Start With A Win - Interview with Nate Martinez

Episode Date: November 6, 2019

Our guest on this episode of the Start with a Win podcast is Nate Martinez, co-owner of RE/MAX Professionals in the Phoenix area. Nate wears many hats as an owner, broker, team leader, and agent, and he is fortunate enough to have his wife and two of his children on his team. With over 33 years in the industry, Nate has overcome plenty of challenges and has learned many beneficial lessons that now point him in the direction of success. Even with everything he has going on, he prioritizes his team by setting aside several hours every Wednesday morning to talk through the issues of the week and also provide a collaborative space. Nate’s keys to success are being committed to learning, being coachable, and being a mentor. When it comes to continual learning, Nate doesn’t understand why some people make a conscious decision to just give up and stop improving when there are so many mountains left to climb. By being committed to learning, you are truly living life to the fullest and you are able to enhance the lives of others. Part of this also is the willingness to be coachable, recognizing that you don’t know everything and that a coach could help you improve yourself in all areas of life. Finally, Nate encourages everyone who wants to be successful to take the time to help others as well. This mindset of giving over gaining and abundance over scarcity is rare in a world where so many people are primarily focused on themselves, but this will make all the difference for you and those you are pouring into.Nate’s advice to up-and-coming real estate agents is: (1) find a mentor, (2) find a coach, and (3) invest in yourself. He starts his day with a win by visualizing his day and focusing on the “Miracle Morning” principles.Links:“Trillion Dollar Coach” book: https://www.amazon.com/Trillion-Dollar-Coach-Leadership-Playbook/dp/0062839268 “Miracle Morning” book: https://www.amazon.com/Miracle-Morning-Not-So-Obvious-Guaranteed-Transform/dp/0979019710 Connect with Nate:[e-mail]

At top of the 12th floor of the RE-MAX World Headquarters, you're listening to Start With a Win with CEO Adam Kantos. And top of the 12th floor, RE-MAX World Headquarters here in beautiful Denver, Colorado, Adam Kantos, CEO of RE-MAX. Here with Start With a Win, producer Mark. How you doing, buddy? I am so good. So good. I love it. I love it. You always bring a smile to everybody's face around here. Well, I'm a smiling

kind of guy. You are, yeah. That's the cool part about smiles. You can hand them out and you never run out. They're limitless. Yes. As we like to say here. Exactly. Yeah. So we have a good friend of ours in studio today from Arizona. I know. It's probably cool here in comparison. I don't know. It's like 100 degrees here today. Yeah, exactly. It's still cooler.

It's cool. That's true. So I want to welcome to the microphone Nate Martinez with Remax Professionals in lovely Glendale, Surprise, and Avondale, Arizona. How are you doing, Nate? I am doing great. Thank you. Glad to have you here. I'm excited. So what brings you to town?

Well, we're here learning about Booz. We got three of our team members here learning about all the insights of Booz and getting ready to launch. So we're really excited. Cool. Awesome. Well, we love the Booz platform and everything that that has to offer our brokers, teams, and agents. So, Nate, you've been co-owner of Remax Professionals since 2001. Is that correct? That's correct. We started on September 11, 2001.

Wow. Interesting day for all of us. Yeah, no kidding. You guys have three locations. You've been in the real estate industry for quite some time, very well known in Arizona in real estate and in a REMAX network as well. So besides REMAX, tell us a little bit about yourself. Well, let's see. I'm going to be turning 60 this year, so I'm excited about that. Happy birthday.

Been licensed 33 years. I got two children in the business. My better half is also licensed, so we have a family team. Tanya and I also have a nine-year-old. So we started another chapter in our life about 10 years ago with having another child. So that's been a game changer. So not only running an office and involved in title company and go into plays and all the stuff with our daughter, it's really fun. That's cool. Very nice. So, you know, as a business owner, you know, you've got a couple different facets of business that you focus on. So you run an office, you know, you're a broker owner, you run a team. Correct. And you also are an individual agent. So, I mean, what are some of the challenges that you see,

you know, an entrepreneur in that space face? Time management, probably, with all those hats. But we have a really good team that run Remax Professionals. My business partner, Frank Russo, and I started 18 years ago, basically this week. And we grew a great team. We grew to over 300 agents and seven offices were open at one time. And then the market in Phoenix crashed and we had to go through all of that. We'll probably unpack a little bit of that later if you'd like. But in a down market when it's sliding that fast and you have a lot of real estate out there, it was very interesting. A lot of employees and trying to keep it all together.

Today, Frank retired from ownership about a year ago today. Right. And so he's still with the company, and he does what he likes to do, and he just likes to flip homes, but he wanted to get out of the day-to-day operation of the brokerage. Cool. So you're not just juggling the real estate transaction itself. You're juggling employees, you're juggling independent contractors that are in your offices. Like you said, you have multiple locations. So you've got leases, you've got all sorts of upkeep and maintenance of facilities, things like that. I mean, that's a lot of stuff. How do you prioritize those things?

Well, again, having the right team. So we have a team that Mike, our CEO of Remax Professionals, kind of manages all the day-to-day operations and hiring and terminations and motivating and just making sure that works. I meet with our leadership team at Remax Professionals every Wednesday. We have a morning for about four hours. We kind of go through any issues, any visionary stuff we want to put on the table, reprioritize. And that team pretty much runs itself. My real estate team, which today we closed our 100th home today for the year. And we've had different years where we've had as many as 680 home sales on our team back in the REO days to today where we're a little bit more lean and mean.

The team consists of pretty much my right-hand, Christine, that kind of runs the daily operations back at the office. And my son, Nate, is kind of becoming the team leader. My daughter, Brandy, and T Tanya and the rest of the team are doing their job of selling real estate. I love it. And congratulations on that 100th home. I mean, for a lot of people in real estate,

that takes many, many, many years and you've done it by, what, September 3rd. So, I mean, that's a huge undertaking to close that many transactions just in one year. So congratulations on that. Well, thank you. In your mind, you look at, take a step back and take a look at you as a broker in a business and you as a team leader in a business, things like that. What would you say makes somebody successful at those things? What particulars can you tell our listening audience as far as, you know, if somebody's not just an entrepreneur in our space,

but, you know, entrepreneurship in general has some, you know, some characterizations that everybody needs to be focused on. What would you say those things are that help people be successful? Well, I think learning-based is definitely one. Being coachable is another. And being willing to be a mentor. You're a broker-owner. You're helping people build their businesses. And that's what we try to do. I go to many conferences every year since I've been in real estate, and I take that knowledge and I try to feed that back to my agents and help them when they have challenges or help them build a team. We've been a big team office for 20-plus years, and that's what we do. We help people build their teams. I love that. So let's unpack that a little bit, because you said a couple things there that are really gold in my mind here.

So the first one, learning-based. So many people stop learning at some point in life, and I don't see that out of you. I mean, you're always at our events. You're out there researching, trying to find out how do I improve myself, things like that. What do you think causes people to give up on learning in life? And what kept you going? I don't know why people don't keep going, you know, because I think our life is here for us to live and we want to live our life to the fullest. And at the same time, we want to enhance other people's lives. So it's all about learning and growing. I've watched you grow from

when you first entered the REMAX system and your development over the last two to three years has just exploded. And I'm very excited for where you are right now and how you're leading our organization. Well, thank you. Thank you. So to segue from that into the next piece, you talked about being coachable. At the Broker Owner Conference recently in Chicago, the first thing I stood on stage and said is, are you coachable? It was taken from a book, The Trillion Dollar Coach, a story of Bill Campbell, who was a Silicon Valley coach and leader of really some of the top technology billionaires in society. So, and you're talking about this throughout leadership principles and throughout running

different types of businesses. What does being coachable mean to you? Taking somebody else's perspective. I've had two or three coaches in real estate. I've had a coach specifically for the REMAX brokerage on multiple occasions, different coaches. So letting somebody else take a helicopter view, I guess, and finding out what do they see that I don't see? And what can they bring to the table that I'm not looking at? You know, sometimes we're so busy, caught up working in our business, not always working on our business. And sometimes a coach can keep you accountable, can remind you of some of your goals that maybe you're not focusing on. So coaching, I think, is very important. And more and more people are being

coached today than probably ever before. That's an interesting observation. I agree. I think a lot of people are taking coaching seriously now. And I have coaches. I know you have coaches. I mean, you've got to be coachable, which obviously means being vulnerable. And that's tough when you start putting egos in the way and people saying, this is my business. Don't tell me how to run it, things like that. That's tough to get over that sometimes also when you've got your head down and you're on the offensive to grow your business, you're making decisions, and then to switch over to vulnerability, that doesn't feel like it goes together. Do you have to make that a conscious effort to say, all right, stop, Nate, listen? Or is it something that you've ingrained yourself over the years? How does that look? Well, depending on what they're coaching me on.

If I'm not coachable to certain aspects, like I can go back 20 years ago and some of my coaches, Mike Ferry was one of my first coaches, one of his coaches, and they wanted me to knock doors, work expires, and do that type of prospecting, and I fought it all the time. I remember I had to do an accountability fax. We used to have the fax in our sheet all the time, and I did not like that. So I rebelled from that type of coaching. To today, coaching, I think the coaching that I have now keeps me focused on my goals and how I want to work my business and just keeping that flow moving forward. Not every coach is good for every person.

You have to find the right coach that kind of flows with where you're trying to go. But you should be looking for a coach that is good for you. Right. Yeah. Yeah. You might have to go through a couple of coaches to find the right one. It's kind of funny you say that because it's weird. You know, when it's somebody that you're going, all right, I want this person to coach me. It just has that weird feeling to it. I think, I mean, I don't know if you agree with that. Sometimes you can get too comfortable with your coach, but then you end up just our buddy-buddy on the phone call. Right. And I had a coach like that, and I'm still within the same coaching organization, but we got too friendly. So we switched it up, and my new coach now coaches both myself and my son, which is really good. I've seen the development in my son over the last year by him being coached.

He's a different person, and he's growing a lot faster than he ever did before. So when we talk about coaching, we're not just talking about business, right? I mean, you just can't make your business right and have the rest of your life have problems and expect to be successful in your business. How do you, I know you're in a personal improvement. I know you've started a new fitness challenge, new life challenge type thing. How do you see holistically all of that fit together in order to create a good business perspective as well as, you know, make yourself happy at home? Well, you gotta be happy at home, right? If you're not happy at home, nothing else, you're not going to be happy anywhere else. So you have to make sure your home is,

is your castle. What we've done over the years is creating a perfect week, just having some type of map that is both personal and business and that you're trying to follow. So with all the things that we do, I pretty much work Monday through Friday. I pretty much work from eight o'clock till five o'clock. That's my schedule. I don't go on a listing. I still list homes. That's pretty much what I do. I don't work with too many buyers anymore, But I try to be home by 5.30, 6 o'clock at the latest. So I'm there with my family. Tanya and I have a set date night. It's usually Thursday night unless something else is coming up in the weekend. Like last Monday was the Stones in town. So we switched our date night to Monday instead of Thursday. So we have a babysitter set up. We're ready to go.

We have no excuse not to go out and have a good time. So focusing on a babysitter set up. We're ready to go. We have no excuse not to go out and have a good time. So focusing on that, focusing on my daughter. My children are older, so I have a granddaughter and a daughter, spend a lot of time with them. And those are the big rocks. We got to put the big rocks in first. So if we put the big rocks in for family first, the big rocks for our listing appointments, our meetings with our agents, everything else, if it's not a big rock, may not fit on the calendar. But you definitely, you get those things that totally matter done first. So you know at the end of the day, okay, I got what matters done. The little things will wait until the next day

or something like that. Yeah. Or you can delegate, you know, delegation is key. There you go. I love that. And I like how you, you know, everybody says there's no life balance. And I agree with that. You know, it's always a struggle to go after the next thing, to seek improvement, to seek success in different aspects of your life. Nothing's going to balance itself out by any means. So I love what you're talking about there. And then you move on, because you talked about just consecutively be coachable and then be willing to go give and help other people improve themselves. That's an interesting transition because people think I'm either coachable or I'm a coach, but you can be both and you've demonstrated that. How do you make that transition? I just look back how I was treated when I first got in real estate. Some of the big producers that I looked up to were not willing to give you the time of day. And I remember that. And then other people would take time and teach you stuff. My biggest mentor, my first mentor was Howard Brinton. And Howard Brinton was the first real estate class I went to. I was a construction worker

and I had a real estate license and I went to get my GRI designation. I got to spend a week with Howard Brinton teaching GRI. What he taught me in that first week and what he taught me over the next probably 20 years changed my life. He took time to reach out to me, to give to me, to teach me and to get out of judgment, get into curiosity was one of his sayings that we kind of hooked on to. So because of that learning that I got from Howard, to give back, it's great. And I've mentored a lot of agents. A lot of agents started our company as a brand new agent. We probably have four or five of those agents that started our company all own real estate

companies today and very successful. So when they first leave, you're kind of disappointed. but then you realize, well, they're just like me. They got to a level in their business and they wanted to own their own business. So I look back at that and all the people that I've helped, and I want to continue to help more people. And that's the Nate Martinez that I've known for so long. You're in this mindset of how can I help you? You're not looking to gain something out of it. You're looking to give. And, you know, we've heard the term be a giver. I think that's, I mean, just my perspective, why you've been so successful in business and why you are an

amazing broker to be with is that giving attitude. Because it's cool. You go out and you get from, you know, your coaching, from your education, things like that, and you don't have to give that stuff away. And so many people, they block giving that away with their ego. You get rid of the ego and you go out and see how many people you can help with it. So thank you for all of that because we wouldn't have the next generation or even the current generation of people improving themselves in real estate if it weren't for people like you. So much appreciation for that. Well, thank you. We've got to live in a world of abundance instead of scarcity. We have to share what we know so everybody else grows.

Awesome. I totally agree. Up and coming agent who wants to succeed in this industry, give me one or two tips. You know, you sit down with somebody, they say, Nate, I'd love to buy you a cup of coffee and hear from you some success principles on how I can help myself in the real estate space. What would you tell me? Well, there'd be three things. It's find a mentor and somebody that will help you, right? And then find a coach at some point, right? Maybe not at the beginning, you probably couldn't afford a coach, but a mentor is just as good as a coach. And then invest in yourself.

I think for me, looking back where I was before I got my real estate license and where I am today is all because I invested in myself by going to that first GRI class and going to CRS classes and continuing educating myself and joining REMAX back 91, the satellite network, you know, watch that all the time. So all the things that we have in front of us are out there. It's a matter of just having the thirst for knowledge and going out and learning. But I think surround yourself with the right people, right? I had to move away from the neighborhood I grew up in to become the person I want to be. And the neighborhood I live in today is definitely different than the neighborhood I came. And the people I surround myself are all givers. They're all great people. It depends if they're a doctor or a lawyer or whatever they are in life. They're good people giving back to society. And that's the type of people I want to hang around with. So

if somebody wants to emulate somebody, find somebody that they want to be like, and then maybe even go to work for them. Become a member on their team or just have them mentor them and just listen. And I think the key, though, is action. They have to apply the action to everything that they learn. I love that. That's some amazing tips. So, Nate, we've got a few questions that we throw in here every now and then for our amazing guests. How about a favorite quote?

Do you have a favorite quote? Well, I like Wayne Gretzky's quote, skate to where the puck is going to be and not to where it's at. And he wasn't the biggest, fastest guy out there, but he was one of the smartest in the game of hockey. So that's pretty cool. This is a big one for me because, obviously, the show is called Start With a Win,

and I truly believe I've got my morning routines, and I like to get going with some wins in the morning, and I know you do as well. How do you define starting your day with a win? Well, a couple years ago I read the book Miracle Morning by Al Rod, who was our closing speaker last year at R4, and I started using those principles to slow down. I used to just get up in the morning and take off. Slowing down, meditating, journaling, exercising, getting into an exercise routine.

That's the routine I do just about every single day. And it really, I think visualizing the day is probably the highlight for me. If I visualize the day and I kind of look at my day timer and know what appointments I have and I kind of get ready for them mentally, the day just flows through really nice. If I forget to visualize the day, it's a little more chaotic. So I think just going through that regimen. And now I'm on a little bit higher now right now, so I'm only on the third day of that. So it's a challenge. Awesome. Awesome. And I know you love a new

challenge and kudos to you for starting a new one. That is amazing. Nate Martinez, broker owner, Remax Professionals in Phoenix, Arizona, one of our amazing broker owners here in the Remax Network. Nate, thank you so much for being with us today. I know our audience got a lot out of this. Where can people find you and learn more about you and your business? Basically, you can just reach out to me via email, natem at remax.net.

Love to help you any way I can. Awesome. Thanks so much for being with us today, Nate. We appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to Start With A Win. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Don't forget to go onto iTunes and subscribe,

write a review, or rate the show. It helps us get the word out and reach more people. You can follow Adam on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. And remember, start with a win.