When I focused on education and not selling, I got really comfortable just talking about what I do every single day because it’s what I live. It’s my life. Right? We talk about work/life balance. There is no work/life balance as entrepreneurs. It’s harmony. We live in life, we live in business, we live with kids. It is pure harmony. I tried the balance piece and it didn’t work. It doesn’t work because everybody pulls me in different directions, so you just have to be centered.
My history has been 23 years in this space, but the majority of it’s from ’96 until 2000, I do what I do now. But from 2000 to 2015, I’ve built very large companies, mortgage companies and insurance companies, and all these kinds of different companies taking me out of this one-on-one type deal with real estate agents. I realized, Hmm, nobody knows me. I mean, the people that I needed to know me, didn’t know me. I dealt with the big banks, Fannie and Freddie. I dealt with loan officers that were working with agents and all this type of stuff. But I had no clients, I had no revenue. I had nothing. And here I’m about to embark on this different phase of a career at 40.
And I said, “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. I have one thing that nobody can challenge me on. I have knowledge, and I’m willing to give it all away. But I’m not going to do it with one-on-one in meetings.” That’s going to take way too long, especially with what I saw out there with real estate agents and trying to get business. And I was just like, “I’m not going to go back to 1996. Some things have changed in those 20 years. Let’s figure this out.”
I sat down with my camera and a teleprompter. And I was a newscaster. I had a suit and a tie, and I sat there and I read. And I read every line because I knew you guys were holding on to every word that I was saying. Then I started to get even smarter and realized that you didn’t even watch more than three seconds of the video. You weren’t interested in it because I was a newscaster. It was about mortgages and that is not sexy. So you were interested in that moment, but you weren’t interested if you weren’t looking to buy a home.
And so, as I started to get more and more comfortable with doing the videos, coming up on a Saturday and recording six, seven hours of videos for that next week, sending it off to an editor to have them edit it. I had to produce all the content and everything. And then, I just started doing a Facebook live show. And then just opened it up and instead of going to traditional, let’s meet with a client or a potential agent at a coffee shop, let’s just bring them into a Facebook live show, help them promote their brand, and at least that’s my coffee shop meeting.
And then it became more valuable because I’m promoting them. They wanted to see what I was doing. And then all that started to happen. Then my videos got picked up by a blogger, and then it kind of took off from there.