Good Neighbor Podcast: Tri-Cities

EP# 124: Turning Challenges into Opportunities: Jim Griffin's Journey from Music to Real Estate Success with Griffin Home Group

• Skip Mauney & Jim Griffin • Episode 124

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What makes Jim Griffin with Griffin Home Group a good neighbor?

What if your greatest challenges could become your most significant opportunities? Join us in a compelling conversation with Jim Griffin, owner and operator of Griffin Home Group, who transformed his life from being a piano performance major into leading a top real estate team in the Tri-Cities area. Discover how Jim’s upbringing in a single-parent household fueled his passion for sales and personal growth, helping him navigate from music to a flourishing career in real estate. Jim candidly shares his insights on why individual expertise often trumps brand names in the real estate world and how misconceptions can be overcome with the right mindset and skills.

Prepare to be inspired by Jim's philosophy of empowerment through adversity and community impact. Uncover the innovative strategies behind Griffin Home Group, where real estate meets marketing to maximize client success, highlighted by the revolutionary Jim G Guarantee. As Jim opens up about the importance of accessibility, family support, and personal choice, he sheds light on the profound role real estate professionals play as specialists in people's journeys to success. Tune in to learn from Jim's experiences and gain motivating insights into how challenges can be stepping stones to success.

To learn more about Griffin Home Group go to:

https://www.griffinhomegroup.com/

Griffin Home Group

423-528-6674



Speaker 1:

This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Skip Monty.

Speaker 2:

Hello everyone and welcome to the Good Neighbor Podcast. We have a very special guest with us here today that I'm very excited to learn about them and their company, and I'm sure you will be too, as it is my pleasure today to introduce your good neighbor, mr Jim Griffin, who is the owner operator of Griffin Home Group. Jim, welcome to the show.

Speaker 3:

Thank you, man Appreciate it. Good morning.

Speaker 2:

Good morning. Hope you're having a good day.

Speaker 3:

Yes, sir.

Speaker 2:

All right, very good. Every day is a great day to do a podcast. So, like I said, I'm really excited to learn about you and your business. So, if you don't mind, why don't you kick us off by telling us about what you do?

Speaker 3:

So it's pretty simple. I'm Jim Griffin. I run a real estate team here in the Tri-Cities area, Been in real estate since 2007, but didn't really start practicing real estate until 2011. Part of my journey to getting to full-time real estate was a little interesting but been the top selling real estate team in the Tri-Cities since about 2015, 2016. And I've been having fun doing it, making a difference in our community.

Speaker 2:

Top selling huh. That's outstanding Congratulations.

Speaker 3:

Thank you much. Yeah, we're blessed. The average real estate agent nationally sells between seven and eight homes a year and we run about 320, 325 a year.

Speaker 2:

Wow, wow, that's incredible. Well, jim, how did you get into the real estate business?

Speaker 3:

So, you know, growing up I was raised by my mom and my grandmother, you know, and being in a single parent household gave me some, you know, some things in my life, some characteristics I was able to develop to go out and win and, you know, realize that I don't want to grow up, and my kids to grow up as I start to develop a family, necessarily with the things that I was not able to have, not that we needed anything, but there were things that I wanted.

Speaker 3:

But I've always been interested in sales and even in high school and elementary school actually started out in elementary school, school, you know, slinging pencils and notebooks and whatever, just to have that little bit of a side hustle.

Speaker 3:

But that ended up going on to where, when I went to college, I was a piano performance major and I had a defining moment about my sophomore year in college where I decided do I want to hate the gift that I have, that God's given me because it became my livelihood, or do I want to go out and create income and, hopefully, wealth, to be able to make a difference, because money is good for what money can do and what's the easiest way to create, you know, a massive amount of income or you know, to start building wealth, and it's real estate. So I ended up, you know, went into real estate sales and through some corporate stuff previously worked in the wireless industry and then ended up going into real estate sales and through some corporate stuff previously worked in the wireless industry and then ended up going into real estate sales and then it's been an epic experience failing forward ever since then. Wow.

Speaker 2:

So from piano to real estate? Yes, sir, I see one sitting right behind you.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that's my pride and joy right there.

Speaker 2:

Is that a baby grand?

Speaker 3:

No, it's just that it's upright. My grandmother actually we couldn't afford a piano when I was taking piano lessons, and so I literally would have to take Xerox copies of piano keys and tape them to the stairs of the apartment that my mom and I grew up in, and I'd look at the music, and that's how I had to practice, because I didn't have a keyboard. We couldn't afford a piano. And then, fast forward, ended up moving in with my grandmother and we got a piano out of the newspaper for like 50 bucks and I started taking lessons from a different teacher and they discovered that I had the ability to play by ear and also started learning really fast. So then my grandmother sold all of her cows what little cows that we had and bought this puppy Nice very nice.

Speaker 2:

Well, I can relate, man. I'm a musician as well, and I've played guitar since I was about six years old, and my brother was a musician and he chose the professional route. But you're you know, you're exactly right. I made the choice of. You know, this is a gift from God. Do I really want to make it work instead of pleasure? You know so and and so, yeah, I'll play at church, but anyway, so you moved on to real estate. In the real estate field, what are some myths or misconceptions about the business?

Speaker 3:

You know it's the consumer or the public as you have, it has a lot of. There's a lot of them, but you know some of the big ones are is that, first off, that all agents are created the same, that you know. This agent over here has all these accolades of these awards and half the alphabet after their name because of their designations, and this agent over here has nothing. They think that the agent or the brokerage is the one that's necessarily doing everything. Or they list with a certain list, or home for sale with a certain brand, because they think that that brand does something.

Speaker 3:

Really, it's a one-on-one business. Real estate agents are all independent contractors and they all run their business completely differently. And you can have somebody that's been in business for 30 years and you think, oh, they've got 30 years of experience, but they've sold one, two homes a year for 30 years. And then you've got somebody that's selling 15, 20 homes a year and they've been in the business for two years. The public will think that, oh, this agent has been in the business for 30 years, that's done their job 30, 40, 50 times in the entire time spans, versus the person that does it as an expert time and time again.

Speaker 2:

It's the one thing that they focus on, that that they're both equal when they're really not, when they're really not, all things not being the same. Yes, very good, very good. Well, outside of work, jim, what do you? What do you do for fun?

Speaker 3:

So I'm blessed with you have three kids, so I've got London, and Loughlin are my two boys, and then my fiance and I, her daughter Juliette, so we like to spend time with them. I know it seems kind of what most people say, oh, I like to spend time with my kids, but we really do enjoy spending time with the kids and then when we have time to ourselves, we like to travel, travel quite a bit, because I feel like, going back to the whole thing, god gave us one life. I want to experience as much of it as I can, and we don't know when that day is going to end. It could be tomorrow, it could be 10 years from now, and if we're working, why be stuck in that rat race of doing the same thing over and over and over again but not experiencing life? So we, we travel.

Speaker 2:

Travel and, of course, family first, which I always say is a good answer. If you say spend time with my wife and my kids, yeah, that's the right answer. So, but love travel too. Um so, jim could you describe a hardship or a life challenge that you've overcome which you touched on one earlier, but how that made you stronger coming out the other side.

Speaker 3:

You know it's a really good question and I'm a firm believer that you can have excuses or results and you can't have both. It's one or the other. There's so many different things that we have through people's lives. They grow up that they can choose to be a victim or they can choose to become victorious. And it would have been really easy for me to grow up and, you know, fall prey to oh, I was raised in a single parent household. Oh, my, you know my father wasn't around. Oh well, this, but we didn't have these things growing up and, you know, get stuck in that pity story and a lot of people do. A lot of people get stuck there.

Speaker 3:

I'm not saying that it's not real, but you have to come to the choice to say you know what? I'm not going to allow this to impact my life negatively. I'm going to turn this into something that's going to make me who I am and continue to grow, because it's my choice. It's my choice to allow the things that are in my life or outside of my life to take up my mind, space or to affect me. It's like life's going to happen, but we're the ones that determine what impact that has to us individually.

Speaker 3:

So that life challenge which a lot of people would see that could be a big challenge I decided to say you know what? I want to grow something big. I want to make a difference in my children's lives and at the same time, take my mom and my grandmother along for the ride with me. Because without them and them putting forth the sacrifices especially my mother, working multiple jobs at times, keep food on the table If she wouldn't have sacrificed her time and her energy to do that to keep things going for us, then I wouldn't be who I am today, I wouldn't be where I am today. Life would be completely different. So I want to be able to pay that. We're supposed to pay forwards, but I'm paying it backwards, back to my mother and then paying it forward by pouring into other people and mentoring other people that are in similar situations.

Speaker 2:

That is an awesome philosophy. I couldn't agree more. You're either excuses or results. I love it. And you can't have both. You can't have both. That's right. That's exactly right. Well, you are obviously not a victim. So I'm sure your mom and your grandmother is very proud of what you've done, not just in real estate, but in life. I'm sure, yeah, go ahead, I'm sorry, yeah, they're pretty lucky.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's right, that's right, and you're modest, so that's it for it thing. If our listeners could remember one thing about Griffin home, griffin, about you, what would that be? So?

Speaker 3:

is that we are a real estate company but really, at the end of the day, that we are a marketing and sales organization or a marketing and coaching organization.

Speaker 3:

We coach the people in my world to reach their full potential and we market our product. Our product just happens to be people's homes and or people's investments. And the fact that all real estate agents aren't created the same, that when you go to hire that person, whether it's me or somebody else, knowing that that person is an expert in their field just like if you were diagnosed with some life altering disease you want to go find the doctor that specializes in that one field. That's the one thing that they do day in and day out. It's the same with real estate, but a lot of people don't think about it that way. When it comes to what's typically their largest investment that they have to their name, which is their home, they just go with whoever they like, whoever has the pretty picture or whoever has the pretty ad in the homes book, versus really interviewing to see who's going to be the best fit for that for you and who's going to help you to negotiate to the most amount of money in your pocket.

Speaker 2:

Very good. Well, you mentioned you're a marketing company, which you know. I understand that. What, what do you do? I know marketing is key to just about any business.

Speaker 3:

What? How do you do? I know marketing is key to just about any business. How do you market yours? So we're home of the Jim G Guarantee, which is jimgguaranteecom, which is part of a guaranteed sale program, which is where we can't sell your home, we'll buy it for cash within a certain timeframe. We also have a cash offer program that gets us in front of different sets of clientele, different sets of buyers and sellers, and, at the same time, when it comes to how do we market the product that we have everything from Google local services to retargeting, to geofencing, to Paper click ads, to running billboards and TV commercials and radio.

Speaker 3:

And, honestly, a lot of people have heard us on the radio because they've heard Glenn Beck, sean Hannity, talk about me on the radio for years. They've heard on the conservative news talk on, you know, the country station or the top 40 station here in Jim G guarantee. Most people don't realize that, even though it's good that Jim Griffin is Jim G guarantee, until I'm like well, you know, I sell real estate. Until I'm like well, you know, I sell real estate, like, are you? Are you that guy that? Oh, you're Jim G guarantee. And I'm like yeah, that's me, but you know, when it comes to marketing.

Speaker 2:

the key is to explore every opportunity to get the most amount of exposure for your product and making sure that the return on that marketing is working to not just get the exposure but creating results. Absolutely Very good, very good. Well, jim, I can't tell you how much I've enjoyed chatting with you and learning about you and your fascinating guy and your philosophy. I love For those that would you know be interested in talking to you about doing business. How do we learn more about the Griffin Home Group?

Speaker 3:

So it's really easy. You can look me up on any of the social channels. Jim Griffin is my smiling face, but jimggaranteecom is my main site. But you can also give us a call at 423-482-0743.

Speaker 2:

0743.

Speaker 3:

Yes, sir.

Speaker 2:

All right, yes, sir. All right, I'm sorry.

Speaker 3:

I said I'm pretty easy to find most days.

Speaker 2:

All right, very good, very good. We want to make sure that's the case and hopefully we'll connect a lot of our listeners with you. So, jim, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you taking the time out to be on our show, and especially during, you know, in between the holidays, and I just want to wish you and Griffin home group and your family all the best moving forward.

Speaker 3:

I appreciate that. Thank you so much, man.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely. Thank you, and maybe we can get you back on the show sometime in the future.

Speaker 3:

Sounds good.

Speaker 2:

All right.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for listening to the good neighbor podcast. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to GNP, try dash citiescom. That's GNP, try dash citiescom. Or call 4, 2, 3, 7, 1, 9, 5, 8, 7, 3. 5, 8, 73.