Since I was hitting my natural cap of achievement on my own (approx. $12M in production / 60 units sold/year), instead of reinventing the wheel or stalling out as I observed in so many other agents who hit ceilings, I began studying top performers who had achieved much more than me in business.

This often required me to look outside of my local market and go to industry conferences.

I started seeking out specific coaches who had done what I wanted to do at this moment in time: build financial wealth.

I knew I could not make this journey on my own. I needed help.

My Purpose.

For me, it’s never been about production or getting my name up in lights (although both of those happened over time). It’s always been about freedom. Specifically, time freedom - which is earned by building financial wealth, because wealth gives you options.

• In 2013, when I lived in my mom’s basement after graduating from Virginia Tech and worked in downtown Washington, DC, I felt trapped with no way out.

• In 2014, when I worked for four months in another basement - a corporate basement - with no windows in Melbourne, Florida, doing a W-2 audit job with a bunch of other negative people, it felt mentally like hell on earth. I was SO depressed and lonely.

• In 2015, when I had worked my butt off at Deutsche Bank only to have the bonus ripped away from someone’s actions that I didn’t even know, I felt the desire to have control of my income and life.

The pain from these job experiences was deep for me. I remember calling my mom crying multiple times which I had never done before - thanks mom for listening!.

That’s why I keep the end goal front of mind: get to financial independence as soon as possible.

Asking Questions.

I always knew there were large producers out there, but I never knew how much money they made or what their lifestyles or relationships were like. So this led me to ask these top producers hundreds of questions, which pissed a lot of them off.

Most producers got defensive when I asked questions that I refer to as, value metrics, rather than vanity metrics.

Value metrics are the metrics that actually matter in life to me: time freedom, financial wealth, health, quality of relationships, ability to adventure freely, the option to build businesses, and helping others.

Vanity metrics are the metrics that you share for status: winning awards, revenue or production numbers (which mean very little to me), bragging about how hard you work (though hard work is important, it can often be at the detriment of your family and health — which I learned from experience), and doing things that only help yourself - often at the detriment of others.

I wanted to learn everything I could from the VALUE metric producers who seem to actually live awesome lives, help others, and build their wealth.

SO - I started systematically observing and studying the top performers around me. What I learned is that the VALUE metric producers all had something in common:

They thought like business owners, not salespeople.

Business People vs. Sales People

Sales people can sell homes and are good at it, but they usually blow their money on shiny objects (big cars, big houses, big boats, you name it). Business people know how to help others and make profit by doing it (and then invest the profit into rentals, apartments, syndications, flipping homes, private equity deals).

When you meet a person, there’s an immediate sense of which bucket they fit into.

For example, the business people all knew these characteristics of their business, referred to by me as the 4P’s: Price, Product, Perimeter, and Personality.

In other words, these top agents all knew the price point they wanted to serve, the type of housing they wanted to sell (product), the area they wanted to do business in (perimeter), and the type of person they wanted to sell to (personality).

They were specific. 

Because they had clarity on WHO they were serving, they knew what to do every day.

Because they knew what to do and for whom, it was easy for these value producer agents to take action and have a value proposition to target their preferred segment of the market.

Because they took action, they were top performers AND earned sizable profits.

It all made sense. Clarity gave them power.

On the other hand, typical salespeople didn’t have any business plan, strategy, or any accountability to execute. They kind of just wing it and hope for the best. Oftentimes, they float around from brokerage to brokerage looking for shiny objects to help them, when the reality is that they just need to start working on themselves and thinking like a business person.

There was a second finding.

The agents who “burned out” of the business were the agents who failed to give up control of their responsibilities that made them successful in the first place. At the same time they wanted to increase their production. These two things are in conflict.

Control is what gave the top performer a taste of success in the beginning, but now it holds them at that level of success and no further. What allows agents to go beyond their ceiling is building in a new way: building a system of people and technology to do the heavy lifting of servicing the customer so they can focus primarily on building more relationships and adding more and more people to their database.

These business-builder agents were also much happier in life and business.

It's a much better feeling to be on the floor moving up than hitting a ceiling and being pushed down. 

So I got smarter by studying the best and began implementing.

Here was my business plan:

In 2017, I decided I was going to serve customers $200,000+ (and target luxury) and then refer out the other customers to agents in my office. I was going to focus on single family homes and condos only, no land or commercial (which came up literally every day). I decided I would only serve three zip codes: 32225, 32224, and 32246 as these zips were in a 15 minute drive so I could scale - and the rest would be referred out. I decided that I would only work with people who wanted to work with me, through buyer agency agreements, which my coach taught me about. I also decided I specifically wanted: no jerk clients.

I knew that just one bad deal can make me fall out of love with this business, so I decided I wouldn’t tolerate it anymore. I had one of these jerk customers in 2016 and it was not worth the money.

So, I was beginning to evolve from a salesperson to a business person.

I was willing to give up control because I knew from studying others that would be the only way.

Now at 24 years old, I just needed to learn how to recruit and train talent to help me serve these customers at a high level.

It can’t be that hard, can it?

This led me to my next big failure (‘ahem, adventure!).