 When you hear me say that, I make it sound so simple. So easy. But it wasn't easy because nobody wants to think about or talk about the fact that I made it, I lost it, I worked roofed houses, worked on an oil rig, read 100 books. From 2008 to 2014, that was six really tough years. And literally at this point, just sharing everything that I've learned over the last 20 years, in hopes that I can somehow reduce the failure rate in the real estate industry. 90% of agents fail. So, and what I do is really unique. Most coaches and trainers, I'm sure you guys would agree, are just teaching regurgitated strategies and scripts from the 1980s, 1990s. You know, and you know, the new age of social media, you know, I think these old school coaches have tried to figure out a way to use that and really the same philosophies, right? And it turns into this really weird, high pressure situation. Anyway, it puts you and your prospects in this really weird, awkward situation. And that's what I'm trying to help you guys avoid, right? And let you know that you can actually, there we go, you can actually use your specific personality and you can actually be yourself and actually build a much larger business short and long-term than you can when you go this different route, this mainstream route of the traditional way that coaches and trainers teach agents to build the real estate business. You know, which is more in the lines of this. You know, hey, Mr. Seller, you don't know me, I don't know you, but will you sell your house so I can make some money? That's what it sounds like, you know? Hey, I'm selling sale with whatever real estate how you doing today, you know, are you interested in selling your house kind of thing? You know, and it's so focused around what can the client do for the agent and what I wanna do is reverse it and put you guys in a position where we're trying to figure out what we as the agent can do for the prospect. Just complete 180 in the entire philosophy. We wanna figure out what we can do to help. We wanna connect with these prospects before we try to convert. Tens of thousands of agents are in my coaching program all around the world. Why do I have over 40,000 agents in my coaching program? Because I'm bringing value first. I'm bringing value first. How do I monetize my coaching program? I make money off books, speaking. You know, sponsorship deals. My personal brand, I'm building businesses on the back of the personal brand that I built through my free coaching business. Where I went wrong with this whole thing is exactly what I'm trying to prevent you guys from doing. And that is high pressure sales, only focused on the deal, trying to get deals done, trying to see how big of 2021 we can make. When in 2023, you're not gonna care what you did in 2021. You're only gonna care what you did in 2023. And your results in 2023 is only gonna be predicated on what you do in 2021, in terms of database growth. Database growth. That should be really your main concern. Your number one objective should be data. Number one, you should be a data collector. Number two, a real estate agent. Through your journey of collecting data and trying to create new friends in the market, you end up selling so much real estate, short and long-term, but we're focused on the wrong thing. We're focused on the flashy, I did this many transactions when in 2023 again, it's not gonna matter how many transactions you did in 21, right, we only care about 23, but 23 is gonna be dictated by what we do now. So we need to be working every day now thinking, this is gonna crush it in 2023, meanwhile closing so many deals in 2021, all by being yourself. Okay, that's not the objective for me. My objective is to really make a new friend. And if they happen to want to or need to buy or sell something today, great. If not, I wanna be their agent later when they decide. Now how can I bring them value between now and then? Say they're not going to decide to buy something for two and a half years. All right, two and a half years. How do I connect the dots between now and two and a half years from now? Very simple. And I ain't realized I was doing this, building a personal brand on the back of a weekly email, but that's what I was doing. In 2008, nine, 10, there were so many foreclosures in the market. And I heard so many times from so many clients that they wanted a weekly list of foreclosures. Weekly list, weekly list, weekly list. So I started sending this weekly list of foreclosures to that specific group. And then I was like, wait a minute, I'm just gonna send everyone, I'm sure everyone, all the property owners I'm meeting and everybody in my database would love to see the weekly list of foreclosures because there was like 44 closures at any given time for sale. For half the price that these properties were going for five years before that. And that since 2014 as a single agent, I've closed 100 deals every year since. This will be year number eight. I'm going for a dime piece. 2023 will be 10 years in a row, 100 deals as a single agent. When you hear me say that, I make it sound so simple, so easy. But it wasn't easy because nobody wants to think about or talk about the fact that I made it, I lost it, I worked, roofed houses, worked on an oil rig, read 100 books. From 2008 to 2014, that was six really tough years. I was a full-time real estate agent just trying to figure it out and grinding my face off. Nobody wants to even imagine, go back to that point and imagine what I was going through and what I was trying to build. But I listened to my clients, they wanted a weekly email, I gave them a weekly email and I kept building on it and then I realized, this is big, this is where I need to focus my entire business on and eventually I quit doing everything else. I quit doing direct mail, I quit doing postcards and whatever, every advertisement you can think of, I quit doing it. Social media included, they gave you their data and then take that data and build your personal brand around that. But you're the number one skill that you need. So that's the number one objective. The number one skill is making people feel comfortable with you. People are like getting listings, closing the deal, setting appointments, negotiating, all that stuff. But let me tell you something, ladies and gentlemen, you're not gonna get to any of that unless the person feels comfortable with you enough to do the deal or to move forward with you in a business type relationship. Your number one job is to make them feel comfortable. Everything else falls under that because without that, there's nothing. Well, what you have to understand is that if there's two avenues, okay? There's the avenue where you've built a huge personal brand in your market and people just come to you and list properties, which is where I am. I haven't made a cold call since 2017 and I still sell 100 properties every year. I have like 56 sold or pending so far this year. I have like 22 pending right this second. All I do is a weekly email. I already built my brand. People call me to do the deals. That's one avenue, okay? If you're not there yet, if you're not there yet, you're still beating the bushes. You're still trying to build your database. You're still trying to build your name, build your personal brand in the market. First thing you need to realize is I wanna be where he's at. I wanna be on the other side of this thing where I don't have to figure out how to get a listing. People are coming to me to list properties left and right. That's where I wanna be. So how do I get there, Ricky? See, that's the first thing. You need to visualize three to five years from now building a database to the size that people just call you to do deals. That's the first thing I want you to think about is long term. Now through building that database long term and just trying to create five new friends or property owners every day to build that 2023 mega business, you can't help but to close a lot of deals this year. And what we're doing as an industry is we're thinking, man, this is horrible. This is horrible. Look at how much work I have to do to get a listing. But what I'm thinking in my mind, the way I view that situation is, is listen, effort per listing all time high. Effort per relationship created in the market same as it's always been. Through making your calls and talking to all these sellers and trying to get listings and create friendships, you make 100 calls, you make five friends, let's just say. You make 100 calls, you talk to 10 people, you make five friends, okay? That number's not gonna change regardless of the markets up, down, sideways, left, right, interest rates, supply demand, inventory, doesn't matter. You make 100 calls, you talk to 10 people, you make five friends, generally speaking. So what I see is, okay, yeah, you're asking me about getting listings in 2021 and I'm saying, yeah, maybe you have to make 1,000 calls to get one listing, but you made 50 new friends that are gonna buy and sell with you once this thing flips in the next eight months. You ask them and they say, oh, how do I depict my agent? I had a friend in the business. I had a friend in the business. Think about that really hard. Now, we want more listings, okay? The most common answer is I had a friend in the business. So what does that tell us? We gotta make as many friends as possible in our market with property owners. We wanna be known as that friend. How do we become friends with property owners? We gotta talk to them. We gotta talk to property owners, you know? So to evaluate your business, I would have to ask you a series of questions to figure out what exactly you're doing. Are you talking to property owners? What is your strategy? What is your script? You know, what is your process? Once you create the relationship, are you actually just going after a deal and then saying, next, if they're not ready and not even collecting data? Or are you trying to salvage that and nurture that relationship for later? Once you do have that relationship, what are we doing to actually stay in touch and build our brand with that person from that day forward? Do we have a systematic way of doing that? The only book I've ever read twice is called The Slide Edge. And The Slide Edge is a lot like the compound effect. The Slide Edge is by Jeff Olson and it's a lot like the compound effect by Darren Hardy, but much more graphic, if you know what I mean, like, you know, literally like, you know, not pictures and stuff, but the way that he writes, you envision this. And it's literally, it's a game of compounding. It's a game of accumulation, okay? If you look at my 20 years, I did nothing special. I made 100,000 calls, talked to, you know, 10,000 people and made 5,000 friends over the course of 15 years. Did a weekly email, okay? Woke up every day, worked as hard as I can, tried to figure stuff out. None of that is like hard. Anybody can do that.