 2022 is right around the corner. What do people need to be focused on right now? If you had to say there's one thing for somebody to focus on their business right now to prepare for 2022, what would your advice be? Number one, Matt, let's refrain from using the verbiage that we're in Q4, because we're actually in Q1 2022 right this second. You know, August 31st or August 1st or whatever you want to say. Like that should be a real estate agent's January 1st, okay? You should have new years. You should be doing like celebration, counting down to midnight and drinking some champagne and stuff, and the next day, you need to have that same feeling that you have January 1st. You should have two new years. It should be August 1st and January 1st, because this is a lag business. So the seeds that you're planting today are not going to come to fruition for a good three months at the earliest, right? Sometimes it's not, it's six months, year two, three, four, five years, but let's just go with short-term business. The short-term seeds that you're going to plant aren't going to come to fruition for at least three months or so. And so the thing is, is every single year, the reason how I stair-stepped my income every year was taking that fourth quarter and really making it my first quarter, right? That's how I've continued year over year to take advantage of that slow time in the market when most agents are just chilling, right? Already hit my goals. I'm just going to hang out for the rest of the year and start fresh in January. It's absolutely backwards from where you need to be thinking if, Tyler, if in fact you want to be a top producer. Some agents don't necessarily have the ambitions, to be honest with you, to be a $500,000 a year agent, a million dollar a year agent. They're happy with 100, 150, 200. And for those agents, I'm not talking to you. Keep making your 200,000 and more power to you. There's nothing wrong with that. What I'm saying is, is if you're at 200 and you're wondering why you keep hitting 200 every year, it's because you're calling the fourth quarter, the fourth quarter. Stop doing it. The punchline. Closings happen every single day by the truckloads. And so the fact is, is that as the market overall slows down with less transactions, let's say that we're at 100% capacity this past summer in terms of number of transactions, going into the, you know, the cool down of the market, plus the seasonal changes that we normally have. Let's say we reduce that down to say, let's say we come down 20, 30% number of transactions. That 70% that's left, that 70% that's left is still plenty for you to go out and close as many as you want. As many as you want, right? You shouldn't have a slowdown in your business because the overall market slows down because it gives you that allure that, that, oh, the market did this and so my business is gonna do that. But what you don't understand is that the markets way up here and your little old business is a little microscopic piece of sand in the ocean of the market right here at the bottom that is not affected by the waves, right? Do you think a piece of sand 30 miles out in the ocean is affected by the little one to two foot waves, you know, 100 feet in the air in the water? Absolutely not. Does it move around a little bit with the tide? Sure, gets a little, you know, might do a little bit of this but it's not gonna do any of this, right? And so you gotta think of yourself as a piece of sand, Tyler, all right? These real estate agents are just pieces of sand and the ocean is the market and you just sit down there on the bottom and what you need to be doing is closing as many deals as you want at all times and let's take this notion that the market has anything to do with how many closings we have off the table. Now what does that do when you think like that? You're gonna have fluctuations to closings just because that's mother nature, you can't stop that. But what does it do? It puts you light years ahead of your so-called competition that doesn't exist. It puts you light years ahead of all the other agents. Because let's face it, we've had some scary moments in the market, right? We had 2008, we had pandemics, we had dot-com crashes, we had 9-11s. Did that stop the motherly nature of real estate closings happening? We couldn't even have human-to-human contact. Human-to-human contact. We could be nowhere close to another human, but somehow miraculously, we have 80% of the same amount of closings happened during the 45-day complete economic shutdown last year and one of the scariest moments in the last 100 years. Miraculously, title companies and mortgage companies and buyers and sellers figured out a way. Why? Because you can't stop it. Now, what's so crazy is not only 80% of the same amount of closings, it was 80% of the same amount of pending deals were happening, right? So it's, again, simple math. Go to your MLS, go to your county records, go back as far in history as you could possibly go and find me a day where there's no closings and take the number of closings, multiply them times two, because there's a buyer and a seller for every single closing and so that represents two opportunities. For each closing, there's two. So multiply the amount of closings by two and that's how many opportunities happen in your market that day. And it's not opportunities of a maybe closing. Those were actual closed deals. That's not counting the ones that fell through or the possible listings or the expires. Those are the ones that went through. So when you look forward at the market and you see all the scary moments that we've been through, where closings never stopped and we're just a little piece of sand on the bottom of the ocean, you realize how much of an abyss that we're actually sitting in and how incredibly we've, agents have hit the all-time jackpot becoming a real estate agent. Job security forever, right? In an industry that is so massive, you can't even fathom. It's just unfathomable of how massive it is. So when you wrap your mind around all of that, okay, and you put that in a box over here and say, okay, Ricky, we get it. It's massively abundant forever and there's nothing we can do to change that and there's as much business as I want and my little old business compared to the rest of the market for as long as I want. We get that. Now, how do we have all these closings? What do we do to put the wheels in motion to actually close the deals? That is, again, very simple. You know, and I've asked hundreds of thousands of agents through in-person events and online, Zoom calls on YouTubes on everything, right? Give me a system better than picking the exact property owner that you want to do business with, getting their information for two cents, calling them not to sell them just to make friends followed by a weekly email on the same day that we forever, okay? And you accumulate five new friends a day for four years. You got 5,000 people. You, my friend, at that point are the number one agent in your market, all right? And no one can tell me anything better. So when you break the math all the way down, okay? Two cents for their contact info, 10% pickup rate, which equates to 20 cents per contact. One out of two is gonna be a great conversation that you collect their data. We're at 40 cents for a great conversation with a future client who owns the exact property that you want to represent them buying and selling for the rest of their life. Would you rather have a great conversation for 40 cents a piece, followed by a weekly email on the same day of the week forever, sprinkle some social media in there? What I mean, would you rather do that and focus on that and accumulate that and scale that and build that? Or do you wanna spend $20 per lead up to $100 or $200 on Zillow? Whereas you get a random person in your market for a million times more money. And then what do you have to do? As soon as you get the lead, call them. I said it in Dallas, it's astounding to me the amount of agents listening right now who try to avoid making calls by spending thousands of dollars on leads just to turn right around and call them. It's scary is what it is. It's like, why can't you see, right? Why can't you see the work around here that it all comes back to a conversation anyway? Why not just get all the contact information of the people you wanna do business with right now for the cheapest dollar and go ahead and call them and have the conversations? It's just, it's mind blowing to me when people hear this and they still decide to go get Facebook leads or Zillow leads even doing open houses or even door knocking makes no sense once you understand the power of instant data, automatic dialing. Here's a punchline for real estate agents, right? And this is the future of sales, okay? We're not in the sales business. We're not in the sales business, okay? The reason why I've helped so many, sold so much property is because I just help people do what they're already doing. Again, closings are happening every day by the truckloads. So you don't have to get people to do stuff that they're already doing left and right. We're not in the sales industry. We're in a service industry. It's not sales, it's service. We're servicing their needs. They come to us, they wanna buy or sell something. We help them through that process. We cold call them or we find them or we end up talking to them somehow and they're interested in doing something. We are servicing them through that process. We help them and three years later they wanna sell what we sold them and buy an upgrade or they refer someone to us. Those clients come to us and say, hey, Ricky, I wanna do this. I say, great, here's what we need to do. And now I'm servicing them. And so for me, this isn't sales, right? This isn't sales. We're not even selling ourself out here. We're just being good people and we're servicing the public. You need to thank yourself as a volunteer worker. You need to thank yourself as a community worker and do an outreach to the community to see what we can do to use our services as a real estate agent to help people. Obviously they need it. You look at MLS and you see all the closings happening where they're being represented by real estate agents. Obviously they need our help and our service. So every day that you're not making calls you're doing not only yourself and your family but you're doing the community a massive disservice by not upholding to your responsibility as a real estate agent to help as many people as you can that are out there that need your help buying and selling real estate. The rate turnover and where is the best area to prospect? So what she's trying to ask here is how do I find areas where properties are moving? I don't want a stagnant neighborhood. How do I find areas that are moving quickly and target those areas to prospect? Let me help you Dolores, all right? Quit worrying about that. Just complete, listen, a stagnant neighborhood is a great neighborhood. Why? Because we're going to get in there and we're going to say, Mr. Seller, how are you doing? Cool me too, I'm enjoying the days and the gorgeous. Look, I don't want to take up too much of your time but nothing's sold in your neighborhood in like three and a half years. I was just calling to see how you're doing and see if there's anything I could do to help you, right? It gives you a reason to call them. Whatever the situation is in a neighborhood, okay? That's your reason to call them, to let them know, to bring them value. We're wanting to bring value, market value. Maybe there's nothing sold for, you know, eight months and now there's one just hit the market. Hey, listen, I won't take it too much of your time but you probably know that nothing's sold in here for eight months but I want to let you know one did just hit the market. Is there anything I can do to help you today? Right, so that's the first thing. Number two, how do you pick a subdivision? What you want to do is you want to pick a subdivision, right? Especially if you're newer or you're trying to build your business. You want to pick a subdivision that's close to you geographically, okay? That's eating into the efficiency of what you're doing that you're not on the road, you know, like why would you purposely pick subdivisions that are farther away, you know, and spend more time on the road? It doesn't make any sense, right? So let's think efficiency. Let's pick geographically close subdivisions and we want to pick subdivisions that are close to the average price point of the market. Why do we want to do that? Well, because that's going to be your best bang for your buck. That's going to be your best dollar per hour, okay? So when you think about average price point of the market, those are the properties that are going to sell for the most money in the least amount of time. That's where you want to live.