 50-50 is good in the beginning for like the first month or two until you get that first lump of training past you, and then kind of go to more of a 70-30, you know, 70% building your business, which means making calls, following up, you know, showing property, listing appointments, writing offers, negotiating, right? It's the media, it's yourself, it's everybody else that kind of scares you into thinking that, you know, business is dead kind of thing where it's not, it's not dead. And so this is one thing I really want you to get today, and I want you to have confidence in your business, in your market, in you, yourself, moving forward, that you don't care if the market does do this, do that, up, down, interest rates, supply to man, the amount of houses on the market, it doesn't matter, none of that matters. One thing that matters is what's right in front of you today. You need to do today, right, are you going to work as hard as you can, are you going to be the best you can be, and are you going to create five new relationships with property owners every single day and add those people to your database? It's really that simple, it's really that simple, and then take that data and build your personal brand through a weekly email as your foundation and sprinkle social media on top of that. Are you going to do that? Because it's really that simple, and all that costs basically nothing. You don't have to buy leads for thousands of dollars, you don't have to spend thousands of dollars on real estate coaching that's going to teach you stuff you already know. Get rid of those thousands of dollars of expenses that people are telling you you need, right, and contract that down to, listen, this is a sweat equity business. There's nothing, people are trying to put systems in place to create automatic business before they create the brand, before they put the work in to actually build the relationships to create the brand. They're trying to put those systems in place like they already put the brand together. It doesn't work like that. You got to build, you have to put the sweat equity in to build the brand first, and then you can build automated systems on the back end of that brand to create automatic business moving forward. I told you, closings happen every day, right? Just because the market crashes doesn't mean that our business crashes, it just means we have to make some adjustments, right? We have to just kind of flow with it. You know, whenever that scary moment happens in the market, you know, like 911.com crash 2008, the pandemic, the pandemic is a great example, guys. 80% of the same amount of closings, not only closings, but there were still 80% of the same amount of pending deals happening, people negotiating and ratifying contracts to close during the complete shutdown, no human to human contact, title companies were still figuring out how to close deals, mortgage companies were figuring out how to get people pre-approved and close these deals. That tells you right there how resilient the industry is and how much job security you guys have and all of your agents, right? The teams that you guys are building, how much job security that we have and the confidence that we can have in this business moving forward. Some people are worried about different things like the Zillow thing and the Showing Time thing and the, I don't know what, but somebody's going to have to sit down unless I'm just completely oblivious, somebody's going to have to sit down and really show me because I really want to know to show me what, from point A to point B, them completely taking over the industry and doing away with agents because the way I see it, that's not even on the horizon. I don't even see anything that could even potentially even threaten our positions as real estate agents. Now, might there be some supply and demand and might the market dictate our commission a little bit? Might we get squeezed a little there? Yeah, sure, sure, absolutely, but it's not going to go to zero and it's always going to be super lucrative, right? It's always going to, it's incredibly lucrative, right? If we go to a four and four, two and two to each agent, which is already happening in a lot of markets, that could become a norm. I'm not about it. I take five and six for every listing, but if we did go to that, 2% still incredibly lucrative and new agents coming in never knew what 3% felt like, right? So we just have to go with the flow. We can't complain and we can't worry about these outside factors of what, you know, Zillow's doing and what the market's doing and what supply and demand's doing and what the commissions are doing and this, that and the other. We have to do what we have to do to take care of people who want to buy and sell properties. That's our job. That's what we need to be worried about. See, I built the brand first with sweat equity through calling people individually for years and years and years before trying to automate anything. Too many of us are trying to automate first before putting the sweat equity in and actually talking to people, you know what I mean? So that's what you have to watch out for, you know, with social media, you know, people are like putting that, like it's the very top. And really it can be the top as long as it's filtering to a position to put you on the phone with people or in person with people on a very high frequency and a very high, it needs to be doing it at a very high frequency for it to really make sense. You know, the digital marketers that are running ads against real estate agents to tell them, Hey, this is the new way and, you know, this is the way you got to do it. I mean, there's a couple of things to look at. Okay, how many properties of that guy sell this year? Right. Also, how much is this thing he's trying to sell me? You know, I mean, okay, Facebook is a new thing for agents. So how much are you trying to charge me for this? It's just marketing, man. It's just marketing, right? It's just marketing to try to manipulate people and to believe in a certain thing, to turn right around and get you to pay them some money. That's all it is. Don't be manipulated, man. Don't be manipulated, right? Just understand that I don't care if you use social. I don't care if you use Zillow, open houses, door knocking. I don't care what you do. As long as whatever you do is producing enough phone numbers of people in your market to call from nine to 12 every day. That's all I want. And if not, then just get Red X Geo leads and get property owners in any subdivision and then call them all day from nine to 12. You know what I mean? Yeah. I don't care if you use Facebook. As long as it keeps you on the phone every morning. I guess you're Facebook. You don't know everybody anyway. You don't know the people you're calling when you're cold calling. I mean, this game is a game of communicating with people that you don't know who they are. I mean, that's, you're not going to grow unless you're reaching out beyond your sphere, right? Your sphere is only going to maintain your business. It's only going to, if you're just messing with sphere and past clients and referrals, you're not growing, you're just going to maintain. You're just going to make that same all hundred thousand every year, 100, 100, 100, 100, until you branch out and actually go after new people to bring them into your sphere and create a bigger sphere, a bigger sphere, right? You need a larger sphere if you want a larger income with everybody's situation is different. I like to look at everybody's situation specifically and try to carve out a good game plan for them. But 50 50 is good in the beginning for like the first month or two to get that first lump of training past you and then kind of go to more of a 70 30, you know, 70% building your business, which means making calls, following up, you know, showing property, listing appointments, writing offers, negotiating, working on, you know, your marketing, whatever the marketing is, whether it be your weekly email, whether you are posting on social media, you know, daily, creating content, making videos, whatever that whatever it may be. But when you go to that 70 30, you're going to split that up. Okay. That 70% almost needs to be 50 50 with phone calls. You've got to have calls in there somewhere no matter where you get your leads from. And the more you lean into that, the bigger your business is going to be the quicker you're going to get to your first deal. And the more momentum you're going to have on the back of that first deal, moving into, you know, your second deal, third deal, fourth deal, and you just kind of get on a roll. I don't know, new agents, it's tough because expectations are really high. You know, there's this, you're excited, there's this new business, your, your sky's the limit, you know, very exciting moment. And then you come in, then you realize there's this mountain of knowledge you have to learn that you can't learn in a day, you start to become a little frustrated, people are selling stuff around you, you still have, you're not even close to a deal, it's frustrating. And the next thing you know, you become disappointed because you haven't made your first sale in the first three or four months, and you just kind of feel down. Some people quit right there, but I'm here to tell you that that whole cycle right there, every single agent goes through that same exact cycle. The winners that end up coming out of this thing, they at that low point, they look around and they say, you know what, this is harder than I thought, but I can do this, other people around me are doing this, they're no better than me, I can do this, then you have this sense of excitement again, and you get back at it, you're happy, you're excited, you're motivated, and you kind of go through the same thing again, you know, you get a little frustrated and disappointed. So we go through these little cycles of emotions. So people can run from calls all you want, but all you're doing is running away from closings. If you're scared to get on the phone, you're scared to make money. Well, it's a warm call, Ricky, I'm okay with warm calls, or I'm good face to face, just can't do that cold call thing. Number one, that's a cop out, that's the most classic, I'm just scared to make calls, and I don't care if I'm gonna go into foreclosure, I'm gonna just not make calls. People call me sometimes, like I'm fixing to go into foreclosure next week, what can I do to get a deal really quickly? I'm like, how many calls you're making, and they say none, and I'm like, so what you're telling me is that you would rather lose your house, possibly your family, because you lost your house, before you'd make a phone call, it makes zero sense. So if we want to have as many closings as we can have, we're gonna have as many conversations as we can have. So that's just real, it doesn't matter where you get your, that's what's so interesting about real estate is that it's a sweat equity business, and everyone's trying to get around that part of it, where they put the sweat equity in, of all those one on one conversations. The one on one conversations is the only thing that's going to scale your business, okay? Creating those great first impressions with as many people in the market as possible, right? And then when you make that great first impression, we have to have a machine in place to build our brand on the back of that great first impression, whereas they never forget who we are ever, right? The way that I've done this is through a weekly email, right? Real simple stuff. Talk to as many people as you can in your market, make great first impressions, and then do a weekly email to your entire database on the same day of the week forever. Boom. I just gave you guys the secret formula to the most successful, the most successful, the most efficient, the most simple, the most effective business, right? And you can literally take this and scale it to the moon, right? But you have to understand the sweat equity part. Too many of us are trying to create an automatic business before putting in the sweat equity to build a brand. You can only automate your business once you put the sweat equity in, talk to enough people, build a brand, okay? Then you can, you can automate that once people know who you are, because then all you have to have is something that keeps your name in front of them and people come to you because they know how you are, they know how you operate, they know what you're going to do, they know how dependable professional you're going to be. The problem is, too many new agents I see are trying to create that automation before they put the sweat equity in to build a brand. Like for example, people who, this is a great example, I brought this up a couple times, I've seen it, they'll do a giveaway, they'll do a giveaway and they'll have a great presentation for the giveaway, a great prize to win for the giveaway and they do just a great job with the giveaway and they get 3,000 people's contact information and then they just plug those 3,000 into the database and start sending the weekly email or whatever, you know whatever they do with that information, but they don't call them. They're trying to create automation before putting the sweat equity in, right? The real estate is so sweat equity. It's not like e-commerce where you just run Facebook ads or buy a Nike shoe and people just click and buy and boom, you got it. You know, if you want to acquire leads, you know, from that source, you know, use social media to extract as much data as you can of people in your local market. If you can hack the system to extract as much data as you can. Names, phone numbers, emails, even address. I don't know what all data you can actually extract, but if you could somehow figure out a way to extract data because that is the name of the game. If you look at all these larger companies, the Zillows and Googles and Apples and Amazons and Facebooks, they're all, their drug of choice is data. They're all just addicted. They're spending billions of dollars just to get data, right? And so I think that we as agents need to think of ourselves first as a data collector whereas every day when you wake up we're just trying to make five new friends with people in our proper, in our market and collect their data. If it's even at that low of a level, because you can get thousands of people's data, you know, with a click of a mouse kind of deal, but talking to them and having a real conversation is a totally different ballgame that they gave you your data, gave you their data because they, you made them feel comfortable. That's a whole different scenario. But if you could collect five a day, if you think of yourself every day when you wake up, I'm a data collector, not a real estate agent, I'm a real estate agent. Second, through your journey of trying to make as many friends in the market, collect their data, do a weekly email, through that journey of that being the main focus, you'll close so many deals. It's ridiculous that you're focused on how many deals you're going to close this year. And for what? In 2023, you're not going to care how many deals you closed in 2021. And in 2023, the amount of business you do that year is going to be predicated on how many relationships you created in 2021. So why aren't we focused on the relationship side of this business now? Right? And in 2023 it's the same thing. We're going to close tons of deals from the work we put in now, but we shouldn't even be focused on those deals at that time. We should be focused on 2025, right? It's always this carrot that we're pushing out further and further. I don't like the carrot scenario analogy when I'm talking about goals, because there's a lot of unhappy people in the world who have these huge goals and they keep pushing the goal out every time they get closer to it. They keep pushing it out further and further and further. And I think that's good to a certain extent, but you can't revolve your happiness around hitting these goals that you're never going to hit because you keep pushing the goals out further. There's got to be a happy place where you're satisfied and happy every step of the way, but still motivated to hit these bigger goals. But I do love the carrot analogy when I'm talking about, because it helps me kind of center myself on what I should be focused on, which is database growth. Whatever agent has the largest database and builds their brand with the people within their database wins.