KGCI: Real Estate on Air - Creating a Compelling Vision that Drives Results

Episode Date: February 20, 2025

This call today is something near and dear to my heart, as I know it is to these gentlemen, and we're going to get into what that is. But we're going to be talking all about how to create a compelling vision that drives results. I want to jump in, and I'm going to kick it to you, Lars, first. What does casting a compelling vision? What does that mean to you? Man, to me, my mind goes to how hard it was to sort of leave a, cozy corporate job and get into the just the belly of the beast in real estate and just grind.

And the vision is the only, my personal vision was the only thing that kept me going. So it wasn't that I had a love of like working with buyers and sellers and my heart just, you know, was in the transaction and like the lovey-dovey part of it. It wasn't like that at all. It was the only thing that kept me going was a compelling vision for a future that was different than my present. And so I was like literally willing to do whatever it took to to realize that vision, you know, and I did like a three and a five and a 10 year vision when I first got into real estate. And I think just most people that they literally are rudderless, right? They're

kind of just going through life with no vision at all. And so and it could be a vision. It just doesn't have to be just in business. I mean, we'll talk about lifestyle. and your personal finances and your physical body, your relationships, your marriage, you know, it's a vision for every area of your life that that is meaningful to you. And that's the only thing that I think will have you make different decisions today. I was talking about this recently. Like, if when I ate a donut, if I instantly gain, like I saw my belly get fatter, like that eating the donut does not align with my vision of where I want my physical body to be.

And somehow, you know, agents kind of just, they cast a vote every day for, you know, for not being the person they want to be according to the vision or at least mentally what they have in their mind. So that's kind of what the question brings up for me. I think it's really going to have, I think we'll all have a different definition of what casting a compelling vision is to each of us because it's personal, right? right? As, as Lars, you share that. Like, I know you personally, and that sounds exactly like you. AJ, what does a compelling vision mean to you? I was just thinking when Lars was saying about the belly expanding when you eat the donut, like, like how simple and easy would success be, like whether it's your body or your business, if that actually happened. Like, you don't make

your prospecting calls that day and immediately like your bank account is empty. Like, you would be so on it with everything. That would be really, really cool. Or it wouldn't be. That would be crazy. Yeah, the vision for me, man, is so important. And it's a place that I like to spend a lot of time.

For me, it's really exciting to cast a vision for myself, for my life, my family. And one of the things that I personally like to do is write everything down. I think the best when I'm writing them down. So casting a vision is really just spending time with yourself and getting super clear on what you want.

your future self, your future life to look like. And what I discovered and I'm excited for today's calls or today's call as my practice is casting a vision for yourself is a lot different than casting a vision for your business or your team. And that's one thing that I learned over the years. So casting a vision is just getting really clear on what you want your future self, your future life to look like. So good, man. Yeah, I know that this brings you a lot of joy and it's fun to be around you when you're talking about your vision because it makes me want to make my vision greater. And I think that's a true sign of a leader. And I think something that we've all brought to our teams. When I think of a compelling vision, you know, I like to keep things really simple and synthesize the concept down. And for me,

it means change. Because no matter where we are, no matter how great or not great our life is, when we talk about a compelling vision, it has to involve change. And that it has to be compelling enough and we have to make it compelling enough that we want to go through that change because nobody likes change. I mean, the market's changing right now. We're all, we're all noticing that and feeling that to some extent or another. So what have you guys done in the past, maybe for yourself or with your teams that you have like actually done, tactfully done to incorporate vision? Yeah, I'll jump on that. For me personally, I kind of develop a format that works really well for me. So this is going to be the answer for the personal side of it.

So I created what I call a vision sheet. On one side, it's all my goals broken down, my values, my mission statement. And on the back, it's images of what I like to accomplish. So similar to me, a dream board, vision board. I like called a vision sheet or laminated, two-sided, they can go everywhere with me. So like Lars, I break it down into one-year goals, one to three-year goals, and then five-to-ten-year goals. So I have personal and I have business. And then up top of my mission statement, my values,

affirmation and this is just something that keeps me motivated like that compelling future that you're talking about. I remember when I first started calling expired listings early in my real estate career, really the vision. And I think this is important for a lot of agents to hear because sometimes when you just have a five, 10 year goal down here, it doesn't really feel real. So I like to, you know, people talk about what's your big why. You know, that could be your vision, your big why. And I kind of, said, hey, what's your why right now? Because I think having a why right now puts agents into action faster than, you know, for me, when I started, I was 26. And that was 10 years ago. I was

like, I want to have a house on the lake one day. Like, that was my compelling future. But it wasn't real enough. It wasn't tangible enough to really get me to pick up the phone day after day, getting rejection. So when I discovered my why right now was simply pay the bills, I used to say 20 contacts a day keeps the bill collectors away. Man, that fired. be up on a daily basis to make the calls. So I think it's having a nice blend of what is your why right now, what is your big why in the future and using those short term, midterm, and long term goals. So that's my answer for that. Yeah, it's awesome. And you know, what's funny is we all talk about this, the three of us all the time, like that sheet right there, there's so much power in writing it

down and visually like looking at it. So practically, I mean, when I think about the first I don't even know what I called it at the time. I called it a business plan, but when you actually read it, it was more vision related. And I remember I just thought about like the five or six areas of my life. And it was 2009. So this was before I started my real estate team. I didn't have any sales background or anything like that. I was new to real estate.

But I got really clear on what I wanted my life to look like. And I knew where I was was not it. Like it was, I was doing 50, 60 hours probably as a real estate agent and, you know, 10, 15 plus hours like building the business, which was a separate sort of activity in the system side of it. But it did get me fired up. Like it, it, the market was complete crap. So it was the great recession in our market. And we're all sort of in similar market back in the day. We went from 15,000 agents to 5,000 agents.

You know, and I just refused to participate in, in that recession. And the only reason or probably the most important reason is that every day I read like, why am I doing this? Like, what's the reason I'm doing this? You know, to provide a lifestyle for my family that they never thought was possible. And that was like first because me and my wife grew up super, you know, poor and jacked up chaotic childhoods. And, you know, I just didn't want it to be that way for, you know, for my kids.

And but there's power in it. And there will never be the right time to do it. So it was that document that and every year since that got me through. And it really just allowed me to do the things that suck. And in building anything worth having, there are just parts of it that that suck. And you've got to do them, you know, if you're going to have a better lifestyle in the future. So. And then once I started bringing people into my world, you know, it was creating a vision for the business that and showing how they can feed into the vision.

So, you know, went from 44 sides, my first full year. me just in production to, you know, 450 sides with 10 producing agents and I was out of production. You know, so I showed them like, hey, you could come in and sell four, five, six homes a month. And we had agents selling over 100 homes in a year. So making their vision fit inside the overall vision of the company and having them go through the process. You know, they went through the personal and professional vision exercise as well because most people, you know, we're pretty high performers. We love personal development. So we do it.

but if you lined up a thousand real estate agents, I mean, five maybe, you know, it wouldn't be one percent that have, have an actual vision. Yeah, I like what AJ said about having a vision or having a like, what is your why right now? Like, I think that's super powerful because when I think back of like my journey and experiencing this and casting vision and coming up with my goals, like it's so, I was so different 10, 15 years ago than I am now. Like, as you, were sharing that Lars, I was thinking back to when did I first start doing this? For me, it was 2008. I got involved with this guy who became my mentor and he had me reading the book, What to Say When You Talk to Yourself by Shad Helmstetter. And I was writing out affirmations.

I had like these, you know those moleskin like five by eight little journals. I had those journals and I started writing in them and I have tons of them now, like a whole stack of them. I actually keep those in my safe because I love to go back and look at them and see. I remember in 2008, I was sitting in my bed propped up with pillows because I didn't even have a headboard. I was in a townhouse that I could barely afford. And I was writing out like, what do I want right now? Like what would my idea of a perfect life look like right now? And it's kind of personal, but I'll share it. You know, I wanted a craftsman house. And I specifically wanted a craftsman house, like that style built by Kenneth Beeler, who was a builder in my marketplace.

I wanted a Mercedes Black S550. I wanted a brightling watch. These were just like aspirational things to me at the time when I was broke as a joke, things that I thought I wanted, right? What's crazy is I create that book. I'm going through that. And then that book becomes last year's book and the year before's book and the year before that book.

And by 2013, I had bought my. my Brightling watch because I had my first $100,000 profit month, I was living in a Kenneth Beeler craftsman house with a swimming pool, which is crazy because it wasn't like I saved up the money and sought him out and built it. I actually put an offer in on a foreclosure that had 30 plus offers on it and I won it. And it was a house built by him. So it's like these things have a eerie way of just like the power of the universe is real when you put it out there. And, and, and, and, Lars like you, I think what happened for me is I got excited about this. And then I naturally want to share my excitement with others. The others happen to be my real estate team. And I said, hey, this is where I want the

company to go to. Like, this is the vision I have for the company. And I think looking back, one of the things that I was able to do well was just bring the people into my vision for the company. So like, if we're going to achieve this as a company, the only way we can achieve that is if we all hit our goals. And one of the things that that we used to do, my wife used to leave this and she was awesome at it is we would bring all the agents in at night to our office and we would have stacks and stacks of magazines and we would create vision boards together. So we do this like, you know, once a year, a couple times we did it twice a year because we were growing so fast. We had so many new people. And everybody in their desk area would have this huge poster board with all these cutouts of what

they wanted and we try to help them make that part of their daily practice too. And a proud daddy moment for me is when I hear about people that used to work for me, doing these same parties at their teams and their companies now. I think it's really cool. So we haven't been perfect at this. None of us are. Can you think back to either of you guys to specific times where you know, you maybe went a direction with your company, your team and you tried to cast a vision and it failed?

Yeah, I'll jump on that. I'm not sure if it was like necessarily be formally casting the vision to my team or maybe just informally casting it by the way I live my life. But when I was running a real estate team, a traditional real estate team, the reason I got in real estate was for financial freedom, time frame, location freedom. So as I was starting to build out this team, because I saw that as the best way to live my life, having those freedoms, I wanted my team to also have that. and what I discovered through that was oftentimes maybe the agents that were on my team, some of them just didn't have the same maybe work ethic that I had, other maybe things going on there. But it was almost like I was leading by example by having this freedom type lifestyle,

even as a real estate agent, a producing real estate agent. And it just didn't work for them because they weren't willing to put in the short-term work that I put in. So I think by maybe informally casting a vision of, hey, this is a real estate agent, kind of freedom type lifestyle, they saw it as, well, I don't need to work that hard, but they didn't see the two years prior that I busted my butt to get to where I was. So it really didn't work that well. You know, I tried to run my team where they didn't have to make a prospect kind of on their own times versus like the morning from 8 to 11, which is what it took me to build my business, was having that set prospect in time. It's more like, hey,

you're your own boss, you make time for it. So I discovered through that process that I just didn't like managing people. I didn't like leading a team in a traditional sense because I somewhat felt, I don't know if guilty is the right word, but I had created this amazing lifestyle for myself. And then I was hiring agents on my team to grind when I was already out of the grind phase and the thrive phase. So maybe I had some mindset stuff around that where it was like, well, want them to have the same freedom that I have, but yet they didn't work for it yet.

And essentially what ended up happening was I ran a team that was successful in its own right, close to 100 transactions a year, but it could have been a lot more profitable. Yeah. And I'll kind of pick up there, you know, answering your question, John, but tying in what AJ just said, you know, in a lot of ways, I think we're all limited a little bit. I think, John, I first heard this quote, and it's not, it's not credited to anyone, but the most expensive thing you can own is a closed mind. And you and I shared that closed mindness when it came to, you know, A.J.'s view or his experience,

you know, building a different type of real estate organization. And so to answer the question, you know, either you're listening and you just, you're not in the game yet. right you haven't figured out how to sell 30 40 homes and and you're not sort of doubling down and just doing like there's just no secret to being successful in real estate anymore you could just go to youtube and you know follow us or follow others that that have done it and they're teaching you how to sell 100 homes and and you'll dismiss it and say like you know either you dismiss it or you're like man I can do that too um so you've got to you've got to figure that part out first AJ was able to figure that John was able to figure it out I was able to figure out we didn't

know each other back in the day, so we all did it independently. And then once you get to that sort of traditional top producer level focus, then really you have a decision to make. The thing about AJ's vision, and he's sort of the youngest OG, probably that I'll ever, I'll ever know, the thing that I didn't truly understand, and this is maybe where I was thinking even smaller. So I was completely closed off to to an opportunity because I thought it had to be a certain way. So if you're selling 25 homes a year now and you're like, that's top 1.51 percent, right? And you're not thinking bigger than that. I was at a point where like, no, a real estate team is, is their way to do it.

I created massive leverage. It is super hard, right? And the type of freedom AJ was looking for, I hadn't really. contemplated. Well, two things, really. I mean, I thought I had financial freedom until I look at what we're doing now and just like, holy, holy schnikes. But the other freedom was location freedom. You know, like never have I been able to, you know, I was out 22 of 31 days in March and, you know, did a six figure month in just the revenue share opportunity, you know, which is just, it's wild when you think about it. So my miss on the vision side is like,

What could it look like? You know, is it possible? Instead of dismissing, you know, because so many people, and again, we talk about EXP because we're freaking excited about it. It's not the EXP show. At the same time, if you're sort of like a little bit like you think you know what it is, I promise you don't know what it is, right? John and I, we dismissed it, super closed off to it.

Yeah, and it was a lack of vision around it. You know, where John's- What do they say? a lot of times your initial success prevent you from your ultimate success so like you were really successful right like and you had a vision that got you there

that I think you were probably still holding on to how is that how is that changed Thank you.