 How you doing? What's going on? How you guys doing? Todd. Ricky. What's your mission? I know. It's going to be a good one. Nice to meet you. Ricky, I'm Israel. Nice to meet you. Good to meet you. Good to meet you. You're welcome. Nice to meet you. You're in. Nice to meet you, bro. You're in. Nice to meet you. How are you doing? I'm good. Nice to meet you. I'm good. Sorry about that. Sorry about that. I got it. It's right here. We're waiting on Tyler. Yeah, he's just found me. Ricky Grooth is with us, and Ricky is on top of us. You see it in a code on somebody's account, right, on a significant number of our customers accounts, which is why Ricky's here. But what we're going to do is I've asked Ricky to share a few things with us, and then we're going to open it up to some Q&A with Ricky. And ultimately, I think the goal here is to help Ricky understand that we take care of his customers as best we can, but at the same time, I want you guys to understand what he expects from us as people supporting his clients. Are you guys familiar? Oh, yeah. Why Sandy beaches? Palm trees. You guys been there? All shores. Yeah, all the time. You guys go there? Nice. So I've been working with you guys as an affiliate for over five years now. I have flip flops on. I'm on the beat, so it's got to get pretty cold for me to put shoes on. But yeah, I've been working with you guys for over, right out of, right out of over five years. Okay. You know, when I, when I very first, I'll give you guys just a quick, I'm not going to give you guys the full story. But as far as me getting into the coaching business and kind of how that whole thing played out. Okay. What brings us to the day so you guys can understand the whole picture. When I got, I guess I do have to go all the way back. I got a real estate when I was 20 and I made a lot of money and lost it and went back to roofing houses. I worked on an oil rigged a lot of things. I got back in real estate 2008. Okay. And then I worked my way to become the top remakes agent in the center of Alabama by 2014. So I was selling a hundred properties a year at that time, which I'm still doing now. 2017 I decided to write a book. Right. Now understand by that time I had made it lost. It came back six more years to get to a hundred deals, then three years of a hundred deals before deciding to share anything with anyone. Okay. A lot of the gurus and coaches and trainers that you guys probably know either never even had a license, right? Or maybe they had one for two years and sold 19 properties. Now they're selling a course for a hundred dollars and trying to get people to sign up for Red X and stuff like that. Not my story. Right. Made it lost. It came back, made it, kept it for three years and decided, okay, I think I really have something here. Then I decided to write a book. I wrote the book and then I realized as it was being edited, I forgot all the stuff I wanted to put in the book. So I literally wrote a second book. While he was editing the first book, I traded him book for book. Go edit this. I'll go publish this. And that's why there were two books in the one year that hasn't been on since. Those books took off. And that's what kind of led me to speaking, writing, coaching and trying to help other agents. Okay. So when I started coaching, it was early 2017. At that point I had done zero social media. I still don't do any social media for my real estate business. All my social media is for my coaching business. Because I run my real estate business on, I'm teaching them. I'm saying, don't go after the deal. I'm saying, just help them do what they want to do. See, people already know when they want to buy or sell a property. They already know when they're going to do it, why they're going to do it. They've already got all that mapped out in their head. They don't need us as a real estate agent to tell them when to sell. They already know when they want to sell and why they want to sell all that good stuff. That's not our job to get them to do anything. Our job is just to become their friends and build that trust enough to where they want us to help them when they do, when that time comes when they want to do something. And then do that at scale in your local market. Right? So I woke up one day and I realized, wait a minute. It didn't feel right the whole time, but it hit me that here I am teaching my agents, you know, not to go after the old create relationships, build long-term clients, you know, but here I am charging them, right, for short-term financial gains. And what happened was through that process is I realized I'm losing people. So I would do a webinar and I would have 300 people register, 100 would show up, and then one or two would sign up when I was charging for coaching. And I'm thinking 300 people needed help, wanted help. 100 really needed help, but only two or three actually took action. Those numbers weren't, that was completely upside down. I want to help the industry and the model I have now is only really getting to less than 1% of people. It's not making sense. So what can I do to actually help the 300 people, not just the two or three, the 1%, that actually decided they want to just throw some money at me and give me a chance to help them succeed? This morning in Salt Lake, there was about 80 agents there and I said, if you guys ever had the opportunity to do business with me, would you? Raise your hand if you would. Everyone would raise their hands. If they had the opportunity to do business with me, they would. And I said, okay, cool. Now, raise your hand if I've ever charged any of you in here a dime and not a single one of them raised a hand, right? So understand the power of branding. Understand the power of giving without expectations. Understand the power of providing value, right? Just helping people without expecting anything back. Look at what happened, okay? Every one of them said, yes, if there's something we can do to do business, I'm doing it with you. But I've never charged them a dime. See the power of that? If we can all do that in our niche, in our individual businesses, if we can create that value that whereas our customer base is just dying to do business with us, we want to create a situation where we're attracting the business, not where we're chasing the business. If we're chasing the business, you know, that's a red flag that we're doing something wrong. We have to chase our business. Our business should be chasing us because we've robbed them so much value, right? So when you guys are talking to potential customers, think about that when you're talking to them, right? And think about how you talk to your brother, mother, cousin, best friend. Think about the tone and how comfortable and relaxed you are when you're talking to them. That's the exact conversation and feeling you need to emulate when you're talking to prospects. Like they're a long, long span and that we're just trying to help. Your philosophy for building a successful real-estate business, right? It's about connecting and making friends with five people. And will you just spend a little bit of time so that they all understand that for your customers, here's what you're telling them for two cents a lead, get these leads, make these phone calls. We've expound them out a little bit so that everybody here understands the basic thing that you're teaching everybody to build their business. Well, I'll tell you this. I've asked hundreds of thousands of pictures. I asked 800 agents in my two weeks ago. I asked the 80 agents today. I say, instead of doing social media, direct mail, open houses, all the things that you could be doing. When we know that all those activities are going to lead right back to the same place, which is a real conversation, it doesn't matter if you get Zilla leads, Facebook, open house, or whatever you do, it's all going to lead right back to right here. Me and them talking before a deal can ever even start to happen. Period, end of story. So instead of doing all that stuff and spending all that time and money and energy to do all these activities, it's going to get you right back to this same spot anyway. Why not just give me all the property owners I want to do business with for two cents a piece and just let me call them and have those conversations right now? Not to sell them, but just to make friends. People want somebody that they know already, that they trust already, that they feel like they feel comfortable with, that they feel like we'll handle the deal and, you know, look out for them like a friend or family member would, right? So our job as real estate agents is not to get listing appointments, or close deals, or get listings, or show property, you know. Step one is, how many friends can we create in the market? Because that's who's going to, they're going to choose us to be their agent when they get ready to do something. If we can't talk them into by ourselves, they're going to do what they want to do it. Our job is just to at scale, make as many friends as we can. That's our job, right? So for me, if that's the case, give me all the data in my market. Let me just call everybody. Let me think of myself as a politician. Can't miss the market, let everybody know who I am, what I do, and I'm here to help, right? Like I'm a volunteer worker, right? Just doing community outreach, saying, same thing you guys need to be doing, right, here's my services, what can I do to help you with this? How can I help you with what I do? That's what I'm here for. The more and more I let go of trying to get money, I'm not 100% there yet. I'm way deep in the game, but I'm still not 100% just money who cares. The more and more I let go of the money of trying to close the more transactions of money I make. Way more. You stop doing what you're doing for money. When you wake up and you realize this and you stop doing what you're doing for money, you become really happy number one, right? Because now you're doing what you want to do, not because of money, it's not your driver anymore. You're doing it because you love to do it. You become really happy, and you get really, really wealthy. And I'm a prime example. Who's scared of something? Uh, yes. What? What? What are we scared of? Snakes. Sailing? No, no, no, in terms of business, I guess. You know, not snakes and stuff. Difficult and embrace of people. What's that? Difficult and embrace of people. Here's the punchline though. You can't change them, right? And so, when we run into these difficult people, that's okay. You're going to run into difficult people. We're a business, and this world is made up of people of all different kinds. You're not going to just have nice people all the time. We're in business. We're going to have people that aren't as nice as others. Right? How do we handle those people? We recognize them as soon as we can, and we treat them accordingly. Right? Um, you know, and it just depends on the situation, but why does that scare you? They don't know what you look like. They're not going to see you in a grocery store and say, hey, you're that lady that called me from Redx. Can't believe you. That's not going to happen. So where does the fear come in? Listen, every time I ask somebody what they're scared of, they say, I don't know. Every time I say, oh, what are you scared of? I'm scared of this. Why are you scared of that? I don't know. Every time. You guys are scared of nothing. You don't even know what you're scared of. Understand this. Understand the power of what you guys have. I used to look up numbers all night just to try to find the hundreds so that I could hopefully talk to five people the next day all day long, calling with my hand. Right? Now, with Redx, there's my pain point. Now with Redx, you can click a mouse and get thousands of numbers. Click another mouse and autodial 100 an hour. You can click a mouse two seconds and then another hour, 100 or dial. It used to take me 15 hours. 10, 15 hours to do that same activity. And now it takes agents one hour and nobody's doing it. It's no favorite. What you have to understand is I made 100,000 calls during that 15-year period. And now with this technology, you can do the same thing in two years, three years, four years. Two to four years, you can do the same. You can have the same result. You can hit the same exact numbers as it took me 15 years to do in two to four years. You could be exactly where I am in my career right now within two to four years. And I understand the fear part completely because everybody's scared when they make calls. Everybody, even me. But the thing is, and I can completely relate to that. What I can't relate to is not saying, who cares when I'm scared? I want to make the calls because I want to succeed. That's the part I don't get. Being scared, cool, that's fine. Not making the calls because they're scared, I completely don't understand. And supporting prospects and customers and canceled customers. So having some inspiration is always a really good thing. Absolutely. In your journey, just from real estate, roofing, real estate again, where did you figure that out and how did that go? How long did it take for you to realize that that was the best way to do things and what was that process like? Well, the reason why I lost everything is because I had the other strategy in the beginning. I was just trying to close. I cared about people, but it was more just a cold relationship. Just let's do a deal and move on and whatever, right? And that is literally why I lost everything. If I would have been accumulating relationships and building my brand from the beginning, even when the market crashed, I would have continued to make sales. Closing, if you look at every single market crash, I mean, in 2011.com crashed, 2008, the pandemic, all of them. Closings were happening every single day during those, during the worst, scariest moments in our economic history. Closings, real estate closings are happening every single day. Listen, I was a 21-year-old millionaire with a Hummer and a Cadillac and a big house and buying all kinds of stuff. I didn't, I thought this would never end. And when it crashed on me and I had to give all that stuff back, and I went back to roofing houses, it took me a while, while I was working on the oil rig, I read 100 books. And through that, that's when I got real serious about, okay, why did I fail? What happened here? And when I got back in 2008, that was when I put the switch and I started focusing on, I want to be your friend forever, Mr. Prospect. I want to know you and I want to be your friend forever and I want us to be close, I want you to trust me. And it was totally different conversations. You know, at first it was just real cold, here's the contract, but when I came back in and I was actually talking and listening and not caring if they bought or sold, just trying to figure out what I could do to help, it was like we were talking long lost friends and it was like friends and family. And you could tell they trusted me and cared about me and vice versa. It took me, I went 50-50 for a while and I'm still not at 100% guys. Understand, I'm still not there, I'm striving to get there where I totally have let go. Because I'm telling you, that's going to be complete before then. I'm almost there, but I'm not there yet. There's still a piece of me that's trying to close, you know, because I'm a salesperson. Thank you guys so much. Thanks for taking time off. Thanks for listening guys, I hope that helped. Thank you.