The Secret Key to Real Estate (Or Any Other Business!)

I was recently asked to speak at a local real estate investing event and that got me thinking about a topic that I haven’t really touched on yet. There are many technical skills in real estate investing that cannot be learned overnight, despite what some gurus would have you believe. I will continue to cover those aspects over time with you, my dear reader… but the invitation to speak that I received made me ask myself, “If there was only one idea that I could get across to people and I could never talk about real estate again after that, what would it be?” What could be the most important piece of knowledge, or literally, what is the key to unlocking the door to real estate success?

Let’s begin the answer with a brain teaser. Why do movie stars earn more money than teachers? Surely the service provided by a teacher is more valuable to society than entertainment, right? So since a movie star is rich, and generally a teacher is not, does that mean society values the movie star more than the knowledge that teachers impart onto our children? No. Not at all, actually, if you consider it from this perspective: Let’s say as an example that a teacher earns $40k/year and she has 40 students (40 customers). So she’s earning roughly $1k per student. The movie star that earns $30 million on her latest release and had 100 million customers purchase a ticket to go see her movie, so she is getting paid 30 cents per ticket sold. On a per customer basis, the teacher is out-earning the movie star 133k to 1. If you can see where I’m going with this, the movie star has figured out how to serve many more customers than the teacher can, so although the starlet makes much less money per unit sold, she still turns out quite alright with many more customers. She’s moving large volume, taking a small cut, and is able to serve huge amounts of customers.

The lesson that I took from this story is that I have to figure out how to help and serve more people. I can’t do that unless I spend more time networking and meeting more people. Hopefully you will agree with me when I say that your network is your biggest asset. The people that you have direct and indirect access to empower you to find the clients, money, time, and other resources for you to leverage your own abilities and serve more people. In most of my meetings with potential clients, I tell them that regardless of whether or not I do business with them, I want to help them find the people that are going to propel their success. It’s been my personal experience that if I just help enough people, the money takes care of itself. Therefore, I spend the bulk of my time now trying to meet people, shake new hands, and solve their problems. By the way, it also goes a long way in making you feel good about yourself and proud of your work when you are in the game to make a difference and a positive impact on other lives besides your own! Now get out there and make it happen!