 Hey are you working your face off to try to grow your business and you just can't seem to get any momentum? I'm gonna tell you in this video why I believe that referrals could be killing your growth. What's up everybody? Ricky Kruth here. Welcome back to my channel. So today I want to give you some real power thoughts on how to really grow your business and a different way to think about how you need to be growing your business and what you need to be doing on a day to day basis. Before getting into that I do want to let you know that I've been booking events to speak at all over the country. I've got Miami coming up, Orlando, Charlotte, North Carolina. I'm going to be in Vegas and Birmingham as well. So I'm really looking forward to seeing all you guys. I'm going to have links in the description here for all those events. And if you want to see me at your next event, wherever that may be, just shoot me a message or reach out to me and let me know how we can put it together. So just to give you a little backstory on me, I started selling real estate in 2002. I was 20 years old. I made a million dollars. I lost it all in the crash. I came back. Now I'm selling over 100 properties a year as a single real estate agent. I've been doing that since 2014. So I really have figured out exactly what the perfect balance and ingredients and recipe is to a healthy business that grows consistently year over year. The reason that I believe that referrals may be killing your growth is because I've seen this over and over and over again. I've seen it in my business. I've seen it in other agents businesses. I will watch a salesperson grow their business. Okay, they'll grow it over a couple of years. They'll put a lot of work in. They'll do a lot of prospecting. They'll really, really work and try to get it done and grow a business. Then they get to a certain point in their business. Maybe it's 50,000 a year, 100,000 a year, 250,000 a year. Wherever that point is, I feel like most salespeople will get to that point and then they become so busy with the day to day and they feel like they have so many clients. So they quit doing the prospecting. They quit putting the work in to find new business and they solely concentrate on their past clients and referrals, referrals of referrals, which by the way are very important. You have to have that ingredient to grow as well. But the problem is this, you cannot grow your business just off referrals. Referrals only maintain your business. So if you get to 100,000, if you get to 250, wherever that number is that you get to and then you quit trying to grow your business through new clientele, then you're going to get to a point where your business will plateau. So I've seen this time and time and time again. People get their business up to a certain point. They quit working as a new salesperson trying to get that new business off the ground and going and get the momentum that they need and then they start just relying on their referrals and past clients. They're still working a lot. They're still handling those past client's referrals and helping those people do deals and they're really doing well because 250 is a really good living. 100 could be a good living for you, whatever the case may be, but they're not growing anymore. And that's where the philosophy that I've come up with is going to help you. You have to have a balance between new clients and old clients. You have to have the old clients because that's how you build the snowball of your business that continues to get bigger and bigger and bigger every year. That is where you see the year over year and growth. But if you quit pouring the new leads into that snowball, the snowball will just basically stop right in its tracks and it will stay the same size forever. If nothing else, it will start to melt and become smaller. You have to continue pouring new clientele into your snowball to keep the momentum going and let that snowball grow bigger and bigger and bigger. On the other side, you can't only do new clients and forget about your past clients. Then your business becomes a revolving door where new clients come in, either they want to buy or they don't. They buy, you do a deal. Either way, they're out the other side and you never hear from them again. You never talk to them again. You don't stay in touch. You don't have a system in place to follow up and to stay connected to that person forever. This is a huge mistake too. And this is where my weekly email comes into effect. When new clients come in, I can help them if they want to do a deal. If not, either way it goes. When they go through to the other side, my weekly email acts as a net that catches everybody. It catches everybody and keeps them close to me. This is the way I've built my business. The new clients come in and then I have the weekly email that serves as a net to catch everybody on the other side. Do some people get through the net? Is there a hole here and there? Does every single client fit in that net? No. There's some people that do come out the other side. I do lose some people, but it's a really good mechanism that captures most people. That's what I want. I want to be most effective. I have a really good balance in my business. I'm really diversified between new clients and old clients. Now, when I'm doing my weekly email, that gives me an opportunity to spend about a half hour to an hour a week on that weekly email to take care of all my past clients where I could spend most of my time going after a new clientele. That's how you grow the business. Have something in place to stay in touch with all the past clients so you can capture those referrals, those repeat business, those referrals over referrals and still maintain time to go after the new clients. This is crucial. What I don't want to see is I don't want to see you guys just relying on your referrals and your past clients and thinking that that's going to grow your business because it's not. At the same time, I don't want to see you only prospecting and you have no mechanism, no net on the back end to catch all these clients as they're passing through your business. These are the two problems. You've got agents who only deal with new clients. They have nothing in place to catch everybody in the back end or they only deal with everybody in the back end. They quit going after the new clients and either way it goes, your business is not going to grow. What I want to see is I want to see you diversify your time between both old and new clients. I want to see you put your weekly schedule in place and I want to see you time block to fit both the old clients and the new clients within your schedule. I want to see you do this every week. I want to see pieces of this every day. I want this to be in your monthly plan, your yearly plan, your five-year plan, your 10-year plan. Referrals are like little bonuses in your business. You don't see them coming and all of a sudden, boom, there they are. It's like, yes, that's what I've been working for. That's what I love is whenever a client trusted me enough to send me a referral, they enjoyed the experience they had with me and they thought enough about me to send me somebody, their friend or family member. That means the world to me whenever that happens. So it really means a lot. I want to treat that person as if they are the same person that sent them to me, which is an extended part of my family. Every past client, every referral, every new client is an extended family member to me and I'm going to treat them as so. I hope this video helps you understand the balance that you need to have in your business between the old and new clients and it helps you put a plan in place to start executing against that. If you have any questions about anything whatsoever, shoot me a comment below this video or message me on Instagram or Facebook or shoot me an email. We'll talk to you soon.