… but he was best known as simply – The Real Estate Jedi.
Legend had it, the Jedi survived the 2008 real estate crash. He was personally debt free. Nobody ever noticed him because he drove a nondescript car that he bought used and paid for in cash.
He was said to live in the Fortress of Solitude, just beyond a moat in the middle of nowhere.
Billy searched high and low for the Jedi.
Never giving up, one day he found him.
Descriptions didn’t do the Jedi justice. He was majestic. With a beautiful gray mane of hair he wore like a crown of wisdom.
Oddly, the Jedi strolled around the Fortress without a shirt, displaying his perfectly visible abs.
Billy was welcomed in the lovable lair by the Jedi.
“Why do you come?” asked the Jedi.
“I seek wisdom.”
“What is your question?”
“Do you know the secret to business and life?”
“So you have two questions?” the Jedi smiled.
“Yes sir.”
The Jedi paused and said calmly, “The secret to business is this…”
He held up one finger.
“The secret to business is your finger?” asked Billy puzzled.
“The secret to business is one thing. Just one thing. If you stick to that one thing, everything else will take care of itself.”
“Wow! That’s great, but what’s the one thing?”
“That’s what you’ve got to figure out.”
Luckily for Billy (and you) he bought this book.
So next I’ll be sharing with you The One Thing.
Do this one thing in your business (right now and forever) and everything else will take care of itself.
And later, I’ll also share with you the secret to life. (Seriously).
The secret that started with the statement:
Imagine you’re lying on your deathbed, and in walks… the person you could’ve been.
The secret shared with you later in the book about life – will prevent any regret regarding that statement.
Now, before I get to the One Thing for your business (don’t roll your eyes… I’ma get to it)… let me share with you the story that led to this one thing.
The keynote speaker was Darren Hardy. Darren told a fascinating story about Sir Richard Branson.
That story inspired Bride and I to skip the final day of the conference and just get to work. Get to work on defining our strategic objectives.
We sat in the plush surroundings of the Gaylord Texan Resort and brainstormed this list:
Oragazine the list (database).
Define a plan for proper communication to the list.
Deploy the newsletter.
We then sat and painstakingly combed through the database CRM system. Cleaning out old dead leads. Eliminating dozens of “tags”.
And checking the list of past clients against the MLS.
Why?
To make sure nobody sold without us.
What we found was both disturbing and heartbreaking.
In fact, we stopped counting at 37.
Within the span of just a few hours (scouring and organizing the database) we found 37 past clients that had since sold their home… with another agent.
Waaaahh! Waahhh!
No use crying about it.
We had a feeling anyway. This feeling is what led us to the three strategic objectives.
Once we got the list organized and spit shined, we then penciled out a plan for proper communication.
The linchpin of the plan was a Printed Monthly Newsletter.
This personal pow wow at the Gaylord was late November. By the beginning of January we had officially deployed the newsletter.
What happened next (after a lot of patient persistence) forever changed the trajectory of my business and ultimately my life.
Take a look at this:
Year Zero: 151 homes sold (57 of which were sphere of influence, aka SOI)
*Year Zero: the year before deploying the newsletter.
Year One: 208 homes sold (123 SOI)
Year Two: 263 homes sold (177 SOI)
Year Three: 468 homes sold (295 SOI)
Here’s the other piece of the perfectly prepared pie…
Year One: 500 recipients on our newsletter mailing list.
Year Two: 1,000
Year Three: 2,400
Is your face on fire with goosebumps?
If not, let me tell you how dumb I am (Seriously).
At the end of the third full year of newsletter deployment the top agent on my team left and took a handful of agents with him.
(they were his team members within my team so don’t get mad at him)
What did ole brilliant Bart do?
Double down on the newsletter?
NO!!!
The opposite.
I went into scarcity mode and trimmed the “budget”.
One of the cuts was the amount of people we were sending the newsletter to.
Why?
Because we were spending a little over a buck an issue to send the darn thing out. With 2,400 on the mailing list… it looked like an easy target line item on the ole P&L statement.
As much as I knew the newsletter was a boon to the bottom line.
As much as I LOVE one to many marketing.
As much as the newsletter is my saving grace from telemarketing.
I still did the fearful, bone-headed thing… and cut off my nose to save my face.
Now keep in mind, I’m the guy that will hide the darkness with a smile.
Sometimes I feel lonely in a crowded room.
What I’ve discovered with a lot of “self-coaching” is that ALL of these feelings are diabolically delivered by the Monster.
Inside my head and on each shoulder sits two voices.
The Wise and Wonderful Whisperer and the Monster.
When my ear hole fills with the love willed by the Whisperer, magical happenings happen.
When my brain is manipulated by the maniacal Monster, fear shudders my senses and hope is held hostage.
This happens to you too. I know.
How do I know?
You wouldn’t be here, if you weren’t just like me.
You wouldn’t have read this far, if you weren’t just like me.
Now to further prove my insanity, there was even a time (not that long ago) when I shut down the newsletter completely.
I’ll share the gory dopey details with you when we talk in person. For now, let’s get back on track with The One Thing.
What led me back aboard the neverland express newsletter bandwagon was actually a question from a Good Life Inner Circle Member.
He asked me, “What kinda return are you getting from the newsletter?”
Hmm?
Good question.
In my bumble bee buzzing brain I had resigned to the fact that quantifying the exact number of “sales” from the newsletter campaign was impossible.
But in my ever running mental abacus – I always held onto a statistic that Brian Buffini once gave me.
He said that staying in touch with the database will produce a 10-15% transaction return.
So what’d I do?
I finally, after years of deployment, looked closely at the newsletter statistics (number of recipients) and cross referenced them with sales.
What I dumbfoundedly deduced was a direct and powerful correlation between the number of newsletter recipients and the number of sales.
Duh?
Of course I knew this subconsciously. Now I had the data to back it up. Which then led me to once again fall madly in love with the newsletter.
The Newsletter a Love Story:
Once upon a time there lived a timid empathetic introverted real estate agent.
(I know what you’re thinking… this cannot be true. No timid empathetic introverted human being in their right mind would get into real estate sales!)
This introverted precious agent signed up for this amazing career because he craved one very specific thing:
Freedom.
Once inside the cynical silo of real estate he followed the herd. He copied the coaches. He worshipped the top dogs.
He tried it all.
Making calls directly from the phone book.
Knocking doors around his open houses.
Buying leads like a bandit.
Paying product pushers for the same advice over and over and over again…
… make more calls! Pound more doors. Harass more people. Smooch more booty. And practice more pussyfooting.
None of it made our precious agent feel very good.
In fact, he thought he was broken.
The same way he felt when his parents divorced when he was eight years old.
The same way he felt when he lived in his Aunt’s double wide trailer.
The same way he felt when his broker told him, “You won’t make it six months in this business!”
He felt – broken.
He felt like he didn’t fit in.
Until one day he discovered the wonderful world of One to Many Marketing.
Our fine young agent morphed from struggling to fit in and make ends meet – to the Good Life.
(Not necessarily in one fell swoop)
Okay, so obviously I’m talking about me (the introverted empathetic agent).
If you DISLIKE Cold Calls – Then One to Many Marketing is Your New Best Friend.
Let me define One to Many marketing.
One piece or act of marketing delivered to Many (people, prospects, friends, clients, whomever).
The newsletter is the holy grail of one to many marketing. You produce one newsletter and mail it to many many people.
The newsletter is written in a manor that builds genuine rapport over time.
The newsletter is interactive with trivia contests, riddles, spotlights on recipients, inspiring stories, all delivered in a lovable entertaining framework.
Here’s an example of one of my recent newsletters.
Before I continue beating the beautiful drum of the newsletter ideology, let me backup a bit and share my somewhat inadvertent discovery of One to Many Marketing.
