If I were to ask you, what is your business strategy right now? Would you be able to write it down in two or three sentences — your specific strategy and how you're approaching the marketplace?

If not, you may have an issue because you might be market-driven and we don't want to be market-driven.

Why?

Because a market is kind of a high tide floats all boats kind of situation. What happens when the tide's not with you? And you're kind of fighting the market.

That's where you're going into a danger zone. And none of us want to be there. As Vince Lombardi said:

"Hope is not a strategy."

We absolutely have to have a strategy to survive and thrive in this business.

And one of the biggest things that we should be doing every day is understanding that we have a job that probably most people don't identify with. And our number one job isn't sales.

Our number one job is data collection. That is adding people to our funnel so that we can incubate them over the long haul. Getti...

There's a new study out that shows that 77% of homeowners believe now is a great time to sell their home.

And when you combine that with a recent study we talked about — which is that 1 in 10 homeowners is going to place their home on the market over the next 12 months. And 63% of those will do it in the next six months alone.

Question is:

What are you doing about it?

We know 80% of your business is going to come from a direct result of your sphere of influence. Either direct business or referred business. So we need to dive into that first and foremost.

I'm going to give you three ways to have impact at scale with these folks.

1. A weekly email into your database.

This doesn't cost you a dime, but it's one of the most powerful things you can do to stay top-of-mind.

But that email has to be value-orientated. It can't be garbage that people are going to look at it as spam. It has to be high value.

What's the highest value of content we can do? Sharing your opinion a...

What if there's one thing you could do that would have a massive impact on your business? And it was something that would feel like it wasn't work? It was almost rejection-proof. And it's something that you could do every single day. Would you like to know what it is?

The answer is networking. And what I mean by networking is going to coffee, dinner, drinks, lunch, breakfast, you name it. Whatever it is where you're meeting one-on-one with someone in your sphere of influence.

There's nothing more powerful than you can do for your business in terms of marketing than that.

Now it's not going to feel like you're doing anything — you're just having fun with somebody who you like to visit with. But by stretching yourself and meeting with more people in your sphere and getting outside your comfort zone, I can promise you the result of this will be referrals.

Now it's not instant gratification. It won't instantly happen. But when you commit yourself to this on a daily basis, wh...

Have you ever heard of Dave Ramsey? A lot of us have heard of Dave Ramsey but he is someone that wasn't super popular like five years ago. But over the last few years, boy, he's really taken a leadership position even within the real estate industry.

So who's Dave Ramsey? Dave Ramsey is a financial author, consultant, and coach. He has a podcast and hosts a radio program, which is highly syndicated across the country in many different media outlets.

What Dave Ramsey is doing is interesting. Because a lot of people don't know that he's now earning upwards of $40 million a year just in real estate referrals.

What he's doing is he positions himself as someone that's the expert. And then people come and say, hey, who does Dave Ramsey trust in each of the markets to list my home? He then collects a referral fee by referring agents to his audiences.

What a brilliant idea.

But what's really interesting about this when we take a hard look at this is what Dave has done.

Dave h...

What can you learn from Guns n Roses about real estate?

My wife and I took a road trip recently and I took the time to download a book for us to listen to. I don't think she was too impressed in the beginning, but she learned to love it. It was a great book by Duff McKagan talking about his experience as the bassist for Guns n Roses.

We learned his crazy biography of how he got started with the band and what he went through in his life. One thing that he talked about, which really fascinated me, was when Guns n Roses was beginning as a young LA band. They would have to go out and meet with club owners and lounge owners to try to talk them into using them as a band.

In other words, they had to sell themselves. And something the lounge owners and business owners did was instead of just paying these kids to come in and play -- and if they were terrible, make their guests run out -- they would make the bands pay them to play in the lounge or the bar.

And so the classic exampl...

There's one key thing that all great leaders possess: The ability to be self-critical. They're aware that they're not perfect. And that they need to change, adapt, and pivot to be more competitive in their market.

So how do you do that?

One way is to encourage brutal honesty and absolute transparency with your teams — both inside your office and community as well as outside of it.

If you're an agent, this means asking your escrow officers, lenders, and co-op agents to be brutally honest with you.

Now there's a magic question to help you do this that I learned years ago from a top producer that took her business from around $2 million a year to $10 million a year in only about two years.

When I asked her what she did to transform her business from 2 million to 10 million, she told me she just started asking this key question after every closing.

Here's her key question: "Hey, listen, I'm working really hard to improve my business this year. I really want to get better at ...

Have you gotten all of your reviews and recommendations from your past clients over the past year? If the answer is no, you're missing a huge opportunity because there's a young, aggressive, and strong agent that's rising rapidly and would like to capture your future clients.

These young agents are listening to podcasts, watching webinars, and they're learning about a secret weapon in the market — and they may be beating you without actually beating you.

Here's what I mean by that:

These young, aggressive agents are capturing reviews and recommendations. And they are hyper-conscious of getting five-star reviews from everyone and anyone who will give them to them. They're making sure that those reviews go on all the right places, which I'm going to outline for you. And what happens is you can have an agent that's only been in the business 2-3 years, but online, they look like they are super experienced because they've stacked up more reviews and recommendations than their co...