Justin Landis: The Free Tool That Shows You If Your Five Year Plan Actually Works

Justin flies solo this week to walk through a free tool he built to help agents pair their five year vision with the actual math behind it. 

GET THE FREE CALCULATOR HERE

After an agent told him they wanted to net $500,000, sell 25 houses a year, work 30 hours a week, and run a full staff, Justin realized the numbers didn't add up as written, even though the goal itself was completely achievable. 

In this episode, he walks through three real scenarios, the solo agent with full support, the lifestyle agent who wants no management at all, and the lean team builder, showing exactly what price point, transaction count, and expense structure it takes to hit each version of that ideal future.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So right now, Bolst has maybe 310 or 20 agents, a couple offices. Five years ago, Bolst did not exist. I had never heard that word before. And so in five years, a lot can happen. Things can be completely different. Things that were not created can be created and can be up and running. So ask yourself the same thing in five years. What have I accomplished? Who am I around? What does it feel like? What have I earned? What have I invested in? What does my day-to-day look like? How many hours am I working? You can start to ask yourself all of these questions. Welcome to the Just Amanda Show, your real estate podcast about having conversations, building relationships, and creating freedom. And this week it is just me because I'm going to walk you through a tool I made. Well, actually, Claude Co helped me make it to help real estate agents visualize what their business is actually doing financially. And here's where this came from. I recently had an agent tell me that in the future they wanted to make $500,000, sell 25 houses a year, work 30 hours a week, and have a staff that included an assistant, a marketing person, and a runner for out on the street. And I was like, hey, I love that future. And this future is available for this person for sure, but I'm not sure that those numbers work. But numbers are hard to visualize. So if you're listening to this and you want to see the numbers, we also put this on YouTube. You can do that. But I'm also going to walk through the numbers today very slowly and multiple times so that if you are listening, you'll be able to follow along with me as we go. All right. So I've been around so many agents who have done a really great job of planning their day and even planning their week. Because if you're a high-producing agent, you have to do that, right? You have to have some organization because this is a reactive business. And if you're not planning out your lead gen time or your follow-up time or even your time off, and we've talked a lot about this on this podcast, you need to plan all of those things. And they're doing really great on that. And their business grows, but they haven't actually planned the business. I'm talking about the big picture business of hey, what are my goals? How much money am I trying to make? Who am I working with? What clients do I have? And actually plan where they want to take that great day to day that they're doing, that great week of business that they're doing, and do it over the long haul. So I've been working with a group of agents recently at the Justin Landis group to help them do that. And I'd love to help you guys do that today, who are listening as well. And here's how I like to do it I like to ask this question to start, and then I'll ask a follow-up next, and then we'll break it down and go back from start to finish on this. So let me ask you if you had a perfect one year. So we were sitting together one year from now, exactly a year from now, and I'm like, hey, how has the last year been for you? And you tell me, Justin, this year has been perfect. I mean, it's been absolutely amazing. And I'm not talking like you hit the Powerball for a billion dollars, but I mean, everything fell into place. Like the goals you had for your business, they all hit the things you wanted to do in your personal life. You were able to do them. And you got to the end of the year and you're like, this is an ideal year for me. What has happened? And if you're listening in a place where you could actually pause right now and write this down, I'm telling you, it is powerful to get this stuff down on paper. So if you can do that, I would advise you to do it. If not, think in your head and answer some of these questions. What have I accomplished? How does it feel? Who am I around? What kind of income have I had? What have the clients been like? What am I set up to do the next year? As you start to write these down and think through them, you can get a picture in your head of what this great ideal year would look like. And that's one of the things we want to shoot for. Because if you don't know what an ideal year looks looks like, how are you going to make it happen if you can't answer these questions? And a lot of people can't. So if you can't right now, you're like, I don't know, that is perfectly okay. That's why I'm asking them so that you can help think through them and figure out what that ideal year is. So once we figured out this first ideal year, the next question is what does an ideal five years look like? So year one happened, you hit this goal, and then you just layered on year two, then year three, then year four, then year five. So you've stacked together five great years. What does it look like for you then? And to put that in perspective, so right now Bolst has maybe 310 or 20 agents, a couple offices. Five years ago, Bullst did not exist. I had never heard that word before. And so in five years, a lot can happen. Things can be completely different. Things that were not created can be created and can be up and running. So ask yourself the same thing in five years. What have I accomplished? Who am I around? What does it feel like? What have I earned? What have I invested in? What does my day-to-day look like? How many hours am I working? You can start to ask yourself all of these questions. And once again, if you have the ability to write this down, put it on a piece of paper, put it on a whiteboard, it is powerful to get this listed out. So you start to get those things listed out. And it's like, all right, well, we've got this great ideal future. And that's where, you know, someone told me they're like, hey, I want to make $500 to thousand dollars or more, and I want to work 30 hours a week and I want to do 25 sales per year, and I want to have a full, full staff. And that is awesome because that gives us something to work towards. So once you get that, you know, you can start to work towards it. Okay, so let's break this down. The next two things that I love to do on this exercise is number one, ask yourself as I look at this five years, what is the biggest roadblock or hurdle that I'm gonna have to overcome to make this a reality? What's the big thing that's that's in my way? Because that's gonna help us figure out what we have to do on the path to get there. And that may be, hey, I need to develop more referral-based business. It may be I want to have a staff and I haven't made a hire yet. And so I'm gonna have to learn how to, and I'm gonna have to hire that first person. It may be that, you know, I have a side hustle and I've got to give that up so that I can dedicate full time to real estate. Maybe a belief system that I've got to change that I can believe that I can do this. And that's what's holding me back. But it's important to know like what you're gonna have to overcome in order to do it so that we can know what we need to do on that path. The second thing we want to do is we want to make sure that this end result is an actual reality because I almost always see a contradiction in this end result that we want in five years. And that's perfectly normal because we're in dreamer mode. And that's what I want you to be. I mean, I want you to be in dreamer mode. And because if you don't dream big, the odds that you're going to actually hit something big are super small. So you got to dream big in order to do it. But we also want it to be rooted in reality. And what I found in most cases is the initial path, like whatever your the initial outcome that you probably wrote down, it probably the math doesn't math. When you actually start to put the numbers to it of the number of houses you want to sell, the income you want to make, the things you have want to saved, or the vacation house that you wanted to buy, it probably doesn't work the way you wrote it, but it can work. And that's the exciting part, is even though it probably doesn't, there probably is a path that it can work. And that's why I built this tool because I wanted to help people see what is the path that is going to match up the income and the investment and the financial future you want with the day-to-day future that you want, as far as the clients you're working with, the houses you're selling, who you have helping you, and all that sort of stuff. So let's get into that now. And I'm gonna walk you through a couple real scenarios to show you how this tool works and how you can make that five-year future that I see a lot of people pick. And I'm gonna go through three examples because I think this covers probably 90 or 95% of these conversations. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna walk them through this tool that I built with Claude, where you can put in a lot of different variables. So you can put in the number of transactions that you're doing, want to do per year, your average sales price, what your staff expenses are, what your other expenses are, if you're on a team, what your split to the team is, how many hours you work per week. And that way you can even see your dollar per hour for doing these different things. And so you can do that in three different scenarios. I've got it for the individual agent. You're working by yourself, and maybe you have a staff, but it's, you know, you are don't have a team, you're working on your own. Two, I have it for a small team, and that's a team where you're still in production. And I have a lot of people that I talk to that they want to do that. They want to sell some houses and stay in the business. They love to sell, they want to work with their best clients, but they want to have a team that helps them and that they get to grow, and we can look at the finances of that. And then thirdly, and I'm not going to go through this one today, but for those of you who are really ambitious and want to have the mega team where you're out of production and it's your team members that are selling, I've got that tab for you there as well. But the three scenarios that I want to walk through with you, and I'm gonna start with this first one, is someone who they want to do great business and they want to have great support doing it. And so I gave this example earlier. It's someone, for example, I want to do $500,000, make $500,000. I want to work maybe 25 pieces of business a year, and I want to have great support. I want to have a full-time assistant who's helping me. I want to have marketing and transaction coordination support, showing assistance support if I need it. And in this case, let's do it that their business is all relationship-based. So they're not spending a ton on marketing. Because if you are spending a lot of money on marketing to generate your clients, you obviously got to put that into your expenses here as well. And we've got a box for that. So let me walk through this for you. So we've got 25 transactions per year, an average sales price. I'm gonna start with 500,000. The median in Atlanta average is in the four, so this is a little bit above that. This person wanted to have a full-time assistant and additional support. And so I'm gonna put in $120,000 a year for staff cost on there. Maybe you could get that done for $100, maybe $80 or $90 if you were really tight on it. Um, but we'll start with $120,000 see where it goes. And then there are other expenses, which would be things like brokerage, marketing, tech, office space if they had it, drive in a car, even if your business is relationship, you've got stuff, right? You're putting signs in, you've got lockboxes, and someone put $40,000 in there. And they said their goal was to work 30 hours a week. So put that in there as well. Here's what the numbers come out to sell 25 houses at $500,000, assuming an average compensation of 3%. Your total GCI is $375,000. So, right off the bat, at this price point, selling $25,000, 25 transactions, you're definitely not netting $500,000. You're you're a long way from it because you're starting at $375,000. Now, as you actually take these expenses out, you get down to a net income of $215,000. So this is exactly what I'm talking about when there is a mismatch between the future five-year, which is great. I mean, it's great to have a full-time assistant and marketing support and to work with referral-based clients. I absolutely love that. And I'd love to help agents design that business. But if your income goal is $500,000, you've got to do one of two things because you're not going to move your $215,000 net income up to $500 by reducing expenses. Now, yes, if we're like, hey, maybe we could, you know, find more affordable leverage, we go down to $100,000 on that instead of $120,000. Well, we're still at $235. So you really have two options here. You can increase your number of transactions or you can increase your price point. And that's what's fun to look at right here is you can just change this and see it in real time. You're like, all right, well, what if I did 25 transactions, but I went up to $750,000 per transaction? Ooh, that is a big difference. That is a massive difference. Your top GCI is now at $563 and your net income is at $423,000. So you look and you say, hey, what would it take to get to this goal of $500,000? Well, we've got to go up from here, right? The price point isn't isn't high enough yet. And so we go up to $800,000. Still not there. We go up to $900,000. And then we're like, oh, all right, this is where we need to be. At $900,000, we've got a net income of over $500,000 on your bottom line. So to recap that, 25 personal transactions a year, $900,000 average price point. You've got a staff cost of $120,000, $40,000 in other expenses, and your bottom line is over $500,000. And so now we can take that vision that this agent had and we compare it with reality and say, what would it take to get there? Well, it'd take a much higher price point. So then we have to realistically ask ourselves over the next five years if your average price point's $500 now, could you get to $900? First of all, that is definitely possible. Secondly, you need a strategy because the market is probably not going to appreciate that much over the next five years. So you need a strategy to do it. But that strategy exists. The thing is, you could also take a different strategy. If you're like, hey, I don't think raising my price point is going to be the way to go. You can put it back in here and you can say, All right, I'm going to go back down to 500,000 average price point. How many transactions do I need to do in order to do that? And the answer when you get to that is about 45. And so then you can ask yourself, 45 transactions. Is that easier or it'd be easier to raise my price point? Or maybe I need to find a middle ground and you can do that all right here. So that's scenario one. Scenario two, this is what I would call like, you know, biggest dollar per hour max lifestyle agent. I get this a lot where they're like, hey, I want to work with great clients, referral-based business, good price point, but I do not want to be managing that assistant to managing the marketing, to managing the transaction coordination, you know, hiring those people, training. What if they leave? I'm getting my job back. And a lot of times this can be an agent that is a great fit to be on a team that offers full support. And so, for example, with the Justin Landis group, we have a model where you can have a 70-30 split and get all the resources of JLG. And so that's, you know, full-time marketing, full-time listing management, full-time transaction coordination, full-time coaching, office space. You've got all that sort of stuff covered for you. And you don't have to deal with hiring. And so you can say, hey, well, what if I wanted to make $250,000 and do it with no management, fewer number of houses sold as possible? Well, you can put that in here. And the way you do that is you scroll your expenses down, staff cost is down to zero because you're not hiring the staff. You're still going to have some expenses because you're going to have to drive around, have a computer, have a phone, but you can keep those things pretty low. And so maybe we put $20,000 in here for that on our expenses. And then we say, hey, all right, if we were on a team where we're paying a 30% split to get all the staff and the support and everything taken care of, what will we have to do at an average price point of in this case, because they're going for a higher price point? Let's start maybe with $700,000. We say, how many houses we have to sell at $700,000 to net $250,000? And the thing is, it's not that many houses. At 18 houses, you're netting $245 on here. And you don't have to deal with any of those hiring and firing and training. And is there a $401K? And are there benefits? Any of that sort of stuff? And you're netting $245. And if you do that in 30 hours a week, your dollar per hour is $170 an hour. That's a pretty high dollar per hour to net. And this path, this is a path that's available. The main things that you need to do to do this path, for example, is you got to get to 18 personal referrals per year, close personal referrals, where the transactions you're generating them yourself through your network. And could you do that over a five-year period? You could definitely do that over a five-year period. I'm pretty confident I could help you do that in a two-year period, but for sure for five. And then you find a team that's the right fit for you that has that right support model. And boy, this can be a pretty great setup. And it because you got the 30 hours worth of work, and then you've got all the rest of this time to do other things in life, to be with your family, your kids, or travel, all that sort of stuff. And so this allows you to look here and you're like, hey, well, what if I even raise my price point up to a million dollars? How many million dollar houses would I have to sell in order to do this? And the answer to that is only 12 or 13. And so then you're like, well, maybe that's even a better path for me to work to even raise my price point so I can provide a really high level of service at a little higher price point and net that money. The third scenario I want to look at, and you're going to click over to a different tab here, is to go through the lean team, is what I'm calling it. This is not the mega team. This is not you're managing a humongous organization, but this is you're still selling some houses and you have team members. And the reason I see people want to do this is twofold is one, they often want to pass along what they've learned and mentor and help other people. And, you know, they like they're natural leaders a lot of times. And so they want to lead that team and have people on the team come underneath them. And two, this also allows you to work the best clients, clients that are the best fit for you, but still have your team service the clients that maybe geographically or from a timeline standpoint, or maybe it's buyers or sellers, just aren't an ideal fit for you. But you get to maintain that relationship because they're working with the team. So the way the numbers work here is up at top, I've got a personal production section for you where you can put in and you can say, hey, I'm gonna work 20 deals on my own this year. I'm gonna do 20 deals, and my deals are gonna be a pretty good price point. I'm gonna do these transactions, you know, at $600,000 price point. How many agents am I gonna have on my team? That's the next slider here. In this case, say we're gonna have it's a smaller team, we'll have three agents on the team. And then it says average deals per agent. So for those three agents, how many deals are they each gonna do? Let's say that we've got three agents and they're each doing 12 deals apiece. And then you can put the team's average price point down below. Team's price point may not be as high as yours because they may not be as experienced. You may be taking the highest dollar clients. So you got 500,000 here for that. And then you've still got your staff and other expenses. You're probably gonna have more staff cost here because you've got four agents to support. You've got more transactions. In this case, we've got 20 for you, and then 12 times three for the other agents. That's 56 transactions. That's a decent operation. So maybe we put 150,000 in for our staff, admin, TC, marketing staff. And then we've got our other expenses, put 60,000 in there for that because once again, we've got other people that you know we're helping to support. We got more transactions we're supporting. You probably do team building events, that sort of stuff. And then you're gonna say how many hours worked? Well, this is gonna be hard to do in 30 hours a week because you're selling houses, hiring your agents, training your agents, overseeing your staff. I'm putting 50 hours worked in here to start with. The interesting thing when you look at this is you put it in here and you're like, all right, there's a lot going on here. How is my dollar per hour and my net income compare to doing it by myself with that assistant? Or how's it do being on a team by myself? You got to sell a lot of houses to meet the same thing because this 20 sales for you, 36 for the other team, it's only netting you $400,000. Now, the top GCI is about a million. So a lot of times you might hear someone say, I'm a millionaire real estate agent. I brought in a million. People on teams are not netting anywhere near the top of what they're doing because they've got a lot of expenses. They got staff costs, marketing costs. And this is also assuming here, you know, you've got those 20 transactions and the 36 your team's doing, that's 56 total transactions. That's a lot for one person to generate out of their database. So if you can do that, that's awesome. If you're trying to generate those other 36 through internet leads, farming, postcards, mailers, that's gonna significantly increase your cost from what you have here. And you have to ask yourself that you may instead of spending $60,000, you may have to spend five to 10 grand a month just in leads, which is gonna move your total cost up to $100,000. You put that in and you look and you're like, man, I'm making way less than if I just sold these 25 houses by myself and had a great assistant to help me. So that's really what this application does. It allows you to play with these things. And if you really want to maximize this lean team, what you need is you need the team members to sell a good amount of houses. And that's easier said than done in a lot of cases. I've seen a lot of teams to have three agents each averaging 12 houses, that takes some work. That's something that you've got to go up to. So usually this path is best for people that you really care a lot about that leadership and mentorship. You really want to move out of a lot of those transactions, and you'll enjoy this work more than maybe the transaction work. So there's three scenarios here, but you can do any scenarios. You can come in here and play around and be like, well, what if I had a lean team? What if I was a solo agent? What if I went to the mega team? And if you click over to that mega teams tab, you're gonna see the expenses down at the bottom. They are big. And that's because then you got to have a full staff. You definitely got to have marketing to generate leads. And you can see in there, you may have thought these teams, oh, they're bringing in six million dollars in GCI. They must be rich. In a lot of cases, they're netting less than the top individual agent who only has that assistant in marketing and is doing all the transactions themselves. All right. So to wrap up here with this tool, the things that it really shows is how important it is to pair your future vision with the actual numbers and how you can pull the levers of number of transactions, your price point, the number of agents on your team. If you want to have a team, what your costs are, and you can do that to help make sure that the future you have actually works financially and that you can craft a path to there. And I just want to make a really direct appeal to you right here that if you're like, hey, I've never had somebody do this with me. No one's ever walked through my future or walked through my numbers with me, you are missing out. You should contact us because this is something that I do regularly. And I have done this with dozens and dozens of agents. We would love to do this with you at Bolst and help you get to that future that is actually intentional. It's actually your preferred future and it actually works financially because all the paths that I talked about today, those paths are available. I also know from watching tons of agents, those paths will not happen by chance. You actually have to have a plan and have people help you get there. And if you have the right people help you get there, your odds are so much higher and you're going to get there so much faster. So I'd love for you to use this tool and make it your own, but I would love even more to help you accomplish your ideal future. And I'd love to do that with you at Bolst. All right. So make sure that you download this free tool. Click on the link below the podcast here. It's absolutely free. I would love to get your feedback on it. Send me a message, let me know what you think. And I would also love for you to book a call. Go to bolst.homes, click on join, book a call with us. That's also absolutely free. And we would love to get to know you so that we can walk you through this preferred future into your ideal five years and your ideal financial scenario. All right, everybody. Thanks for listening. Make sure to like and subscribe, and I will see you again next week.