Posted over 7 years ago

The 6 Steps to a 7-Figure Income

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Who wants to be a millionaire?

No not the popular TV game show. I’m talking about becoming a long-term, sustainable millionaire as a real estate entrepreneur!

Pat Hilban, who is a billion-dollar real estate agent, spent over four years self-reflecting, researching, and writing his New York Times Best-Selling book “6 Steps to 7 Figures.” The book outlines a 6-step process he, his mentors, and other successful entrepreneurs have followed to go from little to no money to over seven figures in annual income. In our recent conversation, Pat provided a blueprint you can follow to achieve the same.

Step #1 – Goals and Affirm

The first step is to set your HUGE goal. Then, break it down into smaller, bite-size pieces.

Pat said, “A lot of people just set really large goals. For instance, they set a goal ‘I want to be a millionaire,’ but they don’t set the small daily goals that it takes to be a millionaire, such as ‘I save $10/day,’ or even the goal before that is ‘What are you going to do to earn that extra $10 or save that extra $10?’” In this example, the long-term goal is to become a millionaire, but what you are really striving for is to save $10 per day by doing X, whatever you determine X to be.

Finally, you want to create a statement to affirm that goal. If your goal is to become a millionaire by saving $10/day, Pat said your affirmation would be “I am a millionaire. I save $10/day by doing X every day.”

Step #2 – Track

Once you have set your overarching goal and broken it down into daily objectives, the next step is to track your progress. “I’m an avid tracker,” Pat said. “I’ve tracked everything for years. Every successful person I talk to tracks like crazy. People that tend to not get very far don’t track at all.”

Pat lives by the following truism: “If you track, you succeed. If you don’t track, you fail.”

For an example, for the longest time, Pat’s goal was to become a hundred-percenter. A hundred-percenter is having 100% of your bills paid by rental real estate and passive investments. He said, “In order for me to get to a hundred-percenter [status], I need to do a couple of things. I needed to first of all earn money, and then with that money, save money, and then with that savings, investing that money and invest it wisely. So my ultimate goal is to become a hundred-percenter; my daily goal that I might track would be I needed to list a house a day, or a house every three days. My goal from that would be to save $10,000/month in commissions, and then from that it would to invest. Then I would obviously track… Everything was tracked, from what I did to get the listing, what I did to save the money, what I did once I investing the money, and then how the money paid me sideways.”

There are a million different ways to track, but the idea is to have a system that tracks your daily objectives based on your overall goal.

Step #3 – Masterminds and Mentors

Step three is to join mastermind groups and get mentors. “I’ve had over 50 mentors that I can count that I have learned form and stepped upon. Kind of used to climb the ladder of success,” Pat said. “Many of those mentors I was able to find at masterminds. A mastermind is just simply a collective genius, so to speak. It’s 5 to 100 people that are all thinking the same and are sharing best ideas and best practices where you could just learn in abundance from multiple people all at once. People that have gone through what you want to go through.”

Related posts on finding a mentor

Step #4 – Act

Now it’s time to act – that is, the forceful act of moving forward.

After completing his book, Pat’s goal was to make the book a best-seller. He went out to find some mentors, and he landed on Gary Keller, who has written multiple best sellers like The One Thing, The Millionaire Real Estate Agent, and the Millionaire Real Estate Investor.

At this point, Pat’s plan was to friend request everybody he could find in the real estate industry on Facebook and post about his book daily. Gary told him that wasn’t enough. He told Pat, “What you need to do is you need to quit what you’re doing and you need to go out on tour and start speaking to real estate agents at offices throughout the country, talking about your book.” And that’s what Pat did.

Pat sold his real estate business to his top agent and went on a book tour. He spoke at 53 offices in 53 different cities across the county over a seven-month period and got all of them to commit to buying a book on the first day it came out.

“When my book was released, we sold 10,600 copies in the first week,” Pat said. “My point is that Gary told me that I needed to act. He said something I’ll never forget. He said, ‘You reap what you sow 100% of the time’ It’s so true… There’s no free lunch.”

Now that is what I call MASSIVE ACTION.

Step #5 – Build

One of Pat’s mentors used to always say “Build on a success, not from the ground up.” What that means is you already have success with something, leverage it for more success. For example, when I am inviting guests onto my podcast, I always mention that I have previously interviewed well-known, successful individuals like Barbara Corcoran, Robert Kiyosaki, Emmitt Smith, etc. Those are all successes I’ve had in the past that I use as a sort of bait to get other successful people on the podcast.

“For a real estate agent, if you have a house in a neighborhood that you just sold, don’t go to some other random neighborhood and try to prospect and farm it,” Pat explained. “Go to the neighborhood where you had the success and build on that success up, because you’re much more apt to get a listing in a neighborhood where you could say, ‘Oh we just sold a house up the street. You may have seen my sign.’”

The goal is to find every little success that you’ve had and keep building on those same blocks.

Step #6 - Invest

Finally, the last step is to use the money you’ve saved or created from steps 1 to 5 and invest in real estate. “Bust your ass, save money,” Pat said. “Be a good saver, be an excellent saver. Take the down payments and invest in real estate – that’s how I did it – and then live off the horizontal income from those investments.”

If you have any comments or questions, leave a comment below.