 My goal is not to sell them a piece of property or have them sell their piece of property. My goal is to create a friendship with them and make them feel comfortable with me. Period. End of story. When I look at the industry right this second for just say a brand new agent getting into the business, I have to admit that it's probably a little tough. It's probably a little tough for a brand new agent with low inventory to squeeze out a listing so they're being forced to deal with mostly buyers right now which you guys know that story. They're competing against 15 other buyers and it's a really tough market for that. So they're really just kind of in a tough pickle because they're trying to get to their first sale. They're trying to build some momentum in the business and kind of get their career started. So it is tough in that respect. But if you look at it from the perspective of agents like myself who actually built an incredible brand locally and created some influence in their markets, the market's actually incredibly easy right now because you're the one that people are coming to that are buying and selling and you're getting listings pretty easily because all of your past clients, anyone who does want to sell, they really want to sell because the markets are up a lot. There's pockets in the market. There's pockets in the market of things that are on the easy side and things that are on the hard side. One thing that I'm noticing is that a lot of these agents who are representing buyers right now competing against 15 other buyers, they're in this tough market. They're representing mostly buyers, hardly any sellers, maybe even zero sellers. And they're saying, Ricky, how do I get my buyers' offers accepted in one breath? And then the next breath, they're saying, you know, I'm going to go work on, I'm going to take classes on how to work pre foreclosures and learn how to do short sales and things of that nature because that's got to be coming. Listen to what they're saying. And this could be a lot of you guys. I want you to hopefully this open up your eyes to a few things. Right now, those agents are on the harder side of the transaction, okay? They're on the side with the buyer competing against 15 buyers. And what they're telling me is that while they're doing this, they're also going to try to figure out how to do short sales, whereas if the market does turn towards a short sale environment, guess what? You're going to be competing against 15 agents to get those listings because now everybody's going to switch to those listings. When you look at the outside factors in terms of the market, supply to man interest rates, you know, what's happening with, you know, the stock market and all these outside factors, if the market's going to crash, so on and so forth, have absolutely nothing to do with your success. You really shouldn't need, I mean, there's a part of me that wants to say you shouldn't even watch media, you shouldn't even watch markets. I mean, we need to because we have to stay on top of it for our clients, but you've got to block it out of that part of your brain that allows those outside factors to affect your success because it doesn't have anything to do with your success. Remember what I said, closings happen every day, forever, and business is unlimited every single day for every single agent. I've got to drill this into your heads right now, right? Scalable means being able to, you know, grow your business exponentially, exponentially with very little effort. How do we grow exponentially with very little effort and maintain that on a consistent basis? These are all things I want to dive into. And I learned all this through the market crash, okay? And in 2008, I get back in the business, okay? I fault my way back to really a lot further than I was when I lost everything. By 2014, I was selling 100 properties a year. This will be year number eight in a row that I've sold 100 properties and I'm just a single agent with one assistant. I still show every property, go to every listing appointment, negotiate every deal. I do all the real estate agent stuff still. And my assistant handles all the back end stuff. And we have a really, she's been with me for eight years and this will be year number eight. So she literally came the first year that I sold 100 deals and we've just got a really good system in place. We know how each other work. Having a great assistant is a huge component to me being able to accomplish this. A great assistant will double your business overnight. A lot of people are scared to make that financial commitment but hit me like a ton of bricks one day. And this is something that you've really got to take to heart is that when I'm talking to a prospect, I absolutely do not care if they want to buy or sell something today or not. My goal is not to sell them a piece of property or have them sell their piece of property. My goal is to create a friendship with them and make them feel comfortable with me. Period. End of story. If you can't make someone feel comfortable with you, there's no chance at all for any business. There's not going to be a transaction. The number one goal for you as a real estate agent, one goal is to talk to the most people but an even a secondary goal right under that and the reason of talking to so many people is to make them feel comfortable with you. Your goal when you're talking to a prospect is not to get a listing, set an appointment, close a deal, is to make them feel comfortable with you. Period. Because if you can't get to that part of this, then there's not going to be a listing appointment, a closing, a deal, showing properties. There's not really going to be anything else. They're just going to kind of ghost you, right? You've all been ghosted, I'm sure, and you wonder why and it may be because they didn't feel comfortable for whatever reason. This caused you to make this decision to buy or sell this house because you didn't just wake up one day and decide I want to buy or sell a house today, for no reason. There's something going on in your life. Your kids went to college, you had a baby, you lost your job, you got a job, your mom is moving in, whatever. Maybe it's an investment, we're taking money off the table here, we're going to put it over here. There's something bigger above the transaction and when you can tap into that, that's when we're really building some serious rapport with people and we're really showing them that we care because we do care and we want them to know that and we've got to know the back story before we can really help them. If you use your career as a real estate agent as a vehicle to help, the same old exact follow up for every single prospect. There's a lot of training out there with, here's how you follow up with every single prospect. You follow up the exact same way for every prospect. How can that be? How can you have the exact follow up game for every prospect when every prospect situation is different? There's different motivations, there's different reasons, there's different timelines that they're looking to do stuff. You can't follow up the exact same way with every single prospect. You can't. You have to find out what's happening, create a custom game plan around their specific situation and then execute the game plan. In like 230, some of those were actually accepted. Then Zillow takes the other 1900 and then passes those off to premier agents or whatever. I don't know what they do. They have their own brokerage. I don't know what they're doing. He was trying to make the argument that that's something that could really disrupt the industry there. I said, but listen, it's the same thing as what we're seeing with the digital buyers, picking their agent online. Now it's a huge shift back to who's my trusted real estate agent that I know how they're going to handle the deal and I'm not going to pick an agent online. What's going to happen with the iBuyers in my opinion? We're going to go through a cycle of this where the sellers click to find out what their house is worth and get that instant offer. Come to find out it's 50% of what their house is worth. They're not going to click that. You think they're going to click that button again? No. We're going to go through a cycle of that and people will stop clicking that button because they already know they're going to get an offer that's ridiculously low. You have such a massive brand built on the back of a weekly email on the same day of the week forever to your entire database that's customized by you with opinions on this and that, right? It's personalized going out to your entire database of these people that you actually talk to not a digital lead that you never talked to. These are people you talk to in your market who own the exact type of property you want to sell. Think about the quality of that of your business at that point. Big, huge, not hard to do. Massive. And that builds your personal brand.