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.
Hey everybody. How you doing? Kelly Johnson here from the 4X Formula. I’m so excited that you’re here with me again today. I was driving down the road and I was just thinking about the real estate business. I was thinking about the guys that you look at in your office or in your neighborhood or your community or your city or whatever, and you look at them and you go, “Man, those guys are amazing! Those guys have got to be making so much money! They have so many listings and they have so much! They’re everywhere! They’re on all the bus benches and they’re on all the billboards and their trucks are all lettered up and they’ve got a team of five people or 20 people or 4 people or whatever it is. Oh my goodness, they must be just so successful!”
And you know what? They are. They’re successful. I’m not going to take that away from them. They’re absolutely crushing it. Killing it. I get all that, but I’ll tell you.. I was kind of that guy in my community. I got to that point and I had a team and I was licensed as a mortgage broker. I was also licensed as a realtor. I had a partner in the mortgage part of the business. I had an administration person. I had two other realtors on my realtor part of the business.
In our community, I mean, we were population of about 80,000 people in our community. We don’t have a whole pile of condo buildings and not a whole pile of development going on. We’re not the type of community where someone’s doing 400 deals a year and that kind of stuff. I think that year we pumped out 156 deals it was pretty successful year. I think I did a hundred mortgage deals through the mortgage business. And that was a pretty good year. That was probably our one of our best years at the time in that group, in that little machine.
I was thinking about this and I’m telling you right now, through the 4X Formula, building your business the 4X way, becoming a 4X agent instead of a 1X agent or a 2X agent. To be a 4X agent, which is something that was like an epiphany to me just recently. It was like within the last three or four years, my mind started going into this way of going, “Oh my goodness! Like I need to teach people this! I need to tell the world about this! How to build a business this way! This is how you do it! Less stress, less money going out. I am netting way more money. I’m banking way more money than I’ve ever banked. I have way less stress. I have way less listings, my expenses are way down, but I’m pumping out deals and it’s not hard!” You know what I mean?
Before it was like this battle and I had to win. It was part of it. Most of it, actually probably 90% of it was ego, right? I got to this point where I was like, “Where is all the money going? There’s all this money coming in. Where is it all going?” I actually created a spreadsheet that my wife and I filled out every month because I wanted to know where it was all going. And I said, “I don’t care if you buy a stick of gum, we’re adding it up and we’re putting it in our little spreadsheet that you were going to keep all the receipts of. Everything! Because I got to know where all the money’s going.” So household versus business versus all this stuff. I wanted to know. It was unbelievable.
And then all of a sudden, my nut! Like the nut that I had to crack before any money was really kind of extra over and above. And you know how we are as human beings? As soon as you make more money than you need, then you start spending more money you need to. But basically the nut! Like the things that I had to take care of with all the marketing and payments on everything and the groceries and the lifestyle and everything worked out. It was like 20 grand a month was just flying out, flying out, flying up. That’s a lot of money going out the door.
Now I can tell you, it’s a lot less than that and I’m banking way more than that. I don’t have to carry 30, 40, 50 listings. I can make all the money, the same kind of money, netting way more, carrying 8 to 10 listings and that is way more manageable. It’s less stressful. I find it easier turning listings down that when people are nuts and they want to over list their properties. I have a posture now and I go, “No man, you got to list here.” Like we’re in the business of selling properties. I’m not in the business a listing properties.
My goal is to sell it. 4 months later, you’re going to look at me. This is going to hurt our relationship. If I take this listing, over priced at this price, and then it’s not going to sell. One, you’re going to think I’m not a very good realtor or I didn’t do a good job. Even though I’m going to be reporting to you. I’m going to show you all the things I’m going to be doing. I’m going to be doing all these marketing activities. I’m going to engage all of the traffic. I’m going to follow up with everybody that goes to the property. I’m going to give you all that feedback. You’re going to know all this stuff, but I have been in the business long enough now that I know I’m going to do all that stuff and you’re still going to think I, Kelly Johnston, failed.
It’s going to tarnish our relationship and it’s going to breach our trust. Our relationship needs to stay intact. So you know what, I am not going to list a property that you can listen to somebody else if you want. I fully release you. Go ahead and do it. We’re still going to be friends and it’s all good. When you want to work with a program that works and you’re willing to abide by what we say we should do to market your home, get it sold, then let’s get together and let’s do it. But just letting you know, the plan has to work. We’re in the business of selling houses, not listing homes.
That’s a big kind of, I may not say all those exact words, but that’s the attitude. That’s the actual posture that I have now and the reason is because it’s true. I’ve been through it enough times. I’ve had relationships get kind of bent out of shape beyond my control and it wasn’t even my fault. It was my fault though. I did do everything right. But what I didn’t do right is I didn’t set up the expectation properly and I didn’t stick to my guns in order to serve that person at the highest level. Because the other thing I’ll say to that person is “You know what? I’d love to tell you what you want to hear.” And a lot of times that happens, like I’ll say to people, “You know what? I think your property is going to go on the market at this price and I think you can expect this kind of number.” And they go, “Really? I never thought it was going to be there.” And I’m like, “Yeah, no, I think I can do it.” “Gosh, Kelly, I don’t know…” And I’m now convincing them that I can get him a higher number. That’s awesome. Like that’s the best position to be in, right.
But then there’s the other way, of course. Where that happens the other way but I’ll say to them, “You know, I’m willing to do it…” But, um.. Oh, what was I going to say to that? I got off track….. I had a really good point on that. Ah, okay. It’s gone. Anyway, so this is the analogy that I was thinking about as I was just driving in my truck and I was coming back from another appointment. Just coming back to my home office here to do some stuff and I thought, “You know what? I’m going to record this real quick and then get back on with what I’m doing.”
By the way, I’m still in the trenches. I’m still doing real estate right now. I’m still working. Me and my wife are still talking about things every day and I’m taking time to do this course and put it together and give value to people. But I’m still doing it. I’m still hot on it. I’m still sharpening my tools and still getting better, still making mistakes, all that kind of stuff. I just hope you just stick with me on the journey. Let’s do this together and if you want to get involved in the 4X Formula, right now as I’m recording this right now, we’re still in the forming stages. We’re still recording stuff. But that’ll be out soon and that’s going to be really exciting. I am fired up for that, but right now we’re just kind of doing some communications and just kind of seeing what kind of people are getting involved with us.
So back to the analogy. Do you want your business to be a bathtub or a shower? A bathtub or a shower? So let’s look at the two for a second. Bathtub. So I got to fill it up. I gotta wait for the water to get really hot, put some bubbles in there or whatever. I gotta wait for it to get up. I gotta wait for it to fill up, right? To get to a certain spot, certain temperature and a certain height in the tub because very rarely do you kind of hop in the tub and when it stopped quite filled up yet, right? You kind of wait for it to fill up before you enjoy your bath, right? So now you finally feel it all up and everything and then you get in the bath and you kind of inch your way in and it’s all nice and it’s like, “All right.”
But a whole bunch of stuff had to happen before you can get in that tub and enjoy the tub. The other thing about the tub analogy, in my analogy, is in that type of business, the big business, the tub business, what’s going on with that business is there’s actually a leak in the tub. If you think about it that way, there’s a leak in the tub. This is a non 4X agent business because what’s going on is you’ve got… And the water’s getting cool. You gotta keep warming it up. You got to keep the tap on, so you’re keeping the water getting hot and there’s water leaking out the bottom slowly. It’s just kind of going up, kind of going out, kind of going out. So you gotta keep the tap on. And that’s what I mean. There’s all this, you’re throwing money, throwing money, throwing money, throwing money and the tap is got to stay on full blast. Your effort, your stress, your team, your motivation, the getting up way earlier than everybody, working way later than everybody. Doing all that kind of stuff is full on tap stuff, on hot, using way more energy, right?
Shower! Shower business. Okay. This is what I’m liking to the 4X business: The shower business. You turn on the water. It takes 10-20 seconds to get warm. You hop in. You do what you need to do. Get clean! You enjoy it. You can put it on massage mode if you want a little bit and stand there and sway back and forth and let the water massage you a little bit. Then you clean up, you do your thing, you turn it off, you get out. You don’t have to keep the water going to keep yourself comfortable and you don’t have to keep doing things to make the water hot. You don’t have to worry about filling up the tub because you’re worried about it leaking. The way the shower business works is it’s just working! You turn on the tap when you need it. You turn on the tap when you need it. You take care of the business. You take care of it, you move, it’s efficient and you’re not using up whole bunch of extra energy. It’s the shower business, the 4X business.
This is a little bit of an idea that just kind of popped into my head as I was driving down the road. And I thought, “Well, I wonder how that analogy would play off.” So anyway, I thought I’d try it out with you guys. And that’s the thing. Like I tried it. I tried the big business. I studied all the courses. I paid tons of money and went to a bunch of different courses and seminars. I listened to lots of different people on the Internet, on cds, on tapes, believe it or not, back in the day.
I’ve read tons and tons of books and pounded my brain. I put all this stuff into practice and I worked it and all of the teaching had to do with building the tub business. All of them did. Every one of them are talking about the tub business. No one was talking about the shower business in any of the kind of training because it was always about big businesses. Always about the big man. Even the Keller Williams’ book, millionaire real estate agent. What are they talking about, right? The three L’s: leads, listings and leads, right? They talk about the lead’s leverage and they talk about the leveraging. And then what do you do? You bring more people on, build a team, get to be the millionaire real estate agent. The thing is you’re not a millionaire. You’re bringing in 1 million bucks, but you’re not keeping it… If you are doing a million bucks. But you’re not keeping all that. We didn’t netting out of all that. Right? And for what? All that pain, aggravation and all of that stress.
This is the other thing, when you’re a big billboard superhero agent, that’s what I call it. And that’s what I used to try to be. When you’re out there in a big, big way, what is your marketing have to say? What does it have to say? It has to be talking about success, right? It has to be talking about the fact that you succeed more than anyone else. You’re number one, right? Or you’re the best. Or you get results. Or you know, that kind of messaging is the only thing that can be out there. And that kind of quick messaging. That’s the only kind of messaging.
So what happens? You’re trying to track strangers would that kind of marketing. So all these strangers are calling you and then you’re going to meet them and they have this idea of who you are based on your awesome picture that you have on your billboards and all these kinds of things. And then you show up. Now you have to be that person to them. They have this expectation. Really you’re starting from a different place.
Now in the shower business. You build a business properly and you nurture everything properly and you build it like a 4X agents should build it. What happens is, and this just happened to me, believe it or not, in my truck on the way here, I got a phone call from a gentleman who, about 45 minutes away from here and we help them buy an investment property. And through that we ended up getting good relationship with them. We’ve kept in touch with them, we’d done all the 4X things and he referred another person to us. Well, I met that other person last weekend. Now they have a bit of an accent. I couldn’t quite understand what they were saying, but they’re trying to tell me who had referred them to me. I just, I couldn’t get it, but I didn’t want to embarrass them and I thought I’d just get Nicole to try or try again to figure out who this was that referred them to us and anyway he just called me.
But that’s a high quality problem, right? That’s a high quality problem. Trying to figure out the name of the person and understand it so that you can thank them when they refer business to you. This person referred these people to meet with no expectation of anything. They just felt “These are the people that you need to work with because I trust them. And that’s why I think you should work with and you deal with those people in that area.” So is that exciting?
Now what’s the expectation? Where are we now? What level are we starting out at in our relationship? A way better level. A way better place. We’ve got the bathtub guy going, “Well, if you’re really good, you’ll get me 50 grand more or you’ll be able to pull off miracles or you’ll, you’re a superhero, right? So you should be able to do all this.” And then there’s over here. “Man, I know exactly what you’re capable of. I think you’re someone that I can trust and you’re someone that I want to work with and you give good advice. I’m really excited because someone told me how great you are and I just can’t wait to work with you. I’m actually excited about working with you. You don’t have to prove me anything other than what I already believe you to be.” And that’s easy because I can just be that because that’s what I am. Isn’t that exciting?
That’s the bath tub versus the shower business. And it’s a funny analogy. But anyway, that’s what we teach in the 4X formula. That’s how to be a 4X agent. That’s what I’m so excited about and that’s why I got to tell the world, and I’ve got to tell people about this because everybody needs to know about how to become a 4X agent. Thank you for listening. Hope you have a great day.