The Best Person To Hire In Your Real Estate Business To Help You Do All The Things: A Force Multiplier

Do you ever daydream about somebody helping you in your real estate business to do all those tasks that never seemed to get done or you don’t enjoy, or frankly, maybe you just don’t even have time for because you’re doing everything else. If, so this episode is for you. My guest today, Adam Hergenrother is the founder and CEO of a $1 billion organization. The Adam Hergenrother companies, he is a mega agent, has teams across the country, and wrote a book called The Founder and The Force Multiplier. But I hope we’ll teach you how to look at getting help in your business in a completely new way. I’ve read so many books about hiring staff and specifically in the real estate industry. And this book really changed the way that I see myself as a founder and as a leader and how to pick good people to support me in my business. And I hope our conversation will help you do the same. Listen in. 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 become one of the top 1% of agents in the US even opening my own brokerage full of agents helped me serve all the clients that were coming my way. I taught those agents the same strategies I use in date two became top producing agents. Now through this podcast and agentgradschool.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 Most of which I learned from looking outside the real estate industry, no fluff, no theory, no outdated sales techniques or paying for leads, just the exact steps to get you the real estate business you’ve always wanted.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. On today’s show, we are talking about how to get help in your real estate business with hiring what my guest calls A Force Multiplier, but probably what you’re thinking of is an assistant, but we’re not just talking about an assistant today. We’re talking about so much more than that. So my guest today is the founder and CEO of a $1 billion organization, Adam Hergenrother companies, through which he runs several companies, including the number one real estate franchise and his home state of Vermont of Keller Williams franchise. The founder of one of the top real estate teams in North America hosts a year-long full-immersion coaching program for a very exclusive group of leaders, hosts a weekly podcast named to the Inc 500, three years with two different companies. And it’s the five-time winner of the best place to work award. He’s also a husband, a father of three kids under 10 has done 21 triathlons in two and a half years, hiked Kilimanjaro, and flew a fighter jet. I mean, you really do it all. And so you might think, how does he have time to do all this? And he’s going to tell us how with his force multiplier. So thank you Adam, for being here, and are you tired? I’m enthused, right? Life is cool. Well thank you so much. And I’m glad to be here and sharing with your audience and, you know, we were all new at some point in our career. So I always love going back to that stage and, and providing advice. So I’m excited to be here with you and thank you for all that you’re doing. People don’t realize the amount of energy that goes into putting on podcasts. So I’m, you’re adding a lot of value to the world. So thanks. Thank you. All right. So let’s talk about specifically how real estate agents can get the help they need in their business. And so can you think back to when you were in that place and how did you get to the point where you went from there to then having this force multiplier? I want to talk a lot about how that happened. Yeah. You know, for me, I was inherently lazy and so I was inherently lazy in the aspect of if there was something that somebody else could do that I couldn’t do, then I couldn’t say I had paralysis to actually doing it, but it came to something that nobody else could do for me, like meditation or exercise or eating. Like then I was laser-focused and I worked harder than anybody else could. Right. And so in the beginning, when I, when I got into real estate in 2006, you know, first of all, I quit a job and started in there and everybody around me was like, what are you doing? The whole market’s changing? And you know, that was the Lehman brothers and all that stuff. And I said, well, hold on. Like, there’s still a lot of opportunities there. And so I got in there and the first 90 days, or so of me getting into real estate, I think I put like three homes on our contract. The first 30 days I was an agent by the way, which is kind of interesting. I didn’t even have an office space. I was in a 400 square foot apartment and I had bought eight grand to start the business. And I just went out there every day to work the 12 hour day. So it was, it was a lot of effort that went into it. And I remember walking into the first meeting that we had at our brokerage and people came up to like, well, what’d you do? What’d you do? Cause I was like the number one agent that month. Right. For what it was. And I’m like, did I do something wrong? I didn’t think I did it enough. And he’d be like, how do you do, how did you do three homes or three pendings? And the first 30 days of literally being licensed. And I said, well, what did you do? I just went out there like delivered cupcakes. And I was out there, I was doing all this stuff and I realized that not everybody worked the same way that you and I do. Right. So it was really interesting in the very beginning, I also quickly realized that there was a lot of stuff that I did not want to do. In fact, let me rephrase that. There’s a lot of stuff that I just sucked at. Right. So, I mean, that’s just a much better way of saying it. And I mean, and so I went out there and I made a, you know, we call them EAs or I just made general administrative hires, I think back in 2006, what we referred to it as, and I made like three or four hires in the first, probably year that I was an agent. I actually made a hire for an assistant back in November. This is 2006 teams didn’t exist. The right people weren’t really hiring EAs like they do now in real estate. Like it’s much more common now, but I knew I needed leverage. And so I went out there, I made all these different hires and I failed every time. Right. I didn’t make the right hire. I just hired somebody that I knew or somebody recommended somebody to me. And so I had a lot of trial and error to finally realizing that I think I landed on a couple that were pretty decent. And then I finally hired Holly several years later. And she was instantly, in the first time that I’ve met with her, you could see the difference in it. Now, I didn’t know where our relationship was going to go, but I could tell that this was a more talented person, right? Because remember when you’re building a business, the word talent means something different to all of us. We only know the highest level of talent based on the highest level of talent that we have ever personally led because a talented person to you may not be a talented person to me. Or a talented person To me may not be a talented person somebody else. Everyone’s playing at a different level. So talent means something different talent. Playing baseball at third grade is different than talent playing in the major leagues. So that was really important for me to understand what that word meant in order to get leverage in my business. And so we made that first hire. And then from there, people say, well, what was the thing that she did? The number one thing that I think people should look for when they’re making a hire, especially the first hire is the position you’re hiring for none of that, whatever you’re hiring for should ever come back onto your plate. There’s way too much. And too many people make a hire. And then they feel guilty about giving them their job that they actually just hired them for. Or they allow people to give pieces of their job back because they’re not doing it well enough. And so there’s two main components I used to use to have in my contract until our lawyers told me to take it out. And it literally said in there that it said, if you ever give a piece of your job back to Adam, consider it your resignation letter. I mean, that’s how focused we got on that because it was like, I never, when I made a hire, you’re smarter than me for the hire that I’ve just made, right? So if I hire somebody for marketing, they better be better than me in marketing. So don’t come to me with parts of your job that you need to be doing better and that they do over and over again. That’s a sign that, hold on, let me pause and make sure that I have the right person in this position. Here’s what I love about what you’re saying. But also this book that you wrote with your force multiplier called the founder and the force multiplier is you also take ownership for having to be the leader. Like what you just said means that you have to be the one to give somebody full responsibility in their job. And then you have, then that course multiplier that EA essentially can support you in the way that you need. So how do you create that dynamic? Like at this point you might be that leader who can do that, but think back to the beginning, how did you get to that point where you were able to be that leader so that you could have a force multiplier, like the way that you’re describing? Yeah. So I think the question is, is how do you give up pieces of your jobs? So somebody else can do it. It’s a mental hurdle for most people. I think people feel a couple of different things. There’s the whole fraud syndrome that I went through for about two years, which I started at hiring so many good people in my world that I was like, actually like creating meetings to create a meeting so I could feel meaningful. Right? Like I literally started doing that or I would go into meetings and there’s something up just cause I was the owner and like to make myself so I could walk out of there and be like, see, they need me. And then I just realize that they don’t need me. And so I think a lot of us mentally have to make that shift of I’m making a hire there’s time and a place for you to insert your leadership capital. There’s also a time and a place for you to allow people to build within the organization themselves. So if you’re having a force multiplier, like our relationship with Holly, and even now as our chief of staff, and then we have an EA, is that everyone owns their roles, but we’re all working in the same piece of the project. I mean, we’re all working on the same project. We’re just doing different pieces of it. For example, we use in the book, we talk about the zero to 10 principle, right? For as like this may resonate with a lot of agents, especially in the beginning, I’m good at taking things from like a zero to a one. But I suck from taking it from a two to eight or two to a nine. So then within that two to nine, you had your force multiplier, take the project to two to a nine and then give it back to you. And then you take it from a nine to a 10. So for instance, like if you’re doing a presentation, right, you’re decided you’re gonna go give a presentation to your brokerage or your local community about a first-time homebuyer. You sit down and you take the idea and you sit down with your force multiplier and say, here’s my idea. I’m going to go build a first-time homebuyer process out there and you give them some ideas. They create it for you and give it back, you review it. And then you go out and present it from nine to a 10, right? The force multiplier does not most likely want to present it, but they want to be the backend person. So essentially the force multiplier and you as the founder or the leader, right, are working on the same project. You’re just giving off pieces of the project to the person. So they have full ownership of it where they’re better at it than you are in. A lot of people struggle there because they don’t actually want to give up that piece because they feel like only I can do it or, you know, I can do it better. And if that’s true and you can do it better than go hire somebody, that’s doing it better than you. And so when people talk a lot about you reading books, now it’s like Claire, somebody who’s smarter. New people go, yes, that’s right. I find very rarely people don’t do that. They hire people that actually make themselves feel better instead of hiring people to make the organization feel better. And I think that’s where people get caught. And for me, it was early on. I go, I literally have fired myself from every position I’ve ever held in the organization. And I did that and it’s not because I can’t operate. I’m just not a good operator. I’m really good at one or two things. And that’s it, I’m very clear. So therefore, if I wanted to build a big organization, I needed people around me that could own their roles in their positions. So I think first is as if you’re gonna make your first hire and you want to have that strategic relationship, you get very clear on what it looks like, that you’re going to be giving up. And then you’re very clear in the job description of what this looks like, and they need to own that. And how do real estate agents who are at that moment, I see it so often, they’re like, what is the fear around hiring, committing to hire? Like how does one get over it? I see so many agents that are like finally at some big volume and they’re just running ragged and their life sucks. And it’s like, at that point you need what most people would say is an assistant. But the way that you define it is a force multiplier. So how do we get to that point where you can actually just bite the bullet and do it? Well, I think there’s two things that hold people back. Number one is they don’t want to make the hire because they don’t like doing this. Therefore, why would somebody else like doing it? And I always remind them that it is, this is the thing to hear. And so there’s a lot of people that actually like cleaning up your messes, right? Like I create a lot of messes, right. I shake a lot of trees and there’s lot of people to clean it up. There’s actually people that get so much energy out of cleaning that up and then handing it over to you. And number two and probably a little bit more common is that the agent themselves has not invested properly with their cash flow. And therefore they don’t actually have the funds to go actually make the hire. The second point is about money, right? Either they’re spending all of their money, they haven’t saved enough money or they’re looking at and going, I have to make a $40,000 higher or 50,000 or higher. I don’t have 50 grand in the bank. Well, let me just remind people that I had like eight grand and I was making hires. That was borrowed. Right? And so what you have to look at is it’s not a $50,000 higher because using that as a number, regardless of the number you’re using, but you go out there and you say, okay, well that’s $4,500 a month. Okay. Do I have 10 grand in the bank to see if this person’s going to provide a significant impact on my business over the next two months? Because the reality is you really only need three months reserves for that higher allocation. Now you should have six months in your business, but three months reserves that higher allocation because it was in 90 days. If you’re not seeing a gaping hole, meaning if this person left my organization, there’d be a gaping hole in there. If you’re not seeing that, then it’s most likely you have to get out of business with the person, find somebody else. And you’re going to fail a lot when you’re looking to hire. Not because the human being is wrong because you weren’t clear, your expectations weren’t right. Or you’re hiring somebody for the wrong position. Those are the three things. So number one is you have to understand that somebody loves the job you’re hiring for first and foremost, understand that, check that box off in your head mentally. Number two, if you’re not investing into your business and you’re spending all of your money, you’re not going to have resources leftover. And if you do, you’re going to see people as an expense instead of an investment in people will give you the greatest return. By far more than any other thing, that’s out there. If you invest it to the right person, if you invest in the wrong person, it becomes a disaster. That’s why you have to also learn, you know, Gary Keller, he’s very famous for drawing out his triangle, whether a millionaire, real estate book or a public class he’s ever taught, he’s got listings leads and leverage on the triangle. Well, it’s funny because when people get in there, I said, well, what are people really good at? They’re really good at leads. And they’re really good at listings, right? They can do their buyer presentation. They can do the listing presentation. They can nail their scripts. And then when it comes to hiring, they suck because I always go, well, how much time do you spend on these first two every day? How much time do you spend investing into what it looks like to actually add leverage in your life? Well, very rarely do people do that. In fact, even when they want to go make a hire for an EA or a force multiplier, what they do is they throw it out there where they ask the first person that they ended up making a hire out of the one or two people that they met instead of actually taking through a process. So then you throwing it by chance that you actually may make a higher, instead of actually there’s a lengthy process about hiring somebody. There’s a bunch of there’s so many books or techniques or classes you can take to learn about leverage. Leverage means that I’m adding people as employees in my organization. And what does that look like? Right. So you can learn a lot about that. So if you want to go down the leverage side, start reading books about it, start learning more about it. And as you do, it’ll get just as comfortable as it is for the listings in the lead side. Yeah. So can you tell people who are listening and thinking about leverage? I know that there’s people probably ask you the question. Well, what’s so great about leverage. What is leverage going to give me that I don’t have now? It feels like more headache, more expenses. Can you talk to those people who are maybe pushing back about this idea of leverage? Yeah. I think maybe leverage isn’t right. For some of those people. I think the question comes down to is what do you want out of your business, right? What do you want out of this? If you are a individual who is like, I need to control everything and I’m not going to work on myself to let go of that part, then somebody may not want to work next to you. You may not need that. Right? But in most cases, people are using that as an excuse because they don’t understand what it means. And that’s kind of the point it’s they throw out these softballs that kind of prevents people from digging in further about why they actually don’t want to make the hire. But if you sit down with people and you go beyond that surface shield that they put up is just a lot of fear around there. And it’s fear on money. Or if you’re not knowing about that, I have to change as a leader, going to, how am I going to keep this person? This is a whole other thing, but I’ll tell you the really wonderful things. If you start to build a business in real estate and you want to start even an individual with one EA and you want freedom in your life. Well, here’s the thing I tell people that the thing is, when you add leverage, it doesn’t mean you can’t insert yourself in your business wherever you want. But what it does is it gives you options. And so for me, I would much rather have options, than not have options. If it’s just, you, you have no other option. The only other option would be to stop doing business. If you add leverage, you have options that are layered in there. Should you want to take advantage of them? And so that’s what leverage will start providing you. If then it can take its own course of action, meaning that you hire one person that you go, wow, this leverage thing is actually really cool. I used to be afraid of it now. It’s pretty amazing. That’s what typically happened. Everyone that’s gone through, this is gonna be like, I mean, I was so afraid to do this, right? I actually remember one of the first people that came over to one of my market centers that I own. He was a really good friend of mine. This was 2012. Maybe he came over from a buyer’s agent, started team. And I said, do the first thing you have to do is go higher and yay. And he’s like, I can’t do it on any money as a billboard, I go, you have to do it. And he did it. And he started crying. He’s like, I don’t know what to do with this person. Now he runs one of the largest teams out there. And he’s like, it all started with that first hire to give me leverage, to understand the impact that I could make in my employees, the opportunity that I could actually share with them. So you don’t have to shoulder all the pressure onto you, right? It starts to create this dynamic relationship. You have another reason to show up for work, right? There’s somebody else there, somebody else is you’re supporting each other. So there’s a lot of different benefits that you get from leverage outside of just time. And I think those are the things that people need to concentrate on is what do I really want? Do I want options? Which most of us do if we do, what do I need to learn so that I can put these options in my life and add leverage in here. And here’s the thing you can always go back to you always. Yeah. And so Not a merit, like lifetime thing. It’s a three-month commitment to give yourself and this person enough room to see if it’s a good fit. So I know that one question that comes up a lot when they first hire somebody, it’s like, what do I literally give them to do? How do I know which things to give this person that I hire? How do you answer that Two ways? One number one is just go to the person that, you know, the most has a couple admin and get a job description from them, right? That’s something very similar. You could easily do. The second option would be that you can literally write out all the things that you do not like to do in a real estate transaction. I mean, that’s literally the easiest way to kind of start from there. And if you’re really stuck, I’m gonna throw one other thing out there. You found somebody you really want to hire. I’ve asked people to go write their own job description before and then have me approve it. So it’s like, they literally are writing everything else they’re going to do for your business. And then you go, huh? That looks pretty amazing. If this person does all of this, I would certainly hire. Yeah, exactly. And so you can either, there’s three different ways to do that. One. You can just copy somebody else and get their job description. There’s plenty of them floating around the internet, right. Or people that are local. Number two is just write down all the things you just don’t like to do. And it wouldn’t be that difficult. The problem is people don’t stop to actually think about this. They just instead go, oh, that’s going to be a lot of work. And it’s true. When you make a hire, your job gets longer for a period of time. However, you need to understand that that period of time is worth the investment. So you can have freedom. And the other side of that. Yeah. And so many real estate agents, I know, become real estate agents because they want freedom, but then they create a life. I had no freedom. And so I think like remembering that you have freedom for a time period, but if you’re successful, then you don’t have that freedom. So that leverage also creates that freedom, I think ultimately as your business grows. Okay. So how do you know when you’re interviewing whether or not you have the right person? How do you know when to say you’re hired? Yeah. I think I’ll make a comment about that last one too. And I think some people, that’s why you’re seeing such this blurring of the lines between teams and brokerages right now, because there’s a lot of people who actually don’t want to go out and learn all this stuff and actually would rather go join a team that already has the leverage that’s there, which is kind of interesting to see this whole shift that’s happening in our industry right now. But to answer the first question you asked about how do you know, well, there’s a couple signs, but there’s also a process. So we use a very in-depth hiring process to increase the probability. So I’m taking the guesswork out of it. And that’s called a career visioning process that we use, but there’s many different hiring methods that you can do. But number one, one of the telltale signs that you’re meeting with somebody is that you’re scared to hire them. And that’s a really good hire because you’re now nervous. We’ve made the best hires I’ve walked out of there. And like either how they are. I look at each other and like, if we hired this person, I know what we’re going to do. Or like, I don’t know what I’m gonna do. Like what, what am I going to bring in the organization anymore? Right. Because you feel threatened a little bit. So if you’re being honest with yourself, you’re feeling threatened because this person is so good. And so that’s a really good telltale sign of that. One thing to watch out for right, is to convincing yourself that this person is right and that you can change them. If somebody shows you who they are, believe them. So the reality is part of through this, you understand like, oh no, they’re going to be great. Like I know they don’t do that. Well, they don’t really do this well, but you know, we’re getting them in here and we’re going to change. Right? And the second component is I would challenge everyone. Who’s going to make their first hire to interview at least 30 people. Let me explain why, if you actually go out and interview, at least with the first hire, if you go and interview 30 people over the course of 45 days, there’s a couple of things that’ll happen. Number one is 25 of them will look the same two or three of them will look different. One or two of them will stand out from the crowd. And so, but the thing is you need the data pool. If you will, the 30 candidates to see who’s going to really stand out. I just have people do this. And even after 10 interviews, people go back and go, oh my God. I’m like, I see exactly what you’re talking about. The first eight or nine were like, they’re like, should I hire them? Should I not? I don’t know that they kind of good. They’re kind of this. And then one person goes like, boom. And you’re like clear difference in the person. So just make sure you don’t settle for hiring one or two or three people unless you get really good at hiring. You’ve made a lot of hires. The other thing is like, it depends on where you’re getting the candidate from. Right? A lot of us are getting them from online sources or LinkedIn or ads that we have posted. You know, obviously if Jeff Bezos came to you and said, Hey, you should go hire this EA. Maybe you don’t need to hire any 30 other people. But the reality is most of us don’t have that connection. But Jeff, so what I would recommend doing is build your own pool and interview people for 15 to 30 minutes. There’s a whole set of interview questions. And we’d happy to, if you email us, we’re happy to give them out to you, right? There’s just the interview questions you sit down and you’re just going to notice patterns, just like you do anything else, whatever you like. If you like a lot of different brands of peanut butter, you know, when they’re on sale, when they’re not, because you have depth of knowledge, you need depth of knowledge with understanding, leverage. If you want to hire an interview, enough people, you start to understand the differences between people and people stand out. So you know, whether or not somebody has a high level of talent for your organization, what you’re looking for. And that’s what starts to be very clear. Awesome. And if you want, we can talk about this offline, but if I could email you for those questions, I could put them in as like a download or a resource for this podcast. So you guys will have that. All right. So what I can hear though, is agents for whatever reason, wait way too long to hire people. And they’re like, I don’t have time. How am I going to find time to find the right person to do the 30? Can you talk about when the right time is to hire? Yeah. Before you need it? Yeah. It’s like when it’s just, it’s just so clear. That’s why having a business plan is so important because if you know that you’re gonna making a hire, you look at your financials differently. You look at starting to who could I hire us? They’re looking at people differently. I think there’s different stages that agents can go through. Number one stages. Maybe you walk into Verizon and you look around, you say, wondering who in here is looking to buy or sell a house. Great. That’s awesome. Looking to sell a house at some stage. When you start to realize maybe I could make a hire or an added leverage, you walk into rise and you say, I wonder who in here. I could hire as an agent or an admin. You start looking around for talent everywhere. Instead of looking around for clients. Now you may be doing both, but you’re really looking for, I wonder who in here I can, I can hire. Then at some stage, you then walk into Verizon. You say, how do I buy everything? Which is Warren Buffett’s strategy, right? Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway is just a combination of a whole bunch of really well-run companies. And so for agents of how do you know when to hire that? You’re not doing it. You don’t have time. Well, first of all, you only have time. Everyone has 24 hours in a day. So time is not the cheat for somebody. You don’t have more time than I do. What you have to decide on is how I’m going to use my time. And what that comes down to is a very simple phrase, which is learning to say yes to one or two things and no to everything else. And I think if people can understand that, it’s like, when you’re going to hire somebody, you’re not to say no to other things. So you can say yes to things that are going to be more aligned with your business plan. So the first step is, look at your organization, right? Even for the next quarter saying, okay, what do I want? 20, 22 to look like, really want it to look like? And if it evolves around some sort of hire, go build a bench, right? Go build a bench of people, go interact with people, go start interviewing people. You’re always going to need it. And who knows, maybe you don’t end up making a hire, but they refer people to you, right? You don’t know when you’re going to need people. Because in my experience, what people do is one day they could ask somebody today and say, didn’t you make a hiring. Now I’d never need to hire. Then tomorrow they wake up and go, I need to hire. It’s like this, how fast it goes. And so then, then you’re starting from scratch. Instead of we’re very purposeful in making sure that we’re bench building, no matter what we’re doing, I see a lot of agents get stuck in the TC, like, oh, my broker has a TC. That’s all I need. Can you talk about why that’s not enough? If you really want to grow a real estate business? Yeah. For one you don’t control their time. You don’t control what they going to focus on. Right. And I don’t mean controlling in a way that’s negative. Just controlling how you use that operational person. TC is great. And it’s a great step to leverage it. That’s going to be your first opportunity, right? And that’s why brokerages and market centers can have that option for you. Wonderful. But you should start to feel that if you want to grow your business beyond you, right. Understand if you’re just a single agent, you don’t have a business. It’s just a sole proprietorship. A business by definition means you have multiple people that you’re paying to support and runs the organization. So you don’t actually have a technical business unless you actually have employees that are there. Now, if you want to use that language, that’s fine. But if you want to get into the business, which is what we’re referring to there and making the hire, we need to actually make sure that you are adding people to organization. And it’s not enough just to have a TC, because what about LM? What about all the marketing? What, and this is the other thing I see a lot of people do. And they’re like, I’m going to go hire an agent first. And I go, great. That’s wonderful because how are you as an admin? Right? Cause that’s literally what you just did is you’ve now become the admin. You’ve become the underwriter. You become the coach, you become training. And now you’re going to dilute your own focus. And most businesses actually go backwards when they make a hire like that, because there is a dilution of focus of your time. Whereas if you actually go out and make the right hire beyond just having a TC, that person’s going to give you much more depth for you to work on the business, which then started the hiring, your business plans, your vision, how you want to interact with your clients, your brand, all that stuff is where you can really shine. And then you keep adding to the organization that then grows itself. Yeah. And so you call this person the force multiplier. Can you define with any, wrote a book with your force multiplier, Haley, who’s been with you for how long, 10 years now. So define what a force multiplier is and how it’s different than an assistant or an EA or a front desk person. Yeah. A Force Multiplier is that strategic partner who helps a leader build and grow a wildly successful business. If the leaders right-hand person, they are in the meetings with you, they are, it’s not the devil wears Prada, EA that you see in those movies, right? That’s more of a personal assistant, which is fine, right. But the strategic partner or somebody who’s at the line as a leadership position. Right. And for in, it’s really interesting to watch the whole shift in our book, we started with a blog, went to a book and now it’s become a movement of this force multiplier, which is because people want to be recognized in that word, not support world that, Hey, I love being an EA. I love being a chief of staff and I want to be here for a long period of time, but I want to see the table. And that’s what I think that book is really designed to do is say, these people should have a seat at the table. They’re actually a right-hand person and they are instrumental to your growth because when you make that hire, they’re focused on the organization and you making sure you’re staying focused, that you’re building it. They’re your right-hand person. That’s there. And every time we’ve gotten people to make a really good hire as a strategic partner, they always go, I don’t know how I operate my life without them. That’s typically what we hear. And it’s because you go, wow, they take so much off my plate. You don’t realize how much bandwidth is going to so many or menial things that don’t actually, shouldn’t be your focus. You’re not good at everything. And so when you hire a station partner, they’re taking parts of the business way. So you can go focus double down on what you actually do. I mean, think about how would Michael Phelps be as a swimmer. If every day he woke up and said, I’m gonna play baseball, I’m gonna play tennis. I’m going to go into piano and I’m gonna add some swimming in at the end, right? Like, No, I mean, the one that he, I mean, every day he will, the reason why he became an amazing swimmer was because every day he just focused on one thing. Right. And that’s all, he focused on. Everything was built around that. Good, bad indifferent amounts judging that. It’s just, that’s what it is. So when you’re building a business, how do you get focused on what you really enjoy and what you’re really good at? And when you can do that and layer everything else off, that’s when your organization will have its own legs and start to move beyond you. And that becomes really, really a powerful place to operate from. Yeah. I can’t recommend your book, the founder and the force multiplier enough. I have read so many of these types of books about leading and hiring. And for the first time, this book, what I love about it is it comes from the perspective of both you, the founder and your force multiplier. And my big takeaway was like, number one, I need to be a better leader because for so long, I looked at my EA like my assistant giving them tasks to do. And so my big takeaway was like, I need to develop myself as a leader as defined in this book, the founder. And also, I guess what, I don’t know what the right word is, like elevate my EA to be the force multiplier in my business. So I just want to thank you. I had my EA or I guess my force multiplier read this book also. And she’s like, I learned so much. And so we are now going to like tear it apart and within our own business and say, okay, here are the things that I need to do to grow our business. Here’s things you need to do and approve to grow our business. But I just want to say, thank you. It’s a really unique perspective. And whether you’re in real estate or not, it’s a really great way to look at that really crucial person that can help you really multiply what you’re capable of in life. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. The whole purpose of the book was both the founder leader, right. Manager or whatever position you are in that strategic partner, that first multiplier can sit down and read it together. So it brings everybody on the same page. And so we kind of talk about certain common language. So you can use that language to actually go build a business that becomes if you will a Bible for how you build that relationship and strengthen it. And I love Haley. She’s like, tell it how it is. Like I love it. Yeah. She’s, she’s awesome. Yeah. She’s, she’s quite the, yeah, I know. And we always talk about in the book, how she just kind of pisses me off every day because you know, the thing is, is leaders don’t want to be challenged with their own thinking and they want to think they’re right. And they want everyone to support it when they have an idea. Well, the reality is that’s a terrible way to run a business. You should actually have people always challenging you, whether they believe with you or not. And from a very neutral standpoint. So you can actually have a debate, not an argument. Argument is the, your agree to your side, a debate means you’re able to take both sides. And that’s how I think partnerships are formed is not debate model versus a more of like an argumentative model, which is where people want to avoid. Yeah. So any last parting words for those real estate agents who are saying like, I’m Haggard, I’m too busy. I need help. I don’t know how to make this happen. Any last words of advice? I think you just gotta be very clear on what you want out of real estate. You know, you mentioned earlier that people get into real estate for freedom and the freedom causes most people to fail. And so the advice that I would give you is to put more discipline in your life because discipline equals freedom. And the reason why equals freedom is because if you’re disciplined for a period of time, you actually have the freedom to enjoy the reasons why you disciplined. Most people in real estate are half in half out, all day long, meaning that they’re, they’ve got a foot in here, they had a foot out there. And that’s why they’re running ragged all the time. Whereas if you just became fully engaged, when you’re at work in strategically disengaged, when you’re not at work, you’re actually able to enjoy the work-life integration, which is just called living. There is no work-life balance. It’s living. It’s like, I love what I do. I mean, when’s the last time, by the way, speaking of time, this is just a side note, but it was the last time somebody went to Tom Brady and said, dude, you’ve played too many Sundays. Take the next Sunday off. Right? No, they just assume they love what they do so they can work more. Well, a lot of us love to work too. We love to work together in our partnerships. So if that’s you and you love what you’re doing and you love building these things, you know, set your own expectations, don’t ingest other people’s answers because it’s safe or because it’s easier and go out and build what you want to build. And however, that looks, that locks and just be really, really happy with what you’re building. Amazing. Well, speaking of time, I know you have like 3000 other things to do so thank you for spending this time with us, please. Everyone read this book, the founder and the force multiplier. I listened to it and I read it. I loved every minute of it. So thank you so much for helping all of us be better founders and find our force multipliers. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. For more information about Adam, his amazing book, the founder and the force multiplier, or any of the links mentioned in this episode, go to AgentGradSchool.com/forcemultiplier, that’s AgentGradSchool.com/forecemultiplier. Thank you for listening to this episode of Confessions of a Top Producing Real Estate Agent. We purposely keep those podcasts 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 how about like, they love out five but 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 the 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 AgentGradSchool.com. I’ll see you there.