 All right, I'm gonna bring up our sponsor. This guy's a free real estate coach. He's crazy. He's all the way from Alabama. Ricky Caruth is Zero to Diamond. What's up everybody? So I'm gonna do this a little differently today. All right, so let me introduce myself. I'm Ricky Caruth. I'm gonna be your host this morning. All right, here in a little while, I'm gonna introduce our sponsor, Ricky Caruth from Zero to Diamond.com who paid for this event. And then after that, I'm gonna introduce the keynote speaker, Ricky Caruth. All right, how's that sound? Listen, guys. Before we go any further, let me just act through them. If you guys, tell me if you've ever been at a closing. Okay, you're at the closing. You're with your clients, the title company's there. The title company passes out the closing statement. We're looking at it. Everyone's looking at it. Your clients are looking at it. We're looking at it. We're making sure all the numbers are right. We'll go through the first page. We flip over to the second page. We go to the top left of the page and we see the commission. And I see the commission, and I don't know if you guys are like this, but sometimes when I see that commission, I think, ooh, wee. I'm fixing to be walking out of here with how much money? These people are about to give me what? Guys, where I came from, roofing houses for $250 a week, every single deal that I do, I look at that like that is a lot of money. $2,000, $5,000, $15,000, $30,000, $50,000, whatever it is. It is a lot of money. As soon as I do a deal, as soon as I get a listing, right, do you guys take out a calculator and start calculating exactly how much money you're gonna make on that deal? I've always done that. I've calculated. I'm looking at the money I wanna make. I calculate all my pending deals. Okay, I got this much coming. Even though I know a lot of them, some of them are gonna fall through, I've always been like that. I'm sitting there, and now I'm trying to maintain composure for a totally different reason. Now I'm thinking, they ain't paying me enough. And we do. Real estate agents do so much behind the scenes, so much more than what the general public thinks that we do. General public thinks that we wake up in the morning and from in our bed upside down, we're docusigning some stuff and make $10,000. That's the way they view it. That's why they try to bring you down on your commission. That's why they talk about, well, there's this flat fee company that does it for $2,500. You guys aren't worth $15,000. Why are you worth $15,000? There's a huge misconception in the industry about what we do behind the scenes through the deals. And let me tell you something. What we do behind the scenes is not gonna be replaced. We're not gonna be replaced as much as Zillow, as much as you think. I don't even think they're really trying to replace us, but as much as people wanna think that companies like that are trying to take us out, they can't replace what we do that really nobody see. So I want you to understand how solid of an industry and a business that you're in. All right, I'm gonna bring up our sponsor. All right? This guy's a free real estate coach. He's crazy. All right, he's all the way from Alabama. Ricky Kruth is here at a diamond. What's up, everybody? How we doing? I really broke down every single piece of why I do what I do, how I do what I do, right? And how I'm gonna continue to do what I'm doing. You guys really need to go back and watch that, but my goal is, okay, since a lot of you didn't watch that, is to reduce the failure rate in the real estate industry. One agent at a time. And I'm doing it, I'm accomplishing it, okay? Because I get messages from agents all the time who tell me, I just talked to a gentleman a minute ago, where's Cole? This guy just started in the business in March and he's already closed five or six deals and he said it's all my stuff. Just hearing stories like that, right? But it goes deeper. So many agents have messaged me saying I was about to have to quit the business until I found you, until I found your content, until I started to implement what you're talking about in your videos and your program, right? And I never charged them a dime. And here they are, they're telling me, now they're getting listings every week. They're closing deals every month. And they have some momentum and a nice foundation built that they can build on. That's why I do what I do, guys, to get the messages from you saying this is helping, right? This is helping. That's what keeps you guys motivate me to keep doing what I'm doing. And this is not, this is for me to you here, a gift. I have a new Discord server. I don't know if you guys know what Discord is, but it is better than a Facebook group. Complete 100% transparency. Facebook, when I go there to the Zero to Diamond Facebook group and I'm scrolling through to look at you guys' daily results, I don't see all your daily results because of the Facebook algorithm showing me what they want me to see. Discord is chronological order in the exact timeline that things were posted. I can scroll all the way back through and see every single thing. So if you join that Discord, the Zero to Diamond Discord, and you go there and post your daily results, I will see them. And you can connect. There's already 2,000 agents there and it's a great place to connect, referrals. And we also have a cold calling room. You guys can go in there and just click there and go in there and make your calls with other people making calls during the day. If you go there right now, you'll see there's probably 10 to 20 people in that cold calling room right now making calls. You can go in there and watch them make calls. You can talk to them. You can make your calls. I'll tell you a few things about my wife really quickly. Number one, most amazing person I ever met and incredible mom, but she pushes me every single day to get better. And since the moment that I met her 11 years ago, she has been pushing me ever since, right? We met each other at Remax, okay? Funny story, when we met at Remax, we started at Remax on the same month. And we were new, so we didn't know who all was working there before or anything, so we later on, like three or four months later when we actually said hi, we realized that I thought she had been there for years and she thought I'd been there for years, right? So we became friends, we were friends for a long time, but what was very interesting and one thing that sticks out in my mind about that period of time was she was a W-2. She was my broker's assistant. And as a W-2 worker, you can leave at five o'clock. Right, you're a nine to five person, okay? Every single night, she was in her office, I was upstairs in my office, we had only two cars there, till eight or nine o'clock every day. I mean, this is when I was trying to get back in the business, I'm working 15 hours a day, I'm looking up phone numbers, I'm doing mail outs, I'm doing everything I can do, trying to really hack the system here, I'm trying to really make it. And she could leave at five o'clock, but didn't. She was there until nine o'clock because there was still work to be done. She wasn't worried about the five o'clock thing. So if you guys think I'm a hard worker, you haven't met her yet, I'm gonna bring up the keynote speaker. All right, this guy, he is a real estate agent. He is a coach, he is an author, he's everything and anything. Let's bring him up, Ricky Karuth. Thank you guys so much for coming. For real, that means a lot. Let me ask you this, show of hands. How many people here, okay? If given the opportunity, all right, would do business with me? Keep them up, keep them up, keep them up. I wanna see this, I wanna see. That's everybody, right? Does anybody, who here would not do business with me if given the opportunity? Raise your hand if I've ever charged you a dime for anything. I've never charged any of you a dime, but yet every single one of you said, if you had the opportunity to do business with me, you would. How powerful is that? Do you guys see what I'm doing here? Do you understand the concept? It's very, very extremely powerful and important for you to understand how this whole thing works. Because mainstream training, okay? Mainstream training, right? High pressure sales. Only go for motivated people, right? Is killing your business, all right? Now, we need to start thinking about how we can do what I just did in this room in our each individual local markets for our real estate business. As you grow the next year to 500 and you're a little busier, it gets a little harder to call them twice a year. Now we're doing it once a year. Maybe it goes to a thousand, and maybe somehow we still find a way to call those people once a year. But at some point, your database gets to the level that you can't call them. You're too busy closing deals. That's the progression. And you want to do the twice a year as long as you can until you can't anymore. I mean, I do things as long as I can until I can't anymore. I'm still showing properties. I'm still going to listing appointments. I'm still going to closings and inspections and negotiating repair endems and stuff. I stretch things out way farther than I should. A lot of people argue, get a showing agent, do this, do that, get out of that, do your coaching, that's whatever. That's just not how I'm built. I'm gonna stretch it out. You guys need to think the same way. As long as you can do something to show personability, personability in your business, you need to do it as long as you can do it until you can't. And if you can't, that's for a reason because you're closing deals. Market crashes, deals slow down for a month or two. What do we do? Dive back into our database. Call them, see how they're doing. Any opportunity you get if there's a slowdown in the business. But back to the value proposition that we have to give our local market to create this scenario where everybody wants to do business with us. Let's just work together. What do you want to do, right? What do you want to do? So when you combine and listen, if you're from a high pressure mantra, right? And then you hear me and you're like, oh, that's it, man, that's it. And you can't, it's hard to go cold turkey. When I started to realize that I had to start bringing value and actually care about people, care about what people wanted and how I can help people, it wasn't like I just flipped a switch and I was just all of a sudden just Mr. Low Pressure. No, I was 50-50 for a minute. When I got back in the business in 2008, I was 50-50. I was having better conversations. They were feeling like they were part of my family. But there was still a part of me that was trying to close deals too, right? But let me tell you something. The more and more, I'm still trying. I'm not even 100% there yet as far as completely relationships over transactions. I'm not all the way there. I'm striving to get there. And the more and more I let go of trying to close the deal or trying to make money, the more transactions and money I make, right? Does everyone agree with that? That that's the number one reason why someone chooses a real estate agent? Because they feel like they're a friend that they trust that's gonna take care of them. So our object, the objective needs to be how many friends can we make in the market? Not how many sales we can make? That's gonna come out of the friendships because you lose so many deals going after the deal. Because people smell it a mile away. They smell that you're trying, that's what you're trying to do and they're out because they don't trust you now. And the smallest little thing will throw them off because you might really care about them. And you might be thinking, I care, but then your client, there's some red flag somewhere in your delivery. You're not lining up exactly who you are that you care with how you're communicating. So that's one thing I want you guys to think about really hard today, all right? So think about this. Next time you're talking to your mother, your spouse, your best friend, your brother, your cousin, fellow agents that you feel really comfortable with, right? Today, so because you guys are gonna forget this tomorrow, today, when you're talking to somebody you're really comfortable with, I want you to take just a second during that conversation and just pay attention to what's happening in the conversation in terms of how comfortable they are with you, how comfortable you are with them, your tone, right? The entire, I want you to screenshot that moment in your mind and I want you to think about, okay, I feel very comfortable here, they're very comfortable, listen to my tone, speed of voice, pitch, I wanna emulate that exact moment with my prospects. If you can talk to your prospects like they are your family, I promise you your business is gonna go to an entirely different level. Things that you thought would never happen are gonna happen. I promise you your business is gonna go to an entirely different level. Things that you thought would never happen are gonna happen.