KGCI: Real Estate on Air - Build Your Future The Ultimate Real Estate Success Plan

Episode Date: September 4, 2025

SummaryThis episode provides a comprehensive, step-by-step blueprint for real estate agents who are ready to stop winging it and start building a predictable, scalable business. The discussion goes beyond a simple "hustle" mentality, revealing the core strategies for setting clear goals, mastering your time, and building a foundation of systems that can support your long-term success. It's an essential listen for anyone who wants to transition from being a simple agent to a true business owner.Key TakeawaysThe Power of Intentional Goal-Setting: Learn how to set actionable goals that are more than just numbers on a page. The episode emphasizes the importance of breaking down your annual goals into weekly and daily tasks, creating a clear and manageable path to success.Master Your Calendar: Discover that your time is your most valuable asset. The discussion provides a blueprint for using time blocking to protect your most important activities, such as prospecting, lead follow-up, and client meetings, from distractions.Build Systems for Scale: Understand that a strong business is built on a foundation of repeatable systems. The episode highlights the value of creating standardized processes for everything, from lead generation to transaction management, which frees up your time and makes your business more efficient.Focus on Client Relationships: Learn why a client-centric approach is the ultimate long-term strategy. The episode emphasizes that by providing an exceptional experience and staying in consistent contact, you can build a powerful referral-based business that provides a consistent flow of high-quality leads.Topics:Real estate success planBusiness blueprintGoal settingTime blockingReal estate systemsCall-to-ActionReady to build a future you can be proud of? Listen to the full episode on your favorite podcast platform and start building your success plan today!

Right, welcome everybody and this is now part six. This is the final part of a journey that I've been taking you through, which is kickstarting your business to that high level. We've gone through a variety of different topics and each one has certain actions that's going to help you in your business. Now, in part six, which is the final part of it, we're going to go through a session which is called Build Your Future. And I'll see. by building your future, it is setting you up for the actions and activities to take you those steps forward. But how do you actually plan for this long-term success? This is a question that's come through to me so many times from so many people. How do I actually build this long-term success? Well, it is something that's simple, but in fact, it's also quite complicated. The simple part is, well it's simple like you just need a goal you need to have that vision of the future you need to know where you are heading towards and that becomes that lighthouse for you so that's simple the complicated side of it is sometimes we just don't know now we don't know how to actually identify that goal and

get that particular path so i've been working with a couple of very very high in producing agents And one of the questions that I've asked them is how important is your goal and how important is it to plan to achieve that goal? Every single one of them was like, Stuart, I can't believe you ask him in that question because you're my coach. We've already worked with getting the goal together and working the plan. Without that, we wouldn't be where we are right now. That's exactly what I wanted to actually hear from them. You see, without a plan and without that goal that you're heading towards, your business becomes extremely difficult.

You see, the importance of this long-term planning of knowing of where you're actually going, it actually gives you a lot of clarity as to what you need to do today, this week, even next month. So that clarity is so important because without that clarity, you will wake up every day with the same question, what do I do today? What do I do today? And the first almost email, the first message, the first call that comes through to you, that becomes your guiding light for that particular day. And that could be a totally misleading distraction that lands in front of you. plus you could go down rabbit holes where you've got so far off track that you actually have no idea what that final goal even looks like in what it was.

So it's so important that you have this planning so that you've actually got clarity on what you can do every single day. Now once you've actually got this clarity, you will actually start to self-discover. Wait a minute. I know that I need to do this, but I don't know how to do it. You see, you become so much more aware of your weaknesses. And because of those particular weaknesses that stand out, instead of getting to that point and going,

I don't know how to do it and let me just stop, you can plan. And in a sense, you start creating this growth mindset. So you can see the path ahead of you. You know, hey, when I actually get to this particular point, I must be able to do this, this and this. So let me go and do some research on how to do it. And you can actually then with that growth mindset,

you can actually start moving forward to learn how to do it. Now, the last part of it was shared with me with the top producing agents is I thought this is absolutely fantastic. You've got your goal. You've got your plan. You know where your weaknesses are because you can project them. But their final tip that came through to me, or going into the future was building professional relationships.

And this particular term, building professional relationships, I started to dig deeper. You see, for many of them, when I talk about generating leads, that horrible word, lead generation, they actually look at me and they go, actually I enjoy it. I say, well, explain, why do you enjoy it? And they said, well, you see, for many of the rookies out there, Lead generation is about building brand new relationships and they feel awkward about that.

But as you're going in your particular business, you've got existing relationships, but they're very kind of low level type of relationships. And what they do is they build those relationships deeper. They get to know more and more about their clients and that's what they're doing on an ongoing basis. They take their database and they want to know everything about their particular clients. Now, what's so amazing about that, because I asked them the question, but if you're only sitting with 15 clients, how do you grow it? And they said, but Stuart, here's the truth.

When I've got deep relationships with my particular clients and I know so much about them, they give me leads. They give me referrals. And my business grows exponentially on its own. And that was one of the big keys there, is having those. building the relationship, networking with them on an ongoing basis, that was one of their most powerful lead generations. So they've got this goal that they've got absolute clarity on. They know the path on how to achieve those particular goals. They have identified the weaknesses

so they've got that growth mind to improve, to take that weakness to a strength. And through this journey, instead of just lead generating and looking for new business, they building relationships with their existing clients, and those existing clients are starting to give them repeat business, referral business and leads. And that was one of the strongest sessions that I've had with a number of these top producing agents on how to plan for that long-term success. Now, I want to take this a little bit deeper for you because when we start talking about setting up these particular goals, I know that it can be.

a bit of a challenge. Well, do I look for a goal that's in 10 years time? Do I look for a goal that's in one month? Where do I sit when I'm doing this long-term planning? And I've spoken about setting up a relevant someday goal. This is a goal in the future that has a relevant date associated to that. And you're asking yourself, what does my life look like? How old am I? What did my family look like? Start to get the feeling, the emotional connection to that particular the data in the future. But when I'm talking on a business, on a professional level to my clients, what we typically do is we start with in three to five years. What does your business look like in three to five years? It's something that you can still internalize and you can still have those

goals and dreams and have those conversations about it. So when we're talking about setting this future business, start looking at what does your business look like in three to five years? Not what would you like to have, but what does your business look like? Describe your particular business. Now, if I just ask you that question on your own, it could actually become a little bit of a challenge because you're not too sure where to start. So I'm going to give you three pointers. And these three pointers, if you can answer the question related to these three pointers, it's going to give you a lot more clarity on that goal, which is about three to five years out.

So my first pointer, my first question I'd ask you is, what type of productivity have you have achieved in your business in three to five years time? Now, I said have because I want you to feel like you are already living three to five years. So is it something that on a productivity, you've actually gone out and sold X amount of properties? Is that the productivity? Is it that you are actually having X amounts of appointments? Is it X amounts of sole mandates? What is that productivity?

And I know for many real estate agents, it's they're working around the productivity of the number of properties that sold. Why? Because that's money in your bank account. So how many properties have? you achieved when you start looking into the future of three to five years what is that number that's the productivity so there's the first one the second one it's all about your growth how have you grown in your business in three to five years time so growth is are you and these are just examples are you just focusing in one suburb or have you been able to take over three

or four suburbs where you are the strongest person the strongest agents in those particular areas. So you've actually got market share. You've grown. Or is it something that your database has grown? You've grown a database up to 500 or 600 people that are active in your database. Or is your growth, hey, I was a solo agent now, but in three to five years, I've grown to a team that I've got eight to 10 agents that are now underneath me, working with me and helping to take a, of this particular suburb or this particular town, you start looking at that growth and getting

clarity around that. So that's the second one. And then the third one, and it's actually the most obvious one, it's the profitability. Profitability of how much is it you actually want to make or you have made in three to five years? And ultimately, the profitability is what's feeding back into your personal life to give you that life by design. So these three different areas, when you start to identify them in three to five years, you're going to actually create a much deeper clarity of what that vision is. So the first one is productivity. And this is a metric. How many properties have you sold? How many sold minutes do you take in a year, etc? Growth, it's actual expansion, whether it's taking over market share in an area. Maybe you're growing to a particular team or

or maybe your database size has grown. And then it's the profitability. It's actually how much money you're actually wanting to make. Now, what is so powerful about this is when you take those three answers and combine them into a single sentence or a single paragraph, they start becoming an alignment. So to give you an example, you might say, hey, in three to five years, I want to sell 10 properties. I want to secure 10 properties. But on my profitability, I want to make 10 million RAND.

Well, when you start looking at those two numbers, 10 properties, 10 million RAND, something doesn't connect unless just those 10 properties are extremely high-end luxury properties. That's going to give you the commission based around that. So you'll see that that alignment starts to come in and you can start working those particular numbers. So take those three key points when you're working that particular goal in the future, three to five years, and always ask, I have already achieved it. So that's not something, I need to sell 300 properties. And you're looking and say, well, I'm not sure how to do that.

That's what you have actually done. Now, once you've done that, that was that first part, which is that goal and that vision into the actual future, you will start to look at it and go, right, I'm wanting to grow to a particular a team, but I don't know how to manage a team. I don't know how to actually start. There's a weakness. Remember, we spoke about the second one is actually creating that career growth path. It's becoming that growth mindset. I need to grow a team. How do I do that? Well, let me do some research. Maybe I do a course and that'll start to get more skills and knowledge into you so that you can actually get yourself ready to be that person that has achieved that particular goal.

You see, without the clarity, you don't know what the weaknesses are. So you can now start creating that development career path of what you need to learn as you start going through. If it's something that, hey, I want to sell X amount of properties, well, in order to sell X amount of properties, I need to, and there might be something that you need to need to learn, improve on my sales presentation, improve on certain parts of negotiations, et cetera. You be more aware of it. And now you know what you need to do in order to get to that particular point. When I go through this with producing agents, we put down that vision of three to five years. We identify the skills and knowledge that's required to actually get there.

And then what I do is I then start to ask this question, what could hold you back from achieving that particular goal? And really what we want to do is we want to outline right up front. any potential challenges that could be faced. So, for instance, I sat down the end of 2019 with an agent. I remember this and I asked them the question, let's plan this. And we did a three to five year goal. We went through everything. And I said, so what could actually happen that could prevent you from achieving that

particular goal? And one of the answers that came out of that was if I didn't have a vehicle. If I didn't have a vehicle that did not allow me to get to my different properties, how am I going to actually start to grow my particular business? And we started to, well, let's look at a particular plan. Is it that you can actually have certain amounts of money saved, that if your vehicle is broken down, it's in an accident or stolen, whatever the case may be,

you've actually got money that's secured that allow you to hire a particular vehicle? And that's ultimately what we started to do. That could be a shortcoming, and they created a financial part of their business to actually put money aside in the event that they didn't have a vehicle. They could still hire a vehicle or go out and buy a cheap vehicle to go out and carry on with their particular business. Now, one thing that we didn't have a look at was, well, 2020, COVID hits. And that was two months, two months where you couldn't actually go out to particular properties. And I remember getting that call right in the beginning of the lockdown time, the agent,

contacted me and said, Stuart, we planned if we didn't have a car, but how do I plan if I can't actually go and see my clients? You see, things do happen as we're working along and we pivot. Now, what was so important about this, when a challenge is faced, you don't just throw your hands in the ear and say, oh my gosh, that's it, I'm giving up. I can't do this. You look at it and say, right, what can I do to pivot right now to change? And ultimately what we did is we put together a very, very short little course. They educated their sellers so they would actually do video recordings of their property and they actually went out and they sold three properties during the actual lockdown. So it's not only that you can try and look at the shortcomings of what

can hold you back going into the future, but it's also to be aware that if something does happen in the future that you don't throw your hands up, because you've got a plan, you just need to pivot and make changes. Nobody has that crystal ball that allows them to actually see what is happening going into the actual future. That would be amazing. I mean, that would have been an absolute perfect. If we could have almost projected what happened straight after the COVID, ultimately, that would have been so. so perfect for us to be pre-planned and actually get all the information that's in out there. So now I want to talk a little bit deeper into this growth mindset because what a lot of people

misunderstand when we talk about a growth mindset, it's only about learning what is a weakness. So I don't know how to do negotiation. So let me go out and do a negotiation course. I do the negotiation course. I've mastered it. Fantastic. And away I go. I'm now top negotiator. And you get to this level of, and I call it arrogance where you think you know everything, you are the best and the way you go. Now, when we talk about a growth mindset, a growth mindset, yes, it's about developing your skills to move forward. But there's also the elements of knowledge. And knowledge never stops. You see, it is very, very important for you, if you want to start building your business going into the future, you need to stay updated with what.

is happening around you. You see, every single day, something new happens. There's a new legislation that's passed. Suddenly, there's an interest rate change. Suddenly, something happens in the actual economy. Suddenly, there's something is happening in a particular suburb. Every single day, there's something new that's coming out. And if you are in that particular hole and you are blunted and deaf to everything that's happening around you, when you finally meet with a client and they're going, oh my gosh, so what do you think about this new bill that's been passed? And you're going, what bill? What are you talking about?

Suddenly there's a disconnect. And ultimately, that starts to break yourself confidence and it starts knocking you off this path because you're going to start believing that things aren't working. So it's so important to have this growth mindset, not only on skills but on knowledge. you need to stay updated about everything. Take 10 to 15 minutes in the morning to go and review news articles, financials, just skim reading the headlines. Having as much information that comes in that could be related to your particular business so that you become aware of it. Having those conversations where somebody asks you something and you can continue that conversation starts to build yourself confidence. and it actually, it starts building deeper relationships because they can start to go deeper with you.

And when you start doing that, knowing what's happening around you, something amazing starts to happen inside of you. You start to grow as an individual. It's the most amazing thing. Now, you may not understand it, but when you've done this experience of actually becoming aware of your surroundings, learning something new each and every day, you actually start to grow as a person. Your self-confidence starts to grow. Your business starts to grow.

Everything starts to grow. And what is absolutely amazing, if you think about those goals, the actual second one that I remember, the tip, growth, growing in a particular area, growing at the database, growing with your team, that starts to happen automatically sometimes. And you've obviously putting that effort into it and it starts working forward. What you're also going to start seeing is your productivity starts to go up. You're starting to say, hey, I want to sell X amount of properties. And suddenly your business, you were doing one property every two months. Now you're doing two properties every month. You don't notice it because it's just happening on a natural progression.

But with that continual learning, you're getting better and better and things start going. And then ultimately, profitability, because soon as those properties register, suddenly there's more money coming into your bank account and you're thinking, things are now starting to work. And this is ultimately, this journey that you start to go on to actually get that success as you start leading into the actual future. Now, there's the last little elements of this that I really want you to be totally aware of. as you starting to grow, as your business starts to grow, so are your worthy rivals. They are also growing. They are looking at you and they're basically learning from you, especially when you go from a person that didn't have market share in an area and then six months later, you're sitting

at 60% market share in this area. Everybody is coming to you for their business and it's growing like you cannot believe. They're learning from you. And they ultimately are going to see, hey, but you are doing this, you are doing that. You're not doing that, but I can do this. And they start doing things and your market share may start to go down. So what's important in this last element is as much as you are growing, don't get into that little arrogant train track. Make sure that your eyes are also looking at your worthy rivals to see what they're actually doing.

You're not comparing yourself. Please, you're not comparing yourself. You're not trying to beat them. You're trying to be aware of them. You know that in a particular area, you've got 60%. How do I get to 70%? Those last percentages are extremely difficult to get onto. But if suddenly your percentages start to drop, who's taking that market share?

What are they doing that you're not doing? What are they doing? That you could be better. And ultimately, being aware of your surroundings really helps you to go through. It is your surroundings, which is the biggest reason why agents go from a top producing agent and they suddenly just disappear. They get onto that train track. They think they've got market share and they think what they've been doing for the last 20 years will continue to be the same thing to give them their success. New people are coming in, new ideas and they're actually then taking away that market share.

And before you know it, you're actually down to battling to get your business. So you've got to be focused on your business that's going into the future so that you can grow, you know, exactly that path that you want to go through to, but you need to be aware of what's happening in the economy, the financial sector, in the suburbs, as well as those worthy rivals. You need to know what they're actually doing. You need to know, hey, I was working with that particular client. They didn't list with me. Why didn't they list with me? Is it something that I dropped the ball? Because that could be. be one of the reasons why your market share then starts to actually reduce as you're actually going into the future. So I want to leave you with an action plan that you can actually start to implement. And it's a very straightforward action plan. The first one, create that long-term career development plan. That starts out with that vision and goal in three to five years and having clarity with your growth, your productivity and your profitability and having a look at What are my weaknesses? What do I need to learn in order to achieve that level of success?

Have that plan in place so that it really stands out for you. The second is make sure that you actually network. It was one of the biggest tips shared to me by one of my top clients that I coach. Get into networking but build relationships with them. you want to get it to a deeper and deeper level that you understand them because you soon you hit that point where they start sending you business they start sending you leads so make sure that that is in your pocket that you're doing that on an ongoing basis and the last one and the one that I want to leave you with please commit to continuous learning and professional

growth. Never stop learning. Your professional growth going into the future. So make your business a success is absolutely vital. What was done 30 years ago is totally different. 30 years ago, we had fax machines and pages. We don't have those anymore. So make sure that you are committing to that continuous learning as well as that professional growth of you so that you can start to build your future. And that's where we're going to leave you with. So I'm sure that you've gone through all of these different components. There's so much to learn, so much to put into your particular business. Make sure that you reflect on each, the action plans that I've shared with you, put them

into action, be committed, put them into action because it's just the small changes that you make each and every day that is going to take you forward in your particular business. And my final word on this kickstart series is this. Just remember, you're not just a real estate agent. You're an entrepreneur in the real estate space.