 I'm sure everyone here knows, you know, who you are and what you do. So I just want to kind of get right into it. Um, so I've compiled some questions that we've been getting. Um, pretty much the main one that we've been getting, the biggest one is, you know, what would you, what, what kind of advice would you have for a new agent with, you know, no sphere or they've exhausted their sphere to absolutely not care about anything to quit caring so much about stuff and only care about one thing working as hard as you can for the next 10 years. You know, we're so tied up in how many deals we're going to close this year and all that stuff, get a job that takes care of your bills. You don't have to worry about that and then just go crush it in real estate. Right. That's the, that's the general, um, macro answer. The micro answer is call property owners, uh, reach out to property owners on social media, doorknock, uh, for sale. Like, I don't know. The, this business is predicated on you talking to people you don't know in your community to help them buy and sell real estate. Right. So go talk to people in your community. I think the problem is we're over complicating. There's too many silver, the shiny pennies and, uh, coaches telling you this, that and the other, and it all comes back to the same thing. Every single lead gen activity is the same process. Data collection, communication, conversion and remarkets you forever. No matter where you get your leads or what your business model is, you got to get the leads, get the data, talk to them digitally or, or on the phone or in person, find out what it is you can do to help them convert if possible and stay in touch forever. Real simple stuff for new agents, they got in and you know, let's take the, the most, you know, recent, um, you know, uh, uh, things into account where people got in because of COVID and stuff like that. Let's just take that out of the, the equation. They get in and they come from a nine to five and they're kind of in that mindset that when you show up, you get paid. So they save at reserves. They quit their nine to five. They do real estate and they don't realize that you're not going to get paid over here. Um, you're running your own business now. You're not working for someone else. It's a lot harder and, um, that's where a lot of agents, uh, you know, they end up quitting because they get into financial trouble, you know, go ahead and realize this could take you six to 12 to 18 to 36 months to get going. All right. You may lose some money for a little while, you know, I don't know, but I'll tell you this, the winners, again, back to my original statement, don't care about any of that. They just go do and their, their commitment is a few decades, whether they make it in the first couple of years or not. I mean, I made a meal in the first three or four years and then lost everything, went bankrupt and left the business for two years sleeping in my car. I didn't care. I wasn't going to quit. And so I think there's a big thing going on in the industry right now where agents are, you know, the ones going back to their nine to five cause it was too, it's too tough. You know, some of those just weren't built to do real estate and that's fine. Leave the industry. Fine. But some of those agents have what it takes and to be great agents and they need encouragement right now. And I think a lot of agents are discouraging those agents saying, Oh, you just get out of the business. You need to leave the business anyway. You thought this was going to be easy money and stuff. We kind of need to be the opposite. Let's encourage people to stay in the business and to keep trying. If they have to go get a nine to five, that's great. They're doing what they need to do to pay their bills. But you know, if they can spend an hour a week on real estate for two years and break back into it. Awesome. I'm trying to build people up here in this time of need where we're fixing to have a lot of agents. We're having a lot of agents right now leaving the business. Um, you know, the industry needs some encouragement right now through this little moment. And so that's kind of what I'm focusing on right now with a lot of my content is just trying to pick these agents up and say, go get a job. I did it. Okay. Um, but who cares? You got into this to do it for 30 years. Let's go, you know, let's, it's, uh, it's a patience game. You got to work really hard and not really care about that short current short term successes or failures. If you sell a ton of properties in your first year, great kudos to you. I don't really care. I'm more interested in what you're doing to build your five year from now business, if that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, that's awesome. Um, Hey, good morning to everyone. By the way, Hey, it's Ricky. I hate to interrupt this podcast, but really quickly, I wanted to share with you a way that you can create content exactly like me. I'm posting so much content, so much quality content and that content is helping me build multi-million dollar businesses. If you're having trouble creating content, coming up with the ideas, filming, editing, all that stuff. I want to help you with every bit of it. All you have to do is go to wealthycreator.io backslash Ricky. So again, that's wealthycreator.io backslash Ricky to set a call up with my team today so that you can get started creating content exactly like me and turning those views into real clients. Now, back to the show. Um, you built a huge brand. Um, what, what would you, what kind of, what would you recommend to continue to build their brand and social media too and get to somewhere where you're at? No matter where you get your leads from, you got to talk to them, right? Unless you have an ISA or a VA or a team or you're part of a team that has an ISA that's making the calls for you, then it's on you. You got to make the calls, whether they're, it's, it's Facebook leads, it's Zillow, it's Google, it's cold calls, it's open house, spear of influence. You have to talk to them, ladies and gentlemen, therefore, you've got to treat phone calls as a job and actually structure it into your day where that is your job. So I don't care again where those leads come from. Got to talk to them. That should be done nine to 12 every day in my opinion. I'm just giving you my opinion. Nine to 12, you're on the phone. Just absolutely back to back to back on a dialer or just blowing through numbers in the afternoon, do all your social media, your video, your SEO, your handwritten letters, your, all your marketing stuff, appointments, listing appointments, showing property. That's just going to be random appointments whenever that gets set. Go do, go, go get those deals done. Um, but in the morning you're making calls. Your goal should be at least five new friends in the market per day. The, the big, the, the number one reason people choose an agent is because they had a friend in the business with a great reputation. If you make it a goal to create five new friends in the market every single day for the next five years, 250 working days a year, that's 6,000 people that you've made friends with that own property in the market. Or maybe they don't own property, but you should focus on property owners. Um, you got 6,000 friends there. Hopefully you're doing a weekly email on the same day of the week that you customize to bring them value and let them get to know who you are as well as how knowledgeable and professional and consistent, hardworking, dependable you are that has kind of helped you build that brand with those property owners and scale your name, uh, with very little effort. Scalability and efficiency is the, is the number one thing. So when you're at the bottom, you don't realize, you know, you're trying to figure out what to do. It's going to take you years and even decades to really map out the most efficient activities that you can do, or you can get the most done in the least amount of time. I mean, and as you build this database and you've had these one-on-one conversations and you've built that brand, you're asking how to build brand. I'm telling you how to build brand. You make great first impressions with people, voice to voice, in person, communicating via social media, whatever it is, and you, you collect their data, you get a weekly email going on top of your social media and your phone calls, and it's to the moon. It's, it's so simple. I, my dad was telling me, or he, he came and spoke at one of my workshops and he said that, um, he was telling the, the people at the workshop that he says, you know, I, I listen to, I used to not listen to Ricky. He's my son. Now I listen to Ricky and he said, he said, what he tells you is the truth and what he, what he says sounds so simple and you just think, no, it couldn't be that there's no way it's that simple. I'm here to tell you guys, it's really this simple. And every time I take a sip of fresco, every single time I take a sip of fresco, I get a new listing. So. Ching, Ching. Ching, Ching. Yeah, it's very, a lot of, come on, Fred, Smith, come on. Next key real estate. Let's see some smiles on this, on this call. Let's get excited here. You guys are playing poker with me. I'm not going to the casino with you guys. What would you say that the high value prospecting methods would be? And what would you maybe recommend? I don't know because it's different for everyone. What you need to do is write down the top 20 legion activities and say, there's your hit list. Find the two that work best for you. I can't tell you what's work. We're going to work best for this agent or that agent. They got to figure that out on their own, but there's only a 20. I mean, if you guys can come up with 20 more than 20 legion activities, then let me know what they are. Because after 20, you just kind of start renaming the same 20 and just a different variation of the same 20. It's, there's not many to choose from. You got circle prospecting, expire for sell by owners, door knocking, open houses, you know, social media, all the different social media is all the online stuff and Zillow and Obsidian, realtor.com. You got handwritten letters, direct mail. I mean, we're starting to scrape bottom. And there's not too many of them out there guys. And here's the thing. You can't do all of them. So if you're still in that stage of your business where you don't know what your legion activities need to be, then that's your job right now to test out the legion activities that are there, which is only a handful and pick out the two that work best for you. How do we know which ones work best for us? Well, they have it that create a high frequency of conversations with property owners in the market. If it's social media, great. If you figured out a niche on TikTok or YouTube, awesome. If you just want to be like me and say, oh, I don't want to do all that. Um, I'll just call people. I'll just go ahead and collect their data for a penny and just call them instead the exact people on do business with. Um, I'm a very efficient guy. If I see something that's just a hack, a time hack, a production hack, then I'm going to do that. So when I see all the legion activities that can be done, I'll come back to the same exact funnel data collection, conversation, conversion and remarketing, then I'm like, well, I'll skip all the activities that most people spend a lot of money, time and energy on to get data. I'll just get the data for a penny and just go straight to the conversation today. That's me. So for me, it's, it's geo leads. It's circle prospecting and expireds. Oh no, we're calling people you don't know. Well that, that's the whole that you guys understand that this is what your business is predicated on. Okay. Talking to people you don't know to help them buy and sell real estate. That's the entire premise of this business. Um, and you have to think like, guys, we're in the service industry. A lot of you think that we're in sales. This is service. You're providing a service to the community and you need to thank yourself as a service oriented, almost volunteer worker doing community outreach, right? And by you not reaching out to people in your community to see what you can do to help them. They need your help right this second. They need your help. Closings are happening every single day in your market, but you know, you're, you're not, you're not reaching out to people to see if you can help them using their services. You're doing the, you're doing the entire community at this service here. I love that. Ching Ching. Ching Ching. How do you deal with objections of like cold calling? Objections are just people telling you what they want to do. Yeah. What, what you guys say are objections or not objections. Like, give me an example. Um, you call somebody cold call them and they say, where'd you get my number from? Oh, that's not an objection. That's them asking a question. I found, I got it online. As I was saying, I'm calling to introduce myself. How are you doing? Nice to meet you. I'm Ricky. Right. I work for X reality. I'm in X area right here with you, right down the road from you. Right. Um, yeah, I don't want to take it too much of your time today, but house around the corner, sold or whatever you're calling about that. That's just a question. Well, what other objections you guys got? Uh, Rick, what happened if someone said, uh, listen, I've talked about six or seven of everybody calling me. So what you calling me? Oh, well, it's obvious why I'm calling you. I'm a real estate agent and you might have talked to six or seven people, but you hadn't talked to me yet. I'm actually, sir, or may I'm not here to sell, sell your property. I'm here just to get to know you for a second and see if there's something I can do to help you. It's all about giving value. I'm turning it right around. Mike, I'm turning it right around and I'm providing service. What can I do to help you? Not what you, the seller can do to help me. You want to, will you, you don't know me and I don't know you, but will you sell your house so I can make some money? That's what we sound like as an industry. What I'm saying is, is can we flip that around to, instead of what the prospect can do for us, what can we do for the prospect? Hey, I'm not here to sell your house today. I don't even, I don't care if you even want to sell, by the way, Mr. Seller, Mrs. Seller, I just want to see if there's an opportunity that I can just have a conversation, get to know you for a sec, let you know who I am, what I do and that I'm here to help. And I want to work with you later. I care what you want to do now. If you want to do something now, great, let me help you. If you don't have an agent, I'd love to help. But if you don't, great. I'd love to help you later when you decide to do something. It's a service. We're not selling. We're servicing. Let's do one more. Objection, what you guys got? Another one that I hear quite a bit is I'm interested in buying, but I'm scared of the rates. I heard they got crazy. Yeah, well wait, wait till rates get better. Sounds like a good idea. See, I can't see your name because they're Kyle. Sounds like a good idea, Mr. Byer, Mrs. Byer. Yeah, rates are a little crazy. There's a lot of uncertainty. You want to just, if you, if you, if you want to do something now, let me know, I'm here to help. If you want to wait, do something later, let me know. Here to help. Got it? Here's the punchline, Kyle. Look in your MLS. Closing's happening every single day by the truckloads. So if they don't want to do anything, that's fine. You know why? Cause there's a truckload, a busload, a semi, 18 will or load of people that are doing deals today. You can't get so fixated on one deal, one client. You can't get so emotionally attached to one deal, one prospect. You have to realize that it's okay if they don't buy or sell anything today. The, the, the objective is, is to create the relationship for an hour later. You know, if they've decided they're not going to buy right now, we don't need to try to talk them into it because we're going to lose them on the deal when they actually do a deal later. Cause it's going to be like Kyle tried to pressure me into doing something when I didn't want to. I like to understand. I'm not saying I'm going to ask questions. Okay. The rates are a little crazy. Why does that concern you? If you're going to buy a house to live in it for 10 years, you know, and, and you can refinance later, but there again, guys, I don't want to push that narrative either because here's the problem with the two to one buy downs and the, these temporary buy downs, I feel like it is artificially holding prices up a little bit higher than they should be because a buyer is saying, Oh, well, well, thank you, Mr. buy down. I'll, I like that payment. So I'm willing to pay this price. And later, possibly they don't, they aren't able to refinance. You, we don't know what prices are going to do. And so I feel like there's a little bit of artificial. I feel like prices are being held up just a little bit artificially because of that, especially a new construction because 75% of builders are providing the three to one buy downs and, you know, it seems like new construction prices have kind of somewhat found somewhat of a floor. I think it'll go down a little more, but now the difference in now in 2008 was to, to now you have to get approved for that end, that end interest rates. So say interest rates are six and a half and you get a two to one buy down. So now you're paying four and a half. You actually have to be approved for that six and a half. That's not like it was back in the day when I was, you know, gun slinging with the Wild Wild West, getting loans that I shouldn't have been able to get. You only had to get approved for the front end interest rate. Right. So we are on such solid ground in terms of the market right now. It's not even funny. This is, this is like, this is the greatest. That's one thing that is certain. See, there's a lot of uncertainty in the short term of like where interest rates are going to go in the short term, where interest rates are going to go, how prices are going to settle out, where, you know, where the floor is going to be. There's a lot of uncertainty there, but there's something that there's not uncertain. It's out of the fact that we're in an incredible place in terms of just the overall foundation of people that have mortgages, let's just say, in the country, right? Like for example, right now the average credit score of somebody who has a mortgage is 770 versus 670 back in the, you know, 2004, 567 reigns. It's a hundred point higher on average. There's a lot of other things in place. Third party appraisals, tons of different regulations that, my God, are we glad that they, that they put those in place now, that we see the market kind of, you know, doing what it's doing because it's like, it could be a lot rougher crash right now if we didn't have those regulations in place. So for those long term prospecting, what do you think the best way to maintain those relationships are? Weekly email. Weekly email. Like, I've been doing mine since 2007 every Wednesday. Boom, customize it, spend 15 minutes or so on it every week, send it out to 19,000 people, 8,000, open it up every week and I sell 100 properties a year with zero prospecting. That's awesome. One of the questions that we got a lot was how, how do you manage your personal life and business life? Stop working at five o'clock. And back in the day, I worked 15 hours a day. Um, and that was because I didn't have these tools like social media and red X. I literally had to look up phone numbers one at a time and I had to, um, I had to hand dial them, right? You, you don't do that today. You look a thousand numbers up in a split second of any property owner you want, and then you auto dial 100 numbers in like an hour. So even in today's world, I worked 15 hours a day to build my business back then, but in this new world, you can actually get done. What took me 15 hours and an hour and a half still have your whole day ahead of you, taking advantage of technology and communication in this new world. You can actually do like three or four Ricky days back in the day and still knock off at five o'clock every day and sometime with your family. Yeah, Ricky, yeah, sorry, go ahead, Mike. Okay. Yeah, that's great. How do you handle the, I mean, as a team leader and you have other agents want to reach you after hours, after that five p.m. that they have hot button issue going on. I got to talk to you. So how do you handle that? Just be a single agent. Get rid of the team. I wanted to go back. Yeah, that one took a turn, didn't it? Your face is red. Get rid of the team. Be a single agent. Have one agent or something. You know what I mean? Like, listen, you put yourself in that position where now you have these agents. See, I tried to do a team and I'm not, I don't want to be a CEO, right? Here's the thing, you can go out and make a million dollars as a single agent and keep all the money. Or if you want to scale it to three, four, five million, you have to build a team and your margin is going to be like 30% or something. Right? Right. So you have to make a decision here. You want to make a million dollars and keep it all and still grind my face off and knock off at five o'clock every day and not have agents calling me all hours of the night or don't want to make a million dollars being a CEO, basically working two jobs and have agents hitting me up all hours of the night. You're making the same amount of money. You're just working less doing as a single agent. Just open in your mind up your mic to other possibilities. That's all. Not telling you what to do. I have a question about the weekly mailers. That's exactly what I was going to ask. Yeah. Because we actually do use letters for our team. Hold on one second. Keep that fresh. Hold on one second here, guys. I think Gio here is hosting the thing. He's kind of the DJ. If you guys could actually just put your hand up and allow him to kind of bring you guys on. Y'all are interrupting each other and stuff. Yeah. We will have, like I said, we'll have open questions at the end. But the chat is blowing up here. What do you put in your weekly chat? Let me see. I didn't see that chat. Let's see this chat. Where's this chat? Oh, I see the chat. All right. Let me put a link here. All right. You want to see what I put in my weekly email? Let me help you guys out. I'll show you my last 14 weekly emails right here. And also you can get my email template and all the training tutorials and everything right there. Free training. Sweet. One of the things that's coming up a lot, everyone's using AI to leverage a lot. Is there any other trends or any new things that people should be leveraging maybe this year or looking forward to? Don't neglect these other platforms that have already been here for a while. Email, Instagram, Facebook, still super powerful. People are on these platforms all day every day. Email included. People are checking their email 15 times a day. They're checking Facebook 15 times a day. They're checking Instagram 15 times a day. So don't neglect these other platforms, right? But it comes back to what works best for you. And where do you feel like the best ROI is on your time based on your strengths and weaknesses? So it's different for everyone. But yeah. Perfect. What do you think the most important qualities of an agent are? To be very, very numb to failures and disappointments and frustrations. I think that's the biggest one. I think people take too much of offense when they're friends or family or client they spend a lot of time with uses another agent. Or they work really hard and do all this work and don't produce any sales or whatever the case may be. You've got to be very numb to all that and really kind of ignore it. It's like don't celebrate so hard on your big successes either, right? And don't be so bummed out about your losses. You've got to kind of be numb to both sides and kind of stay focused and look at the long term. I mean, if you are going to be this incredibly massively successful agent, you're going to do 1,000 plus deals in your career. Okay. One deal, one client is really not, you know, when you lose a deal, you learn so much too. Every time you get into a situation where you win or lose every single situation, you win because the losses you lose, you lose every single situation, you win because the losses you learn and the successes you learn. And each deal, you're getting more experience and kind of molding yourself into this great agent. I think the number one quality is being numb to not only your failures, but also your successes and just trying to stay focused on building this influence, guys. The name of the game is influence. How many people in your market know who you are that see your face very often frequently? What systems and infrastructure do you have in place to accomplish this with new people coming into your sphere and the current people continuing to know exactly who you are and that you are the best choice when it comes to buying and selling real estate? So that's influence. So at the end of the day, it's, you know, being very numb to both sides of the equation in terms of success and failure, but also keeping your eyes on the prize of that five-year database of five to six thousand people. And then flipping it just around. This is like, man, this is a heck of a call. This is just, this is fire. Not because of many. You guys, you guys are like just bringing all this out on me. I got a few more and then we'll open it up into questions here. I just wanted to flip it around to what do you think the common mistakes are and bad habits to avoid would be? Um, I don't know that there are any. I think the bad habits are continuing to do the same thing over and over again, you know, and not really adapting. You know, the four keys to success is to believe a hundred percent what you're doing, have a hundred percent confidence to work harder than everybody to adapt along the way and to be patient. So if somebody is, you know, not successful or as successful as they want to be, I can have a five or ten minute conversation with you and figure out which of these four you're missing because it comes down to these four. Believing, working hard, adapting and being patient. I had the first three forever. I was missing that patience part till about 2014-15 and then I had to learn that. Now I'm pretty good on all four of them, always trying to improve, not a hundred percent on all, well, yeah, that they're all a work in progress always, but normally they're all going on in those four areas for you. If in fact you, so coming back to your question, bad habits, you know, well, do you believe a hundred percent what you're doing? If not, that's a bad habit. Are you working hard? And a lot of reason why people don't work hard is because they don't want to commit to something they don't believe in. You know, they don't know if real estate is going to work so they don't want to commit all this time and energy and then think that they're wasting their time and energy in. So I'm just not going to really invest a lot of time and energy and work really hard because it might not work. Well, you're going to lose. You got to believe, you got to work hard a hundred percent and you have to adapt. You have to test, right? You have to go through that phase of testing to see what works best for you and then start to kind of implement the building blocks of your specific customized business. Like for me, making calls between 9 and 12 is my thing. That's not everybody's thing. A lot of people make calls from 1 to 3. A lot of people make calls after hours, like, you know, 3 to 6. You know, that's what they like to do. Great. So you have to figure out what works best for you and you have to do it as quickly as possible, right? That's some fire, guys. I hope you guys are listening. This is amazing stuff. How do you track? How do you set goals and track your goals? I don't pay attention too close to them. You know, I never know what I'm going to end up, what the results are going to be. I used to, like, my big goal was to make a million dollars a year. So, you know, once I hit that, I, you know, but it took me so long. It took me 17 years, I believe, getting in a real estate before I hit that. You know, but every year it was like, I'm just doing everything I could do to hit that goal. Like, I never had, like, 500 this year. It was always a million. It was a million, a million, a million, a million. And that's something that just didn't happen for so long. So, not a big goal, guys, because I don't really care about that. When I wake up January 1, here's the thing, guys. When I wake up January 1, I don't say, I'm going to go sell 100 properties this year. I wake up and say, I'm going to put forth as much effort as possible this year. And in December 31, if I go back and sold 50 properties, I'm happy with that because I know that that is the highest yield on the highest amount of effort I could put in, because I know I'm going to put in the most effort. Um, maybe it's 150 units. I don't know. I don't care because I'm just focusing on my day to day. What can I do to crush each step? The baby steps, right? The building blocks. So, my goal is more, you know, how can I really crush it day to day? I don't know. I think a little differently when it comes to that. Um, and now, like, you know, that was my pie in the sky big goal. You know, now it's like, I want to get to 500,000 a month. Something like that, you know, which will take another decade to get to or whatever, you know. So, I have more, like, long term goals, I guess. Then, what am I going to do this year? Because honestly, it doesn't matter what I do this year results wise. What matters is how much effort I'm putting in. Here you go. It's like, the way I think about it is, is like, most people think it on a year-to-year basis. I'm thinking about it on a five-year basis. Like, and that's kind of probably the wrong way to look at it because then, what's your day-to-day now? I don't know. No, it makes sense though. You set these long-term goals and you have daily goals, like, what do you do every day to accomplish? Every day my calendar's full, back to back to back, and I'm putting forth as much effort as I can in every single part, aspect of the day. Till five o'clock, and then it's family time. Thank you, everyone, for coming. Thank you again, Ricky, for coming on and sharing all this knowledge and value with us. Again, we do these masterminds every Friday at 8 a.m. Pacific Standard Time, 11 a.m. Eastern, same link. Please go follow Ricky at Ricky Caruth, his website, zero-to-diamond.com. Thank you so much for watching this podcast. I hope you got tons of value out of it. I'm going to put the next episode right here so you can continue watching and continue crushing. Keep selling and keep building, and we'll see you guys on the next video, which is right here.