In early May, I presented and posted the MMPT “Success is a Recipe. Follow It.” It was during that call that I outlined the 7 Characteristics of an Elite Level Producer: Clarity, Awareness, Commitment, Consistency, Skill, Innovation, and Patience. Using the “recipe” metaphor, the first 6 are the ingredients. Patience is the cooking time. You need the first 6 ingredients combined, prepared, and cooked properly.
Today, on this MMPT, I want to focus on PATIENCE… the characteristic that inspired this series of calls.
We live in an impatient culture. You can log on to your Amazon app and order anything and have it delivered same day, next day, and normally quicker than direct from the manufacturer. You can access Google and get any information you need in seconds. You can have a car pick you up in just minutes using the Uber app. ‘Selling time’ is a huge business, if not the future of business. These companies provide a lot of value and save us an enormous amount of time and convenience, but they’ve also spoiled us. We expect things quickly and we want our questions answered in just moments. It’s extremely hard for an impatient culture to think long term.
We are all "under construction" and living in this HGTV era, we want to jump right to the pretty stuff without focusing on the foundational principles like Mindset, Productivity, and Relationship Management.
I’ll speak about this in future MMPTs but the point is that you cannot skip through phases of growth. In life, we have what we call the LAW of Gestation which states that "every process needs to go through a period in which it is conceptualized and actualized.” You’ve heard me repeatedly say, “You plant in the spring and harvest in the fall.” From seed to table takes time. You can’t speed up the process. You just can’t.
You have to “plant seeds” every day. If you don’t plant, you don’t harvest. Planting seeds in our business is any prospecting and personal brand-building strategies. Once the seeds are planted, you need to cultivate, water, weed, etc. If you don’t, again, there is no harvest. The ELP understands this and that PATIENCE is so key to success.
Phase 4 of the “Six Phase Meditation” has you visualizing your life 3 years out. “We overestimate what we can do in 1 year and underestimate what we can do in 3.” That phrase, again, reiterates the importance of taking the long term view and being PATIENT.
An ELP plans 3 years out, annually, and quarterly with definite goals and objectives for each timeframe. One should build quarterly objectives to hit annual goals, set annual objectives to hit your 3-year goals, all with a 10-year vision in the back of your mind. For more detail on this process, I highly suggest you read “The Buddha and the Badass” by Vishen Lakhiani. I just finished it this weekend and in Section 3 of the book, he goes into great detail on how to be a visionary and build the metrics that will allow you to meet your long-term vision. I found the book to be incredibly powerful and a timely read. He also puts emphasis on the 10-year vision, but 10 years might sound overwhelming for most so let’s focus on quarterly, 1-year and 3-year. CLARITY is where we started 7 weeks ago. Hopefully, you’re starting to see how all of these 7 Characteristics build upon and rely on each other.
I can tell you that the biggest transformations that I’ve seen agents make in my 9 years of coaching and training have taken 2.5 to 3 years for that agent to be operating at a completely different level. These case studies are with agents that are new to the business/market to 15M+ in production or an agent tripling an already highly productive business. My personal stabilization from “essentially unemployed” to a 37M producer took 5 years, but it was done in the heart of a financial crisis. These transformational times of growth definitely include serious failure, valleys, and difficult times. There is no straight arrow up. Those that win "focus on winning the day to win the week, so they can win the month in order to win the quarter which results in winning the year and thus meeting their 3-year vision.”
Team, PATIENCE, just like CONSISTENCY is a choice. You either move forward every day with confidence in your plan or you don’t. The one thing I have heard consistently from these agents that have created drastic change are that when they look back, they value every minute of it despite their challenges. Here is more specifically what I heard from brokers that have made these drastic breakthroughs:
“Jim, there were times that I didn’t think I could do it. It got really scary but then things started to click for me. Looking back, I’d do it all over again. Every minute of it.”
“Jim, you were right. It takes 18 months to get into a rhythm, 2 years to make good money and 3 to make really good money.”
“Jim, I didn’t want to believe you. I thought I was different and could speed it up. I have so much experience in my previous career that I thought it would immediately translate. It didn’t. It took time to find the clients and have them trust me.”
So, team, PATIENCE is vital to long term happiness with your business.
Hopefully, you’ve enjoyed this series on the 7 Characteristics of Elite Level Producers. On our next call, I am going to review these characteristics through a fictional case study based on actual events that I’ve observed over the years. I’ll pull all of the characteristics together and show you how one goes from just the “recipe” to the table.
