KGCI: Real Estate on Air - Architecting Success: A Tactical Guide to Structuring Your Day as an Agent

Episode Date: April 9, 2026

Summary:In this episode, host Mike Cuevas breaks down the essential daily operating rhythm required for real estate success. Agents will learn how to transition from a reactive "extinguishing fires" mode to a proactive, structured schedule that prioritizes high-value lead generation and relationship-building activities. Mike provides a specific blueprint for the "Morning Primer," tactical mid-day drops, and how to effectively anchor the afternoon to ensure consistent business growth without burnout. The focus is on implementing simple, repeatable systems that keep agents focused on the activities that actually drive revenue.

How do I figure out what's most important? How? How? How? I think in three categories when I'm thinking about what's most important. I think about one, money. I think about two relationships. And then I think about three, marketing. And I'm going to break that down. Have you ever woken up in the morning and been struck by a wave of anxiety because you either have so much going on that you don't even know where to start or you have nothing going on and you don't know what you need to be working on to build your business. Well, if I'm speaking to your soul right now, this episode is for you. I'm Shelby Johnson and you're listening to The Agent Goldmine, the show for agents who have been around the block and are ready to build sustainable businesses that they actually love leading. My host, Ali Garcette and I

are both EXB icon agents. We've closed hundreds of transactions in both our agent and investor businesses before starting over in brand new markets. And we're here to share the behind the scenes of what we're actually doing on a day-to-day basis to build from the ground up. And today, my co-host has completely lost her internet in the apartment. So it is just me. I'm doing a solo episode for y'all. And that episode is called How to Structure Your Day. Special shout out to Diane Shell out of Colorado Springs at Diane Shell, Realtor on the gram, because she requested this topic along with a few others that we are super excited to dig into over the next couple of weeks. And we really appreciate the feedback. So if you're listening to this right

now and you're like, man, I have a topic. I want to, you know, tell Shelby and Allie what they should do on their next episode. Just hit us up on the gram. I am at the Shelby Show. And Allie is at Allie, the agent with an eye. And with that, it is time to dig in. Preemptive note is that this is how I structure my day, not saying it's the only way to do it. And if you ask 10 people, you're probably going to get 10 different responses. So take all of this with a grain of salt. But for me personally, my day starts best after a full eight hours of sleep. For real, eight hours. And then after that, my brain is fully recharged and it's bright and early, except it's not actually bright. It's dark and early because I get up at 4.30 or 5 a.m. It's fine.

but once my brain has recharged, then the very first thing I do when I wake up is I resist the urge to grab my phone because the best structure to any day starts with no devices, in my opinion, none. I go and I drink like a mega truckload of water and salt and lemon because that's what your main makes your brain hydrate and really wake up outside of the sleep. But then I grab a notebook and a pen and in the morning. morning, guys. And by the way, if you're a night, night person and you're like, God, this sounds absolutely horrible. I wouldn't do this ever in the morning. Some people do the same process at

night to set the stage for their next day. So you need to think about, are you a morning person or are you a night person? Because there's a place for this for everyone. But, okay, I'm doing it in the morning. And I'm going to grab my notebook. I'm going to grab my pen. And step one on structuring your day is to actually think before you're distracted by the reactionary mode that your phone puts you in. I'm going to think about what is most important in my business right now. It is super important that you think before you open your phone because the moment that you open your phone, your brain is carried into 75 different directions because you've got your Instagram notifications.

Oh, let me see what they're up to. And then you get the reels of the puppies and the whatever and then you're gone. Or you're like, oh my God, I got like a new YouTube sub. Let me check the analytics. or you open up your email and someone's asking for advice and it only takes a minute. Let me just reply real quick. No, none of those things are real quick and none of them ever just take a moment. So before you open your phone, you have to have already thought through what is most important

so that way you can anchor it in your world and put all of your energy and focus towards what is most important first before allowing yourself to go and do the less important, although arguably way more fun things. There's only so much time in the day. And if you do not do what I just said, then you will probably end the day wondering where it went. Okay, you might be thinking, okay, sure, Shelby, I'm kind of with you so far. Let's think about what's most important. But Shelby, this is part of my problem is that how do I figure out what's most important? How, how, how? You know what? For you who's out there thinking that, that's a great question. And I have a semi, This is my version of the answer.

I think in three categories when I'm thinking about what's most important. I think about one, money. I think about two relationships. And then I think about three, marketing. And I'm going to break that down. So what is most important? When you think about money, what is going to bring money into my business, into my bank account within the next 30 days-ish?

This is priority number one, because y'all, all need to be making the money in order to sustain your life and your business and all the things. So what do I mean by what's going to bring money into my business in the next 30 days? I'm talking about anything that's under contract that needs my attention or anything that is going to get me under contract and closer to that money income thing in the next near future. So this could be writing an offer. This could be negotiating an offer. So you're reviewing an inspection report doing repair request or maybe you were pushing back on like the shitty results of an appraisal. These are all things that you need to do to keep the deals on track and

keep you moving towards the closing table to get paid. That's a number one. Number two in order of priorities when you're setting your day, for me at least, is relationships. And by relationships, I mean what relationship will suffer if I don't tend to this fire. If I don't keep the blow on the little embers there and get the spark going a little bit. And the important relationships would be, of course, clients that are under contract or offering like clients that are related to the money. You need to check in with them or comfort them or dig in, hey, what's really going on, you know, all of those things.

You need to service any hot buyers or hot sellers and move the, mountains that need to be moved in order to keep everything progressing forward. So tending to these relationships are important for now, of course. But guys, these relationships are more important than just now because everyone wants to build a referral-based business, right? Well, how do we get there? We get there by creating raving fans. And those raving fans are the people who work with us and then interred vouch for us in the future. So that is why, when we're thinking about what is most important and we think about money. That's why relationships is next.

If you're on a 50-50 split, it's time to rethink your brokerage. At EXP, the split is 8020. And once you cap, you keep 100%. We show you how to get there faster. I'm Ali Garcet or Ali the agent. My sponsor, Shelby Johnson and I each close over 40 deals a year. We are full-time agents actively producing. And everyone in our upline is an icon.

agent. When you name us as a sponsor at EXP, you get full access to all of our systems and checklists and templates, our 200K GCI playbook to help you make 200K your first year, direct mentorship and direct access to us, no huge group calls. We also help agents add another stream of income, which is RevShare. We will help you with all the tools and trainings you need to build revenue share that will help you retire early. If you're interested in building an actual business, book a call at theagentgoldmine.com. Number three on my list of priorities when structuring my day is marketing. This is the last thing.

Money, relationships, marketing. The marketing is, what am I doing to bring more business into my world today and into the future? So these are things like basically your lead gen, you know, are you calling expired listings or for sales providers? Are you circle prospecting? is this harassing listing agents in the neighborhood that you want to work. So that way they allow you to do an open house for their listing this weekend. Maybe it's that.

Maybe it's you have open houses for this weekend. And you are all over Facebook marketplace or wherever on Facebook and all those groups like posting like, hey, come to my freaking open house. Like you're putting the energy out into the world. Or maybe this marketing could be spent what I'm doing right now, which is building my YouTube channel and creating scripts and thinking through thumbnails and the hooks and all the things that come along with a YouTube channel to bring in business. Or maybe it's creating social media content. These are all things that fall into this like step three of what I think is most important,

which is how am I bringing leads into my world and how am I building a brand for myself that will attract leads into the future. Great job. Now we've thought through what are the most important things. And after those three things, just, you know, like how do I structure my day after those chat priorities are nailed, which, by the way, it's really hard to, like, do all these things once you're really busy. But this is when, like, leverage comes in, because eventually a lot of the things in that money category will be handled by, like, a transaction coordinator or a listing coordinator, et cetera. And even a lot of the relationship things, if you have a team that is better than you, which that is the goal,

The goal is not to hire someone worse than you. The goal is to hire someone who's better than you. And so when you pass them off to a client, the client is like, damn, this person, Shelby, you don't need to come back. I am all set. So really, that's the goal. But once you have, once you can't do these priorities, that's when you start leveraging out pieces of them as much as possible.

Anyway. Okay. So you have their three priorities. Next, if you do have time left in your day. this is when you start leaning forward on anything that's on your calendar. Like maybe it's the listing next month that you need to create a video concept for. Or maybe it's you flip your calendar over to next week and you see that you have a buyer who's relocating or flying in next week to house hunt and your buyer presentation or console,

whatever thing you talk to buyers about. It has not been updated in three years. So maybe you need to prioritize doing that because they're a $3 million buyer or whatever. I'm just making the shit up. you guys get the point. This is also, after you're done with those three things, a great time to think about how am I taking small steps every day to continue building and streamlining the systems in my business?

This is like your templates, maybe your email automations, or maybe this is your checklist for contract to close or whatever. Another thing that I do after I'm done with my priorities is, okay, what am I dumb at? What am I not smart at? Okay, like local, you guys know, I am wearing my little Kentucky. If you're not on YouTube, guys, I shower today. And I washed my hair. This isn't even dry shampoo happening.

You are missing out if you're not seeing what's going on on YouTube. Anyway, I'm wearing a U-TK jersey because I'm now in Kentucky. Wow. Okay, let's bring it back in. The reason why I brought that up is because something else that I do when I have time is to continue educating myself on the things that I'm not good at, which right now, y'all know that I have not been in licensed in Kentucky for that long. I mean, it's been a year now. But still there's learning to be done with market trends, appraisals, like the norms within your specific market.

Or self-education. Like, sometimes I do not binge YouTube. Like, I'm not a YouTube watcher, and now I'm trying to do YouTube. So I'm like, oh, some homework for me would to be watch really good YouTube channels. So I even know what's good and what to do. Those are just all ideas of things that you can do after your priorities are knocked out when you're structured on your day. Okay. So at this point, I mean, technically you're still not with your phone or device, but you have gotten out of your brain that's your undistracted brain has taken out what is most important to you and you have pen to paper. Cool. Now it is time to open up the old electronics. You know what I'm saying? Here we go. You're going to open up your phone. email, social media, and identify any hot tasks that you need to pull out and put on your, oh shit, I got to get this done today list. Anything that is not hot, you also, that's a task you still have to do, you need to pull it out and you need to put it on your brain dump.

And I say brain dump. That is literally, it can just be like a Google Doc. It can be Notion. It can be Evernote, any of those not taping notebook type of digital notebook things. But you need a place to dump all the things that you don't want to forget about either to do in the future, those great ideas, which I've done full classes on how to organize your digital notebook. Because I'm making this super simple right now where I'm just like, dump it on a list. I have a whole literally a digital notebook with like different sections within my notebook and how I organize it based on all of the different things that are going on. I am like an organization freak a little bit, but I love it. So let me know if you ever want me to go through how I organize all of my tasks and lists and keep track of that and keep pressing forward and building.

I'm happy to do that if you want to do that someday. Anyway, bring this back. So we are going through and we're pulling out hot tasks. We're dumping non-hot tasks so that way you can never forget to do them in the future. then you're going to open up your calendar, of course, and you're going to say, oh, what appointments do I have today? What reminders do I have set for myself? And then quickly scan the rest of the week and next month to make sure that you are tracking all things that are upcoming that might need additional prep time for. Also, if right now you are like overwhelmed by all the things that you

have to do on your lists and you're like, God, there's no way I could possibly, do this today, that is okay. You're not supposed to do everything every day. You're supposed to only do what's most important today. And then of all the other things that you need to work on in your business, you're supposed to use your calendar as a workplace, not just for appointments. So right now, if you're like, man, that buyer consult thing that she mentioned earlier, I don't even have one of those. But today, I know that that's not one of my most important tasks. Then what you're going to do is you're going to pull up your calendar and you're going to flip a couple days ahead. Maybe it's, maybe it's, next week. Maybe it's tomorrow and you're going to time block an area on your calendar to dedicate

to doing that task. Then, so you've gone through your calendar, you've identified your appointments and your reminders, you've looked ahead, you know what's coming. Now you're going to schedule your day. Hard times are appointments. You can't miss them. You know, I have to be ready for this at this time. But maybe you have nothing on your appointment. That is where you're going to attack your priorities first. So your hard time, so whatever's on the calendar, obviously you have to do appointments. And then outside of that, you are going to start with your most important tasks first, and then absolutely attack them in the order of priority in which you set. Attack, attack, attack, attack.

I say this because I don't know how I've met so many people who will set their list. And instead of attacking, they rescan their list a billion times. or they're re-looking at their calendar or they're refreshing their email or they're reorganizing the task list to just make it a little bit more priority a little bit better oh i didn't capitalize this level blah blah this is like such a waste of time and i have caught myself doing the same for sure if you're out there and you're like guilty dude i mean same been there done that but it is really really important that once you set your priorities for the day don't touch them that is what it is don't move it. You have to do the work. Attack it. Full steam ahead until you burn out. Then go to

sleep, recharge, and do it all again tomorrow. Oh my God. We did it. And that's how I structure my day. Okay. Questions? Let me know. Also go to the agent goldmine.com for freebie tools and giveaways. I'll see if there's anything I can put. I don't really know what I could put for this one. But there's a lot of freebie goodies on there. So go over there and get access to that and get the cheat sheets to the entire world. Yeah, and otherwise, I hope you enjoyed hanging out with just me. I miss Allie. I love you all. And be a bro and share this show. Bye. If you're on a 50-50 split, it's time to rethink your brokerage. At EXP, the split is 80-20. And once you cap, you keep 100%. We show you how to get there faster. I'm Ali Garcette or

Ali the agent. My sponsor, Shelby Johnson and I each close over 40 deals a year. We are full time agents actively producing and everyone in our upline is an icon agent. When you name us as a sponsor at EXP, you get full access to all of our systems and checklists and templates, our 200k GCI playbook to help you make 200K your first year, direct mentorship and direct access to us, no huge group calls. We also help agents add another stream of income, which is RevShare. We will help you with all the tools and trainings you need to build revenue share that will help you retire early. If you're interested in building an actual business, book a call at theagentgoldmine.com.