Sometimes you can get to the point when it’s time for you to now transition out of the brokerage business, but you may not realize it. So with this in mind, here’s a true story about what I’m now experiencing with one of my coaching clients, that will help to illustrate this point.
A young broker in his mid-30s came to me several years ago, let’s call him Jeff, and Jeff had previously had a career in the business world before getting into commercial real estate brokerage. But he decided that brokerage would give him even greater opportunity, and after having been in our business for approximately 1-2 years, he realized that coaching was something that he wanted to begin doing along with me. He had made maybe $100,000.00 in his brokerage business within the previous year, but he believed he was capable of earning much more. In addition, and not unlike many other brokers within our industry, he believed that he just wasn’t getting the kind of training and guidance from within his company that he really needed, in order to take his income and his brokerage success to the next level.
So we began working together in July of 2020, and during the year 2022, Jeff grossed more than $1.9 million in commissions, and he’s having a great year now in 2023, too!
Jeff has great relationship-building skills, and people gravitate towards wanting to work with him. So when combining his relationship-building skills together with my coaching and direction, Jeff has really made things happen in a big way for himself, since we began working together.
In addition, Jeff is now at the point where he no longer needs to work, and he and his wife can now live comfortably off of their investments.
But I really needed to point this out to him, because when successful brokers arrive at this point in their careers, they can still oftentimes get sucked into continuing on in the grind of just doing day-to-day brokerage, when they could be making the shift towards growing their own investment portfolios, and enjoying life much better instead.
As brokers, we are oftentimes in the position of making other people wealthy, through selling them good investment properties, but there comes a time when you may now be in the position to step into the role of becoming that full-time investor yourself.
With this in mind, Jeff is now being offered the position of running a prestigious brokerage company within his own territory, and I’m asking him, “Do you really want to live that grind of still doing brokerage, and now having to recruit more new brokers, too, while you’re running someone else’s brokerage company? Or would you rather focus on growing your own investment portfolio, spending more quality time with your family, and taking vacations whenever you’d like to?”
Jeff is now understanding my point, and I believe he is going to move in the direction of growing and managing his own investment portfolio full time, and in addition, I’m giving him some good ideas on how he can find and locate the best investment properties for him to buy, too.
People oftentimes get into brokerage, because they see it as a means to an end…and an opportunity to make great money and invest it along the way, so that they can then retire, and not have to do brokerage anymore.
But if you’re not careful, you can end up sticking around in brokerage much longer than you really need to, and there are a number of coaching clients who I’m working with right now, helping them to transition themselves away from that day-to-day grind, towards a much more enjoyable lifestyle that their success and their investing along the way will now enable them to enjoy.
This brokerage business can be tough. You’re continually dealing with principals who can have huge egos, wanting to take advantage of the person on the other side who they are negotiating with, changing their minds during deals, and wanting to beat you up on your commission, too.
So keep this in mind when it may become time for you to transition into a higher level within our industry, because if you don’t watch out, when you get to the point where you no longer need to work in brokerage, and you find yourself still doing it out of the habit that you’ve ingrained within yourself over the decades, it may begin to feel like the famous line that Al Pacino uttered, right here, in the movie The Godfather Part III. 😊