Interview with Brandon Tracy

13 Aug Interview with Brandon Tracy

Brandon shares how his team sold 123 homes in 2017 and on pace to do double in 2018.

Video Replay of Interview with Brandon Tracy

Podcast Replay of Interview with Brandon Tracy

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00:00:00 Hey everybody, thank you for joining us for today, for today’s episode of real estate disruptors. Today we’ve got brandon tracy with btg. Hey, and he’s here to share how his team sold 123 properties in 2017 and they’re already on pace for almost double in 2018. If this your first time tuning in, I’m Steve Trang broker, owner of stunning Homes Realty, cofounder of the Offer Fast App, the one app you need for wholesaling. And I help people become real estate entrepreneurs. If you’re excited for today’s show, please give me a thumbs up or a wave. And before we get started, uh, I did start this show because I want to get back to our community. I definitely struggled before and brand is going to share some of the struggles he had as well. And we want to shortcut that struggle for as many young leaders as possible. I don’t charge a dime for this show.

00:00:42 I don’t make any money doing this. So here’s all I ask. Uh, all it costs you to listen to the show is you get to get. If you get value, please tell a friend whether tagging them below, sharing this episode right now, or given them a best takeaway later on, and that way we can all grow together. I end up forget this is a live show, so if you’ve got questions, please post them below. And Brandon, I will be happy to answer them for you. Ready to go. I’m ready. Alright, so first question, what got you into real estate? Oh my goodness. Um, you know, I’d have to go back all the way to 2004. Um, and I promised you I was going to give you the straight answers here. Normally I’ll dodge this a little bit, but, uh, I had a brain tumor in 2004.

00:01:28 Oh Wow. Yeah, really, really scared me quite a bit. It came on really fast. It was, it was, you know, pretty, pretty dangerous situation. Um, and it just kind of flipped me, you know, flipped a switch inside of me. It was like, wow, I was 24 years old. So I kind of went from just this young kid just finding his way through the world coming out of Asu for kinesiology. I was doing some athletic and personal training and you know, at that age you just feel bulletproof. Like that’s how you feel at that. You can’t imagine, you know, possibility of something being wrong with you. Yeah. So I was, I was certainly operating on that wavelength in my head. Like, you know, I’m bulletproof and you know, and, and just in a, in a, almost a blink of an eye and you know, there was land in the emergency surgery room at Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix and you know, hey, you’ve got to ping pong size, golf ball sized tumor in your brain behind your left eye.

00:02:23 And throughout that whole experience, you know, I, I just came through the other side like most people do with something that kind of shakes them to their core a little bit and Kinda, you know, Kinda really, really pushes your, you know, the fact that you’re, you’re, you’re going to die someday, right? Like this, this is real. We all do that. Um, and I came out of that just with like a renewed vigor of what I wanted my life to look like and what I wanted to be about as a person. And, and I don’t think I got there right away, you know, you develop as a, as a young man, it takes, you know, you go through hardships, you learn from failures and he’d do all that stuff. But ultimately that was where the decision was, um, in a hospital bed at Barrow neurological institute that know, hey, I’m going to, I’m going to do real estate.

00:03:04 My mom had done some real estate, went up when I was younger. I was familiar with it to a certain degree. Um, and I came out of that and, you know, like most people did, mind you, this was, you know, three or four or five and, and I got into investing and buying houses and flipping them, my me and bought my first house on whatever, whatever you hear from this, don’t do this. But I bought my first house in downtown Phoenix on a credit card and fixed it up on credit cards and flipped it over. And, you know, made some money. I thought, wow, this is super easy, right? Like, these get rich quick. Yeah. And, and you know what I, what I didn’t realize what I was too young and arrogant to realize that the time is that it wasn’t my skill that was helping me flip houses or do this.

00:03:46 I thought I was, you know, I thought I was doing, doing some good things. It was like, man, I’m a pretty smart dude. Uh, in reality it was just the boom, the market was absolutely going crazy. So I never had a chance to fail during that time because the market was correcting every single mistake that I was ready to call your mistakes. That covers all of your mistakes. So you don’t ever have a chance to learn. And you know, when you’re, when you’re that age, you do have a tendency to be a bit arrogant and that arrogance can grow in that environment. And I think, I think that’s exactly what happened to me. Um, so ultimately, you know, like most people in, in Oh, eight, uh, you know, that ended quite tragically. Yeah, to say the least. So you’re in your hospital bed. Yeah. And you decide, well now it’s time for real estate.

00:04:30 I mean, you said you were getting your degree in kinesiology. Yes. At Arizona State. So high. So high real estate. Um, you know, I think like most people that come into real estate, that decision was also quite naive, you know, because even today we see what facebook and hgtv does to set expectations for people that come into our world. Yeah. Um, so, so I’m not going to lie and say that I don’t think there wasn’t a level of naivety that, that know was part of that decision, but regardless, that’s where the decision was made. Um, and, you know, and I, and I came into it, you know, just going, well I think this is my path towards financial freedom. And like most people, I said, you know, I really want control over my own schedule and I want to be my own boss. And I said all the things that other people say, but fast forward to 2009 after the crash, I lost everything.

00:05:22 I was sleeping on the floor of a friend of his apartment complex, um, you know, and coming from where I was, you know, really, really humbled me in that moment, gave me an opportunity to become self aware, self aware, to learn about myself and who I was as an individual and who I wanted to be as a man. Um, and it, and, and I think that, you know, essentially being at rock bottom there was, was critical to be in where I’m at today, but ultimately I got a job at a place that I really hated, you know, one of those, one of those jobs that you have just sucks the soul right out of you. Like, and you, like, you just show up every morning and you go, the most exciting thing that could possibly happen in my life is me getting up from this desk right now and walking out and never coming back.

00:06:08 Right. I’ll put it on a planet for that. Yeah. I just wasn’t. And I knew that. I felt at my core. I just felt it at such a cellular level that I was, I didn’t belong in that environment, that I, that I needed to step out. I needed an opportunity, but I was also at the very lowest point of my personal confidence that I’d ever been at. So I’m really fighting these two competing ideas. But I’ll tell you what, I, uh, I was driving down the one on one and I was in traffic from. I was going from Frank Lloyd Wright to the 60 on the 101 bumper to bumper traffic. And listen, I’m just going to be honest. I’m having a conversation with my mother in that moment. And again, confidence is low. I’d lost everything. The shame that I felt, you know, at that time they’ll losing everything and losing investments and going through that.

00:06:55 At the time you didn’t realize how many Americans were going through it. All you knew is that you were going through it and it felt horrible. I felt so much shame, like the amount of shame that was oozing from. He just crushed my confidence and it killed me and I’m driving down the one on one. I’m talking to my mother and I still remember this and she and I talk about it. To this day. I have tears coming down my face and I just tell her, I said, you know, all I want is, is the door to open for me one more time in real estate. Just one small door to open for me and I’ll never look back. I’ll get in there, I’ll figure things out. I’ll be humble about it and I’ll never look back and I’ll use that as a catalyst, not only for me to, to, to right my wrongs and fix the shame that I felt and, and you know, the foreclosures and the, and the, you know, the people I’d invested with and all of that, but also like honor myself and that decision that I made in that hospital bed right about what I wanted to do.

00:07:50 Well, what I didn’t realize at that time in 2004 when I wanted to make that decision and go into real estate was okay. I knew what I wanted, but I wasn’t the man I needed to be yet to go ahead and take action on that goal. Um, and luckily through the collapse in [inaudible] eight and the humbling and hitting rock bottom and becoming self aware and learning about yourself, who you are, who you want to be, I think in that moment I just realized like I’m ready and mentally and emotionally ready to take this seriously and act like a man and take responsibility for my actions and sure enough within a week, and it’s no exaggeration, within a week, a guy that I knew that I had done some investments with that I thought felt really poorly of me because we’ve had some investments and those fell apart.

00:08:40 You know, again, I didn’t realize we were all going through it. All I knew is in that moment, I felt so much shame and I’ve already inside myself on that. Um, and I get a phone call from him and he goes, I met somebody at a bar last night in shocker, right? And he goes, and I gave her your phone number. Um, and I think that you should talk to her about real estate and it turns out that he wrote my name and phone number on a bar Napkin and slid it over to a extremely wonderful woman who I absolutely adore and love Steph Martini, do you know stuff? I think she was a team leader for kw. She was, yeah, she was a team leader for kw and she’s so much more than that. I mean, so much more than that as a person I think.

00:09:27 Yeah, that wouldn’t surprise me at all. Um, but I came in to meet with her. Um, and, and you know, the rest is kinda history. It was that moment, that defining moment, that conversation with her and later on I had another very defining moment conversation with her. But you know, how you talk about really influential people that came into your life at a very specific time. Like steph was that person for me. She was that door, that little crack that I tearfully explained to my mother. Like I just need, I need this opportunity to show up.

00:09:59 Well, I think that’s amazing. Right? Is that you had, you had the brain tumor and then you had the crash and in both instances have been really easy to just fold up shop and get finding moments. Right. But it’s easy to give up, but instead of you embrace those two things to bring you to where you are today, right? Yeah. Instead of. Because most people would just be like, alright, cigarette, you know, this wasn’t for me. Whatever. We’ve took failure and you’ve used it to propel you forward. So I think that’s powerful, right? It’s all matter of perspective.

00:10:30 Yeah. Well, you know, and now with hindsight being been an older, more mature and more responsible individual, you look back and you start to understand and realize the value of failure. Yeah. Like it’s one of the most valuable things that we can have both for personal and professional growth, right? We all think that we succeed our way to success, but what we really do is we, like the people who are most successful in the world simply failed their way there. You know, and you hear it. Every guru has whatever version of you know, flipping the script on failure, but the reality of it is, and especially in the new instagram meme world where we’re just seeing, you know, one after another after another and we’re scrolling through quote after quote after quote and we like them and we move on. Well, we got to sit for a moment and let that information, that language, what it’s telling us resonate at a deeper level and that’s, and that’s what we’re talking about here with failure is you know how you respond to failure and how you use it is a massively determined like it.

00:11:30 It massively affects how well you’re going to do in the future because it’s a learning experience and you get to choose to learn from that. Evaluate what you just did, evaluate what you did well, evaluate what you did poorly, and then use that to reinvent yourself for the next day. I love what you say there though. You get to choose and it’s all like it’s all a choice. Everything that we do is is a choice and I know that that’s so hard for people to hear because life is hard. Like let’s just face it. Life is difficult. We’re in a very interesting capitalism society here. It’s difficult. I get that, but it’s important like it’s really important that you understand that it’s a choice that you make every single day whether or not you want to take action, whether you want to give into fears or reluctancies, whether or not you want to sit at home and watch netflix all day or whether or not you want to get up and change something about your life personally or professionally. It doesn’t matter. It’s a choice. So this is really cool.

00:12:31 Horrible. But with my kids, whenever they complain, life’s not fair. So I get used to it. We’re going to do about it.

00:12:36 Yeah. I mean I don’t think our parents would have taken it that far, right? Because, but, but the reality of it is, is like maybe it doesn’t have to be that harsh. We’re joking about it right now, but like if we can set, if we can set better expectations for not only our kids, but people who come into our industry, if they have better expectations set for them, then maybe they won’t come in or maybe they’ll come in and find success or find a different path towards success that is much more valuable to them. And I think that’s one of the things we do worse than real estate is set expectations for what our world really looks like.

00:13:13 Yeah. Well we all fell for it, right? Be on the beach and be drinking Mai Tai’s all day. Yeah. So if you were to start over today, like we’re the first two or three things you would do now start in real estate today versus, you know, for someone brand new. Yeah.

00:13:30 Um, you know, there’s not too much that I would do differently. Um, and that’s out of sheer luck because, you know, regardless of how your path looks, here’s the truths about when I got into the industry, I came in, um, with Steph, you know, and, and I was very, very lucky to have someone that was so willing to open her heart and be truly honest with me and to guide me and of course it was my responsibility to take action, but she was there, you know, to push a little bit. And then two, I joined a team, um, and what were some of the best things that came out of that was I understood real estate at a volume level, like, under. I understood what it was going to take to sell a lot of real estate and, and I understood why that was necessary.

00:14:20 Um, I also started to learn the effectiveness of systems and processes and what that meant building a business. And I think too often we get really caught up in the idea of what we’re just going to be a real estate agent. Well, there’s a, there’s a big difference between being a real estate agent and a good real estate agent and there’s an even bigger difference between being a good real estate agent and being an effective business owner. That’s the next step. Yeah, and that’s, I think that’s one thing that we just think automatically happens in our industry is, Oh, I sell a lot of real estate, therefore I’m going to build a team and you know, I’m going to go on. There’s really no correlation between being a good real estate agent and being a great business.

00:15:00 Later I had someone’s like, Oh yeah, what do I need you for? Right. I’ll have to do is just hire an Isa, got a couple of buyer’s agents and listing agents.

00:15:08 Why don’t you just slap me in the face because of how painful that you know, building a business really, truly is the risks that are involved. Right? I mean, you have to be highly risk tolerant to even start a real estate team if you’re really truly going to stick it out because we’re talking a five year. I mean, we’re talking five years to really build really and, and you don’t know whether a couple of those years are even going to be profitable or not. Right. So there’s gonna be some skinny months for sure. There may be a skinny year or two. There was for me, you know, so, you know, joining that team was an important part of my growth because I started to understand the business at a deeper level rather than just just showing up and trying to sell real estate. Right. And of course, you know, I got some guidance there around, you know, plugging in and being very mindful of advancing myself intellectually within this business as well, participating in trainings and really just understanding that, you know, it’s not our job to reinvent the wheel and real estate, you know, so many people have come before us and set these very specific models.

00:16:08 There’s, there’s things in place. It’s our job to just effectively repeat those things.

00:16:13 Yeah. And then, um, so I watched that Gary Keller bread man thing. Yeah. There’s a small survey, right? Books still relevant today is the Mra book’s irrelevant today. That’s 100 percent, so rather than reinventing the wheel, it still works.

00:16:27 Yeah. Well, well people want to. People want to go back on fear right there. There’s a lot of fear out there right now about the role technology’s going to play and how our industry is going to evolve and the truth is our industry is absolutely going to evolve more in the next five years than it probably has in the last 25 years. And technology is absolutely the major player in that. But this is still a relationship game. And when I say by that is in the real estate world, relationships, you know, we’re often applying that concept to our clients but we need to apply it to our, our whole industry at this point. Our relationships with one another, our relationships with our staff. You know, like one of the things I’m most proud of at btg real estate is my relationship with my ceo, Kyle, who is just an exceptional talent and, and my relationship with my operations manager and some of the top leaders on, on, on our, on our team and the relationships that we’ve created within that team and how we preach that, how we value it, how we’ve have, we’ve kind of interwoven into the fabric of our culture and how we treat each other matters as much as how we treat our clients.

00:17:34 And I think that we would all be, you know, we’d all benefit from the idea of applying that concept to one another, whether it’s brokerage to brokerage and the same brokerage model, whether it’s a brokerage to, uh, to a competing brokerage. But at some point you gotta think like we need to apply those principles as concepts. All of those things that we preach about our businesses and our clients to each other and to our industry. Because I think that unifying that is gonna, like that’s gonna need to be in place for us to really stay agent centric long into the future, but we got to stop all this other nonsense. Right? Yeah. Uh, okay. So talking about when you first started in, you know, you’ve got your place or you help someone, helped you find a team. So our next question is, a lot of people always ask like, you know, how do you find a mentor in this, in this?

00:18:23 So the, you just tell people will just joined a team. I know. Would your advice be to them? I think just join a team is probably the worst advice you can give to anyone or just get a mentor is probably because here’s the, here’s the thing, do we know what a team is anymore in real estate? Like do we have, do we have a definition of what it, what it means to be a team? Because the webster definition. Yeah. Because what we have right now is we’ve got just a bunch of single agents that, you know, they’re creating brands and they’re getting caught up in the art of their business, need to put group after your name. But that’s what’s happening. Right? So what’s happened is we have all these people that just put group or team or there’s a bunch of agents and they get together and then they called themselves a team.

00:19:05 But there’s no, there’s no backbone, there’s no administrative support, there’s nothing, there’s nothing there to suggest that that’s an actual viable business. Right. So now what we run into is this dilution of what teams really are. And then within the teams that really our teams, the differences are absolutely crazy. I think Tom Ferry put on his website recently and I love this and I’m, I’m going to say him so that when I say this, I’m not the person that the people were throwing tomatoes at, but he talks about like the, for like the, the, the main four structures of teams, right? And, and the one is the family team, which is kind of the oldest. That’s the one that’s been around the longest, but typically that’s a number of family members that all kind of play a role in, in building a team, but the problem that he cites that other leaders have cited around that is it can be difficult to pull people into that system because they might, you know, people outside of the family might not see that as an opportunity to grow within the organization that are not family.

00:20:02 Right. But some of those teams, and I have, you know, I know a couple of them that are just phenomenal, right? And the second one in there that he talks about is the king and the servant team and we know lots of these, right? This was a, this was a very specific model that was even preached for a long time in our industry and that’s usually when there’s one really charismatic leader at the top, but everything that happens in the organization has meant to prop up that leader. It’s meant to validate that individual person, right? It’s not a very collaborative environment. It’s more of a supportive environment to keep one individual on a pedestal. Listen, that model’s worked for a long time. It. I’m not saying I’m not talking about this as if it’s good or bad, it just is, but that model’s been under fire because it, it’s, it has a high turnover and believe me, we, we looked at this model as is this the direction we want to go and ultimately we settled on.

00:20:52 No, because of the turnover because we wanted to, we wanted to value retention a little bit more. We want to devalue helping agents build legitimate businesses and not make it all about me or make it all about one central figure because we kind of felt like we were going to be behind the boat on that anyways. Right. And then he talks about the last one, which is the one that’s really kind of taking storm right now and that’s the collaborative model, right? That’s where you really get into collaboration and department heads and everybody’s playing a role in your creating synergy within a team and everybody’s moving in the same direction and everybody wins as a result. Sure. Maybe the person at the top makes a little bit less money, but they’ve got a more sustainable, healthy business that can survive long into the future because there’s a lot of people winning and invested in the results and I think ultimately like we’re starting to see a lot more of that. We’re even starting to see, you know, really, really talented real estate agents all across our industry, partner with each other, not because they have to financially, but because they’re starting to understand the value of collaboration and we’re starting to think bigger and we’re starting to think of real estate and in more terms of how, not only how we provide value to clients, but how we provide value to our agents on our team or in our brokerage because it’s, it’s being demanded.

00:22:07 No. Well, and I think that’s a really big thing that you’re talking about it because that’s, it’s actually done this way and many of the industries that we admire, right? Yeah. Costco, Nordstrom’s, right southwest. And we’re finally seeing it here in real estate. And I think a Darren hardy talks about this with a Branson was this, um, Richard Richard Branson and he says that he’ll take his team side any day of the week. Right? Like, you start bashing on his people. Great. We don’t really want clients like you exactly. So if you treat your people right, don’t treat your clients right. Yeah. So I think that’s really, really powerful point. So, um, and I was just put in here, I still remember meeting you at a rst alarm event. I don’t know that they don’t call that anymore, but I want to sales like eight, 10 years ago I met you. That was a long time ago and you were a rising star. You were a, everyone’s like, you gotta know who this is. Brandon guy is like, okay, I see that. But um, I just wanted to put that note in there. It’s just interesting to see, you know, there were saying like, watch out for this guy and here you are today. I think

00:23:10 that, um, yeah, that was a pretty interesting time for me because like I said, I was, even when I came into the industry, I was at a real low personally from a confidence perspective, um, and I kind of had to re rediscover myself and my confidence and figure things out and I was doing some things well in real estate, but I was naive and in a lot of areas to um, but, you know, even at that time I don’t know that I was really ready to step in and lean into, you know, accept your greatness as they say, you know, and I wasn’t ready to lean into that. And I think a lot of it was because at the time I just didn’t feel like I deserved it and I was still kind of punishing, you know, we do that to ourselves, right? We, we do that.

00:23:48 We have a tendency to, you know, really let the human side of us kind of, you know, just take us down some rabbit holes sometimes. But yeah, I do remember that. And that recruits what you’re, what you’re referring to, rst, elm was recruit, select, train, lead, motivate. Yeah. Um, so it really, the early stages of me learning what it, what it was like to, to attract talent, to train people, to lead people, to motivate people. And I don’t think I realized that the time taken that class, how relevant all of those things are and building a business and how much time it takes to invest in yourself and to really create a mastery level understanding of those things. And then once you have the understanding of it, even if it is a mastery level understanding and now you’ve got to get into action and apply that and through action and applying what you’ve learned, you’re inevitably going to fail.

00:24:37 So then you get back into failure. Right? So, um, yeah, and it was just, it’s so great that our industry has these kinds of things to plug into, especially if you’re someone who is, you know, going to self evaluate and who is going to step up from failures and figure new things out. And I mean, there’s no better industry to be in with with the, when we don’t have a ceiling, if you’re willing, you just got to be willing. So I went through one year of classes recently and it was that, and correct me if I’m just butchering the name, but a proven steps for referral success was, yeah, we’ve changed, we’ve changed the headlines a couple of times. I think now it’s eight powerful steps to generating referrals and building a profitable database so we can do like a 10 minute version. What would that.

00:25:23 Yeah. So whenever is appropriate amount of time for that, really I think the most effective way to explain how this class was developed was one, I did it, this was how I developed my business and you know, when I first branched out on my own and I had to go figure out how to, how to, how, you know, how was I going to get business, what was my lever going to be, um, and, and I chose referrals and open houses and that’s that, you know, that’s really what I wanted to do. So over time, through failure and through evaluation, I started to realize, you know, how I articulated my message was important, a followup was extremely, extremely important and being able to do all of it in a systematic way so that it was scalable for me to manage a lot of relationships at one time that I started to realize how important those things were.

00:26:10 So fru that experience and through applying what I was doing, what I was learning, I started to systematize what I was doing so that I saw that it would be easier for me to do in the future. I wanted to be more effective and be able to do more with less. Um, so ultimately what, what we’ve really settled on was this really amazing kind of eight step process. And really what we’re trying to do is every, every real estate agent, when they come into the industry, you notice this, right? They posted on facebook or social media. I got my, I got my real estate license, right? And you know, everybody’s posting gifts and making it rain and it’s just like, you know, the expectation is just so out of control, you know, like you almost feel bad for him. Um, but the idea there is you, you post on facebook and you have all this support and you have, it’s really false support, right?

00:26:56 Because all these people are telling you, congratulations, oh, you’re gonna do great. Oh, you’re such a people person, you know, fill in the blank. There’s a million of them. But in reality, what we haven’t done and what those people haven’t done and what I hadn’t done early in my career was take all of those people that were willing to say congratulation who liked me, maybe they even loved me, but what they didn’t do was trust me as a professional. So what we’ve got to do is we’ve got to take relationships and move them from likened love to trust and confidence. And that’s really what the whole eight steps classes about the whole first hour of the eight steps classes online set. It’s all theory about why, why are we doing this? Why is it effective? And why do we use the language that we use, right?

00:27:39 Because everything that we do through there is not about it. It can be somewhat contradictory to what we’re being taught out there in my opinion, which is very old school, hard sales techniques, but what we really want to do with our spear of influence with the people that matter most to us in our lives is we want the opportunity to earn their trust and confidence and if we can start there with just requesting, requesting that you give me the opportunity to earn your trust and confidence and listen, Steve, I know 100 percent that that there’s no obligation for you to use me. I realized that I’m going to have to earn that. Once you get into that mindset and you stumbling, yeah, you gotta get to people first because listen, the majority of people don’t even think they can contact us or talk to us until they’re ready to buy herself, but where we’re most effective is helping the due diligence and preparation point of the process as a result of doing that part really well.

00:28:32 The sales process, excuse me, has a tendency to be exponentially easier as a result. So that’s really what the whole thing is about is move people from like and love to trust and confidence in a very systematic and professional way because you don’t like when people talk about scripts, right? And in that class we give out all of our scripts and we live role play the script when you were there and I, and I told you why we were using the language that we’re using, right? We went through that and inevitably in that class everybody, you know, you know, talks about objections that they have or reluctancies or fears and one of the ones that we get all the time as well. The script doesn’t sound like me and it’s, yeah, of course the script doesn’t sound like you write. The script is meant to sound like a professional person with years of experience that’s humble and wanting to earn trust and confidence.

00:29:19 So we do this to ourselves all the time. We say the script doesn’t sound like me. Scripts aren’t supposed to sound like you. They’re supposed to sound like the version of you. That’s a professional. That’s what, that’s what’s really trying, you know, so it, you know, when you can inspire people and get them really kind of anchored about why the script is a certain way, then there are a lot more of the, there are a lot more likely to use it, but a lot more likely to stick to it. And then there are a lot more likely to get the results from it because we talk about scripts all the time. If people say, well, can I change it? Of course you can change it, you know. But the thing about changing scripts is when you change them, you’ll take out the most important part of the script because it’s the part that makes you feel most uncomfortable.

00:30:00 Right? Right. And when you should be thinking out of the mindset is, I’m going to roleplay this until it’s just ingrained in me and I’m so comfortable I can say it in any situation. You don’t have to think about it. Yeah. So I mean, I, I love that and we talk about theory and we go through all the eight steps and how we kind of move those people in the relationship along. We started at like and love and by the end of the eight steps, hopefully we’ve, we’re well along our journey to earning trust and confidence as a professional. And this is, what do you say, 80 percent, 90 percent of the business that you’ve done for this year? Yeah, last year. You know, last year it was about 86 percent and I think we’re hovering right around 80 percent repeat and referral client this year. So I don’t want to do like 80 percent of the site, 200 transactions.

00:30:42 That would probably be worth going to this class. Yeah, I built my entire business off of it. So it was unwind it. See this class, how do they, um, you know, we should have probably prepared for that. I just, you know, I just got back from Montana. I taught the class class in Montana. For those of you who don’t know, I’m a, I’m a native Montana and born and raised, although I’ve been in Arizona for 20 years, I have had an awesome opportunity to go up there and spend some time with my family and work with some brokerages up there and do some teaching. So now that we’re back, I’ve only been back for a few days now and we’re going to be working to get at least one or two on the books for September and again, one or two on the books for October. So if you follow me on facebook or Instagram, I will put out our next dates as soon as we have them.

00:31:25 All right. So guys, make sure you follow brandon on instagram and facebook. Uh, so max has an interesting question. Do you think then the Solo Prenuer is dead? Wow, man, I’ve been asked that question like three times in the last two months. Um, and I, you know, I wouldn’t say that my answer is going to be the most educated answer and it’s probably going to be a bit of ride the fence answer, but I think that it is possible. It is possible that as we continue to go through the next three, five, 10 years in real estate, that the collaborative environment is going to overwhelm the solo agent in what teams and collaborative groups of people can accomplish both for their clients and for their staff. So I think there’s always, always going to be a place for great solo agent that maintains awesome relationships. That person will always exist.

00:32:20 But I think that you’re gonna have to be really, really great and you’re gonna have to maybe bridge yourself from just being fully solo to at least leveraging yourself in areas that can benefit your clients through, you know, whatever marketing or technology or communication that is needed. I think the hardest part about being a solo agent going forward into the future is we taught, you know, I’m going to say this word and everybody’s going to panic and there’s no reason to panic, but we likely will face downward pressure on commissions and it at a much more exponential rate over the coming years. And as that happens, can the solo agent adapt and sell enough volume to overcome that? Um, whereas collaborative groups and teams will be able to pull resources to handle that, you know, together where it affects one person on the team less than it what a solo agent. So that’s my, like, again, really uneducated, take opinion on it, take it for what it is, but an educated well,

00:33:16 uh, probably got some. Probably put some thought into it, but yeah, I’m with Ya. I don’t, I don’t, I don’t see how in three years a solo guy can do it by himself, but just the crm costs the um, lead Gen, if you’re going to do a lead Gen, uh, the followup, the process, the procedures, everything. Yeah. I just don’t see how one person can do by themselves. Well

00:33:40 alright, and it. Yes. Can you do it? Yes. Can you do it well maybe. And is doing it well, going to be enough to stay in business in the future? Likely not right now.

00:33:51 So I was a, at the high performance forum that, that went to for Darren Hardy. He’s like, look what used to work back in the day. If your average, you’re

00:33:58 debt. Yeah. Your average now you’re in real trouble.

00:34:01 Yeah, if you’re good, you’re getting by. If you want to thrive, you got to be excellent.

00:34:06 Yeah, you do. I don’t know. I’m so biased. I’m just going to say it. Um, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t want to be solo in this environment, but here’s the thing. It’s like we don’t do a good enough job of, of given people the resources to understand what certain teams provide and what they don’t because we’re all competing with each other for, for talent. It’s true. And I think that we were doing the newer agents a little bit of a disservice by not being a little bit more transparent about what teams do provide and how different each of them are in, in what they provide to the agents. But ultimately if you get, if you get a new agent, um, in a, in a great team that helps develop them, train them, monitor them, help them develop standards and goals and help them with execution, and then you fully leverage them with listing management, marketing and transaction coordinator and post-close and Yada Yada, all down the line.

00:34:58 Um, that’s a phenomenal environment for a new and budding real estate agent could be in because it is, oh my goodness, it accelerates their growth so much. And I’m in the way that real estate is moving now. You need to accelerate your growth quickly. Like you need to do that. Now we’re just talking about like developmental agents, right? Or New agents. Now you move to agents that are doing a decent book of business. Will we know anyone who runs a team knows whether they like to admit it, how thin the margins can get? I can get sideways on you really quick, just because you have a team doesn’t even mean you’re profitable. You might be losing money, but on facebook you look like balling. Right? But again, we don’t, we’re not transparent enough to let people in to know that like, Hey, just having a team doesn’t mean you’ve made it, you know, intention does not equal success.

00:35:47 We talked about this earlier but we’ve got agents coming on our team now that you know, eight, nine, 10, 12 million in production and what they’re doing is they’re coming to plug into everything that we worked on in 2017 and you know, we, we did 123 units in 2017 and I’m going to say this and it’s going to sound crazy. We weren’t focused on production last year at all. We were focused on infrastructure. We had a plan and that plan was not to keep pace and be relevant with units and show off and you know, use units as the way to like pump us up. We were building infrastructure and as a result of building infrastructure, now we’re like we’re attracting our tribe at a level that we’ve never attracted before because people want to plug into the leverage that we have and I love working with mid range, really talented agents in that regard because they, it, they get it, they know what operating expenses due to their business and if you can plug into a very systematic, highly leveraged business with, with extremely amazing and talented administrative staff members on a team with no turnover, with really healthy culture and all of those things, they’re actually making more money.

00:36:59 Right? And, and I’m not pumping us or recruiting to us, but I’m saying there’s collaborative teams like that all over, right? You just can’t. It’s just so hard to find them. But that’s a, that’s an ideal situation where a lot of these teams are filling the gap between brokerage and agent. And what I mean by brokers, the broker just have it tough like you know this because you’ve got to be soft, right? You’re too hard on people in your agent count. Dwindles, right? The great thing about being on a team and uh, and uh, especially a highly, highly accountable team, as you have standards, you have accountability, but then you train to those standards, right? Right. You hire to those standards. The expectations are properly set. When you come into the business, you get to hold the entire thing accountable at a level that brokerage is really just can’t do because they have to put their arm around everybody and say, you know, Rah Rah, come on in.

00:37:50 And they provide the resources and the training. But ultimately you’re highly dependent on that individual plugging in and taken advantage of it. And most of us just aren’t built that way. We need accountability. That’s why we have coaches, right? That’s right. That’s why some of us pay thousands of dollars a month for a coach. And then someone asked, why are you doing that? You seem to be successful. It’s because I understand the value of accountability. And I understand the value of knowledge and mentorship and it won’t be successful without the coach. Oh No, no chance. Absolutely no chance. Uh, okay. So, speaking of that, who do you personally coached with? Um, I’ve, I’ve bounced around, I’ve done maps coaching, um, through Keller Williams. I think one of my favorite coaches from, from years ago, Glenn neely from bizzy blondes real estate out of Los Angeles, made a big impact on me early on in my career as he blondes.

00:38:36 I haven’t heard of that one. Glen’s a maps coach. He’s, he’s an extremely, extremely successful individual. He and his wife Rae Wayne or are very, very talented, you know, come from contribution givers to the real estate community and, and, you know, you just got to love him. But, uh, over the last year I’ve been coaching with Michael Mayer who most people know of as a New York Times best selling author of the seven levels of communication. Um, and I’ve been coaching with him as well as participating in his Masters Series, Certified Referral Coaching Program. Um, and that’s been really fun because it’s gotten me a little bit out of just being in real estate coaching and being a little bit more in business speaking, coaching, um, and it’s fun to add different elements to that and increase my skill sets and areas that maybe I’ve avoided either whether purposely or not, um, but getting me out of my comfort zone and making me a better professional as a result.

00:39:33 What is business speaking? Coaching will, you know, there’s, there are strategies to, to teaching and speaking. Right? And I think one of the things that Michael said to me about six or eight months ago when I was, when I was really kind of working with him on being an effective trainer and speaker, was it, it, it doesn’t matter so much about what you have to say. It matters what they learn. Right? And Yeah, w w what do they take away? Like you can get out there and puff your chest and get high fives and standing ovations. But are they taking anything away? Because if they’re not, then what was that really about? It was probably about your ego right? And it was about you being seen and you being held up on a pedestal and I’m really uncomfortable with that in the first place. Um, which is why you know, you don’t see my name and face all over everything that we do because the truth is partially I’m uncomfortable with that spotlight.

00:40:30 But once I started to realize that I could have a positive influence on people and that I could, that I could teach in a, in a, in a more humble and organic way. And then I started to learn the techniques to make sure that when I did teach, it wasn’t all about me and it was about what they could learn and what they could take away that really just inspired me to, to lean into it more and be okay with me being uncomfortable in front of crowds and in front of lots of people. And I started to kind of let some of those butterflies and that nervousness go away when I’ve finally figured out that this isn’t about me. This is about. This is about you helping other people. Yeah. So are you currently then, so you’re, you’re affiliated with seven levels. Yeah. Yeah. So I’m a, I’m a master series certified referral coach through seven outlet.

00:41:14 If you’re interested in that, hit me up on facebook. It’s a really awesome program. You’re not only going to learn all of the just incredible referral techniques and stuff that Michael Mayer is laid out in the seven levels of communication book and through his other teachings and accelerate and catalyst which are coaching programs within that. Um, but you’re also going to how to be a better speaker even if you don’t have aspirations to be a speaker. Um, you know, just like toastmasters would do it is gaining confidence and being able to be your most authentic self in front of other people. There’s massive value in that and it would, it really is self awareness and personal growth. Right. So have you been speaking then? I have, yeah. Cool. Yeah, I mean, you know, I, I do the teaching and that’s kind of my primary role is just to go around and teach the class.

00:41:59 And I’ve been doing a mindset course as well that is kind of higher level stuff about self leadership and different things to challenge status quo quos in here and I think I’m being a little more vocal now than I ever was before about some things that in real estate that just aren’t, it just don’t sit well with me and I think that if we articulate them in a way where it’s solution based versus just complaining, I think maybe we can make an impact and make some changes. So I’m going to lean into that a little bit more now, you know, especially, you know, towards the end of 18 and going into 19 as more of a primary objective for myself. Yeah. Very cool. And I think that, you know, you and I have talked about some of the challenges right now facing our industry. Yeah, it’s great, right?

00:42:36 If you can lead some of those changes. Yeah. Uh, so what does your team look like today? Oh my goodness. We’ve, so we’ve got our core and uh, I think we talked about we sold 123 units in 2017 while focusing on infrastructure and that really worked for us because now we’ve sold more units this year already. Then we did all of last year, so I figured this year we’ll figure in somewhere between 220 and 250 depending on how some of our new talent really blossoms at, at, you know, especially as they get towards the end of their 90 day training. And we really, we really don’t just put people on our team. Right. I mean I think there was two months ago we had 10 people, 10 candidates to put on our team and we ended up not hiring a single one and it wasn’t that they were, they were bad people or they didn’t have a, what we were looking for.

00:43:26 Ultimately, like we focus a lot on the items that we think are going to fit well with our culture. You know, people that are going to fit well with our culture and we don’t. We try not to add to too many people at one time because you had a lot of people into a culture. They have a tendency to immediately change the culture and what we want to do is culture is one of our biggest strengths of btg real estate, so we want to absorb people into our culture and how healthy it is, the comradery, the support, every level of it. We want to protect that first and foremost so we won’t bend away from that just to throw 10 people in the room. We may solve a, you know, a unit problem or a financial problem by doing that in the short term, but were corroding the business as it goes forward.

00:44:11 So we really focus more on organic growth and attracting people to our tribe that, that, that our message resonates with a little bit more. So we’ve got that. I’m going where we are launching our first, I guess full, legitimate expansion in Missoula, Montana this next month. We’re super excited about that. So it was an official this whole time. Well, it’s kind of an official, but uh, now we have our, we have our people. Um, we have our infrastructure, we have our talent in place, we were slow, you know, we, we go slow to go fast. We prepare so that when we get into a situation we do, we do it the right way. We don’t want people having doubts when they partner with us. We want them to come into it and go, this is exactly what I expected. This is phenomenal. Right. Cool. Yeah. So we’re really excited about that.

00:44:57 And I knew and I were talking about too, we’ve got kind of a business partnership and in Tamarindo Costa Rica as well, an international aspirations. We do. Yeah. So we’re, we’re branching out and I just love the leverage that we’ve created at btg real estate allows me to focus on this big picture stuff now and now that I can fully focus on that, it’s been a lot of fun. We’re going to see exponential growth as a result of that and I’ve just got, I’ve got so much love and respect for the people that work at btg real estate alongside and with me and their ability to grow their departments independently of me having to look over their shoulders. These are, these are such talented, well rounded people and it, it, at this point, it’s my job to make sure that they never have to leave my organization to find their next opportunity. So now I’ve got to go out and create bigger opportunities so that I don’t lose these. Just amazing people that have helped us all get to this point.

00:45:51 Alright. So that’s amazing. Uh, so one of the struggles that I’m having and you know, I think you’re concerned about, you know, we were talking about an organization that we’re all familiar with that’s doing really well in Texas, but culture didn’t necessarily permeate throughout the entire country. How do you make sure your culture stays where you’re at? So for example, you know, Brandon’s in Tempe, how has Montana going to have the same culture as Tempe? And then likewise, how is Costa Rica can have the same culture as the US, those,

00:46:31 yeah, those are viable questions that keep me up at night and they literally do, they, they keep me up at night. But ultimately I think that it comes down to a couple of key elements that I’m going to go ahead and ride with and see where it takes me. Expansion is, it looks a lot of different ways to a lot of different people and there’s not one particular business model in expansion that, that is going to take over all others. Right? You got a lot of people that are just kind of going out to different market centers and they’re plucking somebody from the bullpen and they’re saying, Hey, join my team and whatever city. And you know, they’re, they’re influencers. So you know, these people are Kinda like, oh, a little bit starry eyed. And you see that a lot and listen to it. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing.

00:47:16 I mean, it’s a business model and it works and it does help people. Um, but ultimately what you’re doing is you, what are you doing to absorb that culture? Right? And some of these guys are doing a phenomenal job with it through video and through, you know, they’re, they’re creating a whole online community with their teams and stuff and brokerages are trying to do that. I think there’s some more challenges there, but what we’re really focused on doing is we’re, we’re not trying to, we’re not actually trying to expand. People keep showing up in our world right now and they’re, and they’re just such phenomenal people and they’re, they’re, they, they fit our culture and our moral standards and everything else that comes along with our business. And we start to collaborate together. And ultimately, Montana, we want to repeat exactly what we do here up there.

00:48:01 We don’t want to just grab a person up there and then plug them into our hub here. We want to repeat the value of what we bring to the table here, not only to the people that decide to work with us, but also to their brokerage and be able to go and teach and coach and bring different people. You know, cross cross referenced some of that value between the brokerages, so for us it’s about more than just expanding, it’s about being a valuable piece and an asset to the brokerage and, and making a difference both in the, in the client’s lives and the people that decide to work with us and otherwise, but it looks different for us because I don’t think my aspirations are to expand all over the country. They’re just not, you know, I want to have two or three or four of my locations that I can really plug into and be involved in and you know, that’s, that’s where it’s at. And then we’ll see who on my team or who in my organization a world steps up and wants to take it a little bit further.

00:48:53 Yeah. Well good for you. For me for having that courage to take that step because like me personally I got people are like, why don’t you open office and Gilbert bioenergy open and tim in, in Tucson I got people saying, hey, why don’t you open in Texas? And for me, I was like, I don’t know if my culture or leadership is strong enough today to lead that.

00:49:13 And that’s my biggest. And when you say yes to something like that, you have to evaluate what did I just say no to everywhere else in my life. And what will the impact of that beyond my business and my relationships here. Right? And, and you know, Gary said this a number of years ago, like you’ve got it. You’ve, your home base is just got to be so strong. Every crack, every hole needs to be filled. You need to be really, really solid at home before you step out and you and you do that. And I think it’s really difficult to get to that point. It takes time and most people aren’t patient enough. They are so concerned with keeping up with the Joneses that they cut all these corners in their business and culture. You’ll usually is one of the biggest corners cut so that they can go be relevant. Whether it is expansion, the new hot thing, let’s make sure I’m relevant as whatever else is the new hot thing. Let’s make sure that I’m relevant. Right. But you know, it’s really hard to build culture with high turnover. So you got to balance that

00:50:11 stop. That’s my great fear.

00:50:13 Yeah. And we, we just figured if we focus on retention and the right retention, then you know, things will work out for us. Well,

00:50:20 okay. Uh, how many agents do you have anything right now?

00:50:23 Let’s see. I think we have, at this point, we have 13 agents. We have five, what we call leverage series agents and then we have another seven now that are in training and development. Um, we really try to train our agents to one to understand and build a book of business, a sustainable book of business. Um, and then we want to give them opportunities within our organization to not, you know, once they are capable of doing things that we no longer have to train them to do, that they have opportunities to, to earn more money, we’ve got to give them a path to go to. Right? And we find it our responsibility to give them a path to get higher commissions while still holding on to their massive amount of leverage that we provide, um, while at the same time as a business, we’ve got to balance that by remaining diligent on training and providing value to those agents in ways that we can make money into.

00:51:14 So everything that we do is based around creating wind winds for the client, our agents and our business and being wholeheartedly transparent about it so that everybody sees it, understands it, and completely buys into the mission of it. Um, wasn’t leveraged theorization and what’s so that’s our language within our team. So essentially a leverage series agent, um, with us as someone who doesn’t necessarily need to go through training. Maybe they already have a book of business, they’re doing six to 12 million or 15 or 18 million a year. They’re tired of trying to hire and train staff and you know, they’re, they’re tired of having to fire people entire to having people quit. And they’re starting to realize how difficult it really is to build a business. And it is, it is unbelievably difficult to build this business and sustain that, that growth, and if you’re still in production trying to do that, trying to build a team and you’re, you’re not just wholeheartedly focused on it, you have all the time in the world to commit to it.

00:52:13 It’s really, really hard. So when they start to figure out like, oh my gosh, I can plug into a situation like this that doesn’t, that doesn’t take me out of the spotlight, that keeps me front and center to my people and I can get all of this leverage that I really, really truly need. And that would take us two hours to go through. Like we’ve, we’ve built out an administrative staff that is whole heartedly built to create raving fans and leverage our agents into future referrals and repeat business. Everything we do inside is about making sure that happens for our agents. That’s awesome. I kind of want to start working for you. Okay. So then is it fair to assume that you don’t have any iss then? We have a version of it. So we have a director of lead generation who is, that’s how we referred to her inside of our organization.

00:52:58 Of course you wouldn’t say that to the clients. That’s client care coordinator. Um, but either way that you shake it, we decided that we took what Gary Keller had to say years ago to heart when he said, Phil, every crack and whole in your business first. Um, so we really evaluated where agents are weak and listen, this isn’t a like we, we know, I know I was weak at this. All of our agents know they were weak at it before that they came in. But are you responding to every lead inside a two minutes? Are you answering every single phone call? And if that was all that happened, how much more business that would you do? And listen, most of the time it’s not about whether or not they want to. Most people who say I want to, but life gets in the way, right? Stress gets in the way.

00:53:41 Anxiety gets in the way. We’ve got a deal blowing up and everything becomes just about that. That phone call, that phone call comes in and that’s a person calling that represents, you know, a large portion of commission and you’re so stressed you don’t pick it up when you fill those cracks and holes for agents and you know, that’s how we kind of do it inside of our organization. Our director of lead generation can understand when that phone call comes in, they can see right away which of our agents listing that is. She’s extremely well versed at delivering value and helping the person to understand our value and how we can help them. Um, and the fact that she’s there to answer the phone all the time, get back to leads very, very quickly. She’s converting at like 18 percent right now in our Internet leads, which I’m waiting to see the anomaly that’s going on there.

00:54:28 That’s like, what is, what has happened at we have we stumbled onto something. I don’t know. But ultimately I think it’s just that we always come from contribution and the way that we sell. And that way, the way that we present our value as a business, we don’t hard close. We don’t do that, we asked great questions, um, we come from that place of contribution, really articulate our value proposition in a way that disarms them and gives them an opportunity to step into our world a little bit and just learn a little bit more. And as a result of us doing that, we’re seeing really, really phenomenal results. So that is, that’s really what our Isa version is, is just fill every crack and whole in inbound lead generation that there is. Because we do a lot of business. I mean we’re going to be somewhere in that to 20 range this year.

00:55:16 There’s plenty coming in and if all we did was make sure we got all of that, then we’re in really good shape too often we start looking for an external thing to fix our problems before fixing the internal thing. And, and when we really committed to that, it was like, we’re, we’re so happy we did well. That’s a huge takeaway for me. So guess I’m going to have to hire someone or. That’s awesome. Yeah. And then it’s about the right person, right? I mean, that person, our, our, our Gal Shawn, take or Condo has like, she’s just blown all of us away. Like we need to talk about hiring talent and how that one person can make it really, really, um, it can have a huge impact on your business. Like hiring is that important? It really is because that one person can make a huge difference.

00:55:58 The right person. Uh, what is your biggest struggle right now? Um, you know, my, my biggest struggle struggle is in delegation. I think that I, I sometimes feel guilty for given my people, um, our next project, right? Um, and this is a self problem. It’s not a them problem because they laugh at me when I finally tell him like I’ve been kind of holding this back and I wasn’t sure how you were going to feel about it. Right? And then I get the slap across the head like, what are you talking about? I can do this in 24 hours. Right? Sometimes I got to realize that what’s difficult for me in my behavioral style, which is typically details and research and that kind of stuff. What is your disc profile? I’m a high d high I 90, 98, 88. I. So it’s like a. So you’re trying to handle details.

00:56:43 Why not try? Right? Like at some point you got to be self aware enough to know, but you know, it’s, it’s something that I struggled with and I’m coming out of it right now and as I come out of it and lean into my people more and give them their opportunity to shine and do what it is that they do so great. I realized that I just need to take the wheel and let them do what they do. And it’s not that I don’t have all the confidence in the world in them. It’s my own. It’s my own stuff. It’s my own hangups, you know? And, and I still have those and I think we have until the end of time or we’re always trying to overcome something, you know, in, inside of ourselves. We’re always trying to get over something and I hope that never ends because of the challenge of that is is one heck, you know, it’s a heck of a cool thing to be a part of.

00:57:32 Oh yeah, for sure. And I saw my struggle with delegation is just getting out of my head because there’s right. It’s like, oh, we should do this. I go, I’ll have. I’m driving to. My main is, oh, we started doing this and then you completely forget about it and it sounds so complicated in your head and then you give it to them and they simplify it in three seconds you’re like, oh, I feel really stupid for making this so complicated. Right. But that’s,

00:57:55 that’s the beauty of collaboration. Here we are back, right. It’s like being a great leader means being a great collaborator and a great communicator. Right. And when, when you, when you lean into that, and I’m still creating a mastery level, understanding of that myself, like really what it means to be, have a mastery level understanding of, of culture, collaboration and communication and how the delegation process flows through all of that stuff. How you truly utilize other people’s strengths. Um, I’m still leaning into that as a leader as well. And every time I do it is amazing the results.

00:58:27 So what I’m learning right now, so I’m also going to say strategic coach as a coaching program going through at the moment and what they say and I’m trying. Who’s they? Do you know the rule of day? Anytime you say they say you have to cite three specific people that say it. Can you do that? There we go. The head coach to Stephanie Song. All right. She is the quarterly coach Adrienne Duffy the one. I see what you guys can use that out there. Anyone that says they say make them cite three individual people. Otherwise it’s just an opinion. Right? Right. Yeah. Uh, so what they say is that you got to write down the ultimate deliverable. Here’s some ideas I have on it, but this ultimate deliverable. And he’d give it to them. Let them create the path. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s something I’m working on myself. Why? Why do you think

00:59:16 it is that we do that as leaders? Why do, why do you think we’re so reluctant to get in there and do that? We’re holding ourselves back most of the time because we think we’re amazing. We do, and that’s where I was going with this. We get caught up in the fact that we think that, you know, sometimes it’s about ego in the sense that we think we’re the only ones that can solve a problem, but also sometimes it’s just about, it’s something completely different in the sense that were either scared or we’re, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re going to be embarrassed or, or feel like we’re not qualified to lead our people if they solve a problem for us. And that’s, that’s dangerous, right? That’s why they’re there. That’s why they’re there. To be a part of the organization, to solve problems, to create a hive mind mentality when it comes to growth and problem solving. Right. And we gotta get out of our own way. Most of.

01:00:07 Yeah. Uh, so what is your superpower?

01:00:10 Oh Man, I’ve, I really don’t know. Um, I think that a skill that I’ve developed purposely because I want it to be a better person. Um, was empathy, I wanted to understand people and the way that they think and the way that they respond and all the psychological nonsense that we deal with in the world and with our upbringings, I really put a lot of effort into philosophy and psychology. One to understand myself, not only you know who I am, but again, who I want to be. Um, but throughout that process I realized that part of understanding yourself as understanding that you’re part of something so much bigger and all of those individual pieces that are in that bigger picture are as complex or more complex as you. And the better you can understand them, the better you can help them and the better you can collaborate with them and, and it all just starts to fall into place. So, um, I wouldn’t say it’s a superpower, but I would say it could be, you know, the, the more I, the more I honed this part of myself. Um, yeah, I could see it being that way.

01:01:21 Well, yeah, I mean I think the combination of empathy and then the self awareness, I think it’s hugely powerful because you can’t connect with other people if you can’t really stand,

01:01:31 you know, when you’re in front of somebody that hasn’t gotten there. Right. Do you feel it coming off of them, you know, that whether it’s, whether it’s the self awareness or the empathy or you know, when you’re in front of somebody and they haven’t broke out of the shell of their ego yet. And I don’t mean ego in a bad way. I mean ego is just, it’s a, it’s a thing that we lead with and boy you can notice it right away. When you start challenging yourself, you start to see it in others.

01:01:56 Well, another thing too is that the message is people want to feel understood. If you don’t have empathy, you can’t possibly understand. Yeah, yeah. You can say that you do and you can nod your head and shake and do all the, you know, all this stuff. Wait for objection handling. Wait for your turn to talk. Yeah. Yeah, but you’re, you’re exactly right, man. All right. All right, so we’ll leave this one last unless someone else wants to ask, but what is the greatest lesson you can impart right now? We’ve gone through some great, amazing stuff today. What is the greatest lesson that you’ve learned that you’d want to impart on today’s young entrepreneurs?

01:02:32 Just one. Um, I think that for, for a young entrepreneur, I think the idea of coming out of the gates and thinking that you can do it all on your own is extremely, extremely dangerous. Um, I don’t think enough people that come into our industry value a leadership and mentorship and being around people that can show you the ropes. Like we, we have opportunities to make a lot of money, a lot of impact in this business. I’m a lot like other other industries in our world and you know, we always use the doctor analysis with a lawyer analysis and real estate and we say, well, if you were a doctor, would you go to starbucks and meet your client for a consultation? No. You know, we go through all this kind of like boring language. But the truth of it is like there’s not many of us that are great, I’m sorry, like, and most of us are still striving to be that way, but there’s mediocracy rampant inside of our industry and I’m going to bring it right back to choice.

01:03:33 It’s a choice that you can make. You can choose to go get yourself in an environment and become truly professional, truly valuable to your clients or you can choose to just want to be relevant on social media or be popular or have the attention of a producer. But it’s all of that choice and I think that if you can come into this industry and humble yourself and not get caught up with having to have the sexiest facebook logo or business logo and all the nonsense and getting caught up in the art, humble yourself, get in there. Learn how this industry really works and you’re going to be exponentially further along than your peers that you started with. Or even the people who have been in the industry for four years. Because you and I talked about this over over lunch of what, six or seven weeks ago?

01:04:22 There’s so many purposeful distractions in our industry that are meant to extract a little bits of money from agents or, or distract them and they get caught up in the idea that education is somehow work. We all know education without implementation is just entertainment, so you can’t just run around to all these classes and say that you’re working. Eventually you’re going to have to learn what work really looks like in this industry and then you’re going to have to take action on it and it’s not going to feel great. There going to be fear and reluctancies and there’s going to be rejection. Rejection is such a huge part of what we do and you’re going to have to not only grow as a professional, but you’re going to have to grow emotionally and how you handle those things and if you do, if you’re willing and you do that, coming out the other side of that, what we’re capable of accomplishing in this industry is truly great.

01:05:12 Okay. Limitless. Limitless. Awesome. Alright, so, uh, what is the best way for someone to get a hold of you? Now? You mentioned a couple of things, but you want to reiterate.

01:05:24 Yeah, I mean obviously I’m getting better at facebook messenger now. I check it at least every few days. I’m not a fan of it. I’d just like text messages, like why don’t we just do that? Um, but yeah, I mean it, you can always reach me on my cell phone, which is six zero, two eight, two six, zero two, one three. Uh, my email address is brandon dot tracey, t r a C Y@btgrealestate.com.

01:05:54 Awesome. And we get potentially to have their eight a steps class for, for referrals.

01:06:01 Yeah, we’ll certainly have to in September and two an October. No.

01:06:05 Awesome. Awesome. All right guys, again, if you liked this show, please share this episode right now. And uh, also I want to implore you guys to reach out to me if you guys have any struggles. I mean, I want to help, right? So reach out to me, you can message me and I’ll respond to you. And then please do join me. Next week we’re going to have tyler hixon with open door. So that’s gonna be a really fun one. There’s going to be some really angry questions that were on that one. All right, thanks a lot guys, and thank you. That was a great episode.