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The Millionaire Real Estate Agent | The MREA Podcast
101. $20+ Million in Volume in Eight Weeks: The 8x8 Playbook With Jonathan Mills
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Foreign.
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Welcome back to another episode of the Millionaire Real Estate Agent podcast. I'm Jason Abrams and this is the place where we lift the curtain on the world of real estate like never before. Every week I sit down with visionaries, pirates and mavericks. We're here to document, demonstrate, and most importantly, demystify their game changing models and systems. What secrets propel them to the top and how are they living their dreams? This is about passion. It's about strategy. But above all, it's about real, tangible success. So buckle up and let's dive in. This is the Millionaire Real Estate Agent podcast. Do you remember Raiders of the Lost Ark? When Indiana Jones is running through the forest looking for this incredible treasure on the hunt for fortune and glory. Friends, I found it. I found the model that helped a team in Gainesville, Florida. $20million in closed business over eight weeks. And yes, there is a model on exactly how to do it. This team closes over 200 transactions year in and year out. It's run by a gentleman named Jonathan Mills. He's an amazing practitioner and he's gonna tell us exactly how to do 20 million in eight weeks. Sit back and buckle up. This is Jonathan Mills. Jonathan, how are you, sir?
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I'm fantastic, Jason. Thank you so much. And you?
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I'm great. Thank you so much for doing this with us. I've been looking forward to this conversation. Gang, you're not going to believe this, but we're going to get there in a minute. Before we do, I gotta ask, how did you get into the greatest industry in the world?
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A
It's a little bit of a long story, but I'll shorten it as much as I can. But it actually started when I was seven years old. So when I was a little kid, I wanted a yearbook for some reason in second grade, really bad. And I have older siblings. And so the rule in my family is when you graduate from a given school, elementary, middle, so on, you get a yearbook. And so I was in second grade, so I wasn't getting a yearbook, but I wanted one because my older sisters got one that year. And I went to my mom and I'm begging and pleading and she's like, I'm not giving you the $35. You're going to have to go buy it yourself. Which was kind of a like, no. I took that as a personal challenge. And so I racked my brain as a 7 year old of how can I make $35 by Monday? And it's Saturday. And the best thing I could come up with was a lemonade Stand. And at that time, I didn't understand the value of location, but we had the first house in the neighborhood, so I was kind of poised for greatness there. And so I set up shop. I got a pitcher out, poured some lemonade or some crystal light lemonade mix into it and some water, and got into business. And I made exactly $35 that day, which is how much I needed to buy the yearbook. So I got my first taste at seven years old of kind of what you get for working. And so by high school, that escalated to the lawn business. So I was pushing a lawnmower around the neighborhood, cutting grass, upgraded. I saved up enough money to buy a zero turn lawnmower and a truck and all this stuff. And so by junior year, I was driving my truck to school with, you know, all the equipment in the back on the trailer, and I would just leave school and go mow lawns. And again, good timing. It was like 2009, 10, 11, and I was mowing builders, vacant lots that weren't selling, and there was no shortage of supply of those. So I was doing quite well. I was making, you know, 500 bucks a week and as a kid in high school. And so I went to business school, or I enrolled for business school, I should say. And by the end of my freshman year, I dropped out of college because I was just taking so many electives. I think my first semester was like, rock and roll history and marine biology and like psychology. And I went to my counselor. I'm like, okay, so when does business school start? And like, oh, you got another year of electives, you'll be fine. I'm like, I don't want another year of electives. So I dropped out of college. I called my mom the last day of finals week, and I said, I'm coming home tonight. And luckily, I the first person in my family not to go to college.
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B
What did mom say?
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She was just like, there's clearly something going on here. And so when I came home, I was like, I'm gonna. You know, my parents, their other rule was, we'll pay for your college. You can go anywhere in the country you want to go, as long as it's in the state of Florida, because we have Florida prepaid. And so I just got up the street and I was like, look, I'm saving you money. I'm gonna come back and not gonna waste your money. Because I just didn't feel like I was getting what I needed. And so that weekend, I went to the beach with some friends and my mom, on my way out the door, does what she does best. She goes, hey, by the way, when you get back from, you're going to have a job and it's going to get real. And in fact, you're cut off, which was tough love in the best way. And so I went on this trip, and I'm telling my friends and I'm walking down the beach, and I'm like, I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm 19, I have no degree, nothing to fall back on. And my best friend Celeste goes, you know, you're always on Zillow, and this is 2014, right? So Zillow's not that popular. But you're always on this app called Zillow looking at houses. You're always obsessed with that show Million Dollar listing. Go do real estate. And again, lucky for me, another good friend of mine from high school, her dad owned a brokerage, and her mom was the number one agent in our mls. And so I phoned them up that night when they came back from their family vacation, I met with them. They told me to sign up for the class, which was actually starting the next day. And two weeks later, I had my real estate license. So that's probably why there's more real estate agents in Florida than anywhere else.
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B
There are a lot of them, but they don't all succeed like you have when you get into it. Is it success right from Jump Street? I mean, is it just good stuff from the beginning?
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No. I did have a great mentor at my previous brokerage. And my first year, I did seven transactions, and gross, I made $20,000 in net, I made $2,500. And so that was awesome. And I learned from that. But I. The reason I only made 2,500 is I was investing in lead generation. I invested in Zillow at that time, and I actually got laughed at in my brokerage. And one of the meetings, people are like, jonathan, how are you getting business? My second year, I did 21 transactions, and people are going, how are you getting business so early? You're like, you can't even grow a beard. And I'm like, I'm buying leads. And they all just laughed at me. And they're like, you're buying leads. And so, long story short, within a few years, I was selling about 100 homes a year. And then last year, we doubled that to 194. So it was not a quick start, but it did speed up around year five.
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It's fantastic. I want to get into this thing, friends, you know what time it is. We are about to unpack a model. Now, you don't have to take the notes. I'm taking the notes. So if you're on the treadmill doing the old 12, 3, 30, and let me just say this, if you know, you know, you don't have to worry about slowing down or lowering the ramp. I'm taking the notes. They come out every Thursday as a PDF. We email it to you. If you don't get them, go to mreanotes.com that's mreanotes.com Jonathan. You all challenged yourselves and in eight weeks, your team managed to generate $20 million in volume in closed business. Friends, not just maybe business, but closed business. I want you because the market is shifting and a lot of my real estate brothers and sisters are saying, hey, Jay, it was great. Not so great anymore. I want you to walk me through exactly how I go do this. Tell me.
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Yeah, so it's a little convoluted, but I'm going to break it down into as few steps as possible. But we came up with kind of a mini Bold 8 by 8 challenge. And so, okay, we got funds from every brokerage.
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If I don't know what bold is, walk me through that and then walk me through why you did this and then tell me exactly what you did.
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Yeah. So bold stands for Business objective Life by design. It's a course at Keller Williams that's job is to get you into production and kind of re spark the actions that you were doing when you first got in the business, the things you're supposed to be doing all the time to stay off of the real estate roller coaster. And so last year, Gary rewrote Bold to Onward Bold. And so last year we didn't have bold in our area and we knew it's usually in the fall. We're actually in it right now, but we're in the first quarter of this year and the tides had turned and we're going, we need to do something. We need to do it now. And so we thought back, we're going, hey, what about bold? And what if we made our own version of that? And about two years ago, my director of operations, Noah, he made a thing called an eight by eight challenge. And the intention behind it was. I actually have it here. The intention behind it was, what if we can make a one pager for new agents getting the business? It's kind of like the last step before they join the team. So brand new agents. We don't know if they're actually going to do the production. We want to spend the time and money onboarding them yet. So if we like them, what if we gave them a two month campaign where if they went and did those items for two months and started seeing success, we'd bring them on the team and know that they're actually going to do what we tell them. Right?
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Dude, that's so smart. Did that work?
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That's the fun part. It sat in the Google Drive for two years and collected dust. And so it was an amazing idea. But what happened is. So I'll backtrack a little bit. So last year we had our best year ever at 194 transactions. And so we started this year and we had the worst first quarter we had in three years. And we went, this isn't good. And so it's April 1st, literally. And we just had our quarterly review with the team and I'm like, the numbers are bad. So bad. I cut a big fat check to keep the business going. In February we had our worst month in like five years. So the shift had happened pretty hardcore in Florida in the first quarter. So anyways, we knew we had to do something different. And so we're scratching our heads going, maybe it's bold. And then we remembered, what about that 8x8 campaign you made a few years ago? And then we had an aha moment. We can do both. So if we had kind of the coaching and accountability of bold coupled with an action step program and we gave it to our agents and gamified it, what would be the end result? And honestly, the end result blew us away. And to your point. So in the first quarter of the year we did about $12 million in volume. And the next two months we did $21.1 million in volume just from that, those action steps.
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Okay, now everyone listening is like, I'm in. Literally, I want to do this. Walk me through and don't spare me the specifics. I want to be able to do this tomorrow. Take me on the journey.
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Okay, so the eight steps, I'm going to go through the eight steps and I'll kind of talk about how we built the model around this. But the eight steps are each week you need to add five new contacts to your database. That's step one. So AKA one a day, that's a name, a phone number and email. And bonus points if you can get their address. But we use fellow, so oftentimes if we have the name, phone number and email, we can get the address.
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By the way, if you don't know. Fellow friends. Ryan Young love what he's doing. Go check out that company. Fellow. Any real estate agent I think should be using fellow.
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That's just me, 100%.
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Okay, so adding five in step one, that might be easy. The first week or the second week. How do they find the five? Give me a couple of the hacks.
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I have a few stories to tell you that in a second. But we had ways that people were getting 20 and 30 in a day and then that would buy them time. But people, our team members ran into that really quick. It sounds easy. Everything I'm going to tell you is super simple until you go to put it in practice. So five contacts, one contact a day. Next is one handwritten card a day. So five notes per week. So so far we got five minutes of tasks. One new contact in the database, one handwritten note. The next one is one of the challenges. It's five connections a day. You need to speak to five human beings, either giving them something of value or asking them for a piece of business directly. So that's 25 contacts a week. The next step, number four is three roleplay sessions a week, 30 minutes in length at least. And now we have the tool of AI. So it used to be just a few months ago, it used to be that we would do those in person, but now you can do them with AI and just spending 30 minutes practicing your scripts and role playing around. Any objections and we'll get into that in more detail in a minute. The next step is host two open houses a week. And a twist we put in here is we actually had our admin do this with us. And so for admins it was get two reviews a week. Next step is get two signed agreements, BBA listing agreement, whatever it may be assigned agreement. This isn't contracts but an agreement. And for agents or for admin, our challenge was to get two referrals to the team a week. That's a big challenge. And then just two more. The next one is five social media posts a week, which is just one a day and one contract a week. You need to sign one sales contract a week. So those are the eight steps. So you see most of these are broken down into daily tasks like what can I do? And it's most of them are one just one thing a day. Super simple and super digestible. But as you know, real estate agents have busy days and light days. And so what would happen is a few days in they'd be behind and then they'd have a three hour Time block one morning to actually try and catch up. So to gamify, this is the next step here. So we have the credentials, right? These are the things you have to do. But to actually gamify this and to make it accountable, we added a point system which is on the back of the sheet. And the point system is for things like the handwritten note cards, adding connections and social media posts. Those were one point each, so a low weight. The next category for five points was roleplay sessions. Getting a five star review or hosting open house would get you five points. Assigned agreement would get you 10 points and a signed contract would get earned the team 30 points. So that's kind of the outline of the actual accountability metric. Right? So those are the numbers. But here's where things get interesting. At this time, we had an even team. And what I mean by that is we had five agents and five admin playing together. And so that's why we tied them up. So every agent was paired up with one admin and they formed teams. We had five teams and we had them compete as teams to win a prize. And so the goal was whoever earned the most points during this eight week span from these action items would win two $150 gift cards to the restaurant of their choice. So basically the admin and the agent would both get a gift card theoretically to take their families or their spouses out for putting up with them for the eight weeks and reward them for that. So that was the gamification is we added a point system, we added a reward at the end and then we tag teamed agents and admin because we wanted to get the admin involved in the business.
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By the way, I'm guessing the $150 gift cards for restaurants was Satchels for the best pizza in Florida, which happens to be in Gainesville.
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It was for me. I go there every Friday, so I was just there last night. But there's lots of good restaurants here.
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So I'm immediately taken with three things when I hear what you're saying. Number one, the idea of eight steps can feel overwhelming, but the reality of it is this breaks down to taking six actions on a daily basis that result in the lag measure, which is the agreements getting signed. Is that how you thought about it?
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It's 100% how we thought about it. And so that's what we taught our agents was going, look, it's very obvious that agreements and contracts earn substantially more points than everything else. You're never going to win in this challenge. All you're doing is writing handwritten notes and adding people to your database. However, if this week you haven't, if you've met all your things, you did, your 25 connections, you wrote your five cards, you added five people to your command, but you didn't get an agreement signed or you didn't get a contract signed, do more. And if they go, what do we do? Those you do those six things. That's forget everything else. Go make a social media post with a moer a call to action. Go write a handwritten note to somebody. And the reason for the handwritten notes, Jason, if you think to who you would write a note to right now, I imagine it's someone you really care about or someone you have a kind of deeper relationship. It could be someone you haven't seen in 10 years, but they're just on your mind. An old mentor, a friend, a family member. Those are the first people who are going to give you business. So that was kind of the reason for adding that step in. There is if we can get really intentional about posting to the masses on social media, but making direct outreach in a really old school way to people who we know are going to like and trust us, the likelihood that success would come from this would be pretty substantial. And it was the second thing that.
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Jumped out at me was it sounds totally doable as you and I sit here right now and talking about it. But my trainer told me 30 minutes of cardio six days a week. And when he said it, I was like, 30 minutes, no problem, brother. I'm struggling. This is easy, but easy can sometimes be hard.
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Yep, yep. It's simple. It's simple. So that's where the next piece of. So now we're going to build on this. So then we said, okay, how do we keep people involved? Right. So we knew exactly what you're saying. We're sitting here going, all right, we think we've got a good system, but how do we keep them involved and motivated for eight weeks? Because people can fall off pretty quick. That's where bold comes in. So we built a one day a week. We built a bunker on Wednesday mornings from 9am till 10:30. An hour and a half time block, all hands. Everyone had to be on that meeting. No home inspections, no nothing. No excuses. You're in this meeting. And so what we did there is we would just ask four simple questions to the group and then once we're done with kind of coaching around those questions, we would go into a bold light. So I would literally take out the old Bold books. And I would just make a makeshift bold class about the things that I thought were really impactful. And so to your point, the first week, what we talked about was mindset to get people excited, to get them jazzed up. We knew week two, they would have the exact realization. Week one, everyone's ready to go. By day seven, they're like, wait a minute. I feel like I've been tricked into something that I didn't realize would be this hard. And so we did the bold exercise where you calculate how much is bold worth to you. And so we had them say, okay, if you did this and you got one contract signed a week for eight weeks times your average sales price, times that commission, what is this worth to you? And that kind of lit that fire again. So we kind of built in things like that throughout the system to keep them engaged.
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I love that. Needless to say, friends, all commissions are negotiable everywhere. We all know that to be the case. But number two is so smart because now they've tied a dollar amount that may end up in their pocket if they do the actions. I think that's genius. What'd y' all do on week three?
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A
So weeks three through seven were just, again, bold principles. So kind of tools in your tool belt. So by week three, they're going, all right, I'm kind of running out. Like, I'm running out of my bag of tricks. And so we would talk about the things that bold would get you. How do you add value in a conversation? What are some ideas of adding value? What does that look like? We would script and role play about asking for business. So how to gamify asking for this? Hey, I'm in an eight week challenge right now. I'm looking to be the number one person on my team to earn the most business in this eight weeks. Is there anyone you know who might be looking to buy or sell real estate sometime in the near future? Again? So we just role play, script practice, all of those things that you would do in bold. We just boiled it down to the nuts and bolts.
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B
There are so many people that say, jason, I could never say that. I'm not solicitous by nature. And, Jonathan, I know you care so deeply about people, but you still have no problem asking for business. When you have people on your team that say, this feels icky, what do you tell them?
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So then let's pivot real quick. So let's go to the four questions that we would ask at the beginning of every single board meeting, because it's going to answer your question. The first question was, what did you do this week that made you a win? What was your win share? What you did, what was your success? I got a contract, I got two contracts, whatever. It was awesome. The next question was, what did we talk about last week that was the most impactful to you? The third question was, what did you actually implement that impacted your success? So what did you do that got you the win? And then the fourth one was, what was your biggest obstacle or objection. What prevented you from success? You have to ask all four questions. Those four questions is where the magic happened. And so someone would come back after week one and they'd go, I just can't do this. This really sucks. Two things there. One, remember, they're in a team. People don't do things for them. So for your fitness example, I only do group training. I will work out at like a 50% level if it's just me versus me. But if I've got a bunch of people around me and I feel like they're watching me, I'm going to work out at the highest level. And so I only do group training as kind of my hack for that. And so this is the same thing. If I'm going for a prize, I might not do things that make me really uncomfortable to get the prize, but if my team member success rests on my action, I'm going to do things that I might not have otherwise done. So we had team members taking really big action that made them super uncomfortable simply because they didn't want to let their team member down. So that's step one for the accountability. But part two, the things that would, like, come up, we actually had a really vulnerable story. There was a person on our team who the entire time they had been on the team never posted anything on social media. Not one post. And I'm like, please, for the love of God, post something on social media. And I'm a big social media person. That was obviously part of this campaign. So day three comes around at this competition, still no social media post. And I'm kind of loving on them going like, you're letting your team down, you know, by not doing this. And so they mustered up the courage to put a post. Long story short, the first comment on the post was, what, you're in Gainesville and selling real estate. I need to buy a house. And they scheduled an appointment, right? I swear, first comment was in 15 minutes of making the post. And so, aha, light bulb moment, right? So then they shared the reason in our Next meeting. So the next week comes around, we're in our meeting, we're going, what were your limiting beliefs? And they shared that, and they had a really deep story as to why they weren't posting on social media. And it was this huge fear of theirs. And because they were in this competition and kind of of forced to take action, they did it, but then got this reward, right? And so they share the story, and now every other team is listening and going, wait a minute. That person broke through their limiting beliefs and got success. And that happened every single week. Someone tried something that they were totally uncomfortable doing, and it won. It created a winning result.
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B
That's such a big idea. And we always hear like, get a swim, buddy. It makes everything easy. But I don't think you get this result if they're not playing with someone. And you're gonna have people listening right now who say, well, look, dude, I don't own a team. It's just me. Go grab anybody in your brokerage, your market center that wants to play. Someone out there wants to play.
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A
You know, it's so funny you say that. Back in the day at my old brokerage, I was the same way. I was a single agent, but there was another agent that I would always compete against. And every year, we would do almost the exact same volume. And so we actually put thermometers on the exterior of our office doors, and we would have competitions to see who would hit that number first. And then whoever lost had to buy the winner dinner. I've been doing that for years, way before I had a team. So that's not an excuse, to your point, but you have to be in this with people. And another example, this actually impacted people outside of the team. So Brian on our team, his wife's a pharmacist, and she is the sweetest person in the world, but a little shy. Like, sales isn't her thing. That's why she's a pharmacist. And so he had been on the team for two years, never sold a single home to anyone in healthcare, right? Zero. And this competition happens. We're in week two, and he's on the phone with his wife. It's on speakerphone. I walk in, I overhear it, and I'm like, hey, Nudging him, going, you should get her to ask for some business. And he kind of jokingly goes, hey, babe, can you ask someone if they, you know, you need to buy or sell real estate in the office and the pharmacy? And so she jokingly on speakerphone goes, hey, Dave, do you. Anyone looking to buy or sell a house? My husband's a realtor and he goes, what? Oh, my God, of course. I'm actually about to list my house. Swear.
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B
You're kidding.
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A
Oh, get ready for this. Brian also had never sold a home over a half million dollars. That's kind of above that is tiptoeing and luxury in our market. He sold, closed two homes over $900,000 and signed a $750,000 agreement during this eight week campaign because of the pharmacy. Just from his wife. She watched this happen and goes, wait a minute. It was literally that easy. And so she started becoming his number one referral partner.
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B
That's unbelievable, man. So now levitate above all of this for a moment and talk to me like I own a team. I'm about to kick this into gear. Number one, what are the hacks? Because I'm going to have people that say they can't make the contacts. I'm going to have people that say that they can't spell and they can't write the notes. So give me any hacks you can. And if I'm going to screw this up, if this is going to break, where is it going to break? And save me the heartache.
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A
Yeah, absolutely. So I'm a story guy, so you have to have some stories. You should have been in some sales training, whether it's bold or something else. Take the content from that, whatever you learned. And you need to preemptively make eight weeks of teaching. And you need to think in advance. Just like I told you. You were saying exactly what we thought. We know after one week, the energy is going to start getting low. We also know around week four, the halfway point, that same. So week one happens, they get some success, but they're like, oh, I'm running out of ideas. So we reinvigorate them with money. Week four comes around, now they're going, it's been a month. It's crazy. This is really hard. This is a lot to do. And here's the crazy part. They're getting busy, right? They don't put these things together. They start complaining about busyness in week four and five. They don't come to the recollection that, wait a minute, I'm busy because I've been doing for four weeks the tasks that I should have been doing the whole time. So your biggest problem in the second half of this is keeping them doing these tasks while they're busy because they're going to generate so much business. And that's the Point, you have to have a weekly meeting to keep everyone locked arms around this idea and then sharing why they're successful. So if I show up to that meeting and I go, there's no way I could do this. You better believe there is some team somewhere in there going, are you crazy? That was the thing we did that got us the most success last week. So you asked a question earlier, Jason. You said something about, what if I can't get my contacts? One a day is really hard. Keaton from our team was inspired by Brian's wife action. He goes, wait a minute. He's a nurse, and he works one day a month to keep insurance and kind of keep the things going. And so he goes in the hospital. He started going to the hospital a little more often for a shift just to kind of meet people. And so the next time he went to the hospital, he did a giveaway and on his floor, and he knows all these nurses and doctors. He works with them. And he just put a little sign up with his face on it and said, I'm giving away a $200 gift card to Spurrier is another great restaurant in town. And all you have to do is enter to win right here. And the enter to win was name, phone number, email, and you have to answer a question. Are you looking to buy or sell a home in the next six months? 24 people entered that competition that day. 10 of them said, yes, I'm looking to buy or sell a home in the next 12 months.
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B
Get out of here.
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A
So someone comes to the team the next week and says, oh, I can't get my connections. It's so hard. Keaton goes, I've got my five connections for five weeks just from one action. And it cost me 200 bucks.
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B
You know, it's so crazy because, like, if I closed my eyes and heard what you just said, I would say, you're telling stories from 2020. From 2021, brother. You're talking about something that happened 60 days ago.
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A
Yeah.
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B
That's incredible to me. So now I gotta ask, because I think you're brilliant, and I think this is brilliant. And we know there's no debating on what the result was. Friends, it was $20 million worth of business. Closed in eight weeks. Here's the question. Why do you ever stop doing this? Why doesn't this just become the way the Mills Group does business?
- [26:00]
A
We're about to do another one because we're in that lull. So we're in bold right now. So we're going to finish that up but we decided we're going to do this two to four times a year, depending on the market and depending on feelings. The thing is, people do get a little tired. And so we knew by the eight weeks, people were like, okay, like, I really got to keep doing things. What's so funny is this was now three months ago, around day 45, after the competition ended, we started hearing grumblings about like, oh, man, my business isn't looking the way. July was a really good month. Yeah, it was. And you know what I'm saying? And so they've caught on. Wait a minute. And so I asked them, I go, well, I'm assuming you had all the success. You must still be doing all the things from the campaign, right? Zero. No one is. And so we actually just had that chat in our most recent team meeting. And so we're going to be implementing another one after our session at BOLD is over, and everyone's actually really excited for it. So my point being is we've discovered that we can actually do this more often than not. I would say an aggressive cadence would be once a quarter. So two months. A quarter. You're doing it a month off and so on. But I say give it a shot and then find out what works for you. But people get a little tired, and then you got to let them get hungry, right? So they're going to go that month and be like, wait a minute, I'm hungry now. And so they want it versus if it was always a competition and it's not as exciting.
- [27:11]
B
Dude, it's so sage. There's this weird thing that happens where people stop doing the thing that works. And then all of a sudden, the result changed, and they're like, well, I don't know what it is. You stopped doing whatever was working. It's almost like you work out and you get to a point where you look in the mirror and you're like, I'm awesome. And then you start eating all the again, and before you know it, you're back to where you were before you started. I don't know why that happens, but it does.
- [27:36]
A
But then you want it again, right? So then you work twice as hard to get back to where you were. And so that's what we've discovered is through a break, we actually thought the team would want three months of break. It was after a month to a month and a half that they were ready to start it again. And then happenstantially, BOLD was happening. And so we pushed pause to do bold. And then we'll Start this again after Bold Gary Keller.
- [27:56]
B
And if you're new to the program, Gary Keller wrote the book the Millionaire Real Estate Agent with Jay Papazan and Dave Jenks, may he rest in peace. And Gary always says that the road to making a change in your life begins by setting a big challenge. This idea that you can set a big challenge that's gonna require you to change the way that you think and change the way you behave. And ultimately it forces you to set up your life around doing the activities. And I think that's spot on. And that's. Jonathan, that's what you did here, and that's why it's brilliant.
- [28:27]
A
And that's the kind of the biggest piece here. So I think the reason we're on this call today is because during Gary's Mastermind, I think you'd agree with somewhere around 70% of the conversation was surrounding fear. And this is, you know, the biggest minds in our industry coming together in the sacred space, and we're talking about fear, like, what's happening in this market. One of the conversations, how do we take a listing for two years? You know, those conversations were coming up, and there was a lot of fear around that. How do I negotiate these things, Whatever it may be, but it's also your agents. If the top, top people in our company are feeling this, you better believe the new agents are feeling this. And so Gary talks a lot about exposure therapy, and that's what this was. This was a safe space for eight weeks for people to practice exposure therapy and share the results freely with other team members and then get inspired by their. So they faced their fears. They did something that made them uncomfortable. They got success from it and realized it wasn't as scary as they wanted. So then it created this domino effect. We had three different competitions going on in three different hospitals as a result of this. People were looking for, like, hey, do you know a nurse? Like, you know, so they could go and put something. I. I'm not kidding. There were quite a few departments that were having little competitions going on simultaneously, and that was because one person tried it and had massive success.
- [29:34]
B
It's so good. By the way, he is on fear right now. He's writing a new course and all new writings around it. Friends, trust me on this. You're going to love when that comes out. All right, I want to switch gears. Jonathan, I got a question for you. I heard through the grapevine that you run your business, but you took somewhat of a sabbatical and moved to Manhattan while your business is running. Did I get that. Right?
- [29:57]
A
Yeah. So I lived in Manhattan last year. That's the interesting thing too, right? So in 2023, we sold 104 homes. And in 2024, January 8th, I moved to Manhattan and we sold 194 homes. So we actually doubled up in volume.
- [30:09]
B
And that's what's crazy because I knew the dates and you and I have not had this discussion before, but I gotta ask, number one, why Manhattan? And number two, what did you learn being that far away from your business?
- [30:23]
A
Great question. So Manhattan was always on my kind of to do list of something I wanted to do. In fact, I'd been wanting to move there since 2020 and just hadn't had the opportunity. At one point, I remember going to my team leader and saying, hey, I'm closing shop, I'm going to end the Mills Group and I'm just going to go move to Manhattan. I had been introduced to Frederick Eklund of Million Dollar Listing, which was my favorite show as a kid and was told I could be on his team. So I'm like, I'm gonna go do that. And luckily we have a lot of amazing accountability here in Keller Williams. And I rented a Brady Sandal. And he goes, you're using a lot of buts. You should be using ands. Why can't you run your team? And to go do that. And so that changed my mind. That was in 2021. So then I spent the next three years building a business, really two years building a business that would support me living my dream. And so that's what we did. And I. The only reason I came back is actually my number one agent. Well, this is part of how this all kind of came together. In November, my number one agent left the team to focus on being a mother. But she did 99 transactions in her first year as an agent on our team.
- [31:18]
B
Wow.
- [31:19]
A
She did 99 transactions. However, do the math, that's half the business. And so when she left the team, my lease was ending and I needed to come home and rebuild that section of our team. But for that year that I had it, we were running a really well oiled machine. And what I realized was if I can sit in the seat of coach. I took coaching skills camp and SPL Servant productivity leadership from Gary a total of three times last year while I was Manhattan, really honing in on that skill. And what I learned is when I got out of business and truly got away, you know, people aren't walking by the door asking me questions all day. I wasn't Having unnecessary, necessary lunch and coffee dates. I was really having phone calls that I needed to have and zoom. Meetings I needed to have. I was working maybe 30 hours a week. But my production level was exponentially higher because the distraction was so low. So that kind of part of bold about build a bunker Manhattan was truly my bunker and it's what created those results.
- [32:06]
B
All right, biggest difference between selling real estate in Gainesville and selling real estate in Manhattan.
- [32:11]
A
Time, time, time, time. So I was on a few listings. Like one was 5.7 million. A normal home in that price point in Manhattan can take upwards of two years to sell. Like days on market average is like six, 700 days. So you have to be very comfortable with these uncomfortable amounts of time. Versus in Florida right now things are taking a little longer, maybe 70 days, but that's 10 times less time. And when we hit the 70 day mark, sellers like, why isn't it sold? It's Florida and in Manhattan you just have to constantly have conversations. And the second, a close second, is in Florida. I've always viewed real estate as an amazing investment, right? So my sellers, who or my purchasers who bought a few years ago and are selling today, are making all this great money even despite the market, because of how things went in 2020 and 2021 and so on. In Manhattan, it was not uncommon for people to be losing seven figures on a sale and they were just like, yeah, that sucks, whatever, on to the next one. You know, just because they didn't like the kitchen anymore. So I thought that was really different.
- [33:05]
B
Oh, my gosh. Yeah. That is a different world. Dude, I think you're brilliant. I love what you guys did. I love how you gamified it. I sit here and my inside voice is saying, you're not running enough competitions in your life or your business. And if you want to make a change, go run a competition. I'm going to give you final thoughts.
- [33:24]
A
Jonathan, what you should have heard earlier is what I said about when I was at my previous brokerage in a single agent, I was still forcing myself to create competitions because there was an embarrassment, right? So I had posted on my door my volume production right next to my competitor on her door. And so when she had more volume on the board than me, that was somewhat embarrassing. So I would go out and get some more business. When you're a top producer, or if you want to be a top producer, one thing you're going to catch on to relatively quickly is we're in a business where you can make pretty crazy amounts of money. The money isn't the point of the game. At some point it's about, to Gary's point being the best you can be. And so I have to gamify things because I'm doing it to serve as many people as I possibly can and give away, you know, and create new people. Like having McCall sell 99 homes in her first year. That's what I'm in it for. No one just wakes UP and sells 99 homes. They have to be super motivated. And the motivation for me comes from competition. So to your point, find a way to create a competition. But I cannot emphasize enough. Find a way to also create some accountability amongst your team members where they're competing together and against each other, and then have accountability in team meetings where you can open and consistently on a weekly basis, in this case talk about wins and losses because that's where things will come up. They normally agents don't know what they don't know and they're not going to just go out of their way to ask you tough questions. But when they're trying to accomplish something and they're not winning, they're going to ask questions about how do I win? And if you're their only source of information, it's probably not going to be great. You're going to run out of ideas. But if they're competitors, like I would have never thought of doing a competition at the hospital, you know, to get more contacts. That would have not been my first guess or first suggestion. But it was grinds and then Keaton did, and then Aaron did it. And so my point is, when you have information coming from other places, people will get really creative if you give them the framework to work within and they'll compete at a really high level. The $150 gift card that they won was peanuts compared to the business they did. And one last example of that is Jimmy. In our first quarter, he sold two homes. He was a brand new agent. He had this limiting belief about maybe I'm not cut out for this business, right? He gets in this competition. He is an extremely competitive person. He was so mortified about the thought of letting his team member down. He sold a home every single week of the. He was the only person on the team to sell eight homes in eight weeks. He had sold two homes in the previous three months and in two months he sold eight homes simply because he didn't want to let his team member down. That's the power of accountability.
- [35:39]
B
There it is, friends. The power of accountability. Jonathan, thanks for Joining us today.
- [35:44]
A
Thanks, Jason.
- [35:47]
B
Simple, not easy. I mean, that's the key here. Here's the genius of Jonathan Mills. He stripped away everything that didn't matter and got down to a very select handful of activities. Lead measures that were going to result in the lag measure that he wanted. Let's just review the concept. When we say lead measures, we're talking about the things that we're doing. So if I said to you, I want to lose 10 pounds, the lead measures would be the calories that I'm eating and the amount of minutes that I'm moving. The lag measure would be the ten pounds. In this case, adding five contacts, one a day on a weekly basis, writing one handwritten note, making these five connections, having the three role play sections, hosting the two open houses. These are the lead measures. And he knows that if we do those things consistently, we're gonna get the lag measures. These are signing agreements and having closings. There's nothing innately brilliant about the activities they were taking, but here's the genius of it. They took them. Did you notice what he said? People that had done two deals in the previous five months suddenly did a deal a week. Friends. Activity leads to activity, which leads to more activity. And that's what he did. Putting people together with a partner and giving them a common goal, that's just brilliant leadership. Here's my question. Are you as clear on the activities that you need to be taking every day that Jonathan and his team got by running this eight week program? Are you tracking them in a way that makes you wake up in the morning and think about the actions you're taking? Or are you waking up and you're doing some good stuff? Because here's the deal. If you do some of it, you're going to get very little of the end result. But if you do a lot of it consistently, that's when big things happen. Gary Keller's fond of saying you can be anywhere you want to be within five years. You know how you get there? You figure out exactly what needs to be done. And you don't end that day or even start something new until you're one. One thing is finished in this competition. That one thing was generating leads and contacts. Go forth and do likewise. There it is. That wraps another episode. Friends. I don't know what you're taking out of this. I really don't. I'll tell you what I want you to be taking out of it, which is these are the people that are having tremendously big lives. And the reason it's happening is because they they're setting up the models and system to do just that. Gary Keller told me that leadership is teaching people how to think so that they do the things they need to do when they need to do them, so that ultimately they get the things they want when they want to have them. And that's what I want for you. You're all leaders, but it begins with leading ourselves. If you're enjoying this podcast, I want you to click the subscribe button anywhere that you get your podcasts. We want to be the voice in your head every single week and every week we're dropping new content. We also send out a newsletter at the conclusion of every show to make sure that you get the highest points in the models and systems that were discussed. So if you want to sign up, I need your name and your email address. Head over to themillionaire agent podcast.com millionaire agent podcast enter your name and your email address and every week that newsletter will be in your box. Friends, you just went on a journey. I hope that what happens between now and the next time we meet is absolutely wonderful for you. Thanks for listening. I'll see you next week.
- [39:23]
A
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