Why Real Estate Agents Need To Start Thinking Like Entrepreneurs

The following is an edited excerpt from the book, Blueprint: The Agent’s Guide to Building a Thriving Real Estate Business by Garry Creath and Chris Scott.

If you asked a room full of real estate agents what the most important part of their job was, seven out of ten would likely say something like “service.” Two out of ten of those agents would probably say “sales” or “lead generation.” And those two would likely be selling more properties than those focused on service.

But a lone agent would say something different: “business owner” or “entrepreneur.”

That one agent would be focused on building something that rewards now but, more importantly, will continue to pay them long after they’ve stopped showing homes and putting signs in yards. That one agent would be focused on a blueprint that will help them build a business — they know they’re not simply working another job.

Real estate professionals often overlook this key aspect of their role. Whether you’re a solo operating agent, you’re working out of a broker’s office, or you’re that broker or team leader running the office, you’re absolutely an entrepreneur. As agents, we’re all entrepreneurs and businesspeople. A real estate practice is a business you own rather than a job you attend.

Most real estate professionals feel comfortable providing a service. They are excellent at customer service for their buyers and sellers, and they’ve found one or two particular activities that they are comfortable doing as part of the process. They aren’t as comfortable with sales and marketing, however. And they aren’t at all comfortable with finances.

What they haven’t yet recognized is that they’ve started a business — that they’re entrepreneurs, and their success depends on more than just doing the aspects that they enjoy.

This isn’t a surprise, really. According to the National Association of Realtors®, by the time we become real estate professionals, it’s actually our second or third — or fourth or fifth — career. Life goes sideways, your nine-to-five job ends, and you get sold on the idea that real estate is an easy alternative.

Sales, marketing, and business finance classes aren’t required to get your real estate license. Realtors® are highly interpersonal — we love being around people and helping them, and we are “people persons” by nature. But we also need to learn business, sales, and financial savvy. Unfortunately, in the educational opportunities that exist, most of the focus is on how to avoid getting sued or how to not cause conflict in a real estate transaction.

Meanwhile, there’s an enormous turnover rate for real estate professionals in the United States. Many reports show that over 75 percent of agents fail in the first year of business, and over 87 percent are out within three years. They simply aren’t given the knowledge they need to survive.

What you really need — from the brand new Realtor® to the long-time professional — is education on lead generation, lead conversion, business development, sales mastery, marketing, financials, and what it’s like to be a business owner. You’re doing much more than selling real estate. You’re a business owner — and we believe you have the potential to not only survive but also thrive in this profession.

We’re All In This Together

We’ve found that there are two different types of personalities in real estate. There’s the practitioner, who prioritizes the skills and training that will help them provide excellent service within their niche. And there’s the entrepreneur, who recognizes that they own a business and need to expand their education and develop their business practices.

In this book, our goal is for the practitioner to expand their business and the entrepreneur to expand their practice. The difference comes down to mindset. And by the way, when we say “we,” we’re not just wagging our fingers at the collective “you.” We include ourselves every step of the way, because we’ve been there. We have been in this business for more than twenty years each — Garry as an agent and Chris in marketing — and we’re still practicing today.

Who Are We?

Garry Creath, cofounder of The Paperless Agent, grew up around this kind of business — his parents were in real estate for forty-plus years together. But he fell into real estate entirely unintentionally back in 1997. Like many of us, his story begins with struggle.

After I graduated from Texas A&M, I left Texas and moved to Colorado to become a ski patroller. That was the plan. But one morning at 5:00 a.m., I got a phone call that changed everything.

My dad had unexpectedly died in the middle of the night.

My mom would have died of a broken heart without someone there to help her, so I left right away — no job, no plans. And I never moved back to Colorado. I stayed in Austin, and I did what any lost and wandering soul does: I got my real estate license.

More than twenty years later, Garry is still here — in both Austin and real estate. While working in real estate full time, Garry was taking six listing appointments per week, carried over fifty-six listings at a time, and was the co-owner of GoodLife Team, which won the Inman Innovator of the Year award. His real estate service and sales experience carries an emphasis on sales scripts, narratives, and processes for turning prospects into returning customers.

Chris Scott, president of The Paperless Agent, is a digital marketing expert who spent years helping real estate professionals market their databases to develop their real estate practices and ran the sales and marketing divisions for a two-time Inc. 500 award-winning company, all before running into Garry.

The rest, as they say, is history — and our histories share a common thread. Like Garry, though for different reasons, Chris also stumbled into real estate. From Chris:

I started off as an IT person and a computer programmer. Real estate was never in my plan. But it just so happened that I had worked in a company that was providing support and services to the real estate community. From there, I quickly moved into helping real estate professionals with marketing — beginning with Brian Buffini, who I worked with for eleven years.

Decades later, I’m still in real estate, working alongside Garry at Creath Partners and The Paperless Agent. But at the core of what I do — what drives me — is my passion for learning and sharing what I know. If I were to win the lottery, I’d become a full-time student. Learning has always been my passion.

It’s Garry’s decades of real estate experience and Chris’s marketing savvy and love of learning and sharing information that makes our practice work and has led to the book you hold in your hands.

Garry has worked to overcome the struggles of falling into a real estate career, going all in — blood, sweat, and tears. (Almost undoubtedly the latter two, anyway, thanks to long hours in the office, well past the time the office managers would shut off the AC.) He knows the struggle and pressure that come with wondering whether the next deal will come before bills are due. He’s been in survival mode, but he didn’t want to stay there long. He learned all he could learn from the best he could find — literally listening at the door of Dee Shultz, his mentor, to hear how she worked — and did exactly what they did to get where they were.

Chris has plenty of success of his own to share — generating over 6,000 leads per month, managing pages with over 248,000 followers, and training over 50,000 Realtors® on social media marketing over the past three years. Chris holds the same two decades of experience in real estate, but from the valuable outside-in perspective of a marketer. Together, we’re always in conversation about the books we’re reading, the conferences we want to go to, and the ways we can continually improve our business for our customers.

Simply put, we all raise the industry together. There’s no destination that ends your journey. We’re all in this together, in a constant evolution of knowledge and practices combined with a good work ethic.

(Don’t) Do The Hustle

There’s a process that people have to go through to get from where they are to where they want to be. Maybe your life isn’t what you want it to be. Maybe you’re not performing in your work the way you’d want to perform.

For many of us, these thoughts tend to resurface every year around the beginning of January. You’ve taken time off to rest from a hard year, and you come back thinking, “I’ve got to get back to work.” So you set objectives: “This year, I’m going to double my business — no, I’m going for ten times my business! I’m going all in, and I’m going to blow it out of the water!”

No doubt, you will hustle and work hard, as you’ve done every year. But when it comes down to it, how often have our strategies stretched beyond “I’m going to get down to work”?

Hustle has its place, but a real estate business is about more than that. First, there aren’t enough hours in the day to be able to achieve an unreasonable goal. As we’ll look at later in the book, your goals have to be substantiated by real, feasible action steps. Plus, the things you’re doing and the systems required to sell twenty homes in a year are very different from those needed to sell a hundred in a year.

When you substantiate your goal, you might find that selling thirty-five homes is more feasible than a hundred, based on the number of calls you need to make, appointments you need to go on, contracts you need to convert, and closed deals you need in order to reach your goal.

But the other piece to that is if all you’ve got is hustle, you can easily hustle yourself right out of the business. You could be doing the wrong activities altogether. As the proverb goes, “Optimism without knowledge is useless.” It doesn’t matter how optimistic you are — how much hustle you have; it’s pointless if you aren’t making the best choices.

There’s no way to reach a 500 percent increase through a nondescript effort like “hustling” or “getting after it.” Unlike most speakers and educators in this field, we won’t expect you to turn motivation into miracles, and you shouldn’t expect that of yourself, either. It doesn’t work that way.

You’re not going to hope your way into success, in real estate or in life.

We Want To See You Win

Tell us if this scenario is familiar: You’re working your tail off. It’s crazy how many hours you’re working. You’re sneaking work into every corner of your life — office hours all day long, and then clients want to see you in the evenings and on the weekends, always busy doing something. You know you’re supposed to work hard, and you certainly feel like you are. You’re worn out just from taking good care of your clients, so you figure the marketing tasks can slip a little if a day goes too long.

Come January, when you realize business needs to pick up to get you back on track, you hustle again to build it all back up. After you get a client or two, you pour yourself into taking really good care of them — just like you did for the clients you had last year. Prospecting activities slip again, and by the next year, you’ve hit the reset button yet again. Sure, you’re getting to those clients who carry you through to a commission check — the national average is one per month — but then you’ve got nobody left. You’re starting from zero, over and over again, and why? Because just blindly doing stuff won’t get you results. It’ll only get you burned out.

Everything we do has just one simple goal: to see you become a true business owner with a profitable, bountiful real estate business. Outside of our real estate business, we also run a real estate coaching, education, and technology company. We’ve trained over 71,000 real estate agents a year through our webcasts, giving them the tools they need to turn generic hustle into effective strategy. To stop hitting the reset button. To move from surviving to thriving in their real estate businesses.

To do that in this book, we’ll go deeper than any of the conferences or education experiences you’ve had. We’ll get into the tactical skills and thinking that someone who wants a long, successful career in real estate will need — and only what you actually need. Because there aren’t enough hours in the day to grow your business to sell a hundred homes per year with the approach you’ve taken to hit a dozen homes per year. You’re going to need to be intentional about the steps you take. We know, because we’ve been down that path already, and we want you to follow us there. We don’t hustle anymore, because what does it even mean? No. You’ll need a good work ethic, but more importantly you’ll need to know the right things to do, and then you’ll need to do those things. That’s it.

Work through the book a chapter at a time, and we’ll help you build your real estate business from the ground up — and we all know that you don’t have to be just starting out to be back at ground level. If you already have an operating business, we’ll help you refine your operation into an effective empire, à la Peter Drucker’s Effective Executive: if you’re doing the wrong thing efficiently, it’s an exercise in futility.

Before we ever look at sales or realization, you’ll design your platform and build intention into the services you offer your clients. We’ll show you how to research your potential market and calculate its value as you set expectations and goals. Then we’ll walk you through the sales and marketing skills that you need to succeed and — yes, we’ll do some math — how to properly structure and track your finances.

Most importantly, you’re going to walk away from this book with a substantiated business plan. There are no pie-in-the-sky numbers here. By the end of the book, you’ll know exactly who you’re selling to, what you’re selling, how much you can possibly sell, and what you need to do to get there.

Along the way, you’ll have access to our website, www.BlueprintBook.Online, where you can print worksheets and supplemental information to put it all in action. If you’d still like hands-on help from there, our course is available to you as well. We’ve been where you are, and we’ve accomplished the goals that a lot of you are dreaming to. We’re here to see you succeed. Are you ready? Let’s go!

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To keep reading, pick up your copy of Blueprint: The Agent’s Guide to Building a Thriving Real Estate Business by Garry Creath and Chris Scott.