capacity? I think it's more of a fear of rejection, but from those that know you and those that you like. Okay. Well, well, number one, what you have to realize is that what you guys think is fear or what you guys think the definition of what you guys think the definition of rejection and objections are, um, is wrong. It's actually rejections and objections are actually your prospect telling you what they want to do. It's not rejection. Right. They hang up on you. That's them saying, Hey, I don't want to do business with you. They're actually not being mean. I don't have time to talk to you. Right. If, uh, you know, like, give me another objection. Right. Give me, give me like an objection, guys. Like, what's an objection you guys are running into? We're like a rejection situation. What's up? It's all right now. I'm at three and a half. Not getting rid of my rate. Awesome. Do you have an agent you're going to work with when rates get better and you decide to do something. Yeah. I've got someone I've worked with when I bought the place. They know them. ABC. I know ABC. They're a great agent. Sounds like you're going to have listen. I still love to stay in touch with you. Is that okay? Sure. Cool. What's a good email? Well, I'm taking it to the same place every time guys. Right. Um, but what I'm saying is is when they say, I don't want to sell right now. I'm on 3%. Awesome. They're telling me what they want to do. Not nothing right now. Great. That's what I'm going to go with. They're telling me what they want to do. I'm not trying to turn it into a deal. I'm trying to turn it into a lifelong relationship. I'm trying to treat them like family. If your mom said that, what would you say? That's what you need to think about. If your mom said, uh, son, I'm sitting on 3%. I don't think I'm going to write it out for a minute and see what happens. What would you say? You say awesome. Let me know if you need something. I'm here. That's what you say to your mom. So why are we treating prospects differently, man? You should trip for me. This is just my, my, this is just me. I want to treat everyone like they're my family. And that's what my business blew up. Honestly, when I started treating prospects like family instead of deals. Cool. Anyone else? Anybody else got questions? As far as the sphere thing goes. Yeah. It's like, they're your friends. These are people you know. What's the problem? Like call them up. Tony, how you doing? How's it been? What are you up to? How's the fam? That's it. See how they're doing. Cool. Well, I got in real estate. Did you hear about that? They're going to be like, oh man, congrats. Cool. You need something? No. Great. I'll send an email to you every week. You need something. Let me know. Peace. All right, man. It's a, it's so easy. The problem is the only thing between you guys and millions of dollars are thousands of one-on-one conversations with people in your market that you aren't willing to have. You do everything you can do not to have a conversation. You do everything you do to sidestep having conversations and it's the one thing that's between you and everything you want. You spend thousands and thousands of dollars to try to not make calls to turn right around and call the leads you spent thousands of dollars on. It's the most absurd thing I've ever heard. Just make calls. Doorknock. Send letters. Have fun. Help people. Build a business. Simple. Simple. All right, guys. Sweet. Thank you, man. Much love you guys. Have a great Christmas. Thank you. And let me know what I could do to help. And I'll go to zero to diamond dot com guys and join the new platform and join those Monday calls. Awesome. I'll fire that out to everybody. Ricky. I'll get this recording. Thanks guys.