KGCI: Real Estate on Air - The Truth About Scaling a Real Estate Business

Episode Date: September 6, 2025

Friday Focus is your weekly mini-series from KGCI Real Estate On Air—a deep dive into one theme, broken into tactical, easy-to-implement episodes. Every Friday and Saturday, we unpack the strategies, scripts, and systems agents use to win more business—without the fluff.Catch every episode in the series to get the full picture, and put these moves into play by Monday.SummaryThis episode is a no-fluff guide that debunks the myth that scaling a real estate business requires an endless hustle. The discussion reveals that most agents fail to scale not because of a lack of leads, but because they lack repeatable systems and a CEO-level mindset. You'll learn the truth about how to transition from a solo operator to a true business owner by building a scalable, predictable, and profitable business that works for you.Key TakeawaysSystems Are More Important Than Sales Skills: Understand that you can't scale a business built on your personal effort alone. The episode emphasizes that the key to predictable income and consistent deal flow is creating and implementing simple, automated systems for everything from lead generation and follow-up to transaction management.The "Hiring Hierarchy": Discover why the wrong first hire can be a costly mistake. The discussion provides a clear framework for which roles to hire first to gain the most leverage, such as an administrative assistant or a transaction coordinator, which frees up your time to focus on high-impact activities like prospecting and client care.From Agent to CEO: Learn to make the crucial mental shift from being a technician in your business to being its leader. The episode highlights that a CEO works on their business—building frameworks and a team—while an agent gets stuck working in it.Data-Driven Decisions: Understand that guesswork is a surefire way to fail at scaling. The episode provides a blueprint for tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) to diagnose where your funnel is leaking money, allowing you to make informed decisions that drive real results.Topics:Scaling a real estate businessReal estate systemsReal estate coachingTime freedomBusiness automationCall-to-ActionReady to build a business you love without the burnout? Listen to the full episode on your favorite podcast platform and start your scaling journey today! Ready for more? Subscribe to KGCI Real Estate On Air and grab the Always Free Real Estate On Air Mobile App for iPhone and Android. Inside, you’ll find our complete archive, 24/7 stream, and every Friday Focus mini-series—ready when you are.

Built to close your week strong and start the next one smarter. Here's what you is from this week's Friday Focus on KGCI, Real Estate on Air. I'm going to get into not necessarily building a big team. That oftentimes is overwhelming to think about, you know, what could it look like? Or even when I talk about my journey, sometimes it turns agents off to what we do because I was able to get down to 453 transactions with 10 producing agents working one day a week. that's like for most agents, that's like mind blown. Yet the money and the time freedom that comes with cracking the code on even just the

initial stages of thinking about this thing you're doing as a business, I think is vitally, vitally important. The real estate industry has failed to create a clear path to time and money freedom. Having helped over 5,000 families in my real estate career and coached thousands of agents to scale their businesses, I know what works. and what doesn't. And my goal on this podcast is to share it all with you, the good, bad, and ugly of building a highly lucrative lifestyle business so you can focus on what truly matters in life. You won't find any hype or fluff on this show, just real world tactics and strategies that get results.

You just got to do the work. What's up, real estate business builders? Today we're going to cover the truth about scaling a real estate business. And if you ever want our help implementing any of this stuff, It's all the same stuff that I talk about. And it's all inside our million dollar agent method. Just go to million dollar agent method.com, seven minute video, book in the strategy session. We're not going to sell you on something that's not a good fit. We're basically interviewing each other on those strategy sessions.

So 80%. Here's the thing I realized about real estate. And the reason I was able to play an entirely different game. There are some of you that are going to consume this training. Probably most of you are a better real estate agent than I ever was. I just decided to not play that game. You know, 5,000 plus families served in my real estate sales journey. And I only sold maybe, I think, like 220 homes, me personally.

So the year I did 66 transactions. We did 178 as a team. That next year, we went up from 178 to 248, and I went from 66 down to one. And so that was just a decision that I made. But every principle, every tool, every strategy that I, teach you that helped me achieve that $3 million plus, almost a seven-figure net profit business, it's the same stuff you need to just break free financially and get to two, three, four transactions per month. I promise you. Here's the thing. 80% of what real estate agents do

is administrative in nature. Now, just look at all the jobs you do. If you're doing transactions regularly or even if you've done, you know, a handful of transactions in your journey and you're just getting started. Think about all the things you're doing that, like, they're important things. They have to get done. But when you think about the skill set required to do them, it's not, it's not the highest level skill set. Or let me put it this way. It doesn't pay the best. You know, so is it important that when you take a listing that you get a lockbox put on that house? Yeah, it's like you would lose your job. You couldn't even sell the home without a lockbox.

Is it important that you get a sign in the front yard? Yeah, really important, right? The seller's going to be like, what are you doing? How come there's no sign? What are other good examples? You know, putting MLS remarks together or doing data entry, ordering photography, getting those photos uploaded into your MLS system. All that's important.

It's just highly, highly administrative in nature. And I just realized that there are different. And this goes for any situation. Like look in a hospital. You have people that are in the operating room that their pay grade is like $20 an hour. Maybe, you know, they're cleaning out the trash cans. And they have scrub text and you have anesthetist. My wife was a certified nurse anesthetist, a certified registry, a CRNA.

They're pretty well paid. But there are some nurses in that room that aren't that, you know, well paid. And then you have the surgeon who comes in like somebody even washed his hands and he's making an ungodly amount of money per hour, probably over $1,000 per hour. We have that same opportunity in real estate. 80% of what you do, I promise if you were to audit your time, 80% of what you do is administrative in nature. And I just realized that early on. I brought in a full-time licensed administrator, local. So she lived local to me.

She noticed that I posted the ad to hire an administrator. at 2 in the morning, and she responded at 7 in the morning. And in a city of a million people, 2 million in our metro, she lived four houses away from me. So talk about God having his hand on that situation. So she came in. She was instantly my marketing coordinator, my listing coordinator, my closing coordinator, and a runner. And so she did signs and locked boxes and picked up checks with attorneys and met buyers at

properties. And so that was one person that took me to four. 44 transactions that first full year, then 58 the next year. Just one person, right? And she was paid $20 an hour, you know? And I just decided, I did a calculation. We call it the business freedom index now, but I did a calculation back in the day where I decided I wanted to clear net $500,000 from my real estate business.

And I wanted to work only 40 hours a week. So 50 weeks, time 40 hours a week was 2,000 hours a year. So I just did the math on five, five. 500,000 take home divided by 2,000 hours. I wanted to work. That's $250 per hour. I wanted to make 200, unashamed. I was gonna make $250 per hour.

And I knew in order to do that, that I need to limit the things I got my hands in. Because I capped the amount of hours I was willing to work. So I couldn't get in the car and run signs or pickup checks or like we hired somebody that like a grandpa that had a pickup truck to do our signs and run stuff. around town, right? He was happy getting his gas paid and like 15 bucks an hour. So even if that's only like five to seven hours a week and probably even more, it's still time compounded 50 weeks times five hour a week, five hours a week is 250 hours that you're doing like low level administrative tasks. And so it's just this awareness like how much money are you making per hour

and how much money do you want to make per hour? What's the difference and what's holding you back from getting there. We've got an awesome relationship with a virtual assistant company that they're trained on our database touch system, our brand authority builder, our client care system for transaction management, and what do they cost even in a whole year? Like 20 grand for the whole year, a full-time person in your business trained to run all the marketing, all the closing coordination. you could easily 10x that investment. So you spend 20, I know I could, I could probably 20 exit. I spend 20 grand and I could turn that into 200 grand.

And even if I, you know, even net, the 180,000 net would go into my pocket because I would just put my time into things that are more dollar productive than the things I was offloading, right? So it's just a different mindset. And here's the thing that, and I say this and I think it, I think it rubs people the wrong way, especially if you haven't cracked the code on like doing multiple transactions per month. I think the path, so my whole passion now is this million dollar agent method. I want to help as many agents as possible get to a million dollar GCI with the right economic model,

not on crappy lead sources, no coal calling or pay at, you know, referral fees at closing, all those models. Like that's not what we're talking about. All of our stuff is inbound organic lead generation. I think the path to a million dollars in GCI is quite simple. Not easy, but really, really simple. And there are four stages. So I want to avoid the overwhelm here thinking, well, I haven't even hit, you know, a deal a month.

How can I think about two, three, four, six, eight deals per month? To get to a million dollars a year in most markets, it's about eight deals per month. So to get to a hundred thousand, it's about one deal per month. So where are you now in that spectrum? Here's the thing, though. The journey, there's four stages, 100,000 GCI per year, 250, 500, and a million. So that's one, two, four, eight transactions per month. If you're roughly a little over $10,000 commission check per transaction.

And if you're in a higher price point market, there's usually more competition. So it may be less units, but it probably is just as challenging to get to that million-dollar agent status. there's different mindsets required at each point in the journey. To get to 100,000, if you're not at 100,000, and this is probably 85, 90% of agents don't hit 100,000 in GCI. There's a recent, and they do it every year. NAR, the National Association of Realtors does an income study. And I forget what it was. It was like 16 or 17-year veterans were at 92,000 GCI on average.

And the average, yeah, so those were veterans. the average was at 55 or 54,000 GCI. And then two-year agents were at like 9,000. They were maybe selling one home a whole year at their second year in the business. So the industry itself is not going to teach you any of this stuff. And most brokerages, they're not going to do well if all of their agents sold two or three homes per month. Because at most brokerages, it only takes about 10, 8 to 10 homes to cap. And the upside for a broker is non-existent if they had less agents doing more production.

It may help for recruiting, but it's generally the game of the brokerage is just a body shop. How many agents can I get in here selling seven or eight homes a year? I was in the number one. I've since joined EXP four years ago. But I was in the number one Keller Williams office in the world, five years running. And our average production per agent was seven homes. seven homes. Our promise in 90 days in million dollar agent method, it's only a 90 day implementation, is that we're going to get you everything you need to get to that two to three homes per month

run rate, closings, right? So 100K is pure grit. Like it's just like you have to figure out how to do a deal per month. This is just talking to people not overly complicated. To get to two deals per month, you definitely need to put some organize your database, get your touch system, your value touch system in place, a properly organized database could scale to seven figures. We have many, many clients, dozens of clients that have scaled that one lead gen lever to over seven figures, so over 100 deals per year. Got a client that does three million per year on that one lead gen lever. Then you've got brand authority builder, which is essentially your digital footprint. That could take you, those two could take you to two deals, probably two to three deals per month,

get to that second stage. And then if you want to maintain some sanity, when you're going from two to four deals per month, that stage two to stage three, you're probably going to want to bring on at least a virtual assistant because you will cap out on time. You'll be overwhelmed. You will not have any time freedom. The money might be good, but the time element going from two to four deals per month is not, it's not bearable.

And that's where most agents fail when they're scaling. And then to get to a million, honestly, to get from four deals per month to eight deals per month, it's bringing on two junior agents and you as the team leader of a very simple, small team, maybe one local admin, maybe a virtual assistant and two junior agents. They're doing all your open houses on your listings. You're basically stepping out of working with buyers. You can still maintain the client relationship, but there you're showing agents at that point. We have systems for all of that.

And they're doing two deals per month, each of them and you're doing four deals per month. But your deals are listings. And then we just leverage those listings for additional business. via open houses and yard sign calls and even helping those agents come up with their own brand authority and the database touch blueprint as well. So three things I want to leave with you. So that's the overarching truth about this is that most agents never make the mindset shift. And once you make the mindset shift, you're just playing a different game. And the beauty of real estate is that there's so much margin in these commission checks that if you can crack the code on getting to two, three, four

deals per month, you can absolutely buy back your time and get out of the things that just aren't. They're critically important that they get done, but they're not the pay scale that hopefully you want to be making, whether it's 250 like I started out. I got up to $4,000 per hour in my real estate business because I mastered this mindset of delinking time from money. Three things I want to leave you with as we kind of end this training. The first one is marry the process, divorce the result. So what does that mean? in my journey to building this business pretty much all the time. It still exists because I'm still getting after. I want to take my coaching business to a million a month. And it forces me to do

things. I'm really impatient. I want results like this. But I know that I just have to do the daily blocking and tackling. And so I need to marry that process. Do the inputs and the outputs will come. Even if I suck at the inputs right now, I'll get better where the result is going to come. So marry the process of new business development is the example, right? Get to 20 to 25 meaningful conversations per day. If you've got our lead generation systems in place, these are inbound opportunities. So you're not cold calling. We don't condone it. It's life-sucking. I know it works. I just, I can't stand it. So marry the process, divorce the result and just keep working at the thing, right? So that's number one. Number two is run your own race. What do I mean by run your own race?

You ever see the horse in horse races have the blinders on, those little things around their eyes? Those are there. So when they're running, they're not, they can't see what they can stay in their own lane and run that race. It's almost like we need to do that more. And not only in business, like when we go on on Instagram or Facebook and you're looking at other agents and, you know, they're driving nice for cars or they're taking a vacation or they're whatever. this is a you versus you situation. I tell my son, there's one thing. He's playing like high level competitive volleyball. I tell him over and over again, like he is playing. He wants to play at high level in college and then maybe even potentially play professionally. And I just say you're running a different race.

You know, when he gets a little down that he maybe didn't play well or the coach sat him out for a reason or whatever. I said, Anders, your game is, it's different. You know, so the reason you're having to train harder, not so you can play club volleyball as a junior in high school, your training so that you're going to position yourself in college to be able to increase your vertical, whatever, right? So it's just you versus you and making the commitment to do the workouts when other team members are probably not doing the workouts. I said, you're not playing for this season. You're playing for the future, right? So there are just things that you're going to have to do if you're playing this different game that I would want you to play, this game of business builder.

and it requires you to run your own race. And you're going to be building systems. A good example, you know, everyone's looking to buy leads or to like pay a closing or referral fee. That is stuff that you can't do if you want to build a business. It gives you that instant gratification because someone else is generating that lead for you, but it's not sustainable. I promise you, I promise you.

We've talked to agents that are on their 13th lead gen source and they're coming to us. We're going to be the 14th that's going to work. I'm like, we do not do that. And here's why you want to get out of that. racket, right? So it is you versus you. Last thing. So my third sort of parting thought here is decide to turn pro. Where are you when you look at your calendar and your daily activities and how you're showing up in your business and the way you're taking care of your physical body and training and hydrating and sleeping and not consuming all the crap on this thing and social media

and Netflix and like have you really made a decision to take your business and your life to the next level. I mean like a significant commitment to take care of yourself physically and emotionally and stop consuming junk and consuming stuff that's going to help you. And you're time blocking your calendar and sticking to those time blocks to do the things you know need to be done to be able to make the sales and earn the income that you want to be earning. Right. So have you actually made the decision to turn pro? It doesn't mean that you're a pro once you make that decision, right? But you will show up differently in your business when you sit at your workstation wherever it is and you have in your calendar from 830 to 1130 is new business development.

And you've decided and committed to show up as a pro. Pros do not blow off the most important thing that they need to do every day. A professional athlete is the one that is working out is the only one working out at 5 a.m. And so that's the decision you need to do. to make in your business. So the question is, have you made that decision to turn pro? Are you sick of not having the money in the bank to be able to do whatever you want? We talk to people that come into a million dollar agent method and they're like, I would love to do it. I'm a 10 out of 10. This is the best thing ever. I see how all these systems can change my life. And they're in their late 50s. And they have no money. Right. And we have ways that we can help them financially get into the

program. But they have not made the decision to turn pro. And maybe nobody actually taught them. So it's not a judgment as much as it is once you make that decision, the game is over at that point. Yeah, you're going to have to do the reps and the work and you're going to do the workouts, the business workouts and get uncomfortable and all that stuff. But the game is over at that point because you made the decision to do it. I made that decision early, early on. And I was able to just stack building systems upon building systems. And every part was uncomfortable, but was a little bit easier.

So that is all I've got for you guys today. So if you need help with the implementation side of this, go to million dollar agent method.com. And we'll see you on the next training. Be good.