Spend Time Or Spend Money, But You’re Always Spending One In Your Real Estate Business

On today’s episode of Confessions of a Top Producing Real Estate Agent, whether you know it or not, you are always spending either time or money in your real estate business. You are always without exception, even if you don’t know you’re making the choice, you are always spending one or the other. So how do you know when you’re spending time when you’re spending money and when is the quote-unquote right time to spend time and the right time to spend money. And even when it’s time to switch from one to the other, find out on today’s episode, 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 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 used and they too became top producing agents. Now through this podcast and 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 Most of which I learned from looking outside the real estate industry, no fluff, no theory, no outdated sales techniques or paying for leads, just the exact steps to get you to real estate business you’ve always wanted.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 episode. I want to share a concept that I talk a lot about with our students inside Agent Grad School. I think at least once every live coaching call that I do. I asked a student this question, are you deciding to spend time, or are you deciding to spend money? Because it’s so crucial as you start growing and building your real estate business. And as you start using certain tools or citing to delegate or making the decision to learn and invest your own time in getting a certain aspect of your business up and running, it’s something that you like, it’s a conscious choice that you should be making in your business. So the point of this episode is A, to help you recognize that this is a choice that you are making in your business, whether you know it or not, and B, bring it to the surface a little bit so that you are making a conscious choice and knowing what to expect. So here’s what we’re going to go through on today’s episode. First, I’m going to talk about what exactly do I mean by this home this whole Time or Money trade-off in your real estate business. And, and how is it that I know that you’re always spending one or the other, I’m gonna talk about that. And then I’m going to talk about why it’s a choice that you are making between the two, even if it doesn’t feel like a choice. Sometimes we’re going to dive into that because I think that will be something maybe controversial that a lot of the new agents who said, well, I don’t have, I don’t have time. I don’t have money to spend. And I’ll say, well, then you’re choosing time. So we’re going to dive into that. And then how to know, when is the right time to spend time, or when is the right time to spend money. And that is all based on your personal situation, your personal goals, your budget. And there really is a right time to spend one or the other, and when to choose each and what to expect based on your choice, and then last but not least mistakes to avoid that can actually slow down the growth of your real estate business along the way, because you’re not consciously choosing or you, aren’t making a crucial flip when you need to make it from time to money. And so we’re going to dive into all this today, so let’s get started. Okay. So I want to give you a concrete example of spending time or money. So I can really illustrate this concept for you and really help you understand that this is a choice that you’re always making, even if you don’t think you’re making it. So I’ll give you two examples. One is, and I think that the easiest examples really are when you’re a new agent, because that’s really, that’s really when, and I know it doesn’t seem, oftentimes seem like a luxury, but it is in the beginning. You do have more time. Like when you’re a successful real estate agent, you don’t have time. You have a lot of money, but a lot of time you don’t have time. And so I, I, it’s one thing that like I reminisce about after becoming successful and becoming so busy with my real estate business, there’s this little tiny piece of me. That’s on the other side of the struggle. That is like, gosh, it was so nice to have so much extra time. I wish I wasn’t. So an angst about it at the time, because it was really like lovely in hindsight, not being so busy. So, you know, for those new real estate agents who are like, I don’t have any money and I am all sorts of time, there will be a day when you are successful. And you will remember having all this free time. And if you don’t make this free time that you have now, so I don’t know what the right word is, anxiety-producing. It really can be a luxury. So when you’re first starting your real estate business, there’s one major thing that you need and that’s clients. And I want you all to believe and empower yourself with the thought and the idea that when you’re a brand new real estate agent, you are choosing whether or not you get clients more quickly or less quickly by the fact of you choosing whether you spend time or money, getting your clients. And this is why so many real estate agents decide to spend money, to get clients essentially buying leads. When you decide to buy leads, you are deciding to spend time, excuse me, spend money to speed up the time it takes to get a lead and to get clients. Now, some of you might be saying, well, I don’t, I’m a new agent. I don’t have money. That’s a whole different podcast episode that we need to do about why are we putting ourselves in a position to quit our jobs without any money and start a new business. So that’s not what we’re going to go into today, but just know that if by default, if you are not choosing to spend money on something like paying for leads or paying somebody to help you understand and learn how to create clients, then what you are investing is your time. And it will take longer. If you invest your time versus investing your money in getting clients. If you’ve done, if you’ve never had a real estate business, and you’ve never learned how to get a client or, or if you’re never, if you’ve never been in a sales role of any sort, you have to invest your time. If you don’t have the money, you have to invest your time into learning that skill. And obviously, that is going to take longer than investing money where either you’re buying leads or giving someone a referral fee, because they give you a, you know, another agent gives you a lead or paying somebody, spending your, your money, investing your money to learn how to create clients. And so if you are unwilling to spend money to speed up the process of getting clients, then you are investing time into learning how to get clients and why this is so crucial is because, and this is just one example. This is one tiny piece, or for many people, a huge piece of being a real estate agent, how to get clients. And so often I see real estate agents who are unwilling or unable. Well, I should say unwilling, right? They’re unwilling to invest time or money. And so this is where I start to go into a conversation with our students about them setting realistic expectations and what “realistic” means. Like we all can define what that means, but I think the bottom line is, if you are unwilling to spend time or money as a new real estate agent, how do you expect to grow a business? You either have to invest money and have somebody else do things for you so that you end up with the results that you want, or you have to invest money in somebody showing you how to get the results that you want, or you need to invest your time, learning the skill and skills to get what you want, the results that you want. So let me give you another perfect example. And this is where it often comes up in our coaching calls that I have with our students. One of the things that we do inside agent grad school is I believe that your online presence is so crucially important to building your brand and answering that question. Why should somebody choose you? And I have never found a real estate website that does this in a lead-producing way. And so I’ve created website templates and I give them to our students for free. And they are created to specifically bring in leads and answer that question. Why should somebody choose you? And so inevitably, you know, creating a website is something that is very hard, even though I give a step-by-step template, I give all sorts of tutorials walking you through how to, you know, click here, do this, do that, right. And this is where a lot of our students get caught up. And then I asked them, well, what have you decided to spend? Are you spending your time? You physically being the one, investing your time to get your website up and running, or do you want to invest your money and speed up that process and have somebody who’s done websites before help you get it done more quickly? And there’s no right or wrong answer to that question. It’s not a leading question. There’s no, there’s no one right. Answer for every student. And I’ll say the same thing to you. And when you think about anything that you’re doing in your business, whether that’s doing YouTube videos, doing social media, any of your marketing that you’re doing, you really have to ask yourself, am I going to devote the time to learn this skill and get the results that I want out of this action? Or am I going to invest money to have help either being shown how to get results faster or delegate it entirely so that I can get the output that I want essentially, a finished YouTube video or whatever it is, a finished website. Do I want to spend money delegating that so that somebody who is better at it has done it longer is quicker at it can do it for me. So I don’t have to spend time learning the skill. Okay. So I hope those are just a few. I hope that this concept of spending time or money and knowing that you are doing it, no matter if you’re a new agent, if you’re an experienced agent, we’re actually going to talk in a few minutes here about when you, if you have decided to invest time, which many new agents do because of the budget, which I totally understand it’s exactly what I did, but there is a crucial moment when you do need to, when you start not having time, you’ll have to invest your money to continue growth. So we’re going to talk about that in here in a second, but what I want to make clear at this point is based on your decision to spend time or money. And again, don’t go into a thought process where you’re saying, well, like kind of like I, you know, I don’t have money. And so therefore I have to spend time know that that is a choice that somehow you’ve decided to make. However, you got there, there was choices that you made along the way, and that is the choice that you are in. And so whether your decision is to spend time or spend money, I want to have realistic expectations on what the outcome would be based on which decision you’re making, or maybe which one you’re quote, unquote, forced to make at this juncture so that you don’t compare yourself. Who’s made a different decision and tell yourself that you’re not something enough. Okay. So often I see real estate agents who, you know, come in and spend a lot of money buying leads. And then they, you know, the first year in their rookie of the year and they’ve sold 30 houses. And I don’t know of any agent who their first year out of the gate who had not inherited some kind of like, you know, it wasn’t the daughter, or like wasn’t a family member of somebody who was successful in real estate, who just out of the gate, quit. Their job became brand new real estate agent with never having anything to do with real estate in their, in their past, never bought a lead, never spent any money and purely spent their time and then became rookie of the year selling, you know, 30 houses. Now I don’t want to take that away from the person who’s decided to buy leads or inherited any kind of success or, you know, within a family who was in real estate. Like I’m not, I don’t want to take anything away from those people. Those are valid, hardworking ways to accomplish that goal. But I, what I don’t want anybody to do is sit here and say, well, I’m not good enough, or I don’t, this isn’t gonna work for me, or somehow put yourself down because of other people’s choices, decisions to go a different path. And so don’t compare yourself if you haven’t, if you don’t, if you’re not, if you’re deciding or you are in the time choice, I want you to know that as a result of choosing time, investing time will usually slow results down. I often think of the tortoise and the hair when I think about spending time or money. And the thing about spending time is if you truly invest your time and learn how to do things, which is typically my approach, like I always say, I’m a turtle. I need to learn how to do something so that later I can delegate it and spend money to free up my time. Right. And I don’t, and I don’t compare myself to somebody who totally skipped over the learning phase and has invested money to get somewhere way faster than I am. Right. Because what’s valuable to me is investing my time, going slower, learning the skills, because then nothing can ever take that away from me. And yes, it takes me a little bit longer to get where I want to go. And for those of you who are choosing time again, I want you to see this as an opportunity to sharpen your skills, learn a new skill and become really good at something, right? The only reason that I’m able to teach you here on this podcast and teach my students every single week and agent grad school to like a T, like, don’t say it this way, say it this way and see them get results from just those tiny little shifts is because I invested the time to grow a skill. And so I got really good at all of the skills it takes to be a successful real estate agent because I did not have the money to invest. Okay. So what that means is if you’re deciding to choose, to spend your time, I want you to embrace. The fact, I guess, is the right way to say it embrace the fact that you’re learning a skill you’re improving yourself and that it will take longer to get where you want to go. And that has to be okay, because that is the choice you’re making. I’m choosing to spend time. And therefore I can’t expect my results. I can’t expect to do something new for the very first time and have a huge result. And that means that doesn’t mean anything about you. Right. I know when I quit my job and became a real estate agent, I truly legitimately I see this all the time. I truly legitimately thought that I would just like, knock it out of the park. The first, the first year, the first time, the first client with no background, no knowledge, never having been in sales. Right. Like, and I just think that my expectations were off. Right. And because at the time I could not spend any money investing in education or delegation. Right. The only thing I had was time, I didn’t even have that because I was waitressing most of the time, most of the night. Right. So I didn’t even feel like I had time either, but between the two options, I guess certainly didn’t have. So the only thing I had to invest in my real estate business was my time and that has paid off. So Hampson handsomely because of what the time invested did for me, which was, teach me, teach me how to be good at this thing versus spending money, which would have gotten me maybe here, or most likely some were very different, but it would have gotten me to the results that I wanted faster. Okay. So I just want to set those expectations for you or with you, where if you’re choosing money, then you really gotta, you know, you should expect your results to be faster than if you were doing it on your own. And if you’re learning a new skill, investing your own time, then just know that it will take longer. If you invest money, usually there are two ways to invest money in your business. Number one is delegation. Number two is education, right? Either you learn from somebody who’s gone before you and can say like, don’t do it this way, do it this way and help you kind of speed up your process of getting to the results or the second way that you tend to spend money in your business is delegation having somebody who’s done something a million times before do the thing for you. Okay? So obviously you’re going to get way faster results when you’re spending money, learning from somebody who’s done it before or delegating it and not even having to do it yourself because you can be off doing something totally different and you can speed up your results. Versus when you spend your time, you’re trying to figure it out by yourself. You’re, you know, if you don’t spend any money and all you’re spending is your time, it’s going to be a lot of dead ends. It’s going to be a lot of trial and error. It’s going to be a lot of, am I doing this right? And kind of circling and circling with no direction. And again, that’s the choice I made. So it got me somewhere. And I want you guys to know that there’s no right answer. Time is not necessarily better. Money is not necessarily better, but you’re always making one of those choices consciously, make it and ask yourself right now, am I spending time? Or am I spending money? Now I’ve given you some examples at the beginning of your career. But what I want to note and make sure that you also are aware of is if you keep at it and you spend, whether you decide to spend time or money to grow your real estate business, there will be a point. If you keep at it where you will start having the results that you want, and you will start being busy, you will have less time and more money. And this is a hugely crucial piece that many agents kind of hate. I hate to use the word fail, but in the way that I think of failure, I think I don’t think of it as a negative thing. I think failure is actually a beautiful thing and we should all fail more often. Cause it’s such a huge learning opportunity. But where I think a lot of agents create a bottleneck in the growth of their business is there is this moment where they stop having enough time and they have all this money and many agents don’t take that switch and they start saying, I’m going to invest the money. I have to free up my time. And there is a crucial moment. I know that I did. I definitely gave too much of my time for too long. And it leads to grumpiness burnout, you know, kind of being unhappy, not having any time to enjoy the fruits of your labor. Right. And then there was this moment where I was like, wait a second. Okay. I’m done. I’ve invested my time all this time. And I finally have the money and now if I want to get my time back, I have to be in reeling to invest my money, to get my time. Okay. And for all of you, it’s going to be different, it’s going to be a different moment, right? Like there are many of you who have different priorities. Like you, you want to be home when your kids get home or you want to, you know, drop off your kids at school or pick them up from school. Right. And so that moment where you’re willing to invest your money to get back more of your time might be different than somebody who has no kids or is it a different place in their life, in their career. Right. If you’re retired, you might have so much time to invest and you can spend a lot more time invested into your real estate business than somebody who says no, like I want to be home at three o’clock. Okay. So just know that those points are up to you. There’s no right time. But whenever you feel, there’s a moment where you will feel like you don’t have enough time, you have a lot of money or more money than you had when you had, when you, when, when you have more time, right. When you have less time, you should be having more money. If you don’t, there’s a problem here. And that’s a whole other thing. That’s a whole other conversation. But if you don’t find yourself having enough time to spend in your real estate business, or time to take on new, new clients or time to have a life outside of their real estate business, then you should be having at that point enough money to invest in your business, to get back your time. And then the choices. How do you want to spend your time for many of us, it’s time to have you handle even more clients. And I know that as I grew my real estate business for a very long time, I kept being like, okay, how do I delegate? Or how do I invest money to be able to help more clients? And so I put a support team around me so that I could handle as many clients as I could, because that was my goal. And then there came a time when I was like, well, okay, I’ve got that down, but now I want to invest money in getting some of my more, even more time back so that I can handle all the clients that I possibly can and have a lot more free time in my life. Okay. And so I had to be willing to invest even more money for that. But I had the money because I was, I, I took the steps to invest my time first. So that then I spent, so then I had the money, which then I invested my money to get myself more time, to get more clients, which then gave me more money, which then meant I could have even more free time and clients. Okay. Those were the choices that I made throughout my career. And yours might be different, but always know that you’re kind of not trading one for the other, but it’s like, you’re consciously choosing which 1:00 AM I doing? And for many agents, I see them not have any time and either they’re spending too much money so they can invest to get their time back already, which just means they’re spending in the wrong places, which I see all the time. A lot of our students that come in, they end up saving a lot of money, a lot of money by becoming a student because I’m like, you don’t need this. You don’t need this. You don’t need this. And here’s this. And it’s usually cheaper than what they’ve been doing. So sometimes it’s just a little bit of finagling so that you can actually have more money, which then allows you to invest that money into more free time. And then you get to decide what you do with your free time. It’s either yours and you can spend it however you want while it is yours. And you can spend it however you want, but you can either spend it inside or outside your business. And that’s what I love so much about our business is we truly have the choices. We truly do have choices about how we get to spend our time and how we get to spend our money and how we get to grow our real estate business and what we want to invest to create the business and the life that we want. And so I hope that your takeaway from this episode is not just okay, focusing on, am I spending time? Am I spending money? What should I expect based on the choice of the investment choice that I’m making, but really that it’s a choice that you get to make. And all of us, there is no one right answer, right? I’m going to spend time and you might spend money and you might sell more houses the first couple of years. And I might take five years, which it did take me to get any money in my real estate business. And then all of a sudden, you know, my, my money keeps growing and growing, growing, right. I was willing to invest more time in my business because I was in a part of my life where I was okay with that. Whereas you, somebody else listening to this might say, no, I’m going to invest. I’m going to invest my money as soon as possible to get my time back. Okay. So that is what I wanted to share with you guys today. I hope that this is helpful and really understanding, you know, what I promised at the top of the episode was that really first and foremost, knowing that you are always choosing between time and money, you know, what does that mean? What does that look like? Okay. We’ve defined that and then know that it is a choice that you’re making or it’s because of choices that you’ve made up until this moment. And it is a choice or an outcome of choices past, even though it doesn’t feel like a choice sometimes. Okay. And really being conscious of when do I want to spend time and when do I want to spend money? And yeah, sometimes we only have time. We don’t have any money and we want to spend money. Right. But then you’re just, you’re gonna, you’re gonna spend your time to get the money to then get your time. Okay. And then also that you know what to expect your results to be, how quickly they should be performing for you based on your decision of whether you spend time or money and then avoiding those mistakes about that could slow down your growth. Right. So I hope this episode has been helpful to you. And one last thing that I will say about this whole Time or Money thing, one thing that I did for me, again, this is a personal choice is I would spend money when I got, when I finally had some money I would spend, I started because I was so scared to spend money in my real estate business, that what I started to do just as like a little way to free up some of my time was I would pay for things outside of my real estate agent, my real estate business. That wasn’t a huge investment. So for example, like paying to have a cleaner or paying to have like a food delivery service where, you know, where you, like, I paid a little bit more to have meals delivered or things like that, where it did help free up a couple of hours of my time, or, you know, paying for grocery delivery, for example, it’s expensive. And so those little things that didn’t feel like such a huge commitment, right? It wasn’t like, I’m not suggesting that you all of a sudden hire your first assistant. Not at all. There are way different ways, cheaper ways to get more time back for your real estate business. And when I was scared to do that, or when I had already bought tools to get my time back, I said to myself, okay, where else can I buy my time back? And for me, it was a lot of my personal life. So feel things like, you know, getting the grocery deliveries, having somebody clean my house. So I wasn’t spending, you know, half a day on a weekend or, you know, the one day I had off spending, half of it cleaning my house, you know, having somebody paint my house, for example, instead of me painting my house, even though I could do it and love doing, I love painting. Right? So it’s just those little things where it… just think about how can you open up the time that you need to get the results and have the life and the business that you want and just know that it’s always a trade-off, right? And you get to consciously choose. And I know sometimes that feeling like you are forced, quote, unquote, to pick time, feels like you’re kind of getting gypped, or it can feel like you’re put in a position where you have no choice, but I would like you to at least see that as a, as a choice you’re making and then to make the best of it. And you’re, you get to invest your time in learning new skills and you can get really good at this. So I hope this episode has been helpful. I hope that you now see what understanding time and money and how you can play with it and how you can choose it in both your real estate business and outside of your real estate business can help your real estate business grow and help you grow also. So thanks for being here. I’ll talk to you next week. 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 how about like, 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 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.