Hi, I’m Kelly Johnson, founder of the 4X formula and the big question is this: How are real estate agents like us able to create a constant stream of commissions and a constant stream of leads while enjoying life without wasting big budgets on branding, without working crazy hours, without worrying where the next deal’s coming from in today’s real estate market. This podcast is here to reveal the answers.
Hello everybody. How you doing? I hope you’re having a fantastic day and I’m so glad that you’ve tuned in and you’re carrying on listening to our podcasts. I’m really excited to get a bunch of information out to you and stuff and I thought, you know what, we’re going to do that. Like I’m just going to keep recording stuff and keep recording stuff and I hope that you find value in everything. And you know what? Sometimes it’s just a matter of kind of listening through things and kind of going, “Oh wow! This person kind of relates to maybe something I’m going through right now or have gone through and maybe could have approached it differently.” Or you can help someone else who’s maybe going through some stuff or you have some light bulb moments, kind of those “Aha!” Kind of things. “Oh yeah. Like if I approached it that way.”
I just really hope that those kind of things can happen while you’re listening to our podcasts. I’m not really a trained at speaking really well. I’m not a very polished type of speaker. You may think my voice sounds funny or whatever, but I really hope that the information comes to you in a way that you can at least relate to it and find some sort of value. You’ll hear lots of “ums” and “Ahs” and stuff like that, but that’s just because I’m thinking. I’m not doing a.. I’m not reading from a script. I just don’t think that’s the way to do it. And so, I guess I could. I do make some sort of notes because I tend to go off track a little bit and kind of go down these little trails. So I’ve got to keep myself on track. So I have the little bit of notes there, but really more than anything… I’m hoping, um…
Because this happens when I’m working with people or helping out new agents or we’re going over something. All of a sudden, these nuggets of stuff will just come out and I’m kind of going, “Wow, is that me saying that? This is like really valuable stuff. People need to hear it.” Everybody needs to hear all this stuff. Because this would really be helpful for a lot of people. I really think if they thought of it this way or took extra time in this manner or kind of focused like this, that would be like game changer type stuff for some people. So anyway, that’s kind of what I’m hoping happens throughout these podcasts.
And who knows? No guarantees, I guess but I thought before getting into all of this stuff. I’m going to try and keep every podcast talking about a specific subject. It’s going to talk about something. A theme of some sort that I hope will help you. And that way you can kind of pick and choose as you go through it. And maybe you need to hear things again, but I’ll label them that way so you’ll be able to see that.
But this one here, I think it might be good for you to kind of just hear a little bit about my story. Where I came from. How I started. Maybe that’ll just give you a little bit of a platform to kind of decide, “You know what? I don’t think I relate to this guy. This guy has nothing like what I want to be or whatever.” And so that’s fine. Then you can just kind of move on and find somebody else to listen to. Or you know, maybe you’re going to kind of go, “You know what? This is something that I relate to this. I kind of feel this. And I find that this is helpful to me and I believe this person thinks like me.” Or you know, that kind of stuff. And if that’s the way it is, fantastic! Stick around and let’s get to know each other. And then through that, hopefully there’s some benefits that happen out of that for you. And that’s what I want. That’s the whole reason I’m doing this.
So anyway, I started out in 1997 and that’s when I became a licensed as a realtor. And there was no kind of… I don’t have an overnight success story at all. Always kind of did okay but started off really rocky in the beginning. At the time in our market it was actually… It was a down turning market at the time. It was kind of like 1994-95. There was a shift in the market at the time. Where we lived, there was an army base that had a population about 30,000 people and they shut down the army base and about 30,000 people left our community. So there was this shuffle going on in our community.
I didn’t know any different, I didn’t know anything. I actually had a coffee shop that I was part owner of with a few guys. I’d worked like three or four, like at one time I actually had four jobs. I was a waiter at three different places and I was landscaping… Sorry, two different places and I was landscaping and then I was teaching some classes. Long story on that but anyway! Just making money. A single guy living with a bunch of roommates and then I got a… Anyway, long story short, I started off that there was some problems with that business and it had kind of the vicious triangle. There was three partners. One partner was taking from the company and it was just not a good thing. It was horrible. I was very green. I was young. I didn’t know much about business or anything. I didn’t even know what success was. I had no idea what good money was. I had no kind of measuring stick to measure to. Raised on a farm just kind of always understood struggle. And my parents were always arguing about money and there’s challenges there. I was the oldest, so I kinda heard it all. Anyway, it’s just one of those things where I just didn’t understand what making good money was. What making a good living was because we didn’t really have a lot of money growing up.
So I was a bankrupt and going through the bankruptcies stuff and it takes a couple of years to go through all that. There’s a long story behind all that, but I won’t get into that today. My partner that I started with was a guy that I had known since we were seven years old. We had a huge history and he was a good friend of mine at the time. He was doing really well. He was in real estate but the thing is he had managed to… Like… I went on one path and he went on a little bit of a different path He managed to buy and sell a couple houses and kind of hit it in the late eighties, early nineties. Made some profit on a few things. He had some money in the bank and it was driving nicer cars. He had this real estate business and he was a hustling type of guy, worked really hard and he would just hustle and I’m very money oriented, very focused type individual.
I started out with him and he needed somebody to help him and get him going. So did all that. Long story short, I’ll fast forward real quick on that. About three or four or five years into it, things just started going wrong in the sense of the lifestyle stuff. My partner just went off on a whole different tangent. Started getting involved with drinking a lot and he never drank. When we were living together, that was his thing. He never drank, he was just focused. He was just, you know, wanted to stay focused and then all of a sudden he got into drinking and very addictive personality of course. So anyway, I kind of became an enabler for him. I would kind of cover up for him and I would do things and I would be up early and taking care of things, but really just… It was not a good situation. Then he started doing drugs and then people that he did drugs with started hanging around and all of a sudden there was some bad things going on and I just kinda had to get away from it.
I had to start over. I had to kind of carve off myself from him which was not easy. It was one of those tough things to do because I really was hoping that he’d be normal again. Because I knew him from whence we were seven years old. It was a very hard thing for me but I sliced myself off from that. We really haven’t been part of each other’s lives since then because I couldn’t. He’s a whirlwind type person. You know all those type of people that come into your life and they’re just a force. They come into a room even and they just create this stir. They have this energy about them that affects everybody. He was that type of person. I knew I couldn’t be part of that because I would just get sucked into it again. So anyway, started over.
There was the first start over coming from bankruptcy and just starting something. But now I’m licensed and I’m doing stuff and I have an understanding of how to do things. I went on my own. I had to really build everything because really it was his business, I was helping him with. I had to start all over. So I started over and as I was starting to get more confidence, I started to understand “I’m going to need some help. I need to build a team.” I started to think big. I really had zero training. There was nothing. I actually learned mostly the wrong ways to do things and that’s a whole other really long story, but I won’t get into that today.
It was just not good. I had to start all over and really kind of figure it out. So I started trying to figure out who to model on how to build a business. And then I also, what I did is I just started reading everything. Like I had a habit of reading. It’s one thing that I encourage everybody to do: get into a habit of reading information that “feeds your brain” I call it. Storybook stuff is fine and it’s a great little escape, but that’s just chewing gum for the brain. It’s not really doing anything for you really.
I would read books and I have a whole shelf of tons of books. Some of it’s good. Some of it’s not so good. There’s some messaging and some of the “success principle” quotey fingers up, books out there that can be mixed messaging and kind of maybe not be right thinking, but that’s okay. A lot of new age stuff and all that. But basically what I was doing, it was focusing on re-jigging my brain so that I would understand what success was. And I never did understand it. I learned how to stretch my brain and kind of understand “Wow!” A hundred grand to me at the time seemed so out of reach. It was the late nineties now. It was like so far away and then I started making it and I actually thought that I was like a millionaire guy because now I’m making a hundred grand! Because in my life prior to that, my understanding of a hundred grand was like not many people made that and it was just so hard to get there and it was just like this pinnacle to reach.
And when I got there, I really thought that was the everything. It was all about gaining and understanding. So I came from a really weird place and I don’t know if you’re kind of relate to that or not, but just so you know, the growing that I had to go through to kind of understand that and have the character to kind of back all of that up took a long time.
There’s lots of failures in my story. There’s lots of money lost in my stories. There’s lots of clients lost. There’s more clients gone that I probably even know that didn’t become part of my business or didn’t be part of my foundational part of my business. There’s all that just kinda happened that I know happened. Even from the struggling part of it. Like trying to figure out where my next five bucks is to drive people around. And I had to talk someone in to… My wife and I only had one car and we were living in a basement suite. I had to get up at four in the morning so that I can drive her to her job. She had to open a little coffee shop about 40 minutes away from where we lived. And then I would drive back and I would use the car all day and then I’d have to drive back and get her and come back in. So all these crazy things that we went through in our life and where we started.
I just want you to know, if you’re going through any kind of struggle or you’re having a challenge with money or you’re not sure how you’re going to pay for things the next month or you have no savings or you’re feeling that sense of struggle or helplessness or whatever. If you’re in that place and you’re in real estate or you’re thinking about getting into real estate, I just want to let you know there is hope for you. There is a way to get through it. That’s what the Club 100, 4X Formula program is all about. Because I know that I can take anybody, any kind of personality, wherever you’re from in your life, whatever your background, whatever, anything!
I know I can take you and I can help you get to that…. First of all, get to the a hundred grand a year thing. And then after that, figure out how to double, triple, quadruple, whatever. That all can be done. Anybody can do it. If I can do it, you can do it. The one thing I did have that maybe you don’t have, but I’m hoping you get is the willingness to fail. The willingness to try. The willingness to really just focus and understand that once you know the things that you need to do in order to build your business, once you have that knowledge, then what happens with that is all of a sudden accountability gets built into that.
Knowledge is nothing. It’s just knowledge. But then there’s accountability that has to go in behind that knowledge and that accountability says, “Now you’ve got to take action with that knowledge.” Knowledge without action is nothing. That’s what I’m hoping to do. I’m hoping to kind of build that huge belief with you. Give you all the tools. Throw it in your toolbox. Put you in the right vehicle so that you can take this machine to a successful level. Whatever you choose that to be.
And that’s what I want to do for you. But the gas that goes into that machine is you. That’s your will, right? That’s your belief. That’s your intention. That’s your goal and your why and all that kind of stuff. All of that makes up your gas that will fuel the vehicle. We’re going to give you the vehicle, but you know what, in our course, we actually go over the why. We go over the goal setting and then we hold you accountable to those things. As we move through the course, what we do is we make sure that we have successes along the way. Success breeds success. That’s a fact. That’s a well known fact. So when you have little successes, then you kind of go, “Wow, I could do that. What about this? Can I do this? Yeah.” Here’s the tools. Here’s how you do it. Here’s why you want to do it. Okay, cool. Then you go and do it and then we give you another idea of, “Okay, well now that you know how to do this, now you can do this. Have you thought about that? And here’s the tools and here’s how you can do it.” “Really I can do this. Yeah.” Belief. We build in belief and then you go, “Okay, well let me try.” So then you can try it.
Why do I want to do it again? Remind yourself, okay, cool. Yes, I want that. I want to do that. And that’s my goals, right? Got to revisit the goals. I see a challenge. Wait a minute, is your eye on the goal? Is your eye on the goal? Can you still see the goal or do you just see the challenge? Well, I know… What’s the goal again? Why are you doing this? Oh yeah, yeah. Oh, I can see the goal again. Okay. Now it’s not a challenge so much. It’s not a wall. It’s now just a speed bump. Something you can get over, right? Something you got to just overcome.
That’s what we want to do. We want to give you all the tools and all the how tos and all of the stuff to get you there. And I’m talking everything! The other day I was in the office and brand new guys started out. Just kind of a couple of weeks and we threw a lead at him just to kind of get him started on something. I had a lead, I thought I’d throw at him just to get him working on it. And he got an email from the guy asking a question… Oh no! No, sorry… Gave him a lead, so he had a listing and then he got an inquiry off that listing. So he got a basic inquiry from the system that basically says, “Hey, give me more information about this listing.”
So just so you know everybody, just so you guys know, this is a prime example of Kelly going off track. I am like way off track right now, but you know what, I’m gonna do this because I think this is valuable. Oh Man. Okay. I hope you guys are having fun with me. Let’s just have fun. Okay.
So he starts answering email. He says, “Kelly. I got an inquiry.” I said, “Okay, cool.” And I said, “Let me know before you send the email back. Let me read it.” He says, “Oh, okay. Um… Yeah, I don’t really understand why, but that’s fine.” And so I’m like, “Yeah, okay.” So then he came and got me after he wrote the email. So I sat down and I read his email. His email was very nice. It was very cordial. It seemed like a nice guy was typing the email but what he was doing is he was basically just giving the information to the person and then he was ready to hit send.
Sorry, I got a little bit of a cold, so I’ve got to keep kind of hydrating as I go here.
Anyway, I’m like, “Wow, okay, perfect. ” This is a teaching moment, right? Here’s an example of a teaching moment. We go over this stuff in the course, like all these little nitty gritty things, like how do you answer an email? How do you, what do you say when you call somebody back? Who’s inquiring on a listing. How do you approach a sign call? All these things and what’s your attitude behind it? And this is the thing, you guys.
Today, we’re going to learn something right now. Okay? So this is the thing. You can take two minutes to respond to somebody and give them the information. That’s really easy right now. You just send a link to the things and blah, blah, blah, blah, and here’s the listing and here’s all the information, right? That’s easy to do. You have delivered what that person is expecting.
So that client now, or potential client or inquiry or whatever is really not a person yet, right? They’re just somebody inquiring on something, but they’re not really a person to you. And what they’re thinking about you right now in that moment when they’re inquiring about a listing is: You’re the information source. That’s all you are. You’re not a person. You’re just the information source, right? When someone says, sends an inquiry through on a listing and they go, “I would like to see this place on Saturday at 10:00 AM.” And they’re just hoping… They’re actually just expecting that your schedule is open on Saturday at 10:00 AM because obviously you’ve got nothing else to do. I’m being facetious right now. And they’re obviously just expecting that you’re just sitting around wondering what to do. They’ve now given you something to do and then now what you are to them is a door opener. So you’re gonna go and you’re going to open the door so that they can go look at this property.
Do you understand what I mean? It’s very one dimensional, right? Very one dimensional. If you allow people to treat you like that, and they don’t mean to. They’re not bad people. They’re not people that… They just… But if you allow it to happen, then you’re just going to continue to be that to them, right? So this is something that you need to think about. And something that we teach in the 4X Formula training is that you need to be more than just a door opener or an information source or a necessary evil to people. You need to be more than that. You need to be somebody that is now going to create value for their lives, for those people.
Okay? So how do you do that? How do you do that? Actually I’m going to be in a zoom meeting here in just a little bit, so I’m going to have to wrap this up but how do you do that? How do you create value to those people when you answer that email, right? Here’s a couple ideas.
First of all, you can give them some of the information. You can talk about some of the assets of that home, condo, townhome, house, acreage, whatever. But in that you need to ask some questions. I need to point out some things that maybe would be things that they wouldn’t know. Maybe ask a question that would get them thinking, “Oh, I never thought of that.” Right? Are schools important to them. Is a neighborhood important to them? Do they want to be close to the downtown area? Are they looking for investment? Is this a three to five year plan or is this their 20 year home? Is this their first home? Do they have children? Do they commute to work?
All those types of things are questions, right? But in the information that you’re giving back now, asking questions and kind of saying, “Hey, if you’re looking for something else more like this, I could send you some other listings too. If you’re coming out on Saturday anyway at 10, I think I might have a window of time in there, but maybe one o’clock might be better for me. Would one o’clock work for you?” To let them know that you are actually busy, you’re actually doing other things and you’re gonna make time for them because they’re special and they’re important. Do you see the posturing that’s going on there?
So I did that really quick just to kind of give you an idea of the thought process that has to go into an email. How do you build value? So I asked the questions that you need to ask yourself when you’re answering that email. How do I build value to this person? How do I make them feel like there’s stuff they don’t know that I can help them know or help them understand or help them navigate through? How can I weave in questions, some terminology, some understanding of that area or whatever that they may not know so that they kind of go, “Oh, I never thought of that.” Right? Would that make sense?
Okay. Nate is here. We’re going to start our meeting and I’m going to sign off.