 And so the lower you go, it's harder to build trust. That's like your choice here. Why are you going to go that route? Ladies and gentlemen, make some noise for Ricky! Garoo! He is an investor, a speaker, and soon to be remembered, in my opinion, as a legend in the industry. The cool thing about what he was doing was he was documenting everything. Like, he would post his calls, his work he was putting in, the strategies he was sharing, everything. People are like, did you even have a life? Yeah, because I understood leverage and efficiency. My point is, is it's all the same exact people. So most agents, they do this marketing stuff, and they drag out the process of having the conversations. I don't care if they click on it or not. I'm just trying to force them to see me as they're trying to look at friends and family to where when I call them, I'm like, hi, I'm Ricky from Facebook, the real estate agent. How are you today? There's different hierarchies of communication and the higher you go, the easier it is to build trust. All right, Ricky Karuth in the house. He has been on the Real Estate Rockstars podcast, not once, not twice, but three times already. Back in the day with Pat Hybin, the OG-est of the OGs. And almost exactly a year ago, he was on with Aaron Amuchastighi, the current owner of the show. And now, me. And I'm so stoked. And actually, Ricky, I didn't tell you this beforehand, but my boy Justin Hosey is a big fan on the internet, on Instagram. He is out of Lake Gunnersville, Alabama. He also worked on The Oil Rig that literally the same company that you did. And he, Dianne Hybin, he was like Shelby, you have to get Ricky on the show. And so thank you so much for, by the way, it's his birthday today, Justin's birthday. So this is Justin's present and also mine. Welcome to Real Estate Rockstars. It was going out live on his birthday, you know? Dude, true. Although, yeah, I guess we can never mind. Anyway, happy belated birthday. Damn right. Okay, perfect. Okay, so Ricky, you have so much depth. You have been in the game for so long and you've gone from like falling to broke back to ballin. And so my first question for you is if you were starting over today, like from scratch, what would you do? Oh my God, yeah. I mean, it depends. Like, am I brand, brand new or am I starting over knowing a bunch of stuff? You, no. Okay, so you know what you know now, but you do not have the sphere, the network, the 257,000 followers on Instagram. Like you are trying to build your brand in your business from the ground up as a real estate agent. I think I would, I mean, there's so many things, man. I mean, it's like, and this is what's so hard about it, right? Because there's so much. And this is why so many people fell because it's just, it's a mountain of knowledge. And I was talking to an agent today, you know, and it's like, I think a lot of agents get intimidated by how, you know, huge of a task it is, huge of a mountain it is, you know, you're sitting there looking at what you need to accomplish, you know, climbing this big mountain and it's just monstrous. It's like really at the end of the day, it bulls down to this, right? Like if you could talk to every single property owner and just have that conversation to, you know, see if there's a possible friendship, what they're looking to do, try to become their friend, you know, for life, you know, and kind of try to build credibility that you're hardworking, honest, dependable, all those things. If you could have that conversation with every single property owner instantly, you know, like all at the same time, then it's like, boom, it's not that big of a mountain. But when you look at like, if you, you know, if your population's a million or 500,000 or 100,000 and you think about how many houses are there and you think about how many people you've got to talk to, because that's what all bulls down to, like talking to property owners, making friends with them and then remarketing to them forever, you know, if they're a weekly email, that's it. And it takes so long to build the momentum, right? Like 30, 60, 90 days to build the momentum. And if you let off the gas for even like a week or two, you lose all the momentum that you work so hard to build. And you gotta start all over again, you know? It's daunting, honestly. I wouldn't even wish like being a new agent on anyway. And like, if I'm scaring somebody, this is the thing though, this is the thing. Like if I'm scaring somebody, that's a good thing. Like if I'm scaring you not to want to be in the business, great. Because if that scares you, then you're gonna be one of the 90% that doesn't make it. Like you've gotta be a complete animal. You have to be, you've got to be somebody, I've said this on the R call yesterday. You want people to look at you and say, damn, he's a machine or she's a machine. You know what I mean? Like you're just, you're putting out so much. So there's this platform that you can run ads straight to property owners on Facebook and Instagram, and I'm like, okay, run $2 a day guys to every property owner in your market where every dollar you spend goes directly to that property owner. It's not being seen by Kevin that lives in his mom's basement and teenagers and renters. It's only being seen by property owners, right? Think about if every dollar you spent went to put your content in front of property owners. Then you're hitting them with a handwritten letter, handwritten envelope, handwritten return address, handwritten letter, what would you consider selling your home at wherever to a prospect of mine? Then you're calling them, right? Right then they're like, you know, it's like, hey, it's Ricky from Facebook and they're like, okay, you know, like it's like a long lost brother at that point. Yeah, like then they start to think he's a machine, right? Then on that conversation, they just get this amazing feeling from you that you care about them. You're not just trying to sell a property and you're not trying to sell a property. You're literally just trying to like see how, my main goal when I call people is like, my entire like call to action, reason for the call. The whole thing is literally just to see how they are doing. You know, there's coaches and trainers that are like, never say how are you doing kind of deal. I'm sure you've heard that. Yup. I'm like, okay. It's like, whatever dude. The thing is, is that's all I want to know. I'm not even trying to like, there's no, like there's nothing else. If I can figure out how somebody is doing, then I'm getting somewhere, you know? But nevertheless, like if I, if I'm hitting them on social, if I'm hitting them a direct mail, if I'm calling them and then they talk to me and they're like, when they pick up the phone, they need to be saying, who the heck is this? As in, damn, they sound familiar, not like who the hell is this? They need to be thinking like, who the heck is this? This sounds like, is this Johnny? Is this, you know, Uncle Coven? Is this my best friend from high school? I hadn't heard from him in a while. Like that's the way it needs to come across. Like in the first second, like that there's just some long lost friend, family member type deal. And at the end of the day, you've created such a bond with them. I'm like, I'm skimming through this. Like new agents are probably listening to this. Like what the hell is he talking about? But the thing is that when I go down that path and I figure out if they want to buy or sell something, let me back up. I sold a hundred properties a year for eight years in a row as a single agent. Number one, Remax agent in Alabama. Number one in my market for eight years in a row, you know, listed 110 properties a year, just literally standing on my head, working like 20, 30 hours a week. People are like, did you even have a life? Yeah, because I understood leverage and efficiency. I had an assistant that handled everything on the back end and I was a listing heavy agent and I took what buyers came from those activities. A lot of like agents nowadays, I just got off the call with an agent. He's actually a broker. And he was like, I'm gonna start doing YouTube. I was like, why? And they're like, well, there's a lot of people relocating here. I'm like, why do you want to talk to those people? And he's like, well, and I'm like, dude, like why do you want to talk to those people? Like you could literally talk to the owners and own the property that those people relocated and you're gonna buy. And then you can go home at night at six, seven o'clock and have dinner and chill while the guys that are on YouTube are showing those listings, right? That's like your choice here. Why are you gonna go that route? You know, he's like, well, I could just pass it off to one of my agents. And I'm like, okay, so you're gonna put all this work and effort in and then you're gonna hand it off to an agent and give them half the money. It doesn't make sense, man. This is not a, and I was like, I was like, doesn't really sound too efficient. And he was like, nope. I was like, there you go. If you say that it's not efficient, then don't do it. I don't know. Okay. So many questions. I have to go back to the beginning. I just went in all kinds of different directions, but like, you know what I'm saying? I live and breathe this. And so all these things are just swirling in my head all day long. You're gonna have to take me down and like, give me, give me a direction because I'll do it. It's okay. I'm the direction girl and I wrote it all down so we can move back to all the things. But so to step one, if you were to start over and I think this was the point that I was trying to uncover with you is I believe when you built your business the first time around, since you're ancient, the social media content creation, that wasn't really a part of your business in the very beginning. And so if you were to redo it today, you would lean more on technology and able to get your message out through tech to as many people as possible. Is that, what are your thoughts on that? Yeah, but the thing is, is like old school agents, they understand like, you know, one-on-one, right? Conversation, right? That's what leads to everything, da, da, da. The new age, you know, the next generation, you know, they're texting people. They're cold texting. They're, you know, they're doing social and they're doing great. They're doing great. But my point is, is if you combine the two, see the older guys need to embrace technology and the younger guys need to embrace the one-on-one actual real conversations because nothing happens without a conversation. And see, there's different hierarchies of communication and the higher you go, the easier it is to build trust. So like the highest is face-to-face. Door knocking, meet them in public, networking events, lunches, all that in-person, right? The next one is Zoom calls where you're not in-person but you do see them, you see they're paying attention, right? You see their eyes, you see, you know, you catch their body language, you see how they're dressing, you know, all that stuff, okay? But it's harder to build trust like that than it is if you're in-person, they feel the energy and the one under Zoom is a phone call. They hear you, you're talking to them, but they don't see you, so they don't really know kind of what's going on behind the scenes there, right? Then you've got all the digital things, texting, DMing, you know, all the digital messaging type platforms, right? And so the lower you go, it's harder to build trust. And then you've got content creation at the bottom where it's just a video or, you know, content or whatever, even an email is a form of content that you're just sending out in a bulk form, okay? So that's the hardest to build trust. Can you build trust? Yes, but it's harder than if you're talking to them face to face. And so a lot of people live down here where they're only texting and they're only DMing and they're only doing social media and stuff, whereas it's okay to be there, but use it to get up here like texts if they respond, set up a call, you know, like try to get to the conversation ASAP. And so what I realized really early on was that no matter what I did to try to get leads or no matter what I did to try to build my business or what avenue I went to try to, you know, find people that wanted to buy or sell, every single activity came back to the same exact result, which was it created a list of people for me to sit down and call. So if I did Facebook ads, I was just building a list of people that I would sit down and call through, right? If I'm doing Zillow leads, I'm creating a list to call people. You know, Zillow now calls in like you get the lead like right then on the line and stuff, but you build a list of Zillow leads, you're gonna end up calling all these old leads and following up, open houses. They come in, they sign the sign-in sheet, right? The next day, you're calling them, right? You're calling through, like that's every single thing. Direct mail, you're trying to get them to call you. Like everything is trying to get them to call you, talk to them, consultation, listing appointment, buyer consultation, show property, list properties, make offers, close deals, but it all comes back to the same thing, list of people to call. So when I realized all that, I was like, okay, well, if that's the case, and the more conversations I have, the more deals I'm gonna do, the more relationships I'm gonna create, the more people I can start to really build my brand with, then why am I even doing all this like minutia marketing stuff, right? That just takes time, money, and energy to get to the same place. When I have a list right here of all the property owners I'm gonna do business with, let me just call them, because I gotta do that anyway, right? And so then I started to realize people put lead, different leads in different buckets, you know, like, oh, but Ricky, these are easier to call because they are expecting my call. Okay, tell me how many of them that you called knew who you were. You're right, you know, you pay for Facebook leads so that you don't have to cold call, then you call them and they don't know who the hell you are, you're right back to cold calling. Okay, and then, totally, same thing with Zillow, same thing with all of them, right? Well, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna send some letters first and then call. 10% of the people that you talk to are probably gonna have seen the letter, et cetera, right? So when I started to break all this down in my mind, I was like, okay, so the reason why I was able to build my business faster than everyone is because I understood this really early on. So most agents, they do this marketing stuff and they drag out the process of having the conversations. And I just went ahead and had the conversations day one, you know, just back to back to back to back all day long. And so my business, it exploded faster because I was, they were trying to get from here to here and by the time they got from here to here, I was already here but I was there right here. You see what I'm saying? Like I just closed the gap between where I wanted, where I was in the conversation I needed to have you know, like scalable business and I just went ahead and created it out of thin air now. So yeah, I mean, but I wanted to finish to this point. Like people put different leads in different buckets. Like these are easier to call. And my point is, is it's all the same exact people. You'd have the same conversation you have with a complete cold call of a random property owner that you have with an expiry, you have with a Zillowly, you have with a Facebook lead. It's all the same people. It's the same people we see in Walmart or Kroger or at the gas station. Like these are all the same people, right? And they're people just in your community that need help. They need help buying this on the real estate. They need a professional to help them through the process end of story. So, you know, quit saying, well, these are easier. Okay, we'll go that route with your little trickle the conversations over the next couple of years. And I'm gonna go ahead and have like, as many as you have in a year, in a week. I'm literally gonna do the work that most people do all year in one week or less than a week. The end result is to have a conversation with someone. If that's the end result, then I'm just gonna go ahead and have hundreds right now. And literally that's all you do all year. So I literally just did a year worth of your work in a week. Why? Why don't you just do what I'm doing? Is that what I'm saying? Yes, also you're savage. And I can see why your clothes, like, you know, it's very just like cut fruit, you know, to the point. For the agents listening, I'm sure you're very personable on the phone with all these people. But okay, question about, so the goal is to get to the conversation. There's like probably a hundred videos of me doing live calls, talking to prospects on my YouTube for like over the past seven years. Perfect, so go listeners, go to YouTube. What in Ricky? What is your YouTube for listeners? Ricky. Just Ricky. Ricky Karuth. Okay, but Ricky C will probably pop up. Okay, perfect. Okay, to recap though. So the goal, the end goal, the don't beat around the bush, try to get to the conversation as quickly as possible. Yeah. If you were going, right. So if you, you know, were starting your building everything from scratch today, would you just literally pull lists and call or would you, you talked about earlier, you know, Facebook ads to get in front of those people and then they fill out a form and then that builds your list for who you're calling. I wouldn't care about them filling out a form. I mean like, if they want to fill out a form, awesome, whatever, but at the end of the day, like on Red X, right? I can run ad builder and I can run ads directly to property owners in my market. Okay. I don't care if they click on it or not. I'm just trying to force them to see me as they're trying to look at friends and family to where when I call them, I'm like, hi, I'm Ricky from Facebook, the real estate agent, how are you today? And then they're like, oh, okay. Yeah. Got you. So that piece is brand. I see you everywhere. Okay. Yeah. Like that piece is like building your personal brand. I don't care if they, like, yeah. Like I'm trying to set them up to where they already know who I am before I call. You know, that's it. Can you? Whatever I get, whatever I get residually off that, like if somebody does fill out a form or follows me or deems me about buying property or whatever the case may be, that's bonus. Could you walk us through a day in your life when you were in this eight year period of closing 100 deals a year? Yeah. So at eight o'clock, I would schedule my day. Okay. At eight 15, I'm studying the market, the hot sheet, the new listings, the closed deals, et cetera. And I'm going through all my pending deals. Like just seeing like, okay, is there any kind of fires I need to put out? Do I need to check on this? Check on that? Is everything going good? Blah, blah, blah. Kind of just check on everything. Eight 30, I'm figuring out who I'm calling today. Am I calling expireds for sell-by-owners, circle prospecting, absentees, internet leads, following up, what am I doing? And so I get myself 30 minutes to really prepare to where there's no excuses at nine o'clock, I'm dialing. And then from nine to 12, I'm just on the phone having fun. Like it's a party. Nine to 12, I'm laughing on the phone, cutting up, prank calling people to see if they want to buy and sell property today. And at noon, I'm going to lunch. One from one o'clock on, I don't care what I do. I've already done everything I need to do right then and there. So after lunch, I would just kind of like handle all my follow-up stuff because what happens is when you're doing that many deals, like I would always have 10 to 20 deals pending and like 20 to 30 listings. So like stuff like pops up. You know, like things come out of the blue. Well, what you have to get really good at is ignoring those things until after lunch. And a lot of people, like they stop if they're doing a handle every little thing when it happens. That's the wrong way to be because now you're just reacting to everything and now your business controls you instead of you controlling your business and you're not going to grow at all. You're just going to maintain the level of income you're at right then and you're never going to grow. You don't grow anymore unless your database continues to grow. The only way to continue to grow your database is to continue to make the calls, talk to people, build a database. So you've got to, you know, there's four things that will supersede making calls or growing the database or whatever that showing property, writing offers, going to listing appointments or negotiating deals. If it's one of those four things, I'll drop everything I'm doing and go do one of those things because those things are making me money. But if it's a repair denim request, you can wait, right? If it's a buyer that wants me to send them a list of properties, they can wait. You know, these things that agents think that they can't wait. And they're just like, just like drawn to try to, you know, tackle these situations when they happen. They think that they're doing a great service, but it's really, they're just hiding behind that so they don't have to make calls. And then they just continue to make the same amount of money every single year. I'm stuck at 200, Ricky. Yeah, I wonder why you only work referrals and past clients, right? They're like, yeah, like, how did I know? Right, you don't do anything to build your business anymore, right? You did for the first two years and then you quit. Now you're just busy all the time just closing deals as a mirage because you're closing deals and you think your business is like growing, but it's not. It's just maintaining, which is good. Like, look, 200 grand a year is like, three or four times what a teacher makes. Like, that's a lot of money, you know? Like, like great. The problem is we're 1099 and we have to pay taxes and blah, blah, blah. Like 200 in today's world doesn't end up being a lot of money. And I know you're more ambitious that you want to make more than 200 grand, okay? So understand what I'm saying. Conversations are the only way to get there. Like, do social media to get to conversations. Do text messages to get to conversations. Do direct mail with the purpose of trying to get to conversations. And you, but you've got to block out everything until you've got to block out that you've got to categorize things of what matters and what doesn't matter. If it matters, then it's one of these four things. Showing property, writing offers. If a buyer calls and says, I want to write our offer on this, I'm gonna, I'm done doing whatever I'm doing for the moment, okay? Somebody wants to see a property. Somebody says, come look at my property and tell me what it's worth. I'm coming straight there. Like, you ready right now? And if I get a counter offer back on something, I'm on that. I'm gonna, I'm gonna wrap that deal up. So if it's one of those four things, I get it, you know, but if it's also one of those four things, you know, agents are, they're not prioritizing the way they need to. It's like, there's those four things at the top, phone calls right below those, and then everything else is down here. So if you can just kind of grasp that and kind of work into a nine to 12 on the phone, stirring the pot, and then just handle the minutia stuff after, after lunch, you're gonna be super successful. Is that a conversation that you have with your clients upfront? You're like, hey, like, I'm gonna be MIA for nine to 12, or do you just ignore it? Absolutely not. I don't have to have that conversation. What do I have to have that conversation for? Right? If somebody expects me to like, you know, like, and I will, but I do bend over backwards, plenty, okay? But like, if it's a situation, like, number one, like a repair denim request is coming from, I'm the listing agent, and the buyer agent sends me a repair denim request. Okay? I'll check that out in a couple hours when I'm done building my business for the day, right? No, I've never like, had the conversation like, I don't answer my phone after six and stuff like that. That's kind of like a given, you know what I'm saying? And look, if somebody sends me a counteroffer after six, if somebody wants to see a property, somebody wants to write an offer, somebody wants to me to go look at a property, say how much it's worth. I don't care if it's eight, nine, 10, 11 o'clock at night. Keep going. I'm going. If it's one of those four things, if it sounds out of that, go, go, go, go, go. You know? Like, I mean, a seller may text me a little something. I'm not saying that I like, I don't like disappear. But I'm not in the office like, you know, like make a phone calls, doing emails, following up, you know, putting stuff together. You got, I mean, you got into this business because you wanted to be your own boss. You wanted to make your own money. You wanted to set your own hours. You wanted to, you wanted freedom. And what's happening is, is agents get into the business and they don't feel free. They're literally working like 24 hours a day. They work till like 10, 11 o'clock. They wake, they wake up groggy. They're starting to get like depressed because they hadn't had much sleep. You know, they're frustrated. They haven't sold anything. They react to every little thing under the sun. They don't feel free. It's because their business is controlling them. They're not controlling their business. You can't react to every little thing right when it happens. If you do, then you're just, you're a prisoner to the whole, to the whole system. And it's a very, I was like that. And there was times when I was like that, absolutely. There were days where that's all I did was just do stuff like that. And there are days when you do have to do stuff like that, you know, for sure. Some of these fires are, you know, there's always exceptions. But, you know, like, especially in the beginning of your career, when you don't have a bunch of deals happening, I mean, that's when it's the easiest to, when you don't have all these fires getting thrown at you to really buckle down. And that's why you see these agents, they do well for a couple years building their database. Then they get all the minutiae stuff happening. They quit building it and it levels off. Did you continue building like through the end? Cause you're out of production now. Is that right? So did each year, did you continue building or did you get to a point where your database was like, this is what I want? So 2017 was the first year I did a mill. And that was the year I quit. I never made another cold call ever. So I made calls all the way up to 2017. And then when 2017 hit, I quit doing everything. Just did the weekly email. And I continued making a mill every year after that, you know, until I got out of production. So, yeah, it was 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 and 22. 21 and 22, yeah. I made a mill a year every year, every one of those years without making any calls at all. Now, could I have taken it to 1.5 and up to two and all that stuff? Yeah. If I wanted to keep on building it, then absolutely. But the thing is, is once you get to the mill, you kind of realize how much of a rat race this really is. And when January first hits and you go from a mill for the year to zero for the year, you're like, oh, shit. Like I got to climb this million dollar mountain again. I don't know if I'm gonna be, that's daunting. So there we are again. We're right back to this daunting mountain. And, you know, it happened, but man, it turns into a thing where the dream is like to make the mill a year. When you get there, you kind of realize you think things are gonna be different. You know, you're working harder because you got way more responsibility. You got way more clients that depend on you. You got a lot more going on. And you kind of realize how much of an earned income profession this really is. And that's when you start, that's when your mind starts clicking that, okay, where can I transition to? How can I get to more of a passive type business? Where can I invest money? What other industries can I get into using my skills I learned in real estate, et cetera, you know? And two questions. First is, why not the team route? Did you ever consider that? What are your thoughts on that? And then second, I'd love to talk about where you actually ended up going. Well, I mean, with the team thing, it's like, do I want another full-time job? It doesn't pay much? No, that's not a good plan for me. I can just speak, like, from my thoughts on the team thing is, this is a lot of work for not a lot of ROI. The guys that have built these huge teams to be able to step out of production, they went through hell. I can promise you, I've talked to all these guys, a lot of these guys, they went through hell to get to that point. They went through a lot of agents. They went through a lot of pain and suffering, blood, sweat and tears to get that to a place where it could run on its own. That is not an easy task. People just, they throw that term around so loosely, like, I'm gonna start a team. I'm like, oh my God, like, you got so much momentum right now, and now you're in your full-time agent, right? You're trying to sell, you're still building your business. And now you're gonna throw another full-time job into the mix as a team leader, still trying to do your production. Now you got two full-time jobs, and this other full-time job is gonna add more expenses, taking away your profit from the other full-time job, and then any profits above expenses, you're gonna split with somebody. You're gonna split with these team members who, by the way, are gonna drive you crazy. So, no, no, not for me whatsoever. I had a team, so I was an individual agent, and did really well my first year, and literally was year two, where I had people coming out, they're like, oh, I wanna do what you're doing. Started team, I'd love to join, and I did not do enough homework on asking people who are team leaders, like, what it was actually like, and I was just like, yeah, let's do it. And I did the team thing for almost three years, and I experienced exactly. Like you joined a team as a team member? No, I started five pillars, a real team group, it was the team leader, and by the time we shut down, we had almost 30 agents. And it was, I mean, we did well, my first year I did 48 transactions as a solo agent, our first year as a team, we did 120, then we did 220, we were on the track to do 360 on the year when I shut it down. But now I ask people, you know, because I know what I've personally experienced, it's very similar to what you described. Because of exactly what you said, it's like so much work and there was so much turnover. And the money was just, I was like, dude, I can make all this and more with, like you said, lean myself and a couple admin, you know, and just crush without the responsibility and not just the turnover, but like the people wanting and not being appreciative. And then there's just so many different, you're right, it's multiple full-time jobs. Well, there's a couple of things. One, the future top producer comes in, learns everything and leaves quickly. And then you're just a stepping stone for the future top producers. And then the weaker agents, they stay with you, well, they're not ambitious, they're comfortable, they suck the ever-living life out of you, right? And then the whole team model, like the traditional team model, it doesn't do the agent any service at all because you're making them dependent on lead gen, marketing and admin. You're literally doing the lead gen for them, just giving them leads, you're doing all the marketing forum and you're doing all the admin and all the paperwork and stuff. So they're not learning any of those activities, right? You're making them dependent on you as the team for those things to where they basically can't leave. And if they do leave, they're starting all over and they have to go learn those three things. So they didn't learn any, they made a, picked up some, they picked up some stuff, right? They picked up some sales skills, they learned how the team leader moves, they showed some property, they learned, they did learn some things, right? But they didn't really learn how to be an agent for real. They kind of took a step, most agents, they join a team because I want to learn the business. No, you're getting in a situation where the team is set up to try to retain you to make money off of you and get mad at you when you leave. I'm sure you didn't do this, but most team leaders, they get mad at the person, they're like, oh, you know, you're gonna leave. All right, you ain't gonna make it if you, you know, all that stuff. It's like, wait a minute. Like, if you cared about me, like you said you did and weren't just trying to make money off of me, then you would push me towards this direction of me trying to better myself and do what, do, you know, do better in life than just be on your team. And so, you know, for me, it's not a service to the agent, the team leader goes through hell. I mean, it just, so I was, so as a single agent, I just crushed it as a single, and you know what? I sold more than, we had 20 people teams around here that I sold more volume than they did in during those eight years. And I was making a meal at 1.1, and my expenses were like 200 maybe. And that was like for my assistant. And then all my stuff, whatever, I think I, oh, that was when I was doing a lot of postcards. I was spending like 60 grand a year on postcard, which I could have just done without because I didn't get much out of them. But I was spending like about 50 to 200 a year, you know, expenses and keeping the rest. I didn't, I was the listing agent. I was the buyer agent. I was the, because it's like the thing is, is if I'm a team leader, I'm gonna work my ass off all day anyway. Why don't I just work my ass off all day and just go do the deals? And then just take that money and just build other businesses, invest, et cetera. And if you do the deals yourself, they have a higher likelihood of closing. I know there were so many times where I gave leads, you know, let's, everyone gets a chance. Everyone gets a lead. And I'm like, shit, I could have closed that. You know, and I know that sounds really bad, but it's just like kind of pissing away money in a lot of the times. Yeah. I'm gonna get haters for that, but that's okay. Brand new agents that don't really have much experience, you know, and it takes a lot of skill to get these deals done. And that's like that guy I was talking to today, you know? He's like, I'm gonna do a YouTube channel. I'm like, why? Well, I wanna talk to relocation buyers. And I'm like, why? He's like, you're right. It's not that efficient. I was like, don't do it. He's like, well, I could give it to my team. I'm like, why? You know, back to what you're saying, you're gonna give half the money if they actually in fact convert the person. They close. Anyway, that's a whole nother podcast. So, okay. Yeah, Ricky, we talked about why not the team route. Let's talk about the route that you did choose to go. Yeah. Yeah, that's a whole nother podcast too. I so in 17, so in 17, when I did the mill, I realized I can't do this forever. I watched two agents in my office literally die from old age making calls. I was tired of just having to be at everybody's bed and call. Every time I got a call, I had to literally drive somewhere, look at a property. It just got old. I loved it when I loved it. And I loved it for a long time. But once it, when it was over, I was, I didn't have a passion for it anymore like I did. And so I was like, okay, I've been in business for at that point 15 years. I made a mill, lost it, came back, was number one, you know, in the state. I have a very unique story. I have a very unique way that I built my business. I'm gonna write a book. So I wrote a book and then I wrote, I forgot a bunch of stuff I meant to put in the books. I wrote a second book out of that really fast. So I put out two really quickly. I haven't wrote a third one yet. And so 17, I wrote two books. I was like, let me try to write books, right? Then I was asked to speak one time. And I did that. And then at the speech, first speech ever, never wear a suit. I was in a suit. I felt like I had to wear a suit. And it was like 400 remix agents. I was the keynote at the very end. I had to like sit there all day, like nervous this can be. I had the sniffles. Like it was a bad deal. Well, afterwards, there was like a line out the door of agents that wanted to just talk to me and say how much it inspired them and ask me questions. And I was like, oh my God, what is this? And I was like, I have something, you know? That people need this, evidently. So I went that route. And then I just started doing social media. I was like, let me build a business around coaching. And I started out charging a little here and there. And I realized really quickly, like agents aren't gonna buy anything. So I was like, let me just do it for free. So I did it for free to build a brand. I did it for seven years, coach for free. That's why my brand is so big. It's because I put all this value into the universe for real estate agents. And then I just started speaking all over the place. Like when COVID hit, I had 19 events I was set to speak at that got canceled. And then it took a while for that to kind of die down and then all the event stuff to kind of come back. Now I'm back to doing like two or three a month all over the place. So I did a lot of traveling and speaking. But mostly I'm right here on a Zoom like this doing coaching calls and group coaching one-on-one all that kind of good stuff. So now I actually switched from free to paid. I've got a coaching program, a hundred bucks a month. It's doing really well. And building the brokerage, it can be EXP 2020. And so I'm really passionate about building the brokerage and coaching those agents and helping them double their volume. That's really kind of my main two things. I travel, I speak, I do social and I'm just on Zoom all day every day coaching and training and helping. And I mean, it's a multi-million dollar. I mean, all that put together is a multi-multi-million dollar operation. And so curious. So now you're charging $100 a month is like super reasonable, affordable, like, well, basically, but you're totally right. You just don't pay for shit. So you have that, you have EXP, I'm sure you have tons of revenue share, maybe even still like referrals, but where is, would you say, the majority of your income? Where does it come from? Or is it just several streams? I'm just curious. It's pretty equal, right? So it's also on like a ton of rental properties. Got like 40 doors and I just closed on three acres to build 46 units, just right down from my house. So like I'm really involved in the investing side too. I'm just buying, flipping, you know, I flip houses every month, you know, buy rentals and hold them forever, all kinds of things. So I got that, that does really well. Like I could literally live off just that, off the money that's coming in off the rentals and stuff. Then I've got the coaching business, which is the new platform, the $100 a month. We already have like over 6,000 members there and like 400 plus have upgraded to the paid membership. And we've only been doing it for a month now, right? So I mean like it's, we're doing well with that. We're gonna continue to build that. The free coaching before I was making money just through affiliates, which was six figure a month already, the EXP, it's, you know, it's getting close to a six figure a month type thing. So like it's all, honestly, it's kind of all kind of equal. There's not really one that's like way more than another stream of income. They're all pretty, pretty close, you know. And what is the, what does the future look like? Whether it be 2024, maybe the next year, or maybe you know five or 10 years, what does that look like? For me or like for the market or for agents, what? I was, this is hyper personal. I was curious about you. I'm just gonna keep doing my thing. I had on my original website, I had over 50,000 members on my zero to diamond site. So I'd like to, and that new site was up for maybe two and a half, three years or so. So I'd like to do the same thing with this new platform, Gold Bar is actually the name of it, zero to diamond.com. And so, you know, just growing that, we're at 6,000 already in a month. So, you know, growing that base back up to 50,000 members there. And then just continue to build a brokerage, you know, 5,000 agents or so, you know, in the next couple of years. The rental portfolio, getting, you know, building that up to, you know, 500 to 1,000 units, something like that, you know. I don't know. I don't get too attached to like what the result may be. I just focus on my day to day. And just trying to, it's like I said in the beginning, if you could call every property owner all at once, then you could crush it, but you can't. You've got to do one conversation at a time. And since that mountain looks so big, people get scared. Same thing with this, you know, like when I'm trying to, you know, coach people and build these businesses, it's daunting when you look at where you're trying to go over the next five years, but I'm just like, let me just talk to one agent at a time, you know, see what they got going on, see what they need help with and just bring them value and just keep doing that over and over and over again and everything will pan out. So I'm just putting in the work right now. I'm kind of, that's kind of where I'm at. Have one more question for the wrap up. I know we're close on time though. Do you have time for like one or two more questions before wrap up? Are you ready? No, I'm good. Yeah, okay. Okay, this is my off-roading question that I didn't know I wanted to ask, but what is the, do you have like a huge staff behind the scene or like who's, are you going to all your coaching calls? Do you have like coaching team beneath you? Do you have admin staff? Like what does the behind the scenes look like? It's just me. It's just you. Yeah, like here's the studio. Like here's my name. And your surfboard. Yeah, like I've got like a ring light on one side, like a little, like a little light, right? Like this is it. I've got- Oh no, no, no, no, I didn't mean like right now. I meant like wish then. No, I get it. I get what you're saying, but I'm just telling you like this is my staff. Like you're looking at it. Like I've got a real estate assistant, but since I stepped out of production, my dad handles the day to day. So I don't really, she, I still like, like the day I had her go pick up a rent check from one of our rental properties. Like I hardly call her about anything anymore because dad handles all that and does all that kind of stuff. As far as everything else, the cool thing about me, the same way I feel about teams, okay? How it's just like, what's the point? That's a lot of work is the same way I feel about building a company and having employees. I don't want nothing to do with it. And why would I? Because I can literally partner with companies, right? I can partner. Like I'm like, I have partnerships with companies whereas they give me top line revenue, right? Off of sales. And but I don't have a single employee, but yet I can use their hundred employees as if they're my employees, if I need something. Several companies, I have partnerships like that. So I'm just really, I'm just really, I wanna go to sleep at night every night without a worry in the world. And if I have employees, then I'm not really going to sleep without a worry in the world. I'm worried about the employees. Like, is it gonna work out? How's this gonna go for them? I don't like that. So I've literally built my life around not having huge businesses, but yet still having equity, still getting top line revenue, but not having to deal with all the problems of having a team or having employees. Like, I know people that like Ryan Panetta and Pace and several of those grants. You know, like I've hung out and interviewed and they've interviewed me and like we've spent time together. I know these guys personally, been to their houses and stuff. They've got hundreds of employees, you know? And they do like, you know, like 120 million a year or 200 million a year or 50 million a year. Like I look at that, I look at their lives and I'm like, that's awesome for them, you know? But it's just not for me, you know what I'm saying? So for me, it's like that balance between quality of life and business and I'm like in my happy place where I don't have a lot of responsibilities, but yet I make a lot of money and I don't owe anybody anything. All of that really, really speaks to me. I don't know if you know this, I'm also at EXP. I also have rental properties. I shut down the team. Like literally what you were saying, speaking to muscle, but what did we not talk about today? It's the same thing with EXP, right? I mean, let's take that for example. It's like, I could go do my own brokerage. Why would I? Then I have liabilities, expenses, E&O, legal compliance, checking initials on contracts, getting audited. I can't expand. Why would I? I can just partner with them and use their 600 employees and their infrastructure to expand anywhere I want to for free with no expenses and have zero liabilities. And literally do what I want to do, which is just help agents double, triple their volume. So I mean, like that's a prime example right there. Like I didn't go my own brokerage routes. Why would I? Like I'm literally partnered with a company. I can use their employees and infrastructure to handle all the heavy lifting while I just kind of sit back and collect all the revenue. That's funny because I have that same relationship that I have with EXP, with several other companies. It's kind of like my thing. Well, it kind of gives you the best of all worlds. All worlds. All worlds. You know, like I was gonna, I thought about doing my own brokerage and I was like, wait a minute, you know? Like why, but I can still have a location, still have a brick and mortar, still bring on agents locally. But guess what? I have no liability, no expenses and I can expand anywhere I want to for free. Okay. And I still get equity. All right. I'm waiting for something bad. I'm waiting for you to tell me something. If I have to, right. Just warm. If you're making me, right, exactly. Okay, Ricky, is there anything, I know there's a lot we didn't talk about, but is there anything that you're, you know, maybe top of mind that you're like really into right now that you wanna share with the audience something that we didn't talk about? I can't think of it, man. I really can't. I hope we, I hope we brought some people some value, dude. I don't know how much I was babbling and how much is actually valuable, but I hope you guys got something out of this. Yeah, no, for sure. Okay, quick wrap up questions. What events are you going to in 2024? I was gonna say if any, but I know that you are speaking this year. What are you going to? Yeah, I, we have a gold bar live in February 29th. That's gonna be with Ryan Serhant, Josh Altman, myself, Juan, my partner in gold bar. That's our event. I mean, it's gonna be on Times Square. It's gonna be great. So that's gonna be 1200 agents, it's gonna be awesome, goldbarlive.com. Outside of that, I got one in LA, like a little 500 agent one. I got one in Houston, little 500 agent one. I don't really like go to like the big conferences and stuff unless I'm gonna be speaking there, like Inman's and the Nars and the- Palm Ferry, real estate rock stars mastermind. And I should though, right? Like I should because like everybody in the audience, or like I would say like maybe at least 30, 40% at least I would think would know me from social media. Like I should just like make appearances at like, I think about this all the time. Like I should go to those events even though I'm not speaking. And just like hang out and network and kind of work the crowd and meet people and stuff. Because the goal is trying to get a conversation, right? Ricky? It is, it is. I just don't have time because I'm at home just pounding the phones, having conversations every day. So, you know, and I will say this too. I'll say this, like you may not like this part, but when I was coming up, I never went to a single event. Never went to a single event when I was like building my business. I didn't go to an event till 2017, I think. I went to my first real estate event. It was R4 in Vegas. And the reason I went is cause I was now trying to be this coach and you know, write books and I was trying to like learn. Like, well, so I was like, I'll go to R4. I went to Remax, I've been with them for what seven years to that point. Never went to an R4 at all. Like I didn't even go to our own conferences and stuff. Ever, why? Cause I was doing deals. I was like at home. You were doing it. You were calling. I was making calls. Like I was like, I can't afford. Like if I leave for even a day, like I'm going to miss this call session that I'm going to meet people that want to buy and sell stuff. Like I can't afford to leave. And looking back now that I've been to a lot of events, speaking and stuff, like I know what goes on at these events and everything and that, maybe that was a mistake. You know, that maybe I could have picked up some things here and there or whatever and brought back to my business and all that kind of good stuff. But it comes back to, no matter what I bring back, I can only have so many conversations in a day. So if I've got more people than I can call, what else do I need to know? That was about like, that was my mind. That was just like, I was just, I felt like I was already maxing out. How can I do anymore? It's, it's maxed, you know? I don't know. I feel, yeah, I do. I'm a huge like conference fan. Since 2018, my first year, I didn't go to any conferences, but you're too onward. I've been like a junkie and I love that. So another day we could debate that, but the next wrap up question is, how can listeners help you in your business and where can they find you? Oh man. So go to zero-to-diamond.com and join our platform for free. I've got free scripts, my weekly email templates. I've got my business planning session and workbook and all that's there for free. So go to zero-to-diamond.com and connect with me there, DM me there on the platform or whatever, Instagram, YouTube, all that stuff as well. But as far as helping me in my business, just go crush it. I think like find me somewhere, go deep on the content, go sell a bunch of real estate and DM me one day and say, hey, thank you so much. I, you know, I got some listings because of your, you know, video on whatever. And it, I mean, it works because Justin, Justin Hosey to bring this whole circle, the birthday boy, such a big fan. He says he messaged you, you know, messaged you every month or so and he's like, he probably doesn't know who I am. Yeah. No, he's like, he's up in your inbox for sure. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, definitely. But anyway, Ricky, dude, I'm so glad. This was so fun. Thanks for coming and hanging with me. I loved it. And real estate rock stars, make sure, you know, we're gonna put everything in the show notes. Make sure, go follow him, send Ricky. Oh my God. Send Ricky all of the love in the entire world. He's a fucking man. Not supposed to curse, that's fine. And guys, if you want to hang out with me and the owner of the show, we are The Shelby Show and Erin Amuchasteghi on the gram. As always, we want feedback. We want to make this the best show out there ever. And the best way for us to do that is to get feedback from listeners and then adjust over time. So please do so. And Ricky, thanks again for coming on the show and real estate rock stars. Thanks for listening.