No Broke Months For Salespeople - The Importance of Building Social Good Into Your Business Model - AJ Hazzi

Episode Date: September 12, 2024

AJ Hazzi is a trailblazer in real estate with over 20 years of experience. Starting at 19, he became a broker-owner by 25 and now leads a revolutionary brokerage model. his achievements include a sales division with 8-figure commissions and billions in transactions, alongside his roles as an investor, developer, and builder managing over 1,000 properties. Recognized as Young Entrepreneur of the Year and featured in 'Top 40 under 40,' AJ is known for his innovative Vantage model and his role in mentoring through Vantage Academy. Outside work, he’s a family man, avid traveler, and adventure sports enthusiast. Join us this episode to hear AJ Hazzi share his insights on transforming the real estate industry!You can find AJ Hazzi from these links below:LinkedInYouTubeWebsite  To find out more about Dan Rochon and the CPI Community, you can check these links:Website: No Broke MonthsPodcast: No Broke Months for Salespeople PodcastInstagram: @donrochonxFacebook: Dan RochonLinkedIn: Dan Rochon

I really believe that your business model needs to serve all the stakeholders. It needs to serve the community that you're in, leave your community better than it was. So I think the model of the future is one that, again, services the community, serves the staff and the team, is a great place for agents to be able to live that work-life balance. And then if you can get all those things right, then there should be a good economy of scale

or there should be a good margin for the business owner as well. Welcome to the No Broke Months for Salespeople podcast, the ultimate destination for salespeople, business people, and entrepreneurs. As you immerse yourself in this show, you'll discover the secrets to unlocking consistent and predictable income. we reveal the new way to persuade human behavior by mastering the art of the teach to sell method get ready to transform your approach and achieve unparalleled success AJ Hotsy is a trailblazer in real estate with over 20 years of experience starting at 19 he became a broker owner by 25 and now leads a revolutionary brokerage model his achievements include a sales division with eight figure

commissions and billions in transactions alongside his roles as an investor developer and builder managing over 1 000 properties recognized as youngur of the Year and featured in Top 40 Under 40, AJ is known for his innovative Vantage model and his role in mentoring through Vantage Academy. Outside work, he's a family man, avid traveler, and adventure sports enthusiast. Join us to hear AJ Hotze share his insights on transforming the real estate industry. Hello, friends. My name is Dan Rochon. I'm the host of the No Broke Months for Salespeople podcast, where you learn how to teach to sell, which is the new way to persuade human behavior. And when you teach yourself, you're going to unlock consistent and predictable income. You're going to unlock consistent and predictable income.

You're going to strengthen relationships to achieve self-fulfillment. And you're going to avoid the number one sales mistake to never face rejection again and learn how to use normal linguistic programming to influence and handle difficult people. Welcome to the show. Welcome to the Consistent and Predictable Income Community. My name is Dan Rochon. Today, I am having a conversation with AJ Hazee. Like, has he have any money? That's the way he just taught me how to pronounce his name.

And I'm really fortunate and glad to have Hazee. I screwed up your first name, AJ. Sorry, man, to have him with us today and um he's gonna talk to us about you know his 20 years of experience and the importance of building social good into your business model aj welcome how are you sir it's fantastic nice to be here yeah my pleasure and so um today we're going to talk about the importance of building social good into your business model. Before we jump into that, tell us a little bit of who are you? Yeah. So I am kind of this real estate fanatic that's managed to really integrate himself into every aspect of real estate. So I have my real estate brokerage.

I've got my property management division. We have new construction. We have development. We have pre-construction sales. We have a whole division for that. We have a fund that we manage. So I manage some investor capital and it, yeah, it continues to go on from there. So I like to continually complicate my life by adding more verticals to my business, but everything I eat, you know, everything I do, I just sort of eat, breathe and sleep real estate. It's a real passion of mine. So you got involved pretty young. Yeah. I stumbled into it after I went traveling for a couple of years and I came back. My plan was to go to university, become a lawyer, but I came back and was a little behind. And in the process of just trying to give myself a fighting chance at one house,

and I fell in love with process and I fell in love with just the contemplation of what buying these expensive assets, huge amount of leverage could do. And so I just got into the business that way. I'm at 19 and never looked back. Preston Pyshko So you're a your business owner entrepreneur investor real estate agent uh all the above owner well if you were to pick father right all right so let's besides father because i'm sure that that's probably your first identity um but but besides that if you were to pick one of those hats salesperson business person how would you describe yourself? Starting with coach, second coach, investor.

I don't really identify as a real estate agent anymore because I've been off the tools for a few years, mainly just coaching my team. Yeah, I mean, for many years, thousands of transactions I would have said realtor. Now it's really, it's coach, investor, and business development. How long has it been since you've identified as a real estate agent? Now it's really, it's coach, investor, and business development. How long has it been since you've identified as a real estate agent?

I sold, I kind of went out with a bang. I sold a $15 million house and then I decided to hang it up there after that. So you don't think you could get 16 million? What the hell's wrong with you, man? I just wanted to beat my previous record of 10. And when we did it, it was, no, it was starting to make sense i was picking on a lot my bandwidth was getting clogged up and i realized my best service years were probably behind me i was getting a little owly i didn't have as much patience for people anymore after 20 years and so i uh i wouldn't

say back in 2021 after we came through that crazy year I was in position where I didn't need to sell anything. So let's talk about social good and, you know, bringing that into your business model. So what do you mean when you say social good? What does that mean to you? Well, I really believe that your business model needs to serve all the stakeholders. It needs to serve the community that you're in, leave your community better than it was. The people on a team, not just your real estate agents, but your support staff and your admin need to be able to build the lifestyle and the life that they want for themselves.

And so it has to create a lot of runway for them. I think the agents on the team need to be able to both make a great income, but also have the time and the leverage to be able to enjoy sitting. And so, you know, that balance between, you know, that work and life balance. So people get to be home at night with their kids and they get to have some of their weekend to spend doing the things they enjoy. Right. Real estate can be all consuming and can kind of cannibalize your lifestyle as many people know. So I think the model of the future is one that again, services the community, serves the staff and the team, is a great place for agents to be able to live that work-life balance. And then if you can get all those things right, then there should be a good economy of scale or there should be a good margin for the business owner as well. And so it's kind of like stakeholder capitalism, all that ESG bullshit attached to it.

Preston Pyshko So let's break that down. So let's put that in different lanes, right? So I know you speak to investors. I know you speak to agents and other entrepreneurs and business owners. Let's say you're an agent, like a solo agent. How do they put that into their world? Yeah. So an agent would join a team ridge. That's just a kind of a hybrid word between team and brokerage. It's a brokerage that operates more towards the team side. So you would have pooled marketing where the brokerage itself does the marketing. There's transaction coordinators. There's people who handle the listing coordination.

You've got marketing department. You've got an inside sales department that's booking appointments. So a lot of infrastructure and brokerage level services that you can plug right into. There's coaching, there's camaraderie. You're surrounded by people who are playing from the same playbook, but also want to see you win. As we all know, real estate can be a bit of a craps in the bucket type of a business where people to your face are happy for you, but really I feel like it's a zero sum game. So if you're winning, maybe that means they get less. And that's just not the reality. There's an abundance of opportunity out there, but it just, unfortunately, the typical brokerage model as I've seen it, reads scarcity. You show up to the

office, there's not enough parking. You walk in there, there's not enough desks. There's not enough managers, certainly not enough leads to go around. And so you just have this scarcity throughout. And so smaller, more boutique setup where there's pool of resources and people are playing from the same playbook is a completely different experience. So to take you a step further, the idea is to build what we call leverage track. So as your career progresses, you unlock more and more leverage. So hypothetically at two deals a month, you get full transaction coordination support. It'll help you from the minute you bring in a new contract all the way through to when that deal closes. So everything in between. As you get a

little bit longer in the tooth, say at level three, social media management becomes unlocked. And some of the other things for your forever client club get done for it. At level four, you get access to credits. So we have this on-ramp for new agents coming into the business where they get a chance to earn a little while they learn a lot from our senior agents. So they get paid 50 bucks an hour basically to do certain tasks. And the brokerage pays for a certain amount of hours depending on where you are in your career. So if you're at four deals a month, you would get 20 hours per month on our dime to basically pay one of these new guys to go do showings for you so you can be in

your kid's soccer game or to host an open house for a seller that's been asking. But the little things that you know you would do out of obligation but don't really move the needle, you make that someone else's job. And so again, buying back more of your time, leveraging your dollar per hour earning capacity so you can, as you start making more money, start to work less hours. That's really the goal. Got it. And so let's talk about, you know, like, let's go back into your, you know, your journey as a, as a, an entrepreneur, what would you say looking back instantaneously? What's the first thing that comes to your mind of, man, that was a mistake or that was a learning opportunity?

What comes to your mind? Well, at the time that I let a house go under contract, two different parties, back in 2007, I got a little big for my britches. I had an assistant. We had a competing bid situation. We accepted one as the main offer and the other as the backup. Everybody knew where they were, but unfortunately, paperwork didn't reflect what everybody understood. And we had two parties with a contractual right to buy that house. And that got ugly and ended up getting some media attention. And that is what was the catalyst for me becoming a broker owner was I got booted on my ass from Remax at age 25 thinking I was the hotshot and next thing you know I was completely nuclear nobody would take me so I had 30 days to build a brokerage to keep my career going and that's what we did but that is that was a defining moment in my world because yeah I got behind for making a huge oversight on a paperwork side

and I could have gone and got a job, which I think a lot of people would have done. But what I did was just create a brokerage out of nothing. So you said huge media attention. What does that mean? Like what type of exposure? The nightly views was on, yeah, it was local, but it got some media attention there.

What had happened was the clients weren't getting anywhere with the broker. So this went on, played out for about six months. I was actually paying a mortgage. I was doing the standup thing, but they weren't getting any resolution to this. They wanted obviously their capital back. And our brokerage had taken a position that, well, you're not suing us, so it's not really a legal matter for us. And they took that position. And so this stretched out a lot longer than they thought it ought to have so i guess in their conversations with friends somebody said you need to put some heat on remax

and go to the media so what had happened actually was they went to the the local news local news came a bit of story they took my sign down so as to protect me but this the headline ran remax sells a house twice. And of course, the other 200 agents at Remax were none too pleased. So the mutiny ensued. Hey, excuse me for interrupting my own show. I just want to break in just for a moment and let you know I would love to meet you. Every single month online, I host a free training session on Zoom where I'm going to invite you to come in and learn the new way to persuade human behavior. I want to demonstrate to you how you can unlock consistent and predictable income and strength of relationships

to achieve self-fulfillment, to be able to avoid the number one sales mistake and never face rejection again, and how to use non-linguistic programming to be able to influence and handle difficult people. So visit www.nobrokemonths.com. That's nobrokemonths.com so that you can save your seat for one of our upcoming classes and that I can be able to help you to learn how to teach to sell again. That's www.nobrokemonths.com. See you online. What's the, uh, on the opposite side, let's, let's get to the, let's get to the positive side, AJ. What would you say is the first thing that comes to your mind about like, you say, man, that was a good move. What comes to your mind?

Well, after the 2008 financial crisis, that's right when we opened up our brokerage. And for me, the thing that had saved my bacon was in advance of that, I had become very much a student of investment real estate, creative real estate deals. I understood how to put trade deals together, agreements for sale, option deals. And all of that creative deal making saved my ass when things got really tight. So the decision to become a real student of the stuff that operates outside of the norm was probably the best thing I ever did because I grew our firm's reputation as a solution provider and as an out of the box thinker in that time. And we gained a lot of market share for having those skills and having those solutions during tough times. Where do you see the industry being today with, you know, so you mentioned like the 2008 crisis.

I don't think these last couple of years have been, well, I know it hasn't been nearly what it was in 2008. But the last, you know, so we went through the pandemic and there was an explosion of opportunity and then it contracted relatively quickly. How do you compare the two, the two times? Very, very different in a lot of, for the reasoning that the drivers and the influencers are very different. But for us, and of course, you can't talk about the real estate market market without acknowledging that's like trying to talk about weather. Yeah, it's local. So it's very localized. But for us, 2008, you had a 20% pullback. 2022, we had a 20% pullback. And so the consistency in terms of the market, it booms, it slumps, and it recovers. It goes the same direction. And knowing where you are in that market cycle and understanding there's a beginning, middle,

and end to each of those three phases as well. And there's different things that happen at different times. So, you know, in 2008, when things crashed, we went through an ugly time and then we traded sideways for a while, right? And then there were signs that things were starting to get better. That was the recovery. So, for every slump is the recovery. And so when you can start to see those signs. So for us now, we're seeing just early green shoots of a recovery in our market. As far as other markets, there might be a little bit of a delay. Maybe you experienced the boom longer and you're going to now have to go through that little bit of pain that we've already felt. Got it. How would you describe, do you have daily habits? Do you have certain things that you do each day that you would describe as habits?

Yes and no. I'm not a terribly structured and disciplined guy. I get up at 6.30 in the morning. I'm not these 4 a.m. guys. I get up at 6 6 30. I try to work out. I look after myself. That's one thing. And I try to read a book that is in, you know, a business book that is kind of whatever I'm, it's leadership right now for me, I'm really focused on leadership. So that's what I read. But I try to read at least something until I get the aha, the ideas might be a chapter, might be two, might be half a chapter till I hit that moment.

And then I usually will sit down and plan my day. And I use a, you know, I use a planner and plan my day out after that, who the hell knows what's going to happen. But the one consistency is workout, read, plan a day. Got it. So, and I think that right there is, I mean, that's useful for, you know, for people listening and watching right now. It's, you know, I think having the habits of something. Well, let me ask you, do you believe that that plan that you have, workout, read, plan the day, is as helpful for you personally as it is professionally?

Yeah, because I mean, a lot of entrepreneurs in this call will say, if you're not firing on all cylinders at work, you kind of show up a little bit different at home. And so it's sort of the setup. If I feel like I'm getting the stuff done, but I need to advance my goals and I come back as a man on fire. If I feel like I'm spinning my wheels and I'm just a little alley. So I think it does set up and translate into a better, and I have my priorities. Like my priorities are my family and my, and my wife. So if I can lead a very intentional day, that means I can pack a lot in the seven or eight hours I plan to work and be home at five o'clock and I don't let my day bleed

into the evening. Yeah. I'd like to say, um, I practice the, the habit of being wherever I am. And so if, if I am, uh, having a conversation with AJ, that's it. That's where I'm at. If I'm with my daughter, that's it. That's where I'm at. If I'm lead generating, that's it. That's where I'm at. And, um, and being very, very reluctant to enter into, you know, into distractions. I would guess you're probably a little bit like that yourself. Would you describe yourself similarly? Yeah. I mean, I, everything I do, I do wholeheartedly, but fighting distraction is one of the things I'm constantly working on. The problem that I have, I think, is that I've taken on so many

things. So there's a lot of things that are happening. A lot of opportunity for distraction for you. A lot of opportunity, period. And yeah, and that does come with distractions. The more I read, the more I learn, wisdom converges at the top. Now it's focus, follow one course until successful. And so now it's trying to make sense of, okay, well, you have these multitude of opportunities. Are they all just legs of the same opportunity or are they actually all distractions and I should pick one? So that's really what I'm trying to wrestle with right now. But do you have any thoughts about which direction you're heading with that or? Well, Vantage West Realty is my brokerage and i've been building that for over 15 years

and i've got a lot of i believe brand equity in that and a lot of great forward momentum and i think that that has the potential to have the most legs for sure and the expansion of it into other areas etc so if i had if someone put a gun to my head said you have to cut everything except one thing i would keep the brokerage but obviously the coaching business is very exciting and has opportunity for, you know, to aid in the expansion because I get to coach people who might soon become my expansion partners in those areas. And so everything connects in my mind and I've done a great job of justifying why I have all these things going, but gun to my head, the brokerage is the thing I would keep. Yeah. You and me both. Just have all these things going, but gun to my head, the brokerage is a thing I would keep.

Yeah. You and me both justifying all those things. My name is Dan Roshan and I have coached thousands of business owners with the teach yourself method and this method, it works as a real estate agent. My team and I, we have been consistent top producers in our marketplace and one of my proudest accomplishments is my track record of having no broke months since 2008 and all along the way i've been paying attention, which is why I have written down the step-by-step path for you to follow in the book, Teach to Grow Rich. Increase your influence, avoid the number one sales mistake and get what you want. And I invite for you to claim your copy of Teach to Grow Rich when you visit the website www.teachtosellnow.com. That's teachtosellnow.com and get your copy.

So, AJ, so if you would go and you say like of your own business journey and then also those that you lead and also those that you lead and also those that you coach, which is all sort of the same, how would you describe, like if you say like you see commonalities of things that get in people's way, what would that be?

And then if you see commonalities of things that create a perceived success, what would that commonality be? First, I think that I see of people who succeed is like an extreme ownership of the situation. They don't look for externalities. They don't wipe fingers. They realize if it's meant to be, it's up to them. So we try to smoke out whether a person has a high degree of ownership in their life or not in the early stages of our interview process. The ones to the degree that

they own their own ship, they succeed extremely well. The next thing is coachability. Sure, we could show up and figure we're going to reinvent the wheel, but all the success I've had in my life has not been reinvention of the wheel. It's been finding someone who's already done the thing that I want to do, getting their playbook and saving myself a decade of trial and error. And so just getting the playbook and saving myself a decade of trial and error. And so just getting the playbook and submitting to the fact that someone's already walked this path, why don't I just bolt onto that and run that book? People who are coachable tend to be willing to do that. What about things, what about commonalities of people that you, you know, that, that struggle?

People that struggle tend to have some limiting beliefs. They have subconscious programming that tells them that, you know, wanting money or coveting things is, you know, is a sin or is not growing with how they see themselves or how their family, you know, has brought them up. That tends to be a pretty big issue. I also find that, you know, the opposite of course of ownership is people who are, have a victim mentality, people who think life is happening to them will tend to struggle. And then I guess the other thing that I should have mentioned in the beginning, but I can mention it now as the opposite. If you have a low level of resiliency, then it's pretty tough to succeed in business,

right? This particularly real estate, which will knock you down a step on your throat if you let it, you have to have a high degree of that resiliency. So I used to be a boxer and I noticed a lot of commonalities between combat fighting and what we do. The number one predictor of a person having any career in box is having a good shit. Being able to take a punch. The business version of that is what is the depth and reach of, of a, when you take a punch in business, you lose a deal. A friend of yours works with another realtor. You've had, you've had a deal on life support that you put six months into and it blows

up. You had a $200 commission and you know, now what? Great. This happens. Does it affect your morning, your day, your week, your month? How frigging long are you down? And if it's closer to the far end of that spectrum, you're not going to succeed in this business. If you can shake it off and, you know, dust yourself off in an hour, you can mope about it for an hour and then, okay, back to business, back to fundamentals. Here's what I got to do. That is a winner. Somebody who has to pull the covers over their head for the next couple of days, unfortunately is not going to succeed. Yeah. I find that I was talking to somebody. So I coach outside of real estate as well as within real estate as well. I know you

do also. I was talking to somebody yesterday who does software sales, basically. And he was he was sharing with me his his challenge of, you know, with a proposal that he'd have to put around 30 hours into the proposal. And then when he doesn't get accepted of how much that feels, you know, how that feels bad to him. My recommendation to him would say, well, about how many proposals would you have to submit for every time that you get hired? And he says, I don't know, two, two and a half. I said, okay, great. So what if you, instead of looking at the 30 hours that you put into it, what if you looked at it like, I'm going to have to invest 75 hours for every single person that hires me rather than looking at it 30 hours and then you get rejected and now you're all pissed off or upset or whatever the case may be.'s like oh my god that's fantastic so now i don't i don't

want to equate that to um to preparing to not get accepted yet you're always going to intend to get accepted yet when you have the reality to say well well, no one's going to get it except 100% of the time, and that rejection is a part of the equation, let me just bake that in so that I don't have to crawl underneath my coverage for the next four days in and of itself. What are your thoughts on that perspective? 100%. That quantification of understanding the numbers game that you're playing is really important. I do the same with people who are getting into the internet lead conversion game, for example, I let them know, here's the reality. You know, you're going to talk, you're going to generate a hundred leads. 30 of them are going to be FU at fu.com and with fake numbers of the 70, you're only going to get 50 of them to actually

answer the phone of the 50 people you talk to on the phone. 45 of them are no value immediately. It might be in the follow-up. Five of them represent potential opportunity. You might book four meetings from that. From those four meetings, three might show up. From the three that show up, you'll probably sign two of them to exclusive agency and one will actually do the deal. And that's kind of how it all goes down. And it's all baked in. And here's how many contacts it takes to get a person on them or how many dials it takes to get someone on the phone, how many people on the phone to get a lead and on and on it goes. So they understand the expectations are set that this is a numbers game.

You aren't going to get this or you're playing a game where, and then you've got to quantify it to the dollar per hour. So what you had said about, well, you're going to invest 75 hours. Well, if that person makes three grand, you know, a sale and he's making 40 bucks an hour or whatever, and they have to understand the game at the point. So I think that's really good advice. Yeah. And then, and then equating it to the dollar amount and then you, and then you make a decision.

The gentleman I was coaching yesterday, it was like a $200,000 sale. Right. Like, you know, like, cause this is not real, you know, and I'm like, listen, I'll for 75 hours of work, sign me up. 300 grand. Right. Yeah. Like, yeah. I mean that, that, that makes perfect sense to me. One of the things that I share, um, in business as well, uh, in particular real estate sales is, um, you know, when I have agents joining me on my sales team or agents that I'm coaching, I share with them. I said, listen, every single lead, every single lead, every single lead sucks, except for the ones that don't. Right. And I got that because early on in my career as a leader, I would get agents coming at me like, ah, these

leads suck, ah, these leads like, ah, these leads suck. Ah, these leads suck. Ah, these leads suck. Right. You know, and I'm like, all right, well, let me be preemptive. Before you tell me, I'm going to tell you. Yeah. You know, so that's another way to look at it as well.

So, AJ, so how can somebody, I know you've got social media and you've got, you know, coaching. You've got some free coaching programs and that type of stuff. How can somebody get in touch with you? Best thing to do. And you know, I'm pretty active in my messaging as well. Go on Instagram, follow me, vantagewest.academy. So vantage like the V not advantage, vantagewest.academy. And then you'll notice in my bio, there's a to school which i think is a great platform we have lots and lots of really great free content in school particularly around lead generation need conversion so people want to learn how to reliably bring in clients on demand that's a great place to go uh we've got a 30-day challenge in there that'll get all of your pieces in place and of course people want more than. And we of course do offer both private and

group coaching for folks that want to really accelerate things. But start with Instagram, see where we go from there. AJ, thank you so much for your time. And thank you for talking about how to build that social good into your business model. Everybody, thank you for your time today. Have the best day of your life. Be grateful, make good choices, go help somebody. And check out aj on his instagram god bless you thanks so much for listening to the show and i want to tell you about teach to sell the new way to persuade human behavior because i'd love to be able to meet you face to face and because i want to be able to help you face to face. And because I want to be able to help you unlock consistent

and predictable income, I invite for you to join us for one of our free trainings upcoming. And to be able to find out details, go ahead and visit www.nobrokemonths.com. That's nobrokemonths.com and find out how you can have no broke months. Dan, you are such a fascinating man. I mean, he has this purpose in life to help people achieve their dreams, their greatness. And he doesn't just say it. He actually has steps and mythologies in order for them to follow. Our very special guest in Featured Shining Every Day.

I cannot even sit in my chair. I'm so excited. Dan Rochon, all the way from beautiful Virginia. Dan, it's an honor to have you on the show. Thank you so much for taking the time. And what I'm encouraging for you is to focus on who you're being, because that's your foundation. And when you focus on that, you're going to find that you do activities that are going to lead to the outcome of having whatever it is in this life that you're looking for.