One question you get asked fairly often as a coach is - "Why would anyone who could just sell houses and make 300-500K/yr, want to be a coach?"
There are a lot of reasons that coaching is a fulfilling, exciting and fascinating career, but for myself I started to realize that this was the direction I wanted pretty early.
I remember one moment in particular which was the beginning of my obsession with personal growth.
I was around 4 years in the business and I hadn't been paid in months and my savings around was getting close to zero.
I had a big cheque coming, $22,000. I was counting on it to pay credit cards and hold me up for another few months
I'd been in the business for years, and I had learned a lot, I thought... but I didn't really feel like I knew what my business was doing. honestly it was nowhere near consistent and I never knew if I was doing the right thing.
I felt rudderless. And then I got my commission cheque.
I didn't know it at the time but my old office took multiple fees on larger cheques.
My $22K came back to me at a total of under $8,000. I was devastated. I felt sick to my stomach. how the hell was I going to be able to pay rent, my bills, cover my credit cards and live for another few months while I found some closings?
I went from feeling panic to sickness to just being at a loss. Then I got angry. I was mad at my broker for only a minute before I realized I was mad at myself.
I remember sitting there and asking myself how I'd let myself get so far off track that I literally had no idea what my next deal was. How was I so unorganized that I didn't even know how my broker calculated my deal fees?
I sat there thinking about what I needed to do and I made what was probably the best decision I ever made in my whole career. I decided it was time to look for help.
I'd always been the creative type. I was the music child... the artist type - I come from hippie parents...
I was always experimenting in my business. The problem was that I was always trying things which people hadn't done before, and lots of them never worked! To add to it, I'd usually quit the new initiative way too early to know if they eventually would have worked.
I started going to courses and my business instantly reacted.
I learned that every time I learned something I could use, it changed the results I got from the effort I put into my business.
How had I missed this for so long?
Imagine that as an agent you hold yourself to a standard that every week you ask 100 people for business. I can share some assumptions you would have about those 100 conversations from my experience training new agents:
For every 100 conversations a new, untrained agent, has, they will create between 1-2 leads and add perhaps another 2 people to their database.
Here’s the thing, if you ask the right questions and use a great script to introduce yourself, you’ll actually get somewhere between 4-8 leads and add up to 15 people to your database.
Just from changing the words you say, you’ll MULTIPLY YOUR RESULTS BY FOUR TO EIGHT TIMES!
The cool thing is that it doesn’t stop there. With those same 8 people, more of them will book an appointment with you, more of the appointments will sign up with you, and more of them will end up selling.
Raising the level of your abilities has exponential returns
Here is the most amazing part: It takes a fraction of the time you are spending on the other parts of your business. Even just 20 minutes a day of script practice will completely change your world in real estate.
Many agents approach their personal growth without overall purpose, just picking things up as they go. While “something is better than nothing”, personal growth can also be a lot more exciting when you know where you are going and create a plan for how you intend to get there.
Creating your growth plan
What do you want your business to look like in 3 years?
How about your work/life counter balance?
What role do you want to play in your business?
What other financial endeavours do you want to pursue? Investing? Speciality? Side Hustle?
What do you want your LIFE to look like in 3 years?
What other pastimes, interests or passions will fulfill you?
So why do I do three years? It's kind of the sweet spot for long term planning. Most people overestimate what they can do in 1 year and underestimate what they can do in 10. One year is relatively short to completely revise your business, and at the same time you have no idea what your life can look like in in five or even ten years… 3 years though, it’s a nice distance out because you can achieve some pretty amazing things and it’s still close enough to be visible by your peripheral vision.
So consider what’s possible, who you want to be and what you want to be doing in three years… then move backwards.
What will you need to accomplish in year two to be on track by year three? How about year 1? What will need to accomplish in the next year to be on track?
Now ask yourself what you need to learn and master each year to be ready for the year which follows it.
I bet if you took the time to map some of this out on a sheet of paper, you'd end up writing a bunch of things down which you otherwise would never have considered…
Okay, now that you know what you need to do, I’ll lay out my favourite strategies. Note that I’m not going to list everything out there - there are a lot of different places you can turn to find help. I’m going to share the strategies I believe bring the highest return on investment and I’ll detail how I use them.
Four best ROI for GROWTH
If you are brand new in real estate or your budget is tight… honestly even if it’s just that you are still apprehensive about this stuff, start small! There are a ton of amazing ways to to learn and grow which don't take significant investment. Note that these are not in order of best to worst ROI - rather they are in the lowest to highest COST. The truth is that the highest ROI is typically also associated with the highest cost, but you will likely only need this kind of education and support once you are ready to afford it.
#1: Books are the highest ROI because they are insanely cheap
Books pack such an incredible punch when it comes to value, it's insane! Make the investment to order yourself as many books as you could ever want and you’ll still only spend a fraction of what most top agents invest in their personal growth.
The catch with books is that it’s easy to go through them without implementing anything. So you’ll need to have a strategy to follow through with what you learn. Here’s what I do:
Buy the book on Audible and listen to it while I’m working out or otherwise active at 1.5-2x speed.
Drop bookmarks in the audible at the parts you think you want to implement and make notes on what was covered so you have them for easy reference.
Buy the physical book and listen to the audible again with the book in front of you.
Revisiting the book with a physical copy in front of you really helps you retain more. Plus you can grab a pen and make notes, underscore important lines and fold pages for easy reference. Make your books a mess, you’ll get more from them if you treat them as a workbook.
#2: Training Courses
Courses are typically either a 1-2 day session or an ongoing regular event where you learn a set of skills or dive deep into a Niche topic. Our “Agent Academy” for example is a one year membership where agents get access to daily training workshops to grow their sales skills and meet in a small groups once per week to build their business plans.
If you are new, I recommend something like this designed to get your fundamentals set up - once you are a few years in it gets even more fun because you get to search and find niche training to help you craft a business that matches your skillset and goals.
Niche training on systems, tech, marketing, hiring, leadership and team building are all very common and, once you have the foundations set up, you should map these into the coming years on your growth plan.
#3: Seminars and retreats
Seminars and retreats are typically less focused on a niche topic and will often approach a broader category of focus. These are larger events and because of this they will usually require travel and are higher cost. Here’s the thing, they also attract top presentation talent, so while you are investing more to attend you will often be exposed to world class talent and and cutting edge knowledge.
The other thing? They tend to inspire the crap out of you, which always helps.
I absolutely love attending seminars, It’s been a huge part of my personal growth and they have also created an incredible network of people into my world which is invaluable.
#4: Mentorship, Consultants and Coaching
These are often confused and they are vastly different. While all quite valuable, it's important you chose the right one to fit your needs:
Mentorship is typically delivered in the form of advice from an experienced person. There is usually very little commitment from their end and mentorship does not have any accountability to your results. If you are lucky enough for someone to mentor you, the best advice I can give you is to follow through on your commitments. If they help you and you don’t do anything with it, they won’t be in your life for long.
Consultants usually are hired for a short stint to look at a particular aspect of your business and recommend a solution. It’s typically less collaborative and once they deliver their solution, it’s your job to roll it out.
Coaching is a long term ongoing partnership. An experienced guide who understands how to coach you works with you in the long term to provide guidance and hold you accountable. Coaching is very collaborative and many of the decisions you make will be primarily your creation with your coach helping you suss out the details and make sure everything works.
I’ve enjoyed having mentors and coaches throughout my life and I’ve often used consultants as well. I try to always have at least one coach who I’m working with, and then I leverage consultants to help on projects where I don’t have a lot of interest in building my skill set. I’m grateful to have mentors guiding me and while they’ve been an incredible source of support, I don’t necessarily expect much from them. I see them as a gift I continue to receive because I show up and bring value to their lives in whatever way I can in return.
Putting the four pillars of high ROI growth to work
Like I mentioned, this isn’t EVERY way you can level up. There are certainly many more. These, however, are the highest return on investment.
Once you have your plan together, I would look at what you need to learn and make sure you are going to enjoy doing all the work which comes with executing it. Remember that there are consultants and service providers who can help you do stuff you aren't passionate about. If you aren’t interested in something, it will drain you and your output likely won’t be very high quality anyways.
Focus on what you’re excited about. Think about what areas you are passionate about and go dig in, you’ll be rewarded at a much higher level if you are engaged and you’ll have the added bonus of loving what you do, which is nice, right?
If you want to put something together, I’d love to see it. Send me an email or drop me a comment for a copy of my growth plan worksheet and we’ll give you feedback on it if you send it into us - free of charge!
As always, thanks for taking the time to read this!
Sean
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