Grant Wise [00:00:00]:
Here's the thing. Real estate agents also want instant results. They don't want to put in the work anymore. And we got trained by this from the incredible demand that the pandemic market created.

Justin Havre [00:00:16]:
Welcome to the Grant y show. This podcast helps ordinary real estate agents build extraordinary companies. Let's grow in three, two. Hey, what's up, everybody? Grant wise here. Welcome back to the Grant wise show. I'm excited for my guest today, somebody that has become a great friend, somebody I've been blessed to be able to work with throughout this past year, and somebody that really needs no introduction. The man, the myth, the legend. Mr.

Justin Havre [00:00:42]:
Justin Haver. Justin has been the number one team at Remax at all of Canada for the last five or six years. Number three in the world recently made a transition from a brokerage standpoint and is set to just continue to set the world on fire. So, Justin, man, thanks so much for stopping in the studio with me.

Grant Wise [00:01:03]:
Hey, Grant, thank you so much for having me on here today. I'm super excited to be here.

Justin Havre [00:01:06]:
Yeah, I love it. Love it. So give everybody the backstory. I know that maybe not everybody knows you personally. I know it wasn't always like this. Right? The point of the show were interviewing people that have built extraordinary companies. And I know that every one of those interviews, nobody's never started that way. So give us the backstory.

Justin Havre [00:01:23]:
How did you all get to a position where you were number one countrywide for so long?

Grant Wise [00:01:29]:
You know what? It's been a fascinating journey to reflect on here over the last 19 years. And clearly I started my career as a new agent just like everybody else who chooses to become a real estate agent. And it really started with my obsession with survival. Survival of, again, having the leads and the opportunities. I remember sitting in a classroom when I was getting my real estate license back in the day when we used to have in person classrooms where my teacher basically said, look around this room, and in two years time, there's only going to be two of you left in this business. And I'm like, what am I doing here if it's such a big failure rate? And coming from a bit of an IT tech background, I knew that, again, Internet was where people were kind of flocking to, and this was back in 2005. And I made the choice to build a website and start to obviously invest into search engine optimization to make that website visible and get a lot of leads, because I believe that if you have leads, you'll survive. That's part of sales.

Grant Wise [00:02:37]:
So that was the start of it. And it's just kind of transformed into what it is today. Sometimes I have to sit and pinch myself because I never intended on building a team when I first got into this business. It is something that has kind of organically happened, and it's happened because of my obsession for generating leads and opportunities.

Justin Havre [00:02:58]:
Why do you think that that has made such the difference? Some people try to grow into this business and they do it solely based on the relationships. But obviously, it's kind of a rhetorical question for me. I get why leads are so powerful, but what do leads give you? What do they give the team that allows you to have so much success as you grow?

Grant Wise [00:03:21]:
Yeah, in my mind, it's pretty simple. In order for you to be able to do a sale or build a relationship in this business, you need to have someone to contact in order to start that relationship process. And back in the early days, it was probably what, 85% of people started using the Internet. Now it's probably more like 99% of people use the Internet as part of their home search. And for me, I looked at, this is where I wanted to invest my time, resources and energy, because this is where I saw that the biggest pool of clients would be so generating the leads, which we all know what a lead is in this opportunity. It's a name, phone number, or email of someone who is looking to transact in a real estate transaction in the future. So I just thought, you know what? This is what I need to focus on if I want to survive and not be part of that pool of agents that fail. And granted, that number is exceptionally high.

Justin Havre [00:04:28]:
I mean, there are statistics that show that 87% of people who get into this industry fail in the first five years, according to Nar. And that's the reality of this industry. And I think it's not something that someone should be scared of. It's something that someone should be aware of so that they can make the right choices and take the right action. Because selling real estate is really nothing like what we see on tv. A million dollar listing or selling sunset. It requires work. And yeah, I wanted to focus on generating the opportunities so that we could have as many people as possible to help and assist in a real estate transaction.

Grant Wise [00:05:12]:
So many people wake up in this industry and no idea where their next deal is coming from, just no idea what tomorrow is going to look like, what next week, what next month is going to look like. And you see a lot of people take that mindset into lead generation. And so I think, I don't know that necessarily sets somebody up for success. But when it comes to generating leads, you've tried it all. You are still actively doing a lot. What have you found to be some of the most effective means of acquiring more names, email addresses and phone numbers, people that you could talk to to sell houses?

Justin Havre [00:05:45]:
Well, I would say IDX websites. Right. Getting these websites, build them up, build out obviously community pages within cities, counties, whatever that is, and ensure that you can get high visibility with organic traffic. That has been my main source. You obviously have a lot of options with using paid traffic as well. The beautiful part about paid traffic is if you want to go on holidays, you can turn your business off and not generate any big amounts of new leads. But if you have high visibility organically, you really have no way of throttling that storefront, so to say of number of inbound opportunities that will come knocking on the door. And again, depending on obviously how high you rank in the search engines can really also dictate on the number of opportunities that you get.

Justin Havre [00:06:38]:
But I see that building these websites out for myself, that has been a massive, massive source of the business that we have had over the years. And we have also segmented now where we're doing more to traditional tv, billboards and radio for advertising as well. I've never really used a lot of print. When I was studying the NAR buyer behavior statistics of the buyer reports, they said less than 1% of homebuyers found their home via newspaper or paper. And I'm like, I'm not spending my advertising dollars there.

Grant Wise [00:07:12]:
Yeah, makes it pretty easy. Yeah, you told me this statistic one time, but you have a couple of websites that are predominantly most of where you all get your leads in your business. And didn't you say that the statistics, it was like $6 million worth of advertising that you're getting for free or something. Wasn't the statistics somewhat kind of crazy, like how much organic traffic you get on those sites? Yeah.

Justin Havre [00:07:37]:
Our company that we now use for search engine optimization, they calculated the amount of traffic that we generated on our websites here locally would equal to spending over eight and a half million dollars a year in Google Adwords. To put things into perspective, right. That's a lot of spend in order to attract the same kind of visitors and traffic to your websites. And clearly, when you're playing the search engine optimization game, first and foremost need to have the right company doing it. There are so many people who say they are experts in it, but very few are. And again, that's why you need to have someone that has a proven track record and not someone that just started up shop yesterday. I think it's vital to make sure that you have the right company doing it, and then you also need to have the patience. Search engine optimization is a long term game.

Justin Havre [00:08:28]:
You cannot expect to get results immediately or even within the first year. Sometimes it takes two to three years before you start to see an ROI on your initial investment.

Grant Wise [00:08:39]:
I don't think people pay attention to the sales cycle that exists in real estate enough. I know that you and I, we've worked together for a little while now, and we did somewhat of like a time study on the average time to close. And I just don't think enough people realize how long it actually takes to get a lead source up and running and to do it effectively, efficiently, profitably, scalably, and you have to invest quite a bit of money to be able to see the fruit from that. Not everybody pays attention to what you just said, which is it could take as much as a year or two to get those things. And not everybody has the patience. Not everybody has the cash flow. Not everybody has a lot of things. And it's kind of created this, I would describe it as this major unintended consequence.

Grant Wise [00:09:28]:
As the industry's grown, I would say somewhat accustomed to platforms like Zillow and Realtor.com and truly and others, they're doing a lot of that work to give the agent a more like, bottom of funnel opportunity. But the unintended consequence of that is that real estate agents have kind of funded companies that may or may not have their best interest in mind. I think that you've got to pay attention to how long it actually takes. You got to have the right mindset and expectations. What do you do? Can you walk us through your mindset pre SEO, really starting to take off? Because I would imagine when you're making those kinds of investments over a long period of time, and it's just what should an agent do? How should they focus? What should they be thinking about while they're waiting for lead sources to really start to take off in their business?

Justin Havre [00:10:18]:
Well, it's a great question, Grant, and I think that what is incredibly important for someone that's starting out today is to ensure that they have a game plan and they stick to one or two lanes that they want to focus on. I see so many agents, they want to do it all.

Grant Wise [00:10:34]:
Yeah.

Justin Havre [00:10:34]:
You can't focus 100% of your attention on multiple avenues of generating business. You got to pick a few and then get really good at it and be highly focused on it. And be willing to put in the time. Know, the wonderful part about paid traffic is that you can pretty much get instant traffic to your website and start tracking and measuring your ROI. But at the same time, if you have a Google Adwords lead and comparing that to, for example, a realtor.com or a zillow lead, they are essentially the same lead. They're just at the different time in their buying journey, right? So Zillow lead is far closer to, obviously transacting, know, a PVC lead. So it's just understanding that and just also having a mindset that there's no such thing as a bad lead. You have a name, phone number and email.

Justin Havre [00:11:27]:
As long as you have a diligent follow up and nurture process for that opportunity, you're going to position yourself where you can transact. Are you using video, for example, when you're working on nurturing these potential opportunities, using video alone will increase your conversion rate by over 70%. Right. In this conversion game, it's all about being the first person that gets face to face with one of these leads. These leads, they don't visit just your website. They visit five or more websites in their buying journey. And if they land on your website, you need to make sure that you obviously have speed to lead that needs to be top and that sometimes should be even like less than a minute, right? Although I've had moments where I've gotten a lead, call them and they're like, oh, that's creepy. You called me way too fast.

Justin Havre [00:12:29]:
Same time. We got to look at again, we're here now going into 2024. And as our consumers, they're trained by speed of information. Everybody wants the information right now. And I think where a lot of real estate agents are taking things either for granted or actually, here's the thing. Real estate agents also want instant results, right? They don't want to put in the work anymore. And we got trained by this from the incredible demand that the pandemic market created, the need and desire for housing, and the low interest rate that created this perfect boiling pot of just order taken. You want to look at a house grant tomorrow, 05:00 or 07:00? Which one works? Awesome.

Justin Havre [00:13:25]:
See you there. That doesn't require a heck of a lot of skill to call a lead to book an appointment, right? And then show the house, write an offer, instant gratification on a lead opportunity. And we're starting to see this now in some conversations online and so forth where agents are saying, oh, these leads are now crap. It's not that the leads are crappy. It's the consumer behavior has changed. So we as real estate agents also need to have the mindset that we need to change how we handle our consumers and how we are nurturing them and getting them to making those significant purchasing decisions. As long as you do a good job there, you're going to be positioning yourself to be the person that they're.

Grant Wise [00:14:16]:
Going to use 100%. This is a skill economy now. You've got to be constantly working on your skill set and refining what it is that you do. Because what we all got spoiled by two to three years ago is just not a reality anymore. It's long gone.

Justin Havre [00:14:30]:
Yeah, it's skill in action. 1000% skill and action. We have worked here, obviously in the Calgary market where from 2015 to 2021 we were in the worst economic conditions in Canada. And it was so bad that I even stopped doing market updates because it was just depressing. Sales down, prices down, and every month. Let's go, Justin. You got to do a New York market update video and I'm like, yeah, what? Everything's down. Cheers.

Justin Havre [00:15:01]:
I stopped doing it because I didn't want to be part of the negative news. However, even in this market, we were able to still continue to be the number one team in Canada for close transactions. So you got to have the mindset know, again, markets are always going to change, but people are always going to buy and sell based on circumstances and needs. It will always happen if the economy is bad, okay? Job loss, divorce, all those things that have an impact on people's needs for changing their lifestyle, essentially. So you just got to make sure that you are like water and you make sure that you obviously constantly work on your skill set to suit the consumer in the market that you operate in.

Grant Wise [00:15:47]:
Yeah, you've given some great little nuggets here. We talk about generating leads. It's important to have great systems and processes for follow up. It's important to leverage video. These are things that can get you in front of the consumer and stuff that we talk about all the time. But how do you know when it's time? When you're going from zero to first place, which is a climb, it doesn't happen overnight. How do you know when to add the next right source? Because I've been on stages. I've been at events, listening to people speak on stages.

Grant Wise [00:16:20]:
And what's interesting is a lot of the people that speak all speak about different things, but they're not talking about, like you said, the 15 things they did to have success. They're talking about the one thing they did really well over a long, sustained period of time that ultimately helped them become some of the most productive organizations in real estate. How do you know when it's right time to start adding that next thing? Like, should I focus on one source for a year or two or three or five? How do you know when to start adding stuff to the business to expand how you get customers?

Justin Havre [00:16:53]:
That's a great question, and I think there's no formula to it, in my opinion. I think a lot of it comes with intuition and your pulse on your business. Right? So if you have a good pulse on your business, okay, you're doing one lead source and that's working really well. Now, if you can take part of the revenue that you're generating from that lead source, and then you say, okay, what is the next lead source? That I want to add that maybe you're collaborating with other agents in different markets and you know what's working really well for them. It's likely going to work for you in your market. Then you add that, test that out, see how that works again, then measure your Roi on that as well. And then you continue to kind of build and stack. And over time, you can then really spread a much bigger net across the marketplace to capture more opportunities.

Justin Havre [00:17:45]:
And at the same time, building a brand. It's incredibly important to build a brand and build a personal brand in your marketplace because if you have a strong personal brand, that will also help you in the conversion of these opportunities that you generate online. And again, there's been many moments where I've made a decision, tested it out. Yeah, that was the wrong decision. That cost me a lot to essentially learn. But again, it wasn't necessarily a failure. I learned, okay, that didn't work. Now maybe take a different approach or try something else and just constantly sit there and test and try things out.

Justin Havre [00:18:25]:
And be also aware that it's okay to make the wrong decision, but also make sure that you make smart decisions based on the lessons that you learned from making that so called wrong decision.

Grant Wise [00:18:38]:
Your business. You described like you got leads first and then you started adding in the branding, the billboards, the stuff. A lot of people do that in reverse. A lot of people go do the billboards, the tv, the radio, the print, and then they start buying leads. Can you tell us what happened in the business when, okay, you got leads coming in, you've got opportunity coming in, you got sales coming in. Now you add the branding component. How did that change things? How did that accelerate the growth of the business.

Justin Havre [00:19:08]:
I think it really helped accelerate the business because it allowed us to build a brand, build a brand. But also the brand helps convert the opportunities. And again, I first started by adding a few radio stations, testing that out and you test it out for a year plus. And then it was adding another station, adding tv, testing out the different stations, the different programs where you want to show your commercials on. We even tested out doing a Super bowl commercial one time here in Canada. Again, significant investment. Was it worth the ROI? Don't know. Did people talk about it? They did.

Justin Havre [00:19:49]:
Right. And that's part of building a brand as well. You're not necessarily going to get direct ROI from doing a branding campaign, but over time, becoming the brand of choice in your marketplace will automatically help converting these leads. At the same time, create an abundance of inbound inquiries into your organization of people that want to buy or sell real estate. And it really where we are at today, when our agents speak to a lead, if they are here from our marketplace and they mention our team name, most likely they've heard of our name, they know it, they've seen it and it helps them with the conversion.

Grant Wise [00:20:29]:
Do you all budget for these things separately? Like do you budget for leads a little bit differently than you would budget for branding?

Justin Havre [00:20:39]:
Loaded question. It is a loaded question. Obviously you want to have in my mind, the branding comes with doing tv, billboards and radio. That is a big brand play. But at the same time, the intention behind it as well is also to generate seller opportunities while you're building a brand. So intentionally we do both with the mindset that, you know what, we are going to also generate leads, but at the same time, building a brand, obviously.

Grant Wise [00:21:10]:
It'S a great way to look at it. You're number one. As I've gotten into the direct marketing space over the course of the last decade, performance based marketing, I've always viewed them a little bit differently. And it's not to conflict with the way that you all are doing it, it's just the way that I always thought about it was let's pick a percentage that we reinvest in branding, which is anywhere from 5% to 20%. Companies will variate that range based off whatever their revenue is or whatever their growth goals are. But then on the performance side of the business, which is lead gen direct marketing, let's analyze the source itself. What's the average cost to get a customer with that source? And then let's pick a percentage that we flow back into the source. So I've always viewed them a little bit differently because branding is something we can't really track, but we know we want to invest in being able to be in the business.

Grant Wise [00:22:00]:
Obviously, I see the impact that your personal brand has on the conversion rates that come from the leads that you're buying. It's very impactful. But if we're going to acquire customers from Facebook, as an example, for $600 a deal, and we're going to net out $5,000 in commission as a result of that, we should invest 10%, 20% of our revenue back into that Facebook ad so that we can increase the spend and therefore the budget for that one source just goes from 300. I spent all day writing about this because we put out my first wise weekly newsletter today and it was all about data. It was all about how data is a language of business and how you can really nerd out and dive into the analytics of the business. And you can take a source from $300 a month to 3000 a month to $30,000 a month if you develop a formula for reinvesting in that one source of business. And so there's a lot of ways that I think companies look at it, and I'm always uniquely fascinated by everybody's formula or their mindset or whatever. I know you've always been a fan of two things, investing aggressively into your spend and also playing the long game.

Grant Wise [00:23:13]:
Could you talk about that a little bit more for the agent that's listening here who's like, I want a deal now, I need a deal now. How can they really rewire their thinking to think longer term?

Justin Havre [00:23:26]:
When I first got into this business, I don't even remember who it was or where I heard it, right, but it's something that stuck with me. And they said, always reinvest minimum 25% of your commissions back into your business. And that is something that stuck with me. So when I was doing that first deal, I took part of that money and I reinvested it. Okay? I knew that I wanted to build a website, I knew that I wanted to generate traffic to it, and I knew that I wanted to also do search engine optimization because I knew that that traffic, essentially, you don't have to pay for. Right? So if you need a deal right now, first and foremost, any real estate agent should really be focusing on working their sphere of influence and making sure that they build and nurture those relationships and make sure that you actually have a plan of action, of how often are you going to contact them, what information are you give them and what means of communication are you doing the simple thing of sending all your people a happy birthday video over commenting on their facebook saying happy birthday. Even that one little simple thing, I can guarantee you you'll probably get a deal in the first year because, you know, oh, my God, Grant, nobody's ever sent me a video for my happy birthday. You're the only one that did know.

Justin Havre [00:24:53]:
That makes an impact again. There's so many different websites out there, too. Allocate a smaller budget to doing some PPC to drive some traffic into your website. Learn the process in how to convert those leads and how to nurture those leads. And then make sure that you're diligent when you're doing so. Again, thinking long term, then take a portion of that commissions and don't go buy something silly. Go reinvest it back into your business. And for myself, I reinvest more than ever back into the business.

Grant Wise [00:25:28]:
It's such an important non negotiable.

Justin Havre [00:25:30]:
Yeah. And I mean, I think so many people that get into this business, they start making some money and, oh, you know what? Now I made it right. Then they stop working as hard or they stop reinvesting into their business. Guess what's going to happen? Your business is going to go down. Right. So for myself, I just have this constant hunger for continuing to grow and evolve. It's kind of fun to build a business. Obviously, it's gotten so much bigger than I ever, ever imagined.

Justin Havre [00:26:00]:
And I'm super grateful for the opportunity and honor to have the privilege to lead the people that I get to lead. But I also have that as responsibility on my shoulders. I essentially have 80 families that rely on me every single day so that they can put food on the table and roof over their heads. And that's an honor and a privilege. But at the same time, it has responsibility as well. And that is for me to make the right decisions and constantly look at how can I constantly move the needle forward when it comes from a brand standpoint, lead generation standpoint, or how to support them and how to convert these opportunities that we obviously invest a significant multiple, seven figures a year into our marketplace. And over the last many years, we even invested over $20 million into building this brand in this marketplace. But then this, now the team has essentially become a vehicle for those agents who we partner with, for them to use that vehicle to do what they're good at, and that is building relationships and handling the real estate transaction, essentially, while the company takes care of everything else that they don't have to worry about.

Grant Wise [00:27:27]:
I can imagine somebody listening to, like, 80 people. I don't know. I need eight transactions this year. I'm not thinking about 80 people, but I would imagine it wasn't always like that, right? You said you never imagined that you'd have such a big team when you're starting out, but you go to a place where you're like, all right, well, I'm going to sell a million dollars real estate this year. Okay, great. Then you do it. Then you're like, I want to sell a million dollars real estate this quarter and then this month, and then can I do that in a week? It's a progression that takes place as you go down this path of achievement, as you're constantly proving that you can do things, and then you want to take the next step and you want to do the next thing. And it's not something, if you're listening to this, you don't need to think about having 80 families to support right now.

Grant Wise [00:28:05]:
But how can you take what somebody has done to build that type of powerful organization and get to whatever your 80 ends up being? It might be that you have eight people that are on your team in five years. I don't know, but it might be they have 800. I don't know where you're going, but it's learning about, how can I take the lessons on the way to 80? I think it is a really powerful, powerful points you're making.

Justin Havre [00:28:30]:
It's all about the lessons along the journey. Right? And it's also incredibly important to not compare yourselves to others, because, again, we're human beings. But at the same time, in our industry, it's very easy for us to compare ourselves to the agent in the next cubicle who's perhaps the top producer that month, and what are they doing? And then we reflect on like, oh, I'm never going to be like that. That negative inner dialogue that we all have. But it's like, be inspired by the people who are where you want to go and observe them, check out again what's their mindset like, and then study their habits and then look at their skill set. They didn't get the skill set yesterday. This is something that they have constantly worked on. And all of these things obviously are part of building that business.

Justin Havre [00:29:31]:
You don't build the business in a day. It is all about running a marathon and just making incremental steps and investments and moves within the business to get to where you want to go. For myself, I spend a month in marketing expenses. What I used to dream about earning in a single year at the same time, there's many moments where I sit and I reflect, and it's pretty surreal of how big this business has gotten. But I think it's also important for me to have that reflection on my own personal journey through all of this and also know that, again, none of this stuff was handed to me. It's everything that this business is today I had to work for. I've had failures. I have hired the wrong companies, the wrong people, but I've also hired the right people because I learned something in hiring the wrong company or the wrong people.

Justin Havre [00:30:34]:
And you look at ways to like, okay, well, maybe that wasn't that right company. I found now somebody better, or maybe I hired the wrong person in the wrong position within the company. You always kind of study the business in every single aspect and find ways to constantly make improvements. And even to this day, where some people may look at our business like, oh, you know what? I want to get to building a business to that level, or whoever that is. I can assure you that those people are also looking at their own business going, oh, man, I have so much work to do. I have so many things to fix or repair or tweak or adjust. Right. So part of this entire journey, and I think it's, again, for people that looking at whatever that journey is and whatever level of success that the person that you admire to strive as or become, just know that it's perhaps part of the journey.

Justin Havre [00:31:34]:
But when you get there, you're going to realize it didn't change you who you are. Right. You continue to be the same person, and you're like, okay, now we're here. Look around. Maybe you bought a car. G wagon.

Grant Wise [00:31:50]:
G wagon.

Justin Havre [00:31:52]:
You're all excited about getting that vehicle. You drive it around for a couple of weeks, and you're like, okay, it's just a car. Now we got to keep going. Next thing.

Grant Wise [00:31:59]:
Yeah, exactly. I'm glad you brought up people, because this is where I wanted to go next. When you're building a company that's more performance based or you're leveraging paid advertising to grow an organization, were there platforms and or people that you found like, oh, okay, this was key to building this kind of machine that I've developed. What are the platforms that are really kind of critical to look out for in order to achieve the type of success that somebody might want to have?

Justin Havre [00:32:27]:
Well, people move money, essentially. Right. So the more people you have in your organization, the more money potential or income potential your company will have. But at the same time, you also have more liability essentially. But I think it's important that if you're a real estate agent, you're looking to start a team or grow your team. You got to really study how you want to run that business. What is your business model? How do you want to structure it? We have been working with the EOS model for several years now where we first, and it was actually really interesting when we worked with our implementer from EOS. We sat down in a boardroom and our implementer said, congratulations, you guys are all fired from your current position in the company.

Justin Havre [00:33:18]:
And we're like, is he joking? No, he wasn't joking. Right? And learning to design first the structure that you want to have of your business and then essentially building the seat, which would be the key responsibilities of that seat. That is going to basically be 20% of the responsibilities that will move 80% of the business and then finding the right person for that seat who has. They get it. They got the capacity and they want it. So making sure that you obviously put the right person in the right seat and you're going to learn from that, you may hire the wrong person. And I think if you want to grow the business, you got to get someone better than you at doing something that you are not good at doing. I think those are some of the critical pieces in your business where perhaps you got to swallow your pride and ego a bit and just admit that, hey, you aren't the best.

Justin Havre [00:34:19]:
And you got to then bring in outside people into the organization, whether those are vendors, partners, consultants, or they become staff. And I truly believe that if you want to have a successful business, you got to hire people that are better than you and rely on them to essentially take the business to the next level. And for myself, again, I've had many amazing people along this journey that have helped support the growth of this organization. Many are no longer with the organization, but the organization continues to evolve, and we constantly find new talents that will come in and that we didn't have before and that are now obviously helping the business to go to the next level.

Grant Wise [00:35:05]:
Are there things that you don't let go of? Like, are there strengths that you found that you had on the climb that you're like, I'm going to leverage these things because maybe I'm not the best at them, but there's some things that I'm really good at. Did you find that there were strengths that you didn't let go of?

Justin Havre [00:35:20]:
Yeah, I mean, you know what? I think the business has gotten to the point right now where I'm more kind of reflecting on myself, of saying, you know what? I need to allow other people to grow and develop, and I need to let go of some of these things and allow them to essentially sink or swim. Even if they sink, they will get up to the surface and learn to swim, but I got to allow them to build that skill set as well and try to be hands off. And I think as a business operator, that's probably one of the hardest things, and I think many people probably relate to that. And again, it's also about the inner growth that we have to do as well, of letting go and putting the trust in people that they're going to either learn or they'll get it right if they make a mistake. And we're all human beings. Everybody's going to make a mistake one way or another. But you got to look at that as like, okay, Grant, what did you learn from this? What would you do different knowing what you know today? And let's carry on.

Grant Wise [00:36:25]:
Man, this has been a great conversation. I really appreciate you. I know you've got a lot going on. I appreciate you taking the time to sit down and talk to us for a little while about how you went from where you were. Were you sitting down to see if you would be able to survive the real estate industry to where you are now. And there's so many lessons that can be learned. If I was listening to this and I was like, all right, Justin, I'm bought in. I think that maybe paid advertising might be a mechanism for me.

Grant Wise [00:36:55]:
I think some of that, I picked up on something you said. What would you give me as far as advice? If I'm like, I want to build something extraordinary, what is my step one? What do I need to do right now to go have success?

Justin Havre [00:37:08]:
Well, I think first and foremost, you need to have a foundation. You need to have a foundation of your current business. And that means by systemizing what you currently do so that it can be replicated. Creating the playbooks of, perhaps you create a playbook on how you handle a buyer, a seller. How do you do a buyer presentation? How do you do a seller presentation and document essentially every single step of your business? I think that is step one. If you want to build and leverage the business that you have built so that you can then put more people into your business to follow your proven processes that have gotten you to where you are today, what you're going to see through this is that you're going to learn from these people that you bring in to follow your processes. And it's going to grow and evolve. Right.

Justin Havre [00:38:03]:
But I think that is where you really need to start because you can't replicate and scale something if you don't have your own playbook on how your business currently operates. And then that gives, says that you plant a seed and that gives it the opportunity to grow and evolve. It's always going to be evolving, trust me.

Grant Wise [00:38:24]:
Yeah, that's so good. There's a lot of, whether they recognize it or not, likely visionary types that watch this show and interact and engage with it. And a lot of people that just don't understand how to sit down or that they should sit down and do what you just described. What's my business? How does it work? And then functionally, step one, step two, step three, start to document their business so that they can really hand this off to somebody else and start to grow in ways that they never thought possible.

Justin Havre [00:38:55]:
And I think that is the biggest struggle that a solo agent actually has. A solo agent that wants to get themselves out of the business. They struggle with that first hire. They struggle hiring. And if it's most likely an assistant and they don't have the time to train the assistant on what to do, well, you know what? When you hire that assistant, get that assistant to build your playbook to itemize every single thing that you do. That's their first job. Then they will learn as you go. But again, I think that is the biggest challenge that most people have, is that how do they hire their first person and what do they do? Because they are so busy selling that they don't have time to train them, and then essentially they end up letting their assistant go because they're not helping them 100%.

Grant Wise [00:39:48]:
Do we have a people problem or a process problem? Most people think they have people problems and they really have process problems because they've not written anything down. And so I couldn't agree more, and I could not be more thankful that you've spent an hour with me. I really appreciate you taking the time to kind of talk us through your journey and help people that are listening to this show understand what they can do to continuously take their business to the next level. And I appreciate you. I appreciate your friendship and just grateful that you spent some time with us.

Justin Havre [00:40:16]:
Awesome. Thanks for having me, Grant, and so grateful for you and our friendship as well and looking forward to what we're doing together here. And it's going to be exciting. 2024, that's for sure.

Grant Wise [00:40:27]:
All right, guys, thank you so much. And thank you that are listening for tuning into this episode of the Grant y show. This was a good one. I hope that you took notes. Now go take some massive action from what it is that you've learned today. We'll see you on the next episode. Peace. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Grant y Show.

Grant Wise [00:40:48]:
Please don't forget to subscribe to this channel. Leave us a review, and we'll see you on the next episode. Thanks.