Build A Real Estate Machine That Works Hard For You With Jay Abraham

Scaling your real estate business, or any business for that matter, is one of the greatest challenges an entrepreneur faces. It’s Jason Williford’s turn in the hot seat as he joins Jay Abraham, the Founder and CEO of The Abraham Group, Inc, on The Ultimate Entrepreneur podcast. They sit down to discuss their book, The Ultimate Real Estate Machine. The co-authors dive deep into the purpose of the book and how it will assist real estate agents in building a highly profitable machine that’s scalable and offers freedom for leaders. Jason breaks down each chapter with key insights you need to look out for to get the most out of the book. Gain transformative, career-making insights by tuning in!

—

Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Build A Real Estate Machine That Works Hard For You With Jay Abraham

How Real Estate Agents Can Build A Prestigious Brand & Have Explosive Growth With More Freedom & Less Risk

My guest is a very high-performing real estate broker agent. He and his partner have built one of the most successful real estate businesses in the Atlanta field, but he has long been in the top 1% of all performers in the industry. I’ve done some very interesting collaborations with him over the years. I’m impressed by him and his values. He’s committed to my strategy of preeminence. He’s on a crusade of the highest level to bring an elevated sense of contribution, value creation and preeminence to the high-performing real estate industry.

He has asked me if we could collaborate on a project, which turned out to be a very special book. The title is The Ultimate Real Estate Machine: How Team Leaders Can Build a Prestigious Brand and Have Explosive Growth With More Freedom and Less Risk. Jason Williford is my coauthor on the project and a very passionate advocate of preeminence in the residential real estate profession. How are you?

I am doing wonderful. How are you?

This is going to be fun. What I’m going to do is very interesting. Parenthetically, about a few years ago, Bulletproof Coffee icon, Dave Asprey, wrote a book called Game Changers. He didn’t want to talk about it himself. He had me interview him about it for his own podcast. In this episode, I’m going to interview Jason about our collaborative book because I don’t want to be the voice.

I want him to express why, how and what it’s designed to do and for whom. It would be very interesting. It’s a cool book. It’s hard lessons Jason has learned in the real estate profession. He has taken a lot of input he has gained by years of studying my methodology. We’ve integrated it into a unique proprietary theorem for any high-performance real estate leader and a leader for anybody who’s not in real estate. That is a man or woman who runs a team of high-performance agents that do various things.

They may all be selling or maybe support, but it’s a high-performance elite team that is focused on usually a niche of real estate or maybe many. They’re all unique and elevated performers who are marching to the beat of a very different drum. They’re not average or mediocre. This book and Jason’s passion are designed to elevate and accelerate high-performing real estate leaders and their teams to stature an achievement beyond comprehension.

As we do this interview, while enjoying almost an aberration and an outrageously remarkable seller’s market, the prospects and the forecasts won’t last forever. This is an enduring book that I’m very proud to be associated with that is designed to help people capitalize on now, but also on any kind of an economic, competitive, transformative and disruptive environment that happens. There’s a lot of disruption happening. At that stage, first of all, I’m going to ask the questions as an interviewer. I’m not going to make a lot of comments. Jason, you are the voice of both of us. Why did we write this book?

The quick story of why we wrote this book, as you know, I had a close call with death. I was in the ICU. A lot of things happen to me when you see someone die in the room next to you. What later became of me is my life mission changed and that changed to positively impact ten million or more lives directly or indirectly, with or without receiving recognition for it. Why I wanted to write this book with you is because I’ve always modeled you for the past few years. My partner and I started out with $700, dead broke between the both of us, not just to launch a business but also to support our family.

We both lost everything in the Great Recession, which is another reason I wrote the book because the market is already starting to see signs nationally of a potential shift. The indicators are already there with some of their seasonality, but some of it is the shift. We drew a line in the sand in November 2011 that we were fed up with living life the way that we were living it.

We said, “Let’s launch into business together.” My partner had been in real estate previously. I’ve been in 100% commission sales since 1999. We launched and then we built an Inc. 500, the 354th fastest-growing privately-held company in America, then 904 the year after that and 1345 the year after that. We have had exponential growth year over year.

The reason for writing the book with you is a lot of the timeless principles that I’ve learned from you through the years before you even knew who I was is what the book is about. It’s not about the latest and greatest Facebook campaign, ClickFunnels, etc. This book is strategically written to be a book. Even Kevin Harrington from Shark Tank said it right in the book, “This book is the business Bible for those looking to grow a sustainable real estate business that thrives, a book to keep forever and refer back to when you’re faced with business challenges.”

That’s how the book was written and why it was written, to impact the lives of not only team leaders. I think that is one thing. The book is not perfect. There probably is no perfect book other than the Bible, in my humble opinion. It’s written for team leaders, but it’s also for any successful agent that wants to break out of being a real estate agent and build a profitable, sustainable, preeminent business with longevity.

It also ties very closely to the mortgage industry. I think these team leaders should not only be getting the book for themselves because without a doubt, there is definitely gold all throughout the book, but also getting it for their vendors, loan officers, title attorneys, etc. There are golden nuggets that they can all take and get it for their team members as well. That’s a part of preeminence. It’s not just the team leader who can be in the mindset of preeminence. That’s something that you have to lead your entire organization to and be highly focused on the external and internal clients so you can collaborate to get to where everyone wants to go.

I’m doing this interview as if I was not part of it. It’s got fifteen very rich, sinewy, no-nonsense, non-theoretical chapters. Let’s discuss what, why and how each chapter fits together. I’m going to go through them. Chapter 1, Launchpad to Exponential Growth. What’s that about?

The Launchpad to Exponential Growth is what it is. It is a launchpad getting ready for takeoff. What I mean by the takeoff is exposing those pain points, not just current pain points, but pain points that have been in the industry for many years. Brian and I spoke about Zillow. Zillow owns even the domain name RealEstate.com. It’s how powerful they are. They have more data than anyone. They’ve made a statement, “We’re taking off the instant offer.” It’s a buying program. They put a halt to it and said, “We’re not doing that anymore.”

They ended up getting their rear ends handed to them, which I think is a great win for the market and the real estate agents, in general. My humble personal opinion, and a lot of agents believe this, is that what Zillow would absolutely love to do is disrupt the industry. I did the figuring one time. I can’t remember how much I came up with. It’s approximately how much commission is paid by the American consumer to real estate agents nationally throughout a given year. I can’t remember the exact number but it was billions. Someone would love to intercept that money, cut out the real estate agent and link the buyer and seller.

The Ultimate Real Estate Machine: How Team Leaders Can Build a Prestigious Brand and Have Explosive Growth with More Freedom and Less Risk

The Ultimate Real Estate Machine: How Team Leaders Can Build a Prestigious Brand and Have Explosive Growth with More Freedom and Less Risk

How does that relate to launching exponential growth? I want to keep on point because we got a lot of ground to cover and we have a very short period to do it in.

How that ties into the launchpad for exponential growth is basically pulling out the issues that real estate agents have now and for many years, and how we are going to be showing them ways to solve their problems throughout the rest of the book.

You’re going to help them identify what they are because oftentimes, they don’t have clarity and concreteness. You can’t solve problems if you don’t know what they are. Conversely, you can’t realize all the opportunities if you don’t know what they are. Don’t you agree?

I would agree 100%. We then go into Chapter 2.

Now you got Chapter 2, Unleash Your Creative Breakthroughs Plural Genius. What does that mean? What’s it all about? Why?

I knew I had to change the reader’s paradigm before we got into the meat of the book because I feel that it’s our job as authors of the book for this not to be intellectual entertainment. It is a book that they take action upon. That’s why most of the chapters have massive action assignments at the end of them. They don’t even have to take the action in every chapter. I would highly suggest taking actions in every chapter, but if they just took actions in one chapter, they would see growth within their business, without a doubt. The reason for Chapter 2 is to program their mind to think differently and expand their thinking to a new way of doing business.

I have to make a point. You probably made it but I was thinking myself about it. I might be a little lazy myself, but in every chapter at the end, you give a massive action assignment. It’s not abstract. It’s very powerful. Let’s go into Chapter 3 which is Stepping on the Scale. What does that mean?

What that means is just like if Jay wanted to go on a diet. Before he goes on a diet, he needs to step on the scale to know where he’s at so he can get to where he wants to go. We can then create the roadmap to get from point A to point B.

There was a course that I did years ago called Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be. It reminded me of the old sailing ship with the three-point section where they have to figure out where you are and where are you trying to go. Those three points, you can’t get to where you’re trying to go if you don’t know where it is. You can’t get there if you don’t know where it is and if you don’t know where you are.

You have to get there the safest and fastest, but with the least probability of failure. Even though we’re talking about this book for real estate leaders, many of the concepts you are sharing apply to anybody in the business. Maybe not this book but the premise, the promise, and the processes are all the same. Let’s look at Chapter 4, The Preeminent Agent. I have a lot of thoughts on zipping my lip for this interview. What is the preeminent agent and how does that factor against the majority of agents?

I’m probably going to sound like a broken record to you. The preeminent agent is the strategy of preeminence for the real estate agent, which is falling in love with your client, above and beyond your product and services. It’s about not selling them too much of a home that they can afford, but it’s also not selling them too little of a home that they can’t stand in and is a bad investment for them. It’s about viewing from the top of funnel marketing. Before they are literally your client, you are viewing them as a client and being their trusted advocate. I would write advertising copy for our radio campaign and these industry disruptors came in quickly into the Atlanta market because it was one of their very first stop stopping points.

That’s when I had the choice to make that I need to change this message up a little bit because they’re saying things like, “Sell your home with no staging, no open houses, no showings, etc.” That’s when I made a choice and we could have made a choice like, “Let’s have a similar instant offer program,” and we do. The preeminence in me made a choice that, “It’s my job as a trusted advocate of the consumer to educate the consumer even though these radio ads that say, “An instant offer maybe a good thing for you if your home is in distress or if you’re in distress. Other than that, this is not a market that you want to give all your equity away to an investor.” That was paraphrased but that’s the mindset that I took straight from preeminence. Let’s be that trusted advisor or advocate for the consumer to educate them so they make intelligent choices.

It worked for your real estate business.

I feel educated and differentiated, not just from the top of the marketing message but that message had to be trained to the agents as well so when they went on listing or buyer appointments, they had a similar message and we did it. For a small group of people, it can be a good program. If they’re about to lose their home, they get an offer. It’s better than losing your home and all your equity. The truth and the irrefutable truth is that an investor is buying the home and needs to make a profit. They aren’t going to give you top dollar for your home.

You’ve got Chapter 5, The Value of a Lifetime Client. What does that mean?

What that means is I’ve made this mistake unintentionally and many in the real estate industry make the mistake of, “We closed the deal, now we get busy and move on to the next client.” We forget to love the one that you’re with. It’s like that old song. It’s those people who are your past and current clients, and staying top of mind with them at a high level to make them lifetime clients.

Real Estate Machine: No matter how great, how profound, how amazing, how profitable your business is, there’s always a sticking point.

There’s an example within the book of how they can come up and calculate what the lifetime value of a client is. It’s not just one time of Jay Abraham doing business with me, but what is the value of Jay doing business with me 6 to 7 times over a lifetime? If I have a predictable referral system in place, how many referrals will Jay approximately send me on average over a lifetime? There’s even a part in the book that they can calculate what the lifetime value of a client is. It’s made very simple and easy. As Einstein said and I kept this in mind while writing the book, “Any fool can make things complex, but it takes a real genius to make things simple.” I tried to simplify as much as I could too.

Chapter 6, The Real Estate Sticking Point Solution. Before you talk about it, I had a very successful book called The Sticking Point Solution. Let’s see how Chapter 6 mirrors and matches that. What’s it all about?

The sticking point solution is about when the market shifts and/or an economy shifts. It’s not just that, but it’s also about any time that you can be stuck in your business. It even ties into life when you can be stuck in your life. The truth is just like you when you live in a world of optimization that even in those sticking points, your business is stuck. No matter how great, profound, amazing and profitable your business is, there’s always a sticking point, and usually many sticking points that you unleash and break through that log jam. It can open it up. It opens your business up for higher profitability and growth, and being more sustainable with more longevity.

The premise of that chapter is there were a lot of hard lessons learned from me and the industry in the Great Recession. I personally lost everything. I’m real and authentic about my story. I lost every darn thing. I learned a lot of hard lessons. There are a lot of other real estate agents that did. That’s an amazing chapter for them to be proactive and preemptive the next time it happens or so that it doesn’t happen to them again in the future.

The point is all of these are designed for a duality of application for the leader to be able to lead with far more strategic and tactical might. It’s to elevate themselves and their organization to a much more rarefied and stratospheric role in the mind’s eye of the market that stands out and is totally differentiated and preemptive. It’s also to challenge them to think differently about every facet of the real estate business.

It’s geometric growth.

Chapter 7, Nine Drivers. Tell me about it.

The nine drivers of exponential profit are designed for many real estate agents and I have been there for a long time. When I look back several years from now, I would probably say the same thing. Several years ago, I didn’t see all the opportunities in front of me, all the hidden assets and the pitfalls that you can fall into, etc. The nine drivers are designed to look at the different opportunities that they have for exponential growth.

Driver number one is my favorite personal topic, which is about marketing. I truly believe that strategic marketing can solve many business problems. I even asked you that when we had our very first interview and you’re very hard to get thrown off track, but I think I threw you off maybe for a couple of seconds. I asked you a question. The question was, “Who wins Jay, the strategic marketer or the master strategist?”

You thought for a second and then you quickly responded and said, “The strategist wins.” I would have to agree that the strategist does win because the strategist is going to know the master marketing plan that needs to be executed. There are nine different drivers within that chapter. Systems, processes, procedures are some of the drivers in there.

Let’s move on because there are a lot more to cover. Chapter 8, What Are the Marketing Principles that Separate You From All Your Competition?

Some of the marketing principles that separate you from all your competition tie back into the strategy of preeminence that ties back into why real estate agents fail. The number one reason why real estate agents and team leaders fail is they are not true marketers. As one of our friends says, “The greatest agent does not win. The greatest marketer wins.” The reason why is because they’ll never know who you are if you’re not a master marketer. In that chapter, it goes into the principles of not just branding. A lot of real estate agents think, “Let me brand myself and put myself on a shopping cart or a billboard,” and have no call to action. That chapter is designed to train them to be direct response marketers.

Let’s talk about Marketing Mistakes That Cost Huge Profits.

Within that chapter, there are 29 mistakes that real estate agents and team leaders can make. I’ve made all of them. Even within my business, I’ve been reverting back and reading this book to solve some of my issues. In optimization, there are always challenges and things to fix and optimize. That chapter quickly lays out mistakes that real estate agents are having in marketing that honestly has cost me and our company millions and millions of dollars primarily in opportunity costs. It’s how they can keep from doing that.

Chapter 10, Inside Sales Agent Leverage. What does that mean?

That’s one piece of the real estate machine that helped our business exponentially because the problem in real estate is not lead generation. The problem is the lead conversion or converting that lead to a closing. That’s one big way that we have solved the problem of real estate agents not wanting to call leads. One thing I’ve found out is that where most real estate agents and most team leaders are the most powerful is when they are in a face-to-face listing appointment or a buyer appointment. What that also does for the team leaders’ business is that it gives them a great differentiated value proposition that, “We don’t just provide leads. We provide face-to-face qualified set appointments.” You don’t have to call a bunch of leads.

Real Estate Machine: The problem in real estate is not lead generation. The problem is lead conversion and converting that lead to a closing.

That was your whole process.

It was a part of the process.

Let’s talk about Innovation and Value Creation. That sounds provocative. What is that all about?

I tie it into Tony Robbins’ Business Mastery, which I had seen you in 2015 when I went to that. It’s fourteen hours per day in four days. It was an amazing conference. I think a good bit of material may have come from you for that course. I could be wrong on that. Tony says, “What are the three highest dollar-producing activities that you can be doing as an entrepreneur?” Number one is strategy. Number two is marketing. Number three is innovation/differentiation. Tony talks about what innovation is. In the simplest form is, innovation is creating value in your market where it does not exist. That’s what that chapter is about.

Chapter 12, Magnetic Referral Generation Systems. That sounds cool. What’s that?

Borrowing from you as I have over the years, you asked the question and now I ask the question a lot. The question is, how many predictable referral strategies do you have in your business that predictably generates referrals? Referrals are the number one most proven, most profitable, most overlooked and underutilized lead source for real estate agents. I know this through my own mistake. We were spending $80,000 to $100,000 a month on marketing to generate a client. What we did not have in place is a referral generating system, which is what we built our business off of, to begin with.

The 99.9% of real estate agents’ common answer is 0 to 2 strategies in place. That’s one thing that I took, with your permission, from your lead agent referral mastery, where we developed 217 predictable referral strategies that allow these team leaders and agents to create a system. It’s not only 217, but if you have 0 to 2 and then you have 10, 20 later on, that’s when you have a system in place, which is pretty much like a cash vending machine that sends you referrals on demand.

How about, Either You Are a Multiplier or a Diminisher? What in the world is that all about?

You’re either adding value to the market or not. You’re either being a great leader or not. You are adding massive value through innovation always or you’re diminishing at any given time. That’s just a brief synopsis. I’ve been both a multiplier and a diminisher. It’s either you are green and growing or you’re brown and dying at any given point.

This is very much like Physics. You’re either expanding or contracting. You can’t stay static. Chapter 14, Four Steps to Greatness from Mediocrity to Magnificent. That sounds pretty auspicious. What is that all about?

I would have to know what auspicious means.

It means pretty significant, substantial, important or cool.

It came from your podcast, The Ultimate Entrepreneur. In that show, you even gave permission, “What I want you all to do is to deliver this to your team,” so I did that. The first time that I delivered it, which was rusty the first time, it got better the second time. There were agents that cried in that meeting and the reason why they cried wasn’t that they were sad. They knew they had a profound moment that they had greatness inside of them that they were not tapping into.

As deeply explained in that chapter, God creates all of us for greatness. I’ve even heard you say before that sometimes you toss and turn at night by the number of people who do not strive for greatness when God did create all of us to live a life and have a business of greatness. There are only four simple steps to take to get to greatness. That chapter outlines that.

We are bringing it all home, What Losing Teaches You About Winning.

That chapter was from your body of work that you did with Fran Tarkenton, which was for those that don’t know on the show, he did not win the Super Bowl. Is that correct?

He played thrice and didn’t win.

He’s an amazing quarterback. He’s from the University of Georgia, my team as well which is pretty cool and he is from Atlanta. What he goes into is to have success, you have to have failure. As a pendulum swing, I’ve had to overcome a lot of adversity in my life. I think the pendulum swings as much adversity as you’ve had. It also swings back in the same direction as how much resilience you have built. Going back into, “You’re going to have a lot of failures.” I’ve seen Walt Disney pitched over 300 times for investors to invest in Disneyland after he already had an established name. One person said, “Yes.”

Real Estate Machine: Referrals are the number one most proven, most profitable, most overlooked, and most underutilized lead source for real estate agents.

The Chicken Soup for The Soul people that I know who sold 100 million or 200 million copies had to present it to 100 different publishing people before somebody said yes. Let me summarize. At the end of reading this book, I always say the person that picks up a book should be different from the person that puts it down at the end. If you’ve done your job and your writing partner, Jay Abraham, what should the reader, the team leader or the agent get out of this? How should they be transformed?

One thing I can’t do is I can’t force people to take action. If they read the book for intellectual or entertainment, their mind will be programmed differently. They will not be the same after reading the book. If they look at it as not just a book but as a roadmap to exponential growth, and they take action and do all of those massive action assignments within the book, I am certain that they will have significant growth and sustainability. My offer in the book is that we’ll give you 200% of your money back and I would make it a 1000% money-back guarantee if you did all of those massive action statements within the book and your business did not change. There’s no way it could not change for the better.

There are 246 very no-nonsense, non-theoretical and sinewy pages. It’s Jason Williford and Jay Abraham’s transformative book, The Ultimate Real Estate Machine: How Team Leaders Can Build a Prestigious Brand and Have Explosive Growth with More Freedom and Less Risk. Jason, you did a good job. I appreciate you. You did a fabulous job of integrating two belief systems. I hope that team leaders around the country, in North America and anywhere else who will read it will be able to use this book and the lessons it teaches to not only be much more successful, but to engineer and architect enormously greater success, first and foremost, for the clients they serve and secondly, for all the agents that put their careers and professional faiths to those leaders and their teams. Good luck to both of us. Thank you. I’ll be watching how we do. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Have a great day.

Important Links

• https://www.Abraham.com/
• The Ultimate Real Estate Machine: How Team Leaders Can Build a Prestigious Brand and Have Explosive Growth With More Freedom and Less Risk
• Game Changers
• RealEstate.com
• The Sticking Point Solution
• The Ultimate Entrepreneur
• Chicken Soup for The Soul
• https://Drive.google.com/file/d/13BwVpfdc3joMoEoTLPQwTy2jjPcLMOA5/view

About Jay Abraham

Jay Abraham The 21.7 Billion Dollar Man & Highest Paid Marketing Consultant: a proven business leader and top executive coach in the United States.

As Founder and CEO of The Abraham Group, Inc. (Los Angeles, California), Jay has spent his entire career solving complex problems and fixing underperforming businesses. He has significantly increased the bottom lines of over 10,000 clients in more than 1,000 industries, and over 7,200 sub industries, worldwide. Jay has dealt with virtually every type of business scenario and issue. He has studied, and solved, almost every type of business question, challenge and opportunity.