 All these things are worth so much money to you. All these skills are worth so much money to you. And all we're looking at is the tax returns for $20,000 because you did three deals. And you're like, I made $20,000. No, you didn't. You made $4 million. You just hadn't seen it yet. Hey, I want to thank you for taking time out of your day, Ricky, to come talk to us tonight. I'd love to get your perspective. I'm brand new to investing, but I'm also almost done with my license, finally. So I'd love to know from your perspective, one, how do you balance your time between investing and being a real estate agent? And then two, pretty much being a real estate agent and being new, what are some things you wish you knew when you started to kind of help somebody who's green in the field? Oh, that's beautiful. So with real estate agent versus real estate investor, for me, you know, and I don't know your situation, right? You may have a job outside of real estate altogether that pays your bills, right? Is that true? Yes. Okay, so you have a job that pays your bills. So you can literally do this for like 10 years because your bills are taken care of. You can do real estate on the side. Investor and real estate agent on the side for 10 years, 20 years, your bills are taken care of. So that's a problem with most agents is they get in and they're in such a hurry to get to real estate full time. If it doesn't happen in six to eight months, they quit. It's like, wait a minute, your bills are taken care of. And if they quit their job to go real estate full time, well, that's just recipe for disaster because if you're putting yourself under the gun to close the deal in six to eight months and now you're in month four and you're getting desperate, people can hear that in your voice when you're talking to prospects and you don't get any deals because they're gonna go find an agent that doesn't sound nervous about their finances, right? And you may not think they hear that, but they do. They can hear the desperation in your voice. And so don't put yourself on a financial pinch. That way you can talk to your prospects more freely and coming right back to what I've been talking about the whole time, communication, right? To be able to talk to people without any expectations from the other side. If you're a real estate agent, you need to think of yourself as a volunteer worker, like volunteer worker doing community outreach to people in the market to see what you can do to help them, who you are, what you do and what you can do to help, right? And the entire name of the game guys with this is to collect data. You know, why do you think Amazon, Apple, Zillow, Facebook spend billions of dollars on data every single year? It's because data is king, right? They use the data to remarkets us based on the data to sell products. Same thing with us. We need to operate our businesses the exact same way. You need to be in data collection mode every single day, right? You talk to people, you create relationships, you collect their data, you stay in touch with them, right? So, I'm just kind of breaking it all down really quickly. And that way you can get like a 30,000 foot view. But, let's see which direction can I go with this? With first off real estate versus investor, real estate agent, right? That's the path you're gonna go, right? You wanna really focus on that. It takes so much effort and momentum to get that business rolling that you really need to focus and be more of a passive investor. Like if you see a deal, grab a deal, right? If you see it, get it. That's how I was for a long time. I focused 100% on real estate. I built it up to a million dollars a year, right? And I bought little rental properties along the way. But then once I started making big money, then I started buying more real estate. But I wasn't really all in with investing. I was kind of like doing it. If I saw a deal, I would get it, whatever. I wasn't like actively trying to be an investor. I was just trying to be a real estate agent who made a million dollars. That was the whole goal. If you focus on trying to build your real estate agent business up to a million dollars a year, you're good. You got all the money you need to invest and you have a million dollar a year of business. But if you let investing distract you from building that million dollar a year of business, then it could crash and burn the real estate agent business, right? I'm just telling you how I played it. I'm not telling you this is what you need to do. I'm just kind of giving you my story. As far as being a really successful real estate agent, it's real simple, right? You want to make calls all morning, do a weekly email on the same day of the week forever to your database, and then do social media and all your marketing stuff in the afternoon. Boom, you're done because it's the number one reason why people choose a real estate agent. At the end of a deal, if you asked the buyer or the seller, hey, how did you pick your real estate agent? The number one response is I had a friend in the business. And so now we understand that the number one goal, because if you think of how closings happen and how people pick agents as they have a friend in the business, our entire objective needs to be, how many friends can I create in the market? How many people can I give warm and fuzzy feelings to that I'm truly care about them and I'm their friend, right, more of a friend than any other agent? And so you do that through communication, tone, right? This is what you guys should try. The next time you're talking to your mom, dad, brother, cousin, best friend from high school, right? During that conversation, take a second while you're listening to them talk and think about how comfortable you are with them, how comfortable they are with you, the tone of your voice, how your shoulders are relaxed, how your heartbeat, everything, how fast you're talking, how slow you're talking, everything and take a mental snapshot of exactly how comfortable you are in that situation talking to someone close to you. And I want you to think, this right here is how I need to talk to my prospects. Because if you can talk to them like family, then there's a really good chance that they're gonna do business with you. And it may not be today, but it doesn't matter if it's today, as long as they're going to do business with you, your job is to stack up lifelong loyal clients that are gonna stick with you through your entire career. Not necessarily do a deal today. If you hear that they're trying to do a deal today, great. Why, you know, why do you wanna sell this house? This is a beautiful, beautiful place. Why in the world would you sell this place, sir? You know, oh, okay, that makes sense. In that case, here's the game plan. Here's what I think we should do to get you the best results, to help you accomplish what you're trying to accomplish. But I'm not going for the kill. I'm going for the connection. And a lot of agents, they try to convert before they connect. And you can't, you gotta connect first then convert, you know, after you understand what exactly they're trying to do. But if you, Kia, if you every morning said, I'm gonna make calls until I've created five new friends in the market every day. If you do that, 250 working days a year for five years, you have 6,000 friends in the market. And hopefully you've targeted property owners that own the exact type of property that you wanna sell. Now you have 6,000 friends in the market that own the exact type of property you wanna sell that are getting a weekly email from you on the same day of the week forever. Now, how big is your business at that point? I'll tell you, you're probably in the top 10 of your market. You're probably in the top 10, top five, top 20 of your MLS at that point. Cause so many, your friends with so many people and that's how people choose a real estate agent. But the problem is, agents overcomplicate this process and they do it for eight months and they only sell one or two properties or no properties and they just give up. Meanwhile, their database was at 200 and growing, right? They've learned how to write a contract, work MLS, talk to people, right? And do a transaction, but they're discounting all that to nothing. Like, okay, I'll leave you with this since I'm getting long-winded about it. Your first year in real estate, you make millions of dollars. You just haven't cashed in yet. Learning how to work MLS is worth a million dollars to you over the life of your career. Learning how to write a contract is worth a million dollars. Learning how to do a transaction, million dollars. Learning how to talk to someone on the phone, input their data in the database, do a weekly email, million dollars. All these things are worth so much money to you. All these skills are worth so much money to you and all we're looking at is the tax returns for 20,000 cause you did three deals. And you're like, I made 20,000. No, you didn't. You made four million. You just hadn't seen it yet. And if you don't give up, you will see it. See what I'm saying? 100%. Thank you. I could really go on and on and on about it, but all my courses and stuff are 100% free at zero-to-diamond.com. 60 days. You wanna post that for us, Ricky? You wanna post that? You can post it in the chat there, website. Zero-to-diamond.com. Zero-to-diamond. Put your Instagram handle. Oh, shoot, I sent that to you. Hold on. All those courses are totally free. There's a 60-day challenge and several other courses, right? There's all my scripts or videos of me making calls, tutorials, the whole nine yards. Everything that I know about being a successful agent is right there. And if you need something, just message me on Instagram. And I'm more than happy to help you in any way I can. I want to, I want to.