Intro

How did I manage to sell 200 properties surpassing 100 million dollars of revenue in only two years? Today I celebrate two years of my real estate license. Let me share with you my story, which is surprisingly is not about real estate. It's more about building a successful business. By the end of this video, you're going to have the five core artifacts that helped me build a successful business so you can apply to your own specific situation. 

Howdy everyone, it's Or Yochanan and let me just start by saying that this is by far the most difficult episode I had to produce. Let's face it, realtors are notoriously known for self-promotion but I personally kind of cringe at it. However, I think it's for a good cause so I'm going to stop whining about it and just go ahead and do it.  

So for this episode, I'm going to dissect my own personal journey in order to help you understand what are the five core things that I think I've done well so you can apply them to your own business and absolutely crush anything that you set your mind to. 

First, I'll cover the abstract -  what am I trying to say here generally speaking. 

Then the application - what have I done in order to apply it so you can learn from the examples and apply to your own specific situation. 

• Produce Extra Value

So number one- produce extra value. And let me start by saying that this artifact is the foundation of everything else. I believe that there are two ways to be very successful with what you do. One thing you can do well is marketing. If you are extremely good at marketing, lead generation, and all these types of things that I'm not really familiar with, you can get to a big crowd and just get a lot of incoming leads and convert some of them. 

The other thing you can do is just have an edge over everything else, and then your network will grow organically. Once you have an edge and once you have a special value proposition, it's just a lot harder to come in there and sweep you. We need to ask ourselves in every transaction; “what is it that we've done that differentiates us from everything else”?, “What is our critical role in this transaction that could have not been done without us”?, and if there is none we should make one. 

So the process that worked well for me is kind of a postmortem situation for every deal successful or not I'm trying to look at the deal and understand what was my role in this deal. Was I just a rubber stamp or did I create extra value, and if I didn't how could I have created extra value? if there were some difficulties how could I make it them better? Every deal can produce a growth opportunity and every growth opportunity that we implement increases the equity in the business itself.

• Don’t Sell

The second artifact is don't sell. Be brutally honest. Don't just try to be the yes man of your clients and don't just try to compliment them on their amazing decisions. You are there to be a critic of the deal, you are here to make  sure that no mistakes are being made even when you need to say something that the client doesn't want to hear. When you fully apply the don't sell artifact you understand that you are not here to sell anything, you are here to advise, and you are here to guide. So if you push a client away from a bad deal you're not losing a commission you are earning trust.

• Master Of All Domains

The third artifact is be a master of all domains. Tell me if it sounds familiar... mortgages? That's not me. Insurance? Speak to that guy. Renovations? I don't know. If you don't speak your mind and if you have a big cloud of uncertainty, then nobody can come back to hunt you later down the road. The easiest way to avoid complaints about performance is not to perform. So, why should you bother? You should bother because of your client’s experience. That's why being extremely proficient in all of the fields that are associated with your industry is going to help your clients tremendously. And remember the first item; Producing extra value is going to help your business as well. 

So how do I actually apply this? Well first and foremost, I always advise my clients to speak with a licensed professional when it's applicable. If you need to speak about mortgages, I have a couple of lenders that I can recommend. If you need to have an inspection, I have a bunch of inspectors to recommend. With that out of the way, I still keep myself extremely proficient in all of these fields. 

With respect, I'm not going to trust anybody else with my client's money. I need to make sure everything is being done well and when it's not being done well, I need to protect and shield my clients. If you want to take it to the next level, one of the things you can do is apply in-house functions to these other domains. If you provide an end-to-end service your clients are going to stay within your ecosystem and they're going to to get better service because you know what service they're getting and they're going to be happier and come back for more deals and refer more clients your way. So in-house services can be looked at like a marketing platform. If you do it very well, you  generate extra value and the marketing will happen organically and there is nothing better than organic marketing.

• Extreme Ownership

The fourth artifact is extreme ownership. Now, we live and breathe our business. We know everything about everything. The things that are going to look trivial for us are going to be confusing for our clients. So even though the easiest way to avoid dealing with mistakes is not owning the process, this actually means that we leave our clients at risk, and poor client experiences cause poor client retention. Remember the clients best interest is your own and you can mitigate their lack of experience with yours. 

So the way that I chose to apply this artifact is to sum up all the questions, all the information that you need to know, and then divvy it up to several checkpoints, and then provide the education portion by portion so it's easily consumable instead of just bombarding them with things and hope that they can deal with it on their own. And then instead of trusting the clients to actually apply this knowledge, we're doing it for them.

• Streamline The Process

Which brings me to the fifth artifact which is streamlining the process. When you conduct the same process over and over and over again, you can detect the common pitfalls, the common friction points, the common confusion, the common pain points, all of the things that are hindering the smooth transaction. All of these are optimization opportunities ripe for implementation. So instead of trusting your clients to own their own process and instead of trusting yourself to own the process, you can implement processes, software tools, whatever the case may be. Lessons learned from past bad experiences can protect your future clients. 

Every failure is an opportunity to grow and the more streamlined your process, the better experience everyone is going to have. You should also consider that your time is one of the most expensive resources in your company, so spending money on processes that are going to reduce your involvement and improve your performance is going to pay out in the long run. 

How did I apply it within my own business? I engineered several systems that help us throughout the transaction to monitor everything, to make sure the deadlines are met. If you don't know software, you can either learn or you can just apply human processes. You can create processes with your team to make sure that everything is being done in orderly fashion and nothing gets missed. 

The main point that I'm trying to make here is that owning the process doesn't mean that you need to do everything on your own, on the contrary you shouldn't be doing everything on your own because you're going to miss a bunch of things. You should build a streamlined process and this way everything will be managed better. 

Alright, that pretty much sums it up for today. 

In the next episode, I'm going to talk about the five things I've done bad with my business. So we can learn from it (especially me). 

If you find this content helpful, please drop us a like and I'll see you on the next one. 

I'll do it again just in case it was bad... Nah, I don't feel like it.