 In today's episode of the Shane Holmes podcast, one of the largest real estate influencers, Ricky Carruth shares how he built a massive following while selling more than 100 homes per year. And if you love selling real estate as much as I do, then this one's for you. So I get in when I'm 20 years old. It's 2002. 90% of people fail. I'm like, yeah, but 10% succeed. That's what all the brokers told me. I went interviewed and none of them really wanted me all through my entire life. Basically, everybody always said I couldn't do whatever it is I was trying to do. And it's like this right here. It's everything that I've done happen really slow. And what I do is nothing special. Like every single person can do what I do. And the problem is people welcome back to the Shane Holmes podcast. Today we have Ricky Carruth. Ricky is a legend 22 years in the business, over 100,000 YouTube subscribers, 250k on Instagram and just a wealth of knowledge. Thanks for coming out. Appreciate it. Yeah, man. Absolutely. I've been looking forward to this for a while. Yeah. I mean, I was like, I'm going to LA. Let me hit Shane up. Yeah, let's do it. Let's jump right into it, bro. So a lot of people look up to you in the real estate space. How long have you been in the business for now? Yeah, 22 years. 22 years. Over two decades. Yeah. And so you started just head down selling, selling, selling. Yeah. And how long did it take you to get to doing like 100 homes a year? 17 years. Well, no, no, no. That was a million bucks. It took me, let's see, 12 years, right? So I get in when I'm 20, 20 years old. It's 2002. And everybody was like, you're too young. Yeah. You know, you're too young to do this. Everybody, 90% of people fail. I'm like, yeah, but 10% succeed. Like, you know, 90% of people, that's what all the brokers told me. They were like, you actually got turned down by a bunch of brokers, right? I went interviewed and none of them really wanted me because I was 20. And I was like, okay, I love it went like all through my entire life. Basically, everybody always said I couldn't do whatever it was I was trying to do. You know, I remember I was a sophomore in high school and I are a freshman. I was a freshman. I weighed myself in my buddy's house. I was 150 pounds and everybody else was, you know, whatever, a buck 20 or something. I was like, I'm gonna play football. And everybody's like, no, not going to happen. No, it was all county. I had a full paid scholarship, football scholarship. You know, every little thing that I did, everybody doubted me. And it's like this right here, like some of the biggest influencers in the real estate business world, they probably saw me come on the scene and were like, okay, here's another here's another guy. Yeah, he'll be here for, you know, he'll be here for six months or a year or whatever. But now, you know, they can't, they're just like, okay, he's not, he's not going anywhere. We might as well make friends with him. Yeah. But same thing in real estate. So it's like whatever I decide that I want to accomplish or whatever I'm in on, I'm all in on it. Yeah, right. And I'm focused on that one thing, whatever that one thing is. So throughout my entire life, everything that I've done has been just one thing at a time, not really doing a bunch of multiple things. You know, there's one main thing that I'm really trying to accomplish. Go all in on. Yeah. And between 2002 and, you know, basically 2022, that's when I stepped out of production. I was really focused on just being the very best agent, like everything I do, I want to be the best in the world at it. That's the way I look at it. And in today's landscape, you can actually quantify that with ways social media is you can literally see what the best people and whatever your field is are doing, what the results are. And you kind of have a baseline, you know, to really lean on. Yeah, you can look at the analytics of how many real views are they getting and what their follower account is. Well, what their results are, you know, what their business results are, you know, and how they're actually accomplishing it. A lot of that stuff's out on Front Street now. So you actually, you really, you know, it's like, you know, I was the number one agent in my market for eight years in a row. So I can go out and teach people how to be the number one agent in their market because I did it. Yeah. And you know, one of the things that I tell agents to do, and it's kind of messed up actually, but one thing I really, you know, harp on is if you want to be number one in your market, look in your MLS and find the number one agent, right? And learn everything about, study their business on MLS. Know how many listings they have, how many pinnings, how many rebuyers versus sellers, how many listings they pick up a month, what type of listings are these. You can learn a lot right there. And it literally gives you the blueprint, right? You've got to beat that to be number one, you know, be a number one, you got to beat number one. Well, here's all the data on number one. And now, you know, you can see what they do on social, you know, and try to, you can really pick up a lot and actually put together a plan to go out there and accomplish same thing with anything. I mean, you look at the Gary V's and the Grant Cardone's and some of the biggest, you know, even Elon Musk's and all these people, literally, you can see what they've got going on, what the results are. And if you've got some kind of massive target, you can easily put that game plan together to go out there and literally do anything you want to do. Yeah, I literally, when we first started talking probably, what, a year ago or something like that, I looked at, okay, how often is Ricky posting? What is he posting? How is he scaling this out? And one thing that really stood out to me that you talked about earlier is that really successful people, they kind of pick that one thing and you're kind of sick enough in the head to like, when someone tells you that you're not going to do it or that it's impossible, it almost pushes you more instead of kicking you back. Yeah. And that I definitely see in you. I've always had a chip on my shoulder because nobody ever thinks I can do what I tell them I'm going to do. Yeah. And then I do it every single time. Every single time. I love that. People used to, people lose bets on me constantly. Yeah. But what's so funny is, is everything that I've done happened really slow. It wasn't, nothing happened really fast. It literally, and what I do is nothing special. Like every single person can do what I do. And the problem is people care what other people think too much, right? Yeah. They don't make the calls because they're worried about what the person they're calling is going to think or other people are going to think about them making the calls or they don't post the video because they're worried about what their friends and family or what other people that they don't even know is going to think about it. And it holds them back. Newsflash, nobody cares. Number one. Yeah, you're not that important. But number two, like who cares what they think. Yeah. Number two. But I don't know, it's crazy, man. It's crazy because like to succeed in anything is not rocket science or something unachievable or something you got it, something that you get lucky at. It's something that every single person can do. Yeah. If they'll just do the little things. There's a guy named Jeff Olson, you know him? He wrote the book, The Slide Edge. And dude is a he's a baller, right? This guy is a baller. And he was one of the original OGs of personal development back in the 90s. He had this network called the People's Network. And he had Jim Rohn, like all like who's the guy, the most inspirational speaker in the world. Not Eric Thomas, but the guy before him. Anthony Robbins. No, no. Now, Tony, he was he was friends with Tony. Tony was never part of the People's Network, but Darren Hardy and like all the OGs of the personal development world were on the People's Network, which was his. And anyway, this guy wrote The Slide Edge, which is my favorite all time book. I read it three times. And it's the way that he illustrates this is just it's masterful. But he the premise is that like these little things that don't matter end up being the reason why you have this massive success, right? And it's so funny because those those things in the moment, like for example, like, you know, if real estate agents makes their calls today, their business doesn't like not going to change. It doesn't change like today, right? Or eating a hamburger, right? Or something like you don't look differently from eating a hamburger. But if you do it every day for a year, you look a lot different drastically. Same thing with with business, you know, those little things posting a video every day, making your calls every day, the things that don't matter in the moment, yeah, is what actually matters for, you know, for your success. And it's crazy because when you make the decision not to do it, it didn't really affect you right then. If you make the decision to do it, it doesn't affect you make decision not to do it. So it's so insignificant in the moment, right? But the moment is all you have. You don't have the past. You don't have the future. You don't have any of that. All that is so far away out of your reach. All you have is this moment right here. Yeah. To take advantage of and do the things that you know are going to add up to be massive. And that's all it's been, man, is just my whole life is basically a slight edge. You know, yeah, I remember when I when I was talking to Ryan Panetta that also kind of kicked up my desire to really start going all in on, on the filming and stuff. You got to be willing to do it for a year and just not really care what comes from it. Like if you're not willing to just put your head down, start post consistently and pick your head up in six months, don't even start. Don't even don't even because if you do that one day of posting a video and then you just kind of fall off, it's like same thing like eating the cheeseburger. You can do it and no one's going to, it's not going to move the needle at all. Yeah. No, Alex Ramosy, he said that when he, when he decided to do YouTube and he had his YouTube guy, you know, that was going to edit and you know, whatever, consult him and stuff. He basically committed to a decade, like let's do this for a decade and then we'll kind of see what happens out of this. And that's really the way you have to be with anything, you know, it's almost like you need to commit to, like this is your new life. So many people go into stuff with these expectations and you know, when it doesn't look achievable after like three months, they give up. It's like you haven't even begun the journey yet. You haven't even started yet. Speaking of Jeff Olson, he did a study in his company and with his sales guys and all kinds of different partners and stuff. And the study was pretty remarkable. And what it said was, is that whatever goal you want to achieve, we'll say you want to, you know, let's just say, for example, you want to make a million dollars a year within five years, we'll say, right? He said that halfway through to your goal, you'll be about 18% there. Halfway through 50%. So like in that instance, to make a million dollars in five years, two and a half years in, you're making 180,000 a year. That's a really good way to look at it. You're making 180,000 a year and it like escalates because it's the compounding of your efforts, right? And it's a curve, right? That's the slide edge is it's like this and then it's a curve that that slopes up. And it was funny because, you know, as I was interviewing him, you know, we hung out for a while and I interviewed him and I'm going to be on his podcast in a couple of weeks. And I said, that's funny because I've been at YouTube for like seven years, you know, I just hit 100,000 subscribers. He's like, well, where were you three and a half years in? I was like 19,000. It was literally, it was literally 18%, right halfway there, you know, it just goes to show you. So like in the beginning of anything that you do, you don't see a lot of movement. There's not a lot of like success, a lot of results. And that's what, that's what crushes people is because they can't see it. It's not tangible to them. So they start to doubt the process and they start to back up and say, let me reevaluate, let me go try something else. Yeah. When all the time this, this was working. Yeah, you got to start the curve over. You don't even realize how much you're crushing it. Yeah. A lot of these people that quit like quit real estate and quit social and all this stuff, they're actually killing it. They don't even know it because they're comparing themselves to other people who've been doing it for 10 years. They're on month three and they're comparing their self to somebody who's been doing it for five or 10 years. That's not even apples to apples. That's not even oranges to apple. That's nothing, right? So yeah, I mean, in today's world, all this instant gratification and stuff, comparing yourself to other people, worried about what other people think, you got to let that go. And it's harder and harder and harder to do because of the way the internet is. We see everything. Yeah. And so it's really hard to do and I get it. But if anything, you just got to understand what I'm saying about how long this stuff really takes and use the other people not as a crutch to say, oh, I'm not killing it or I'm not succeeding, but almost inspiration to keep going. This is where I could be if I don't stop. So yeah, I mean, it's a wild, it's like, it is like the wild, wild West. It really is. I mean, it's just like a free-for-all. You're just going after it and posting and door knocking and just pick your head up after a while and you're like, oh, before Facebook changed their ads and stuff. It was the wild, wild West. You could literally create an audience of anything you wanted. Now it's so regulated because of the regulations and everything. When they started to, everything started to end up in court and before the Supreme Court and stuff like that. But you could literally do anything you wanted to do. That's like in Canada, there's a lot of cold calling laws that are really strict. You get fined. You got to be careful with certain things up there, not like here. And my thoughts are that the way things are going will eventually get there where there actually are. Right now, like the DNC and all this stuff, it's almost non-existent and the lawyers use it to go after Keller Williams that paid out a $40 million settlement on DNC stuff. EXP paid out a big settlement. There have been brokerages. I don't know if Remax did, but it's like those lawsuits with the commissions. They're going after the big guys that can pay out tens of millions of dollars. It's just a paycheck for these guys and they manipulate the situation to line up with what their class action agenda is to make these big payouts and good for them. But I think eventually what will happen, the same thing that's going to happen with the buyer agent commission, like there's going to be some big changes with that because of all this. And honestly, I think that's going to bring it back more to the Wild Wild West because before we had the cooperative compensation rule and you had to offer buyer agent commission to put your property in MLS, it was the Wild Wild West because buyers had to pay their own fee basically and so they were having to go directly to the listing agent most of the time who's looking out for the seller. And there's a lot of weird stuff that goes on when you have those kind of circumstances where the buyer's not represented. And we're reverting back to that. It's getting there. That's like the direction we're going in that I feel like we'll get there. Who knows if it actually happens or not. This is a weird year. We've got an election year. There's no telling how everything's going to play out. And a lot of people kind of freak out about the buyer agent commission disappearing. It's not going to disappear. I mean, the thing is, and a lot of people are like, I'm going to go be a listing agent now because of all this. It's like, yeah, you should anyway. Yeah, you should be doing that from inception. You should be anyway. But wait a minute. The thing is, is in the future, if things go the way that the general public doesn't, they want, but they don't know they don't want. They don't want that. But that's what they want. That's what they say they want now. If it goes that direction, every single buyer that you show to is going to have signed a contract and to pay you and if not already have paid you through a retainer. You're only going to show property if you've been paid or you know that you're going to get paid to show that property. Right now, you take every buyer that comes across your desk, you work for them for free, hoping that they buy something and you get paid out of the sales price. That's not going to be the case in the future. Buyers are going to sign a contract just like a seller does to list a property that says they're going to pay you. So I may start teaching on being a buyer. That sounds good to me. Let me get paid to show properties. It's going to be great. And if the buyer doesn't move forward with that, if they want to go directly to the listing agent, great. Go do that. I don't have to show property now. I can spend my time with something that's making money. Yeah. I recently, not super recently, over the past couple of years, I now only show property with a buyer broker agreement. If you want to go look at a house, I will not go unless you are signed under by a broker agreement because every agent that's watching this has been burned. They've showed 10 houses and then got sidestepped. Another agent represented them. Their friend was an agent and they felt bad for whatever you got used for the showing. So I don't think that's as horrible as a thing as people are making it out to be. No, no. For me, it's going to be, my opinion for the industry is it's going to be fine. I don't think it's going to really change a whole lot of anything. Well, I think what will happen is, I think the big change that's going to happen is going to be, they're going to remove that field from MLS. That's what I think is going to happen. There's not going to be a place to put, this is how much we're paying the buyer agent. It's just not going to exist. They're going to erase that field. And so that will be a big change. Right? So there will be some big changes. There will be a lot of differences in the way we operate and everything. And I think it'll scare a lot of agents out of the business. I think it will affect agents that are not confident in pitching their skill set. Yeah. I mean, you're going to have to sit down with a buyer the way that you sit down with a seller now. A lot of reason why agents don't do listings because they're scared to have that conversation. Why don't know? Why are you a real estate agent? You know, I mean, your job is to sit down, learn what people want to do, consult them, sign a contract to work with you and execute and give them great service. But the way the industry has went over the last 30, 40 years has been a direction where we don't have to do that, especially for buyers. We can just take them. Put them in a car and go waste your time. Yeah. It has breeded this generation of agents who don't have to have those conversations, don't have to sit down and consult and explain contract and have somebody sign it. So it's created this breed of agents that, frankly, kind of weak. Yeah. So I think that that group of agents will either say, this is too hard, this is scary, this is whatever and leave the business, or they'll develop the skills they need to to go out there and help people buy and sell real estate. Yeah. I guess nuts. It's so funny because every time I bring up a buyer broker's agreement to a buyer, they've never heard of it before. They've never in their life been asked to sell one. Yeah. And I just kindly explained to them that I have a business that I run. This is how I operate. I need to ensure that our relationship is exclusive. Well, it's good because it explains, because a lot of buyers, an agent will show them property and then they'll go have another agent show them other houses. 10 other houses, yeah. Or they'll go straight to a builder or whatever. And it wasn't because they were trying to screw the original agent over. It's literally because they didn't know. They didn't know they were screwed out. They didn't even realize what the process really is. They had no idea. And so I think it's a good thing. There's going to be more transparency around exactly what the process is. I think the consumers are going to be more well educated. Yeah. I think the downfall is going to be the buyers who either don't want to or refuse to pay for representation who go out and go directly to the listing agent and don't have any representation. And now they're up against somebody who's a seasoned pro looking out for the other guy, looking out for the seller. I don't think that's a good thing. But it's their choice. As a listing agent in that scenario, in that world, if that world comes true, when a buyer comes to me directly as the listing agent, I'm like, listen, I suggest advising you to go get your own representation because I can write the contract for you. And it's going to cost you this much if I do that. I'm going to charge you a flat fee or something. But if I'm writing the contract for you, I'm charging you a fee for that. Yeah. Number one, number two, I'm only looking out for the seller. Just so you know, I'm going to be trying to get my guy the highest price. I'm not looking out for you just so you know. Right. If you want to move forward with that scenario or you pay me X to write the contract, knowing that I'm going to try to be getting the highest price, sign here that I went over all this with you and I'll write the contract and we'll get the deal worked out. Yeah. It's always a really weird dance. Like I represent both on a good number of properties. And if you're not working with someone who has a lot of experience doing that specifically, it really is a dance. You got to be able to take your hat off, stand over here, talk to this guy, lower your guard, be transparent, put your hat back on, go back over here. And if you're working with someone that hasn't done that a bunch of times, that isn't necessarily good at it, you're going to get burned. It's very, very easy. You mean if a buyer works with an agent who has not real experience working both sides? Yeah, like if someone that hasn't been in the business for a long time that is strictly looking to pop the biggest money they can, you can get hurt in that situation for sure. Thank you, sir. Oh, yeah. No, absolutely. That's why I say like it's going to be a little bit of a mess in the beginning. The fact is that or this is why I think it would play out. You know, if they said, okay, here's we're drawing the line in the sand, no more buyer agent commission on MLS. I think in that moment, because buyers are so used to the way it is now, I think at that time, I think you'll still have about 20% or so of buyers who pay for their own representation. So I think you're going to have 80% initially who don't want to, they're like, I'll go straight to the listing agent. I don't need representation. The buyer agent isn't doing anything for me anyway. I find all my homes on Zillow. I don't need an agent. And so 80% says I'll go represent myself basically. It's the same thing as saying I'm going to go into the court of law without a law. I'm going to represent myself. It's exactly the same. And so 80% I think, I think this is my theory that 80% will go out and try to represent theirself. And I think after about five years, I think every year we'll see a bigger percentage of buyers who do pay for representation because because those because we're going to see buyer, we're going to see all kinds of problems happen. Buyers are going to go out there and realize, wait a minute, I do there's all this stuff I didn't know about that I need somebody on my side representing my best interest. And so I think it's going to reverse and it's going to go to 80% of buyers pay for the representation over time, right? Initially the shock, it's like, I don't need a buyer agent, but over time three, four, five, six, seven, eight years, I think it'll slowly the pendulum will actually swing over to our 80%. And so that's going to be that's going to be the big moment for, for I think agents leaving the business too, because that initial shock of whoa, 80% of buyers, basically that buyer agent commission is gone and the 20% that's there, we got to ask for it. Yeah. And so they're going to be freaked out. They're going to leave the business. And then over time, the agents that are actually agents who understand the process and how to go out there and speak to consumers and, you know, negotiate contracts and, you know, explain agency and representation, they're going to crush. Yeah, it's going to be good for for it. What's going to happen is you're going to develop all this, this, this core group of client, of buyer clients who are happy to pay you for your, for your services. You know, you're just, you're going to build this list that your, your database of buyers who are willing to pay for representation and are loyal to you. I mean, then you just got buyers, you know, you got this group of buyers who are paying you to do this stuff, you got this group of sellers that are paying you to do this stuff. And it's, it's a different business than what it is today. But it is what it is. Yeah. That's the director we're going in. You got to adapt and you got to, you got to look at the new rules and say, okay, these are the new rules. Let me go out here and show them how to crush it. Yeah. I think also the amount of litigation that's going to happen during that initial five years where the agent commission gets cut out is going to skyrocket. I think so too. Yeah. I mean, I've heard that, you know, that the, that the buyers who feel like they got shunned who are going to want to retaliate in court. I think there's some truth to that. You know, I don't, I don't know how I'm not convinced that it's going to be like this huge ordeal. But it could be. Yeah. Yeah. I think something that really stuck out to me earlier is that I haven't been able to stop thinking about is how exponential things are. Like, I almost left the business altogether after being two years in. I started, I started like you, I started when I was 20 years old exactly. And I had a pretty bad mentor. And the first two, I think my first year in real estate, I might have made $20,000 to $30,000. Yeah, me too. I made $20,000 my first year. Yeah. And I was wash, I was managing a car collection for this A-list celebrity guy, basically just washing cars to pay my bills in between commission checks. Yeah. Year two comes, I find a good mentor, start making a little bit more money. I think it made maybe 50, 60 grand. And then you get to like year five. And I'm 25 years old, having never gone to college. And the growth without saying what the actual exact number is, it just happens so fast. So if you can stomach that first few years and put your head down and hit that curve, that's where the magic starts to happen. And I hate seeing people that are so personable to have so much skill, but just don't have that stomach to get through there because they're just losing out on so much. Yeah. They contemplate what to do. So they waste time thinking about what to do. Then they're scared to do it. So then they hide behind other things, so they don't have to do the things that actually move the needle. And then you'll see the agents that are literally crushing it. Like they built this database to 500 people. They've closed, let's just say like six, seven properties, really like building this foundation of something that could be a million dollar business. And they're just like, so discouraged, they quit. And you're right, it's stomaching it. Those emotional ups and downs, because again, expectations, people come on with these expectations that I'm in real estate. I'm my own boss. I make my own money. I set them on hours. This is skies the limit. This is crazy. This is a great opportunity. You know, they're just on fire when they come in. And then after a couple of weeks, they kind of like start to lose the fire and they start to realize, wait a minute, there's this mountain of knowledge I'll never learn in a day. And then after three months of really grinding their face off because they're so ambitious and they want it so bad and they just hit it with everything they got, but they don't sell anything. And it's their three months in with the night, even a sale on site. Then they start becoming disappointed, frustrated. And that's the point where a lot of people give up. But the future top producers, they take that moment and they say, okay, like this is harder than I thought. But Ricky did it. Shane did it. There's all these people that I look at and I'm like, there's no way that if they did it, I can't do it. It's harder than I thought. I don't care. I'm going to pick up the pieces and I'm going to get back on the horse. And what happens is, is they have this really high expectation, then they have this really low, low. Then when they get back on the horse, here's their expectations again. But it's not as high of expectations as the original one. And then they have another low, but it's not as low as that original low because they knew it was coming. That's interesting. That's very accurate. And so what happens is, there's these big swings, these big emotional swings. The first one is massive. And then the second one is not as massive, but it's there. And then the third one, and you get to where it levels out. And it takes a long time. It takes six months, 12 months, 18 months, 24 months to really get to handle your emotions behind the expectations and the ups and downs and all those unexpected twists and turns that happen. Losing deals is devastating to a new agent because it's like you work so hard. This is the moment. This is the deal. This is the one that's going to happen. And then it doesn't happen. And it's like somebody ripped the heart, your soul out of your body. And it's devastating. What's so funny about that is that every single agent, regardless of how successful they are now, I mean like Ryan Serhant, Joss Altman, Jordan Cohen, everybody, not a single one of them, didn't have the same exact path that I'm saying. So my message to agents is if you're frustrated, if you're disappointed, if you're going through this, good. It's the same path everybody else that's amazingly successful went through. So you must be on the right track if you're feeling these emotions. You're on the right track. Keep going. You're right around the corner from this exponential spike. Now you might be two or three years out from that spike. And when you're in that two or three years, it feels like eternity. But when you get there, it's here. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And I wish I could say that those undulations stop. But even when you get to becoming that top producer where you're making over a million dollars a year, it's still going to happen. So just get used to it. Because I just, I mean, I could say over the past two months, I've probably had $100,000 in deals just go like that. You get screwed, you get burned, things change. Well, you learn when to get excited about a deal. Over time, your experience helps you learn when to be excited about a deal and when to be disappointed and when not to be excited and when not to be disappointed. You get to where you see these big deals come in or maybe you have stuff under contract. But you know, because this happened before, this deal could fall through. In the beginning, you're counting your money. In the beginning, you got a commission. It's going to be $30,000. You already know what you're going to spend that money on before it closes. You already got that money spent. And, you know, five, 10 years in, you have something pending for 30Gs. You're like, okay, you're like, all right, we'll see if it goes through. You know what I'm saying? That's money. Yeah, I love what you said too. I remember when I first met with Jordan Cohen, maybe like three to four years into the business. And it was such a helpful... He's right here, right? He's in Westlake. We're in the same market. Mm-hmm. I sat down with him and I respect him a lot. He's done great in business. He's a great guy. Great dude. But I realized like, he's a normal guy like us. Very normal. When I sat down with him, I thought it was going to be this like crazy out-of-body experience and he was going to have all this very charismatic guy. No, he's a very humble guy. I realized sitting down with him like, this is just normal dude. I can do this. Very normal. I can do this. If this normal guy can do this, why would I not be able to? Direct mail. Yeah. He just does direct mail. Direct mail and relationships. Yeah, it's a massive relationship. That's all the marketing he does is these masterful direct mail pieces. Yeah. And he's just built these incredible relationships with some of the most incredible athletes and movie stars in the world. Dude's an absolute animal. I just love him. But you're right. He's just so down to earth. Just super cool. And he's the kind of guy like you can hang out with. You're like, I want to hang out with him. Some of these guys, you don't really want to hang out with. Every time I answer the phone, I'm like, Jordy, he's one of us. It's cool. Another thing that you said that has been kind of sticking out to me is that parabolic growth or whatever the curve is called. Slide edge, man. It's just exponential. Yeah. It's scary and it happens in levels and it doesn't ever stop happening throughout your life. Right now, I'm in the middle of basically this new kind of launch of wanting to become the largest real estate group in the United States. And I'm in the middle of hearing people say, oh, that's not going to happen. That's crazy. It's easily possible. It's so easy. It'll make you sick to do your stomach. It's so easy. The fundamentals of what you want to do is so simple. It's so easy to execute. The problem is actually executing it. Again, this is a 10-year commitment. It's a decade deal. And it's a full-time commitment. Running an organization is a full-time job. The problem people have with teams are they're a full-time real estate agent. And then they're like, oh, the next progression is build a team. Well, they had a full-time job as an agent helping people buy and sell real estate. And they don't realize that they're adding another full-time job to their day. Now they have two full-time jobs. They don't realize it, but most people think they could be a team leader just on the side or somehow just magically being a team leader just magically happens. I don't know what they think. I thought the same thing. I tried to do a team twice. And for me, I grind, but everything I do is more on a passive basis so that I can sleep at night. I don't like problems. I don't like situations. I don't like lawsuits. I don't like all the stuff that comes with building out a true team, true company, et cetera. But I've found ways to be part of organizations, make a lot of money and have equity in companies and organizations and stuff without actually being on the inside and dealing with all the negative aspects of having it, right? And that's what's cool about today's world is you can do that. You don't have to go out and build a company of 100 employees to make $20 million in today's world. You don't. But back to what I was saying, what you want to do is so simple, but you're going to have... But when you say it, it sounds so crazy, right? It sounds so ambitious. When other people on the outside looking in, they hear, oh, I want to do this nationwide team and this organization, this real estate group, people are just saying... Because you have to realize, man, 99% of people don't even realize what the opportunity is in today's world. I grew up in Alabama, but yet people know me all around the world now. And it's not like I have a million followers. I have a couple hundred thousand followers and literally building eight-figure, nine-figure businesses. It's crazy. And back in the day before the opportunity that's right in front of our faces in the palm of our hands, you couldn't do that. You could not do what I'm doing now 20 years ago, right? Even just 20 years ago, you could not do what I'm... I mean, I got in real estate in 2002. There was no Facebook. There was no social media at all. There was no Zillow. There was no auto dialers. There was no... It's insane the opportunity that's right there in front of us nowadays and 99% of people don't even know it. So when they hear something like this, they're stuck 20 years ago thinking that there's no way. They don't realize I could do one post and literally have enough agents to build your nationwide team. In a matter of 24 hours, I could have agents in every state lined up to apply to be on your team, right? People just don't... And then even when you say something like that, people don't believe that, right? Even though you could just be like, well, look, here it is. So the amount of haters in the world now is obnoxious and you just have to use it as inspiration. I tell people all the time, you know what your ambitions are. You know how hard you're going to work. You know how the story ends. You can't listen to other people. It's like I said, everybody always bets against me. But I know what I'm capable of. I know how hard I'm going to work. I know that I'm not going to quit. I know that I'm going to outlast you. I'm going to outwork you. I already know all this going in, right? I know that in five years, I'm going to look back and say, what happened to that guy that was talking smack? You know, like I'm still here crushing it and I accomplished everything I said I wasn't going to do. Where'd that guy go? See these guys that talk smack, they're not going to do anything. They're not going to achieve the stuff that we're going to achieve. You don't want to achieve anything, talk a smack about other people. And like you said, once you've done it three, four, five times and you've beat down what people thought was impossible, people still saw it smack man. At that point, you have even more haters. That's so true. The bigger you get, the more you got. It never goes away and you just accumulate new haters and new ones and new ones and new ones. And the longer you do it, the more you have. And sometimes in the beginning stages, it bothers you a little bit. And then you become numb to it. It's stages, right? You've got to bother some stage. You become a little numb to it and then you get to where you laugh at it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you realize what it is. And without with building the team and bringing on like a full-time social media manager, what I didn't understand before I went like kind of full-time with social media and starting to build out the framework is that you are exactly right. It's literally, I have two other full-time jobs now. I have my sales business. I have social media and I have building out the framework for the team. My workload tripled in the matter of three weeks. Right. And it's just day in, day out working through exhaustion and working through doubt and just continue to move the needle. And most people don't have the infrastructure you have. And so, you know, they're just like a single agent with an assistant. I'm going to build a team. So they start bringing on agents, all right, thinking that's going to like escalate their business or make it to work in scale and stuff like that. And it becomes a thing where they have more expenses and less time to do stuff. And so what happens is they spend time building the team. And it takes time to build up a team to where it's profitable. And then it takes time away from their business, their sales, right? So now they're losing money on their sales because they're spending time on a business that's losing money. Yeah. Right. This is like this thing. It's very hard to manage. It's very tough and people don't realize it going in, kind of what it is, what it actually is in reality. You know, and that's kind of the problem with it. And we talked about this. The other part of the problem is attrition. Agents that come in, they're coming into the team because they want to learn what they have to learn to go do it on their own. Most people don't join a team saying, I want to be on the team forever and give up half my money forever. That's not what that's not their goal. Their goal is to learn what they can so that they can go out and be their own agent, you know, go out and do it on their own, be a great single agent, a mega single agent, number one in the market, maybe build their own team, whatever. But the teams, you know, that's the agent's goal, right? It's to learn and leave. The team's goal is to retain them forever. So the team's goal for the agent and the agent's goal for the agent is not the same. 99% of the time, which creates that. That's where this whole thing breaks down is that there's two different goals happening here. And we're not on the same page. There's really not a whole lot of transparency behind it. And, you know, it kind of ends ugly. And so the team creates, you know, this is traditional. This is just the general teams creates the situation where this agent becomes dependent on the team for admin, marketing and Legion, right? They don't, they don't teach them how to Legion. They don't teach them how to do marketing to get the leads or to market or build brand. And they don't teach them how to write contracts and stuff. They take care of all that for them. They give them all the shit leads, hoping that they call a bunch, sell a bunch, you know, show a bunch of property and sell some stuff so that the team makes revenue. And so, so the agent came there to learn how to be their own agent, but they're not learning anything because they're not learning how to write contracts, do marketing or get leads. Okay. Yeah, they're learning some sales skills on the phone. Yeah, they're learning how to go shop property and stuff like that. But that's such a small part of what you got to know to go be your own agent. So when they leave the team a year or two down the line, they're really starting from where they were two years ago, pretty much to learn the stuff. And then the team makes them feel like shit for leaving the team. Can't believe you're going to leave after all I've done for you and all this stuff. It's a really wild situation that I see out there. So I think if teams kind of more so went to a model where it was designed to teach the agents what they needed to do to go on with their own if they want to stay at the team forever if you want, or I'll teach you everything and if you want to leave, great. My model is set up where I retain you either way and then the ones that stay forever because there are those that want to stay forever, they're comfortable, they're satisfied, they're not ambitious. They want that cushion of all the stuff that you provide and they just want to go show some properties and make a hundred thousand a year. Awesome. But I think if teams would go more towards that route and have a model that wins either way, regardless of what the agent does. That's why I never liked, I was never on a team. I just went, I was just an agent. I just want to go be a real estate agent. I don't want to be a buyer agent. I want to show property. I don't want to give people half my money. I just want to go be a real estate agent. And so I just went and I just became a real estate agent day one and just learned everything. So I was never on a team and I didn't never did a team because I was like, I don't want to take 50% of somebody's money. I didn't feel right doing that, number one. And number two, I didn't want to be in that position where I'm making somebody dependent on me. I'm increasing my expenses. I'm taking time away from my business. Like it didn't make sense to me at all, the whole thing. Now, there's these guys that have built these massive teams and they built them to a point where they can sell that asset as a team. God bless them for doing that. The process that they went through and all the hell that they went through to build the team up to that point. They got more Spain and down in the southeast. He did like 8,000 transactions a couple years ago. They're an expansion team in a bunch of different states and stuff. And it's kind of like they have this brokerage within a brokerage kind of thing. They're basically running their own entire company. And God bless them for that. I think 99% of agents who do a team aren't at that compact. They don't even know why they're starting a team. They're just like, I got an agent so I can make more money. It's like, you're going to lose money and time. 100%. Yeah, everything you said aligns exactly with the team structure that I see making sense. What we aim to do is to train people to become the top listing agents in their market and give them that ability to go out and close instead of feeding them really shitty leads, making them dependent. And then within the model that we're discussing, if they take their training after year and they go out on their own, God bless them like you said. It's like you still make a piece and everyone's happy and not taking 50%. I think it's a big piece charging people 20%, 30% for that hands-on in-person or online coaching to help build them into that person. I think you're right. That's really the only way I see the model making sense. I think it's cool because there have been a lot of brokerage models pop up to try to disrupt. And I think a team model that disrupts, I haven't seen one that really is set up. We're going to go nationwide. This is how we're going to do it. This is our value proposition around disrupting the team model. This is the value we're going to provide. This is how it's all going to lay out. I haven't really seen that. It may exist, but I think it's really cool that we can sit down and brainstorm some more on this. But coming up with something like a team model that's just disruptive. Completely disruptive. People don't understand it. On a team model perspective, not the brokerage, but a team model perspective, I think it really crush. Thanks, dude. I literally just lose sleep over it because I came up with this concept and it connects so well within my brain and the framework of everything that I've been able to make happen so far in my career that I'm like, you know what, let's just let's just do the Ricky special and go all in on it. Yeah. So for me, it was like, I'm going to be the best agent ever. And then in 2017, I'm like, okay, let me crush social media and become one of the top coaches, I guess is what I would kind of classify myself as. Now, which I crushed, now I'm kind of like, okay, what's the next thing I want to zero in on? I bought three acres. I'm going to build 46 units. I'm going to raise 100% funds to do it down on the beach and Gulf Shores. Maybe developer Ricky is the next transformation. I could see that. I would love to see that. It's going to happen. I'm going to build the units and everything. I just don't know where it's going to go from there. But I'm excited to see and kind of what the next chapter is for me. Do you flip houses? Yeah. We buy them on the courthouse. We fix them and flip them. I don't love it. I don't even like it because you take the money that you make and you pay taxes on it and I'm not crazy about it. We've done about 150 flips in, I don't know, four or five years. If we would have kept the best 30, oh my God, dude, we would be so much wealthier and have so much cash flow. It'd be ridiculous, but we didn't. We flipped them all. That's what two other partners and one of them really loves to flip. That's his thing. I just don't want to run the relationship with those guys because we do so much stuff together. But I buy a lot of stuff and hold. I kind of do that on my own and that's what I love because I've made so much money. I'm like, I would buy something that's cash flow in 200 bucks a month. But that property has made me like 400 grand in equity and now it's cash flow in like $2,000 a month. So like rent goes up, values of property go up. It's such a hedge against inflation. It's not even funny. I just made an Instagram story about that literally 12 hours ago, right before you got here, is how putting your money into real estate is just your dollars. Real estate is not really going up. Your dollars are just going down in value. I mean, even in a real estate, just increased in value at the rate of inflation, it would be great. Great. But it doesn't. It goes up higher than inflation and rent. Rent continues to increase. So a lot of people down buying and holding and 200 bucks a month isn't going to change your life. Well, if I flipped it for 40 Gs, I'm paying 20 in taxes and that 20 grand didn't change my life either. However, if I keep it for 10 years and I make 400 K on equity and at that point, I'm making 2000 a month instead of 200 because I've paid some mortgage down, I've done this, rents went up, et cetera, et cetera. Now 2000 a month and 400 K, now that does change my life. I've done that for countless properties. And so it's, I guess, one reason I love buying and holding is because the experience I've had buying and holding has maybe so much more money and it just continues to just pour money into my bank account every month. I'm like, you know, and I've flipped so many houses and when I compare the two, I've made a lot more money. Let's put it this way. I've bought maybe like not even half, probably like 30% maybe of the houses I've flipped. I've bought and held. So about 30% of the same number of houses I've flipped, I've bought and held. But I've made God, I don't know, 30, 40 times more money on a third of the properties that I flipped as I did on the properties I flipped. It's crazy. So again, it's the slight edge, right? It's that curve. The first couple years, you don't make a lot. But then after, and they hit that curve and boom, now it's just like you're in the money. And the only reason I have any kind of a net worth at all is from the properties that I held. The flips, you spend the fucking money somehow. It evaporates and then that passive cash flow, that's the only way that I'm able to eat a lease payment like this or to have some amount of stability in my business. So for anybody that's watching this, if you are flipping or you're real estate agent, you're earning commissions. Awesome, right? I mean, if flipping is your main income source, just like making real estate. To me, real estate agent, being an agent, it's almost like being a flipper. You're taking a property, you're taking a property, you're putting a contract on it. And then when it sells, you make money. It's basically the same thing. And you're paying taxes on the money. So if you're doing that as an agent or a flipper or a wholesaler, God bless you. Keep doing it. Stack that bank. Do your thing. But use it as a catalyst. Know what the end goal is though. Use it as a catalyst to make enough money to buy and hold some of these properties to actually build your worth. Ricky is a smart man, guys. Please listen to what he's saying. It's very powerful. Ricky, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. You are well to knowledge. Thanks again. Thanks, bro. Thanks for having me, man. Of course.