today we're going to be specifically talking about best practices for real estate agents in various different aspects of their career I want to start things off with residential agents that are looking to transition into the commercial real estate business it's a very common space a residential agent gets sick and tired of selling residential homes making $5,000 or $10,000 commission checks and wants to start selling larger and larger properties so they can make some serious money this has happened over and over again it's actually what happened to me in my career as well I got sick and tired of hustling and having to sell over a hundred residential homes per year to make over a million bucks and I feel like I was kind of betrayed by the people who had given me some guidance because this is what I thought was the only way to make money in real estate was selling a lot of residential homes when it comes to best practices as a residential agent transitioning into the commercial real estate World there a couple things to keep in mind number one what is currently paying you money needs to be the main focus so if you're making money right now and maybe it's residential real estate or maybe it's life insurance or maybe it's other Industries or businesses that you maybe have started or that you're in currently and you're looking to sell commercial real estate now so keep in mind that I would not recommend ever and have never recommended that you just completely turn off the flow that is currently paying you what I'd recommend that you do is that you just slowly work down the time that you're allocating towards that thing that is currently making you money and then spend a small amount of time trying this new new thing as a residential real estate agent what I did okay I was doing over a 100 sales a year and I could not just stop doing what I was doing I had a lot of expenses I had a big team I had a lot of bills that I had to pay in my lifestyle costs right like I I had to keep up with all of that so I could not just stop the flow but what I had to do was I was spending let's just call it 80 to100 hours a week on residential business zero on Commercial and then what would happen and this is what I recommend is you spent 80% of your time still creating that flow that pays your bills and then 20% of your time in the new side hustle as this is right the commercial real estate world might be your new side hustle and then you're going to continue doing that okay where you can try to continue doing the same amount of business you're doing at 80% hopefully more but around the same amount of business so you're not in a struggled position financially and that 20% as that continues to roll and turn into some actual business and money in your checking account is when you can start changing the percentages I would never recommend that you change your percentages is prior to you closing a commission check in the world of real estate it takes time to close deals okay it's not like a typical sales job where you might be able to do like software sales as an example you might get a salary and then you might get you know a commission check that same day if you upsell something in some instances or you know maybe it's a two- we lag but you're going to get paid at least that same month and that's just not the reality when it comes to most commercial real estate especially when it comes to sales now obviously with leasing it's much more more common just like if you did rentals in the real EST residential world where you can make money right now so if you're struggling to make some money focus on rentals and focus on leasing on the commercial side you can focus on those two aspects because it will allow you to get paid faster now do I recommend you stay in the world of leasing no but I do believe that it can pay your bills in the meantime now let's flip over to a commercial real estate agent who's just getting started in the commercial real estate business has never done residential before they're brand new to the commercial real estate world what should you be doing there's a lot of things to be thinking about here and for me the first thing that comes to my mind is obviously lead generation because there's only so many tasks that we should be doing that actually pay the bills they are lead generation lead followup pitching deals and getting those offers out and meeting clients you can also add in things like growing your network of buyers that you have what I like to keep in mind is that at the very beginning of your career okay this is like you've never earned a dollar in commercial real estate you should probably not be worried about hiring a team you also probably should not be worried about you know having the best systems in place you have no leads you have nothing to follow up with and you have no deals to pitch that's step one let's just get down to the basics and if we just focus on the basics first let's build a great Foundation at the very beginning of your career all you should be focused on is generating leads and then selling those leads what that specifically looks like is on your your dayto day the very first 4 to 6 hours of your day you are legitimately just cold calling now of course you can call your sphere of influence and like like let's even take the word cold calling out of it because I feel like a lot of people don't like cold calling or they only see me as somebody who likes the cold call which that is a large part of what we do but it's not the only thing you can do calls to your sphere of influence you can go out in network and build professional relationships and Partnerships uh and referral Partners right you can go do that you can post on social media and work on getting clients through social media of course I would just look at it as you have 6 hours to prospect every day and maybe at the beginning you might even do more than 6 hours I mean there was a long period of time where I was doing 6 plus maybe 8 hours a day of lead generation for quite some time because I didn't have any leads okay this was even back during covid where like you know the business went to zero for a period of time and we all had to rebuild I was hitting the phones for 6 or 8 hours a day because that's just what it required spending an insane amount of time minimum 6 hours a day on lead generation is just part of the business okay and again lead generation can be filled with cold calling warm calling professional relationships for building Partnerships and and or social media whatever you want to fill that with I'd recommend you do some cold calling because especially the people who come in you know to the commercial real estate world with no network no understanding of nothing probably one of the better ways to get your foot in the door it's a little bit easier of a process when you have a lead list with several hundred leads you're probably going to get something right where if you got your warm contact book right like you know and you're 20s something years old you might not even have a good contact book right he got a bunch of friends from college in high school like they're not going to go buy up commercial property so you're going to have to go find them which is why I recommend coold calling at least so you can understand how that process works let's just use Co calling as a base you're going to co call for probably 6 hours a day for the first 90 days and then you can start trimming it down to about 4 hours a day from then on out for probably the first two or three years and yes I legitimately mean three years straight of Just 4 hours a day prospecting Non-Stop and that'll obviously start to blend with war calls more sphere of influence calls more networking and so on and so forth but the beginning it starts with 6 hours because you're trying to build that pipeline the following hour should just be spent on followup so you're spending 6 hours of new le Generation 1 hour followup you're now 7 hours into your day now if you started at 8:00 in the morning okay that means you're already somewhere at like what 3 or 4:00 in the afternoon and yes I recommend that you spend all day long doing this at the very beginning because the first part you got to do is generate the opportunities after a few weeks you're going to now have some opportunities right and you're probably going to have spoken to a number of sellers who go I'm not interested in selling but might be open to buying and then those are going to be buyer leads which then the entirety of the rest of the day from 3 or 4:00 on from call it you know let's just call it 3:00 okay you know again we got 8 till 12 that's four you know it's 4 hours till 3 that's there you go it's 7 hours okay you have 3:00 now it's 3:00 in the afternoon you should have food delivered to your door you should not be going out to eat you should bring your food okay to you know save money and now what's going to happen at 3:00 till 6:00 in the afternoon you got 3 hours to do this which is now sell all of the leads you just generated you just generated a number of opportunities today whether it's one or it's several you should just be trying to sell those deals because that's the entire Focus that we have here as commercial real estate agents we create opportunities we sell opportunities and you're only going to go on appointments to even go to see those those those leads that you generate those opportunities you generate after 3:00 because that is part of the offer generation going to see those properties going to shake the hand of the seller that's all part of it but you're going to do that after 3:00 it doesn't interfere with your lead generation time that might be a 9 or 10 or 11 hour day if you break it down right 7 hours plus 3 okay 10 hours okay so you got 10 hours a day for at least the next 90 days straight and then maybe you'll be able to C cut it back maybe two hours and you're just going to literally work eight this is just a simple 8 hour day four you know four hours leg gen 1 hour followup a number of hours pitching those deals and that's the game and that won't change until you start to make more money and that again is just the Simplicity of the game I just want you to keep in mind if you're brand new this business I want you just to follow that blueprint until you've got enough money in the bank where you can start hiring people because that's the next phase so the next block is between $100,000 in income and $300,000 in income where when you start getting to this 2300k range kudos to you that's really great I mean a lot of companies never get that far and uh you know a lot of small businesses try to even break the six figure Mark per year whe you know and I mean we're talking profit cuz you probably don't have you know much overhead especially you really shouldn't the only overhead you're going to have is really the compensation structure you have with your brokerage or your team now that you're making between $100 and $300,000 what differences what moves should you be making okay that are not the same as an agent who's you know struggling to even make their first six figures so let's quickly talk about this the best practices for somebody in this in this bracket is going to be two things number one metrics in working on systems and number two is going to be around the support staff that you bring in to help you this is all about support because what's happening here when typically what at least what I've experienced personally and what I've seen people experience by through coaching and working with people you know hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of Agents Nationwide they just get overwhelmed and they stop doing what actually works and gets them paid and they are spending too much time bogged down in the weeds with things that actually don't result in the making some money this is the same exact type of agent who is doing well I mean good for that making1 to $300,000 good for you that's great however typically what's happening is that you've generate a lot of opportunities you've generate a lot of buyers and you're finding these opportunities you're trying to sell these opportunities or you got some listings you got some leases that you're doing right and you're starting to make some good money the problem is that like you have so much going on and you're like a head a chicken with a head cut off and you're just running around to all these different things trying to make things happen and you just don't have a good system a good process because you're being pulled in all these different directions what you need is to break things down and start delegating so let's talk about exactly how you can do this very simply number one get support so what support's going to look like is hiring a transaction manager on a per transaction basis you literally can pay somebody 500 to 1,000 bucks per transaction you just pay them after the deal closes so the money goes into your checking account and you can pay them 500 to 1,000 bucks out of that so if you're making 25,000 or 50,000 100,000 plus you know if not multiple six figure checks and you're going to pay somebody 500 to 1,000 bucks yeah I mean it's literally that simple and when you think about it the dollar per hour that you're going to get back in the ease of your mind that you're going to be able to think so much more clear and focus on what'll actually get you paid is worth 10 fold you can just go hire somebody in your local market who understands the deals that you do might even just be another real estate agent who might need some money right uh there's a lot of Agents you can reach out to on multiple different you know Facebook groups with exp commercial there's work chat and that's how we found a number of agents that we like to work with because they understand our processes and things like Sky slope and I don't have to ret them softwares we've been able to hire people a lot through that and that has freed us up and I've seen this a lot with other agents where like as soon as you hire a transaction coordinator on a per transaction basis they just go so it's a really simple hire and it's going to allow you to breathe so that's going to be one you're going to need two okay there's two specific hires that I would even recommend and if you don't have both of these and you're making between $1 and $300,000 or more I highly recommend hiring both these positions right away so one's that TC and the second is a VA administrative assistant so what this is going to be and I actually used to have inperson administrative assistance that I was paying $40,000 a year to with Healthcare with all these other added in things with two weeks paid vacation and all this other stuff and I'm like thinking back now and it's just wild because I mean I had payroll uh 50,000 a month you know at one point and I was like why on planet Earth did I ever have it at this stage and I I mean again it you know we were doing over a million dollars in gross commissionable income but it's like I'm spending all this money on payroll because I was trained I was taught that I had to have inperson staff and I even see this to this day where like I see a lot of these companies a lot of these teams where they have inperson staff they have like six people and they don't even have that type of production where you can literally have the same six people bvas and instead of having 30,000 a month in payroll you can literally have3 or $4,000 a month in payroll and net the remaining 25,000 right or 26 or 27,000 right like I mean it's such a smarter move to just have them as vas and they literally do the same work for cheaper okay and honestly my VA do a fantastic job I'm up to a dozen vas now our VA do a wonderful job they take care of you know you know everything that they need and it's honestly the same exact work or at least very very close to the same work for a fraction of the cost so what I recommend you're doing here is you're hiring a VA which you can go on upwork you can go in Facebook groups you can reach out to you know people like hey you know post a status on your Instagram or on your Facebook and say hey who here has hired a VA where have you found them I'm telling you literally we found them on upor we found them in Facebook groups those are the two main places we found people and then the vas that we then hired had friends that they introduced us to and we interviewed over and over and over again until we found the right people okay that's just that's just how it's worked for us what I want to share with you here is exactly what they're going to do for you so that VA think about your TC's handling all the transaction management they can even do your listing management okay you can pay them $250 or $500 when the deal closes es because they can just stack up their hours right you paying $20 an hour to do whatever work and then as soon as the deal closes you just pay them their hourly wage okay and by the way listing a property for sale only should take them maybe an hour or two so you're paying $40 right or 50 bucks if you pay them $25 an hour so it should not be that much money now your VA is going to be handling the following number one we love to have them handle our CRM and Lead management so this is making sure every single lead in our CRM system is being touched with an active campaign okay which is a active text and email campaign because we use some we use follow boss with a lot of our different um with the different teams I work with we like using follow boss we found that it's been incredibly lucrative any CRM system that handles uh text and email campaigns you can use it I mean it doesn't have to be rocket science okay we started I used follow boss when I was in residential business we just continue to use it because it was already built out they also want to make sure that those leads are also have every single lead has a Next Step task assigned to it so if you have a bunch of leads in there and then there's no Next Step task and it could be a in two years from today that's okay but it needs have a task which means like next time to call them that's what I mean by a task next time to reach out to that individual because I just don't want any leads falling through the cracks so our RVA handles all of that RVA also handles creating all the offering memorandums so we don't have to spend time creating a PDF for it okay we also have them write up our letters of intent so we don't have to spend time writing up our letters of intent they'll send out the letters of intent once they've been approved by us they can send it out for signatures again your TC could also possibly even help out with some of these things we've had our VA hand list rvas also can pull a lead list import the lead list right make sure everything looks you know it's nice and easy so you can literally just walk into your office click on Mojo dialer or whatever dialing service you have and you can literally just start dialing you just want to make it where you can think a lot less and do a lot more okay that's the Simplicity of having support and what's Wild to me is like hey if you're making $1 to $300,000 a year which is great let's just say you're working 2,000 hours a year okay which is just a 40h hour work week which I'm not saying everybody is but I think that the quick reference is like roughly you make if you're making 300 Grand a year that means your dollar per hour is something around $150 right you divide it by two and move a z to so it's like $150 an hour at 2,000 hours this is rough math okay the only way to increase your dollar per hour which will make will make you more money is going to be delegating the things that are not worth that amount of money per hour right because if you're making a 100 Grand a year 2,000 hours $50 an hour so if it does not make you at least $50 an hour you probably shouldn't be doing it so does creating an offering memorandum make you $50 an hour no you can delegate it for 4 bucks an hour or 7 Bucks an hour or $9 an hour right for a VA and this is with many things just like managing your CRM or things like your Lois or even sometimes your emails and sometimes you can even have one or two vas for a fairly reasonable price and they can handle just about every single administrative task and they just have to send you a summary at the end of every day of what they did and how everything went and they have to attach a little document so that you can kind of keep track of exactly where they're at I mean it really can be that simple and sure you're going to probably spend a week two or three you know working with them and uh making sure you're doing probably a little bit more micromanaging at the very beginning but over the long term it will pay you back in spades lastly let's talk about somebody who is making $300,000 or more all right again kudos to you you know you're definitely getting into the 1% Club officially CU everyone talks about being in the top 1% of real estate agents but let's just be honest 1% in America right now I think is somewhere in like the $500 plus, a year range in real estate I mean like realistically if you're in the top 1% of Realtors you're probably somewhere in that vicinity as well to get into the 1% overall and actually let's just say the 1% of 1% which means you're netting a million bucks or more uh in the real estate business let's talk about exactly what this looks like it's going to be the next level above what we just spoke about which is the support side there's two big things you need to be thinking about in order to scale your business to the next Next Level number one is realizing the only way to get to the next level is by doing three things number one selling more real estate number two selling more expensive real estate and number three having that real estate deal have a higher commission percentage on it there's a magical Fourth Way which a lot of people forget hiring people to do those things for you which means hiring Junior agents so there's going to be many of you guys who are listening to me today and going saying something along the lines of like well I've been a solo agent my whole life I make 600,000 a year or 900 00 Grand a year or 2 million a year well that's great and again if you're making over a million dollars a year as a solo agent kudos to you if you want to be making substantially more money it typically will mean hiring Junior agents and growing a team of agents that you also are the team leader and Main producer for which is the point I'm not telling you it's not producing I'm saying you need to have Junior agents that are also adding to your production if every Junior agent you hire grosses $100,000 in commission and you have a 50/50 split that's 50 Grand per agent and as you train them and Coach them and they rise up all of a sudden now they're doing 300 Grand a year and you make $150,000 per agent on your team you have 10 agents on your team that's another $1.5 million in net income to yourself plus the1 or2 million or 300,000 that you're already generating this is all of a sudden how a team and all that higher level support of Junior agents can take your income to a completely different place any you have any questions make sure you drop it in the comment section down below appreciate you guys following the journey make sure you like and subscribe and I'll see you guys in the next video take care everyone