 You can literally, like with Red X, you can just go click, click and boom, pick a neighborhood and bam, boom. You got all the property owners right there and it's better data than we used to have because cell phones are mixed in there. It's better data than I used to get. So better data in a split second and then use an auto dialer to machine gun Kelly, bro. Just, you just call it, it's like a, it's like one of the, do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do. Like it, it's incredible. Like I used to dial with my, with my hand. Once you can actually visualize yourself as the top agent, right, then you have to understand that it's going to be a lot of work and it's going to take you many, many years and a lot of patience, a lot of frustration, a lot of disappointments along the way. So I got in, it took me eight months to make my first sale. Yeah, yeah, well, everybody's the same. Like you, you talk to anybody and the average is six months for people who actually make it in the business. 90% of people don't make it. The people who do the average is six months. And that's been true for decades, even with technology, the run of technology lately in the past five, 10 years, that hasn't changed the learning curve of an agent and how fast it takes you to get to your first deal. There may be a minuscule difference. Like you may, maybe the average used to be six and a half months and now it's 6.2 months or something like that. But it's still a long time, no matter how you slice it up. The learning curve and the, how long it takes you to get to your first sale still the same. There's still people that, there's people that come in and sell them one month. Sell one property. That's dangerous by the way. Cause then they kind of have this false sense of security. You know, I see that all the time. They'll sell something quick and then they just crash and burn for the next four or five months and quit. And if you talk to most agents and you say, okay, how many active buyers and sellers are you working with? The most common answer is four. And that's just my research. Like me asking agents, the most common answer I get is four. And statistically speaking, that's no deals, right? That's 0.8 deals. That's zero, you know. I've always had 25 plus, right? Active buyers and sellers. And I've always closed two a week since 2014. Two a week, two a week, two a week. If I want, if I want one a week, I'm gonna have 15 to 20 buyers or sellers actively in my pipeline. Whereas I'm working that list it's separated from my database. If they go ghost, if they tell me they're not interested anymore, if they go with another agent, if they move forward with me, they're off that list. I'm talking about prospects that haven't done anything yet that are actively looking to do something, right? And so that number has to be maintained. If you go below the 15, you're gonna go below your one a week that you wanna close. It's just really, really, really simple math. But back to your question, you know, it took me eight months to make my first sale. It was back in the early 2000s when the market exploded. I made a million dollars quickly and then lost it all in the crash, went bankrupt, went back to roofing houses, worked on an oil rig for a while, read 100 books, came back into real estate in 2008. Okay, then from 2008 to 2014, right? I worked 15 hours a day to get to 100 deals a year. So I'm just seeing a agent one assistant, always have been. And so understand the timeline, right? Get in, make my first sale in eight months, make a meal, lose it, get back in. And then after all, everything I learned through all that still took me six years of 15 hours a day to get to 100 deals, six years. And agents are coming in complaining to me when they're four months in, two years in, right? And they haven't sold 50 deals yet or 20 deals yet or 100 deals yet or whatever. And it's like, dude, listen, like I made a meal, lost it. The lessons I learned from that took that. And then using the lessons I learned, it took me another six years of 15 hours a day to get to 100 deals a year. I mean, really early in my career, I realized that property owners were the best prospects, right? They're your best buyers, okay? They're the most educated. They know what they want. They just need someone to help them get the job done, help them do what they're trying to do. And that's how I've sold so much property in my careers because when I did lose everything and came back, I realized that back then, the one reason I lost everything is because I was so focused on just the deal and just getting deals done. I was not trying to get to know people. I lost myself in there somewhere, because I started out in real estate wanting to help people. But when you start to get the money, you see how easy it is. The market was very easy at that time. I mean, it was super easy. They weren't really trying to get to know me either because those sellers were selling and making 200,000 and they weren't gonna rebuy in that same market that they just bought for 200,000 less and made 200,000, they're gonna sit that one out. They were smart enough. Well, so they didn't have anything to talk to me about either. So it was both sides. They weren't trying to get to know me. I wasn't trying to get to know them. I was just gonna look for somebody else that wanted to make 200,000. And so what I realized was that, one of the reasons why I lost everything in terms of sales was because I wasn't creating relationships and building my brand. That was the reason I lost because at the end of the day, one of the big maha moments was when I looked through the market, right as I was starting to get back into the business and try to do the research and try to figure out where I went wrong, I was studying the market, I was looking at MLS and I was just looking at different agent sales, how much did they sell during this down moment? Like 2007 was our worst year in terms of transactions. I was looking at the agents who were actually selling 20, 30, 40 properties during those years and what are they doing? What kind of properties are they selling? What I realized was that 2000, let's say five to 2010, that was the worst real estate crash we've seen in our lifetime. Surely there's bigger crashes ever in history, who knows, I don't know, but as I looked through the worst crash, real estate crash, real estate was the driver of the crash, the worst real estate crash that we've ever seen, what I realized was during the worst crash ever, closings were still happening every day by the truckloads, okay? And so that gave me this aha moment, I started to realize a few things, you know? And I just, then I had to sit down and think about that for a second, okay? I mean, this is like, wait a minute, like it's like you're digging for gold, you know, you're chipping away at the mountain, chipping away, chipping away, you know, for days and days and days and then boom, you hit a little piece of gold and you see a little glimmer in there, you know, around the dirt. And you're like, wait a minute, you know? I think I finally hit something here, right? And realizing that was that moment where I hit gold for a second. And I was like, well, let me pull back a little more dirt here and see how big this nugget is. And so as I'm pulling it back, I'm realizing, well, wait a minute, how many closings are happening every day? A bunch, a bunch. In the worst of times, a bunch of closings, right? And not only just closings, closings in MLS, which means what? They're being sophisticated by real estate agents. Okay, you understand the market and the cycles and you get behind the fact that, okay, you've got to get out of this number one scarcity and competition mindset, but also that the market has anything to do with your success. And so people are worried like, oh, when the market's great, I'm gonna do great, but when it crashes, oh no, that's not true. Okay, that's not true at all because closings continue to happen every day. What happens? Prices adjust, why do they adjust? Well, they have to adjust to a place where people are still willing to buy. What does that mean? People are still willing to buy. And so there's always people buying and there's always people selling. There's people that have to sell. There's people that want to sell. There's whatever, it's happening. Sorry guys, it's happening. You can't use the market as an excuse, right? It's just, you can't. And so when you realize all that, okay, I'm just taking you through the mindset of what I had to realize before I could actually build the foundation correctly. And so when I realized, okay, closings happen every day, blah, blah, blah, and then I realized, well, okay, how do I become the agent of all these closings, right? If you ask a buyer or seller at the end of a closing, how they pick their agent, right? What do you think the top answer is? A friend referral, some of the people was recommended. They had a friend in the business. So now that's the number one, by far. Okay, by far, like there's not a close second. That one's like 35%, everything else is 1%, all the other reasons. Agreed, 100%. So if that is a fact, and it is, then our job as a real estate agent is not to sell property. Build more relationships. Our job is to create friends in the market, period. And so if we, if we're friends with the most people in the market, we're a number, if we're friends with more people than any other agent in the market, right? And when I say friends, that can mean many things. It could be an accumulation of conversations you had where you created great first impressions followed by some kind of marketing where they never forget who you are and never forget that great first impression, right? I utilize a weekly email. They never forget who I am. It's great, high organic reach. And they never forget that great first impression, that great first conversation we had. And now they're getting this weekly email that I create customily, so they know that I'm working hard and I'm out here and I'm a nice guy and I'm selling a lot of property and they love me and they wanna do business with me. And I can scale that. When you learn how to scale your personality where you can make friends and scale that activity where you can just build all these friendships and they never forget who you are, that's when you're gonna start winning. So that's what I had to do. I realized all that and I started having different conversations when I got back in the business with prospects and they just, you could tell, man, like they talked to me like I was family. I cared about them like they were family. There was totally different conversations. I knew that these were long-term relationships that were gonna produce multitude of deals and referrals. And that's how I started building my business. I started trying to accumulate people and my market started doing a weekly email in 2007. Still do it today, every Wednesday since 2007. And at this point in my career, it's the only thing I do. It's the only thing I do. New agent, it doesn't matter. Like once you plateau, the market crashing could fluctuate your income a little bit because you've plateaued and you're not trying to grow anymore. You got the same clients, you're doing the same stuff. But when you're in that growth spurt period, hell, the market could crash and burn and do all this stuff but it's not gonna affect your income too much because you're growing by four and five X over a year for a couple of years till you get to your plateau point. So, but back to your question because I still haven't answered it. I realized in the very early going that property owners was where the highest quality prospects because they not only is a possibility list which listing is the, you know, that's the, that multiplies agents time more than anything in the business but also they're the best buyers. So why would I go after any other clients? Okay, so those 15 hours a day for six years was literally me looking up at like copying and pasting addresses of property owners. I wanted to talk to into bigfoot.com, whitepages.com, Spokio and I'm literally like reverse looking up addresses, copying and pasting all night. So I would do this all night till like midnight and then at nine o'clock I would start calling all the numbers I looked up the night before and so it would take me a whole day to dial 100 numbers. So I was looking up 100 all night and I was dialing those 100 all day the next day. I would do the same thing every day. I would show property, I would meet clients or whatever in between and go to listing appointments. I would hand write some letters. I was doing direct mail, stuff like that. But my main activity was to look up numbers all night, call them all day. Now, in today's world, bro, after I built my business, you know, here comes Mojo, here comes Redx, here comes Vulcan, here comes Expresso, here comes all these great technology companies that allow agents to do what took me from five o'clock to midnight in literally two minutes. Virtual distance now, I can do the same thing. But you can literally, like with Redx, you can just go click, click and boom, pick a neighborhood and bam, boom. You got all the property owners right there and it's better data than we used to have because cell phones are mixed in there. It's better data than I used to get. So better data in a split second and then use an auto dialer to machine gun Kelly, bro. Just, you just call, it's like one of the, do do do do do do do do, like it's incredible, like I used to dial with my hand and look up numbers, reverse look up, right? And so like those 15 hours a day for six years, literally what took me those 15 hours, agents can now do in two hours, you can do the same damage that Ricky Krooth did all day long and all night in two hours and still have, you know, six hours, four hours, you know, seven hours however long you work to go do even more damage, right? And real estate agents, they don't even, you guys don't even understand like the power and how good of a situation you're in. And like it's funny because like no one, like none of them, hardly any of them use this technology, right?