There's a great book by a guy named Harvey Mackay. He wrote the book Dig Your Well Before You're Thirsty.

And in the book, he talks about this $25,000 question, and I'm gonna pose this question to you.

So the $25,000 question kind of goes like this:

Imagine you own a muffler shop or some kind of business. And it's payroll week and you don't have the money to pay your employees. And you know, if you don't pay 'em, they're all gonna walk because everybody's trying to hire right now. So the question mark is it's 2:00 AM you wake up in the morning and you're like, I've gotta come up with $25,000 by tomorrow morning. Otherwise I'm probably gonna lose my business. Who do you call? In your friends list, your personal friends list, right now, is there someone you call and get $25,000 from by tomorrow morning?

If the answer's no, the reason you probably don't have anybody that qualifies in that category is because you haven't helped enough...

If you were to go back in time for the last 24 months and look at every closing you had, would all those people you closed a transaction with have given you a recommendation or endorsement online?

In other words...

If you closed 20 transactions, do you have 20 endorsements on realtor.com, Zillow, Facebook, or Google Business? Or are you missing a lot?

If you're missing a lot, you're missing opportunities. Here's why:

If you look at a couple of agents in your market, you might find this, I see this all the time. You might have an experienced agent that's crushing it — doing 30-40 transactions a year. Then you have this brand new agent who just started their business a couple of years ago and only closed 10-12 transactions each year.

But... online, they're getting a recommendation or endorsement from every single client. And sometimes clients they didn't even close a transaction with, but just had a good experience with them. So...

Here's a super easy technique this time of year, which is super effective:

Go back to 2021. Look at every transaction you closed. Pull the HUD statement from your closing and then send that onto your client.

Why would you do that?

Because now it's tax season. People are gonna start filing taxes. They're gonna realized they lost those documents. And you can provide a real service to them by sending them those documents,. Just email them over and put a little note on that that says,

"Hey, I know tax season's coming. Thought I'd make it easy for you to file your taxes. There's some things here that may be a deduction for you or may save you some dollars in your taxes. Here you go.

By the way, hope you're enjoying the home. If I can help you or your friends with anything in the future with real estate, your referral is my highest compliment."

Something like that. Simple, easy, and guess what? Your clients will love it. They'll thank you....

I'm gonna give you some numbers that are just reality in our business that you should know. And these numbers are going to drive your success throughout your career — whether you like it or not.

Are you ready for these numbers? Here they are:

They may be slightly different for every person, but in general, across the country, here's what the numbers look like in our industry:

* For every 30 conversations you have, you'll average one closed transaction.

And I want you to remember this:

Almost every single transaction you will ever have in your career will be the result of a conversation you've had in the last two weeks. You want more closings? You're gonna have to have more conversations.

Here's another one:

* For every 10 sphere members you have in your database today, you should average one closing — assuming that you've made 20 to 50 contacts with them in the past year.

20 to 50 contacts will get you a 10 to 1 closing...

I want to talk to you about what I call the algorithm of sales. And what that means is that there's some base numbers in our industry, that if you embrace them, it can unlock unlimited opportunity.

The problem is most agents don't want to embrace them. They just want somebody to hand them a buyer or seller. Or for a buyer or seller to literally lay down in front of them so they can just start working with them.

Guys, that doesn't work.

You have to go out there and work the numbers if you want to do well.

I'm going to give you six numbers that are going to be just what I would call standard in the industry that you have to embrace for you to have success.

1. For every 30 conversations you have, you'll average one closing.

So if you want to make 300, 400, 500, $600,000 a year, you just have to figure out how many closings you need. And then multiply that number by 30, which will tell you how many conversations you need to have in...

I have a question for you:

Who is your #1 competitor in your marketplace?

When I ask that to a live audience, I'll hear all kinds of the typical brand answers. You'll hear the brands in their marketplace: Remax, Coldwell Banker, eXp, John L. Scott, Sotheby's, etc.

And I always tell them, you're all wrong. Your #1 competitor in your market is Zillow. Zillow is coming to eat your breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And in a large degree, they already are. Now, yes, Zillow has stumbled with their flipping operation. But does that mean they're going away? No. If anything, we should be more terrified now than ever, because they're going to turn and focus their entire attention back to where they actually started out, which is selling leads to REALTORS. They are not going away.

What does this mean? When lose something to Remax or eXp, you need to ask yourself:

Did I really lose that listing to those companies? Or did somebody go on Zillow, fill...

What is Q2?

Well, Q2 is your most valuable asset. And you might not even know it.

Your most valuable asset is your database, your sphere of influence, we know that.

But what's Q2 mean?

Q2 represents the quality and the quantity of your database. So let's look at those two issues and how they can impact your bottom line coming into the new year.

Let's start with the quantity. What does that mean? Well, if we know that for every 10 people in our database, we'll average one closed sale, knowing that quantity makes a big difference. In fact, when I talk to agents on a regular basis, and I ask, how many transactions did you close last year? And they say 10, 12, I'll say, how big is your database? Let me guess. It's probably 80 to 120 am I right? Most people will say, yeah, you're right on the money.

Why?

Because your database is a reflection of your performance. Smaller database, smaller performance. Larger database, larger...

There's a new stat from the National Association of REALTORS, which states that 53% of our buyers and sellers now fall into a specific demographic group.

You can probably guess what that is...

It's the millennial generation.

Millennials aren't kids anymore. They're actually in their mid twenties or early thirties. They are definitely the driving force in the market. And they're far, far bigger than the baby boomer generation ever was.

So when we look at just statistically, the numbers of this, we have to embrace millennial marketing. It's super important.

And there's some things that we can do to do a much better job with them.

1. Social media

You know I was going to say that. That's where they're at. We've got to go where the audience is. That means we're doing 5 to 15 posts a week on different platforms that we know they use.

So some of you might be doing Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, you name it. You just got to figure out...

What if from every listing you take, you received five transactional sides? Imagine you take 10 listings in the next 12 months. And that leads to 50 transactional sides.

Is it possible? Absolutely.

And more importantly, we have to look at what we've done the last 12 months — how many listings did we take and how many sides did we create? If we are leaving money on the table, it's probably coming from the activities that we're not doing when it comes to our listings and those opportunities are so massive.

We have a system which I call the "5 Star Listing System" and it identifies the five easy transactions we can secure from every single listing we take.

1. We're going to sell the listing that we take

Now, that sounds simple in today's market. 95% of listings are selling as soon as they hit the market. But as the market transitions, as the market shifts, believe me, we're going to need to be able to refine our presentations and...

We just got stats that show listings have increased again. For the past several months, they've been increasing. And now they've increased again by another 4.1%.

So now we're about 2.6 months of supply in the country. Not a lot, but more than it's been in a long time.

So we're starting to see listings come back to market.

The question is: Are you starting to see more listings come into your portfolio?

If you're not, you have to ask yourself why.

The number one reason why we don't have as many listings as we should is we're just simply not asking for them. We're not asking enough people to give us listings as we should. And we're not asking for enough referrals.

I'll give you one technique that blew my mind recently that one of my students used. And I received it because I'm on his mailing list.

He sent me his resume, his resume letter, the resume letter had a cover letter, just like a regular resume. And on the cover letter, it...