How I Cold Emailed Gary Keller & Got Into His Top 100 Group

It was late 2017, I was 26 years old, and I was in my second year of real estate sales.

Somehow, I got this crazy idea that I could meet and learn directly from the most powerful man in real estate: Gary Keller.  

I was working at his company in 2017 and decided to cold email him to share our real estate team's progress. We had gone from 66 sales in our first year to 87 sales in our second year and laid our sights on our third year of 150+ sales. I had a strong desire to keep learning and growing. 

It was an exciting time. I had just paid off all my student loans and credit cards, started tracking my net worth, and was investing in rental properties. I even convinced my wife, Brittany, to leave her highly coveted investment banking job and join me in selling real estate. 

We were all in.

At the time, I was getting coaching, and I knew from my conversations that knowing my numbers was important to any business conversation. So I just led the email to Gary with my sales numbers, my profit and loss, my reviews, my % of repeat business, my % of buyers and seller sales, and a bunch of gratitude. 

I nervously sent this email off to Gary with no expectation of response.

My Goal: just get on his radar.  

I waited three days and..... 

nothing.

I then told Brittany what I had done and she goes, "Are you crazy? You can't just email the most powerful man in real estate and expect a response!"

But then, the following day I checked my email and sure enough.... I had a response!

Gary congratulated me on my success and dedication to growth, and said I was smart to get a real estate coach early in my career. I felt amazing. 

Then, I got this even crazier idea. I had heard about his Top 100 real estate agent group from my coach. Apparently, they meet at all the big conferences. 

Next Goal: Be in Gary's Top 100 room to soak up the knowledge from others. 

So I instantly wrote back to Gary that I would be happy to fly out, sit in the room with these other top agents, grab coffee for him and them, be a scribe and circulate the notes at the end of the meeting to the members in this group. I would essentially be their assistant for the event. I just wanted to be in the room. 

Email. Sent. 

The next day... he replies and says YES! He was impressed with my progress and yes, I can be in the room as a guest. I would not be getting coffee for anyone, but I could sit and listen and take notes (no speaking, just observing). 

What in the world! I had pushed my way into this high-producing group. It was a pretty amazing feeling and to this day I am very grateful. 

Fast forward a year later, Gary selects me to speak on the 2018 Mega Camp stage to share how we grew a 5-star experience small team while also building high profit. The following year, in 2019, I was invited back again to share how we built a showing agent model that allowed us to outperform teams with hundreds of agents. 

I then had the opportunity to sit in the Top 100 room as a qualifying agent who produced more than $1,000,000 in commission and network and learn from some of the best and brightest in the industry who were doing 3x more than me in revenue. I was also invited to work on the technology the company was building at the time. It was wild.

One email, one dream, and one focus on knowing my numbers and being willing to share them transparently. 

Now, here's the thing that you should know…

At these Top 100 meetings, I personally thought the conversations would be wildly different... but what I came to realize is that the conversations.... are basically... the same. 

In fact, the conversation with the Top 100 was - if you broke it down - going over the fundamentals of business: track your numbers, focus on profit, hold your people accountable to results, find talent and nurture them, find more sources of business opportunities.... 

The only difference is this information wasn't going to a bunch of people who were just there to learn. The energy in the room was different. This group of people acts on what they learn, practically immediately.

And that's really the only difference. 

There's people who take action, and there's people who don't. What I observed is that action takers are those who get the massive, outsized rewards that life has to offer.

The key: living life and doing business with a sense of urgency.

By the end of the Top 100 meeting, these CEOs were on the phones with their assistants and teams, giving orders, and modifying their business, based on what they had just learned 10 minutes prior. These hard drivers had the desire to constantly explore the best way to change so they, and their people, could get to the next level.  The level of urgency was higher than I had ever see before.  

So if the message isn’t clear, here it is: take action.

JB - jon@movewithmomentum.com