As you reflect on your accomplishments for this year, you may or may have not hit your goals.
The real question, though, is what are you going to do if you didn’t hit the goals you hoped to?
Your answer to that ONE question will determine what happens next for you.
It will determine not only how 2023 goes for you, but the entire trajectory of your real estate business.
Yes, this moment is THAT important.
We’ve all learned to set SMART goals–Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound.
And then we promptly beat ourselves up if we didn’t hit a goal we set in the time we’ve given ourselves.
We tell ourselves all sort of terrible things like…
“I’ll never figure this out.”
“This is so much harder than I thought it’d be.”
“Why can’t I be like that other agent in my office who is doing so much better than me.”
“Maybe this whole real estate thing isn’t for me.”
All that stuff.
That’s the moment many agents decide to quit.
If that’s what happens when we set SMART goals, maybe they aren’t so smart after all.
Do this instead:
If you didn’t hit your goals this year, move the “T” as we say here at Agent Grad School.
For example, if you had a goal to sell 25 houses this year, but you sold 12, don’t make it mean anything more than you have the skills right now to know how to sell 12 homes in a year, but you just haven’t learned how to sell 25 homes in a year yet.
That’s all that’s happened.
Instead of beating yourself up about it, simply keep going until you sell 25 homes, no matter how long it takes. Take note of how long it took.
Let’s say it took you two years to sell 25 homes. Congratulations, you hit your goal. You’ve sold 25 homes.
Once you’ve sold 25 homes in whatever time it takes you, you will have learned so many skills and you WILL have gotten better at what it takes to sell 25 homes. You will be able to do all of it faster.
Maybe next time it only takes you 18 months to sell 25 homes. The year after that, it might take you 12 months to sell 25 homes.
So what if it took you three years instead of one year to reach your goal of selling 25 homes in one year? Now you know how to do that and you can learn how to do it faster and faster so you eventually sell double that many homes in one year.
When I first became an agent, all I wanted to do was make $80k per year. It took me FOUR YEARS to make $80k selling real estate. Not $80k in one year, $80k total over four years.
Two years later, I made $80k in one month. I didn’t have a team, I didn’t even have an assistant or a transaction coordinator. That month was January 2008–the “slow” time of the year in the middle of the biggest real estate crash in history.
I’m not a unicorn. I’m not special. I just chose not to quit.
I chose to hit my goal no matter how long it took me. I chose to learn the skill of making $80k by being a real estate agent. I had to make that choice every single day. I kept choosing and learning how to do it better until I learned how to do it once a month.
That’s how we get from where we are now to blowing our own damn mind. That’s how we learn what we are truly capable of instead of listening to the nonsense about not being good enough.
I’ve seen student after student do this inside Agent Grad School. What do they all have in common? They don’t quit until they reach their goal no matter how long it takes. They just keep moving the T until they have the exact real estate business and life they want.
You can do this too.
Learn more about moving the T on this episode of Confessions of A Top Producing Real Estate Agent:
To your success,
Jennifer
Episode Transcript
On today’s episode of Confessions of a Top, Producing Real, Estate Agent, how to guarantee that you hit every single goal you set. Welcome to this episode of Confessions of a Top, Producing Real Estate Agent. I’m your host, Jennifer Myers. Listen in as I share exactly what I did to go from not being able to sell a house for years to becoming one of the top 1% of agents in the US to even opening my own brokerage full of agents to help me serve all the clients that were coming my way. I taught those agents the same strategies I used in day two became top Producing agents. Now through this podcast in agent Grad school.com, I’m sharing those same modern marketing and business strategies with you, most of which I learned from looking outside the real estate industry.
No fluff, no theory, no outdated sales techniques or paying for leads, just the exact steps to get you the real estate business you’ve always wanted and the life outside your business. You’ve always wanted to. Let’s make it happen. And dive into today’s episode. This episode is being released at the end of a year and inevitably it’s the time that we all kind of reflect on the year, look back on the year and ask ourselves, did we do what we thought we’d be able to do? And really, you’ve got really three answers to that question. You either did or you didn’t.
You either met your goals that you set, you sold the number of houses you set, you’ve met your financial goals, or you didn’t. Or there’s a third option where you hit your goals but you’re miserable over it. You feel like you’ve worked yourself way too much or you don’t have the systems in place. Okay? And so I’m gonna address those third, the third group here in a minute. But right now as we start through this episode, I want you to really just focus and think back over a year ago, you inevitably, I would imagine you set some kind of goal, even If, you didn’t make it a big business plan. Even if you never told anybody, you probably had a sense in your mind of, I think I’ll be able to do X in my real estate business.
I think I’ll be able to sell X amount of houses. I think I’ll be able to make X amount of money. And my question to you is, if you’re one of those people who didn’t hit that goal or didn’t sell that number of houses that you thought you would, what are you doing about it now? And that your answer to that question will truly determines what happens not only next year, but it really determines the trajectory of your real estate career. And I know that sounds like a big claim, but most of us, if we don’t hit our goals, we’re beating ourselves up. We’re telling ourselves we can’t do it. We’re telling ourselves there’s something wrong with us.
And we talk ourselves out of reaching our goal. And I wanna share with you a concept that I talk a lot about inside Agent Grad School with our students and they love it. And so I thought, why not share it with you on this final episode of the year in hopes that maybe it helps you too. And so whenever you hit a make a goal, and if you don’t hit it by the time you think you’re gonna hit it, right? So normally when we set goals, we’re told to, to set smart goals, you know, specific, measurable, whatever the A and R stands for. But the T, the T stands for time.
And so we’re always, we’re taught to make time-bound goals. I wanna sell 10 houses in a year. I wanna lose 20 pounds in six months. And we’re taught that that is the way to accomplish a goal. And I actually believe the opposite. I believe that you should set the goal, and if you wanna set a time period for the goal, go right ahead. But if you don’t reach the goal in the time period that you allowed yourself, I want you to remove the tea, remove the time based of that goal. So for example, let’s say you had a goal this year of selling 12 houses, 24 houses.
I don’t care what the number was, or maybe your goal was to hit six figures or $50,000. Again, I don’t care what the goal is, but you, but typically, as real estate agents, we kind of think of our goals as kind of January through December year. Cause that really defines like what we’re capable of or what we think we can do. That is the time base that typically we, we make goals around and we either hit the goal or we don’t. And my suggestion to you is if you don’t hit the goal, so if you don’t, you know, sell the 12 houses you thought you would in the year, do not give up on the goal, give up on the timing that you think you can do it.
And so whenever I have students who maybe are frustrated or they didn’t hit their goal or they didn’t do something when by the time they thought they were gonna do something, I always say, well, just keep going until you actually sell those 12 houses or sell those 24 houses, no matter how long doing that takes. Because if you, and then whatever you wanna do after that, feel free. If you wanna quit, go ahead. If you want to, you know, learn how to do it faster, which is what I would recommend that you do, do that. But do not quit on yourself or your goals or do not judge yourself and, and tell yourself what you’re capable of until you’ve actually hit the goal, no matter how long it takes.
And this is what happens when you, when you, when you think of your goals in that way, you don’t give up. You keep learning how to sell. In this case, in this example I’m saying 12 homes or 24 homes, whatever your goal is, If, you didn’t do it in the period of time that you thought you would. All that happened is you haven’t yet learned how in that time period. And rather than give up on the goal, beat yourself up, tell yourself all these negative things that inevitably make you feel bad about yourself and make you feel like you can’t do this. Instead just focus on hitting, selling those 12 houses, selling those 24 houses, and then look back and ask yourself, how long did that take?
Right? So in the case of 12 houses, let’s say it takes you two years to sell 12 houses, okay? What all that means is that you have not yet learned how to sell 12 houses in a year. You’ve learned how to sell 12 houses and now all you have to do is learn how to do it faster. That’s it. So for those of us who, you know, have really big goals, like for me, when I first started out in my real estate business, I only wanted to make like $80,000 a year. I thought if I could make $80,000 a year, what my parents made, at least what they’d said or talked about during the dinner table, that I would be rich.
And I thought, if I could do that before I turned 30, you know, cause I think I was 23 or four at the time, I was like, wow, like that would be such a huge accomplishment. And I, frankly, I think we all think it’s gonna be easier than it was. It took me four years to make $80,000 in my real estate business, four years. But here’s what I did. In that four years, I learned how to create $80,000 selling real estate. And once I was able to do that, I was able to make $80,000 faster. It didn’t take me four years.
The next time it probably took me, I wish I had the statistics, but it was probably, if I had to guess, it was probably four years to make my first 80,000. And then I think right after that, it was probably like a year and a half to make 80,000. And then all of a sudden it took me a year to make a hundred thousand. And then all of a sudden it took me a y, you know, six months to make 80,000. And then it took me, you know, a year to make 200,000. And I can still remember to this day it was a January. And at the time I was at Keller Williams. And as you guys know who are at Keller Williams, you can see people’s sales.
I had not even known what my sales were. I never looked at that stuff just cuz I never looked at my bank account. And I never looked at the scale, I never looked at my sales numbers. But we were in a meeting, it was the first meeting of the year, it was in January. And I can remember them saying, you know, our top seller for this month was Jennifer. And she made $80,000 that month. And first of all, I was shocked, but the second thought that I had was, I can remember when it took me four years to make my first 80,000. And now I know how I’ve learned how to make that money in a month. So I’m just so glad that I never gave up when I thought I was gonna be able to make $80,000 my first year in real estate.
Because what I eventually went on to do, because I was constantly chasing that number, rather than telling myself I’m never gonna do it, I kept chasing that number. And then once I got to that number, I then learned how to create that in my life and what to do. And then all I had to do was to learn how to do it faster. And I learned how to do it fast, faster, faster, faster. Until I got to $80,000 a month. This was without a team, this was without even an assistant at the time. And I promise you from somebody who took four years to do it the first time, Just, Move, The, T. So inevitably you’re probably looking at your year and one of two things happened.
You either met your goals and if you did, congratulations, keep doing what you’re doing. Just do more of it, do it faster. Get help, get delegation. Do what you can to have that same outcome faster next year. Don’t ask yourself whether you can do it, you’ve already done it. The question you should be asking yourself is, how do I do this more quickly? How do I do it in 11 months or eight months? That’s how you grow your income, okay? For those of you who didn’t meet your goal, don’t start telling yourself that you can’t do it, that you don’t know how, that you’re terrible at this, don’t do any of that.
Just move the tea, remove the tea if you have to. And whatever it is the goal that you set that you’re disappointed about, just keep pushing to that goal. So get to the 12 houses, get to the 24 houses, then, then calculate how long it took you, then do it faster. Okay? For me, this is the easiest way for me not to be disappointed in myself, not to be, not to talk myself out of something because I wasn’t able to do it in the time period that I thought I would. And it’s allowed me to move forward to my goals and just remind myself that all this means is I haven’t learned how to do it in that timeframe yet.
Okay? So keep going. If that’s you. Now for those of you who may have met your goals, but you’re exhausted by it, know that that that is unfortunately the first step. We tend to, most of us in real estate, we tend to focus on the money and we are told to do things that typically exhaust us. And so here’s what I want you to know. Don’t give up on yourself either, because you all you need to do at this point, you’ve learned how to make the, the money, you’ve learned how to bring in the clients. Now all you have to learn is how to create systems in your business, how to create automation in your business, and also how to delegate correctly and at the right time to the right person in your business.
And once you’re able to do that, you’re able to have that money that you want, that you know that you’re able to create. Now you have to learn the new skill of having both time and money. Okay? So whatever happened this year, whatever the outcome was this year, just know that next year is a whole new year and you get to, to work on the skill of having the business that you, that you’ve decided to have. And just because you don’t create it as fast as you think you, you would. And just because maybe you aren’t at the place yet where you’re, you want your business to be, doesn’t mean that it’s not possible for you.
All it means is you have to learn a new set of skills. So for me, you know, like I said, first I had to learn the skill of being able to make a certain amount of money per year. And then once I was able to do that, I was exhausted by it. Then I had to learn the skill of getting more time back and I had to learn how to find the right systems to put into place in my business. I had to learn how to do things that I’ve never known how to do, like have a website, have, you know, email marketing, all sorts of things. And once I was able to put that in place, I was able to free up my time and then I was able to grow my business even more, which then allowed me to scale even more with my systems.
And then finally have a delegate, have delegation, have an assistant who can help me. I see so often real estate agents who are exhausted, who have met their financial goals but aren’t meeting the life goals that they’re setting for themselves. They have nothing left for their family or for their friends or for the things that they love to do. They very quickly hop to hiring somebody to fix that problem. And I can tell you that the majority of real estate agents that I have met and that I have peaked behind the scenes with and that I have personally helped build their businesses, I can tell you that usually delegation is not the first place to go. Building a team is not the first place to go. Having buyer’s agents or sellers agents is not the first place to go, even though I know that’s what they tell us to do.
Systems automation and putting things in place in your business, yes, it takes time. But what that allows you to do is then when you have, when you have built that system, when you have built those things, it then allows you to delegate. And what it does is allow you not to have to like rely on somebody. What if they’re sick? What if they quit? What if, what if, what if, if you have the right delegation in place, you can hire pretty much anyone to sit in the seat and kind of push the buttons, okay? So the reason I’m talking through this is like whatever has happened this year is not the end of the story unless you say it is.
And this is not some like affirmation thing. This is not some like, you know, this is actually the honest to god truth. And my hope is that you’ll see that this, that this, whatever your results are, you can just move the tea. So let’s say you’ve made a hundred thousand dollars this year and that was your goal. Well, I want you to know that you could make 10 times that if you so choose, you could make that in a month if you so choose. Okay? So wherever you are, all it is that you’ve learned whatever your outcome and your results are is that that is what you have learned how to create.
Those are the results that you know how to create. And if you want a different outcome, if you want different results, you have to focus on creating new skills that help you reach those goals. And the only way to do that is to continue reaching for your goals. Hit the goal, don’t worry about the timeframe, keep hitting that goal, then do it faster so that you’re meeting the timeframe that you hoped. Okay? I think goal setting, the way that we’re taught to goal set is totally backwards to me, right? How the heck if you just became a real estate agent, how the heck do you know how many houses you can sell in a year?
And I can guarantee you everyone listening to this, including myself, the one talking on this, when I never thought that selling houses and being a successful realtor was going to take as long as it took me and as long as it takes most people that I come across, okay? There’s nothing wrong with you. Don’t doubt yourself. Don’t doubt what you’re capable of. Simply hit whatever goal you want no matter how long it takes. move the t then once you’ve learned the skill, you can add the tea back in. You can do it faster and faster and faster. So I hope this little note at the end of the year has, has made you feel a little better whatever your results are this year, and know that it’s not the end of the story.
That you can have whatever results that you want and you can blow your own mind next year no matter what happened this past year. You just have to learn how. So keep going, remove the tea and make what the life that you want to have, the life that you thought about when you quit your job and became a real estate agent. Make that happen. Learn how to create a business that allows you to have that. And that is what I’m here to help you to do. Have a great holiday season. This is the last PA podcast of the year. Thank you guys for listening all year long.
Thank you for showing up every single episode and I can’t wait to see you in the new year. We’ve got some really exciting things coming up. See you then. Thank you for listening to this episode of Confessions of a Top, Producing Real, Estate Agent. We purposely keep this podcast sponsor and commercial free so we can focus solely on providing real estate agents with the content that will help them grow their real estate business and have a life they love outside the business too. But we need your help to get this podcast in the hands of other real estate agents. So please, if you liked this episode, leave a review on iTunes or wherever you’re listening, and also tell your agent friends to listen in to.
Thank you so much for supporting this show, for being a listener and supporting other agents along your way to success. That’s what this is all about. See you next time on another episode of Confessions of a Top, Producing Real Estate Agent. And until then, come hang with me over at agent Grad school.com. I’ll see you there.