“I don’t have time.”

Anthony: 

“I don’t have the time.” I’m just so busy.” “When would I fit that in?” I hear this stuff all the time, my friends, all the time. It’s understandable. We all have a lot going on, but if you want to have an improvement in your business something has to change. We can’t use that as a go-to excuse.

In fact, “I don’t have the time. I’m busy”, it’s become like a status symbol. When you walk down the street and ask people, “Are you busy?” “Are you busy?” “Oh, yes, I’m busy. I’m busy as hell. I’m so busy I have things going on at all times. I’m just so busy.” It’s become like a cool thing. I want to start doing like, “No. Not that busy at all.” It’s really become a thing.

Guys, it is the root of the problem with most of you not being able to grow your businesses. Now, I just finished doing my second insanity workout ever, just now. It’s intense, but I could easily say I don’t have time. I have a mountain of work to get done by Monday morning, it’s called my weekend list. Every weekend I go home with a folder, with a list of things that my assistants list out throughout the week. We throw things in the weekend list, but I still fit in my time to work out because if I’m not healthy, and I’m not feeling good, I will not perform at my best.

When you guys are looking at 2020, saying, “What are you going to do different?” “What’s your goals?” It’s so easy to say, “I’m going to kill it. 2020 is the year. This is it, this is it.” Here’s my question, “What are you going to do different to change the outcome? What are you going to do differently to change the outcome?”

It’s easy to say you’re going to kill it, but if you do the same things you will get the same results. Most of the time what I find through helping agents, and coaching agents, and all that is time is their biggest problem. They have a time management problem. Our recruiting coach, Jon Cheplak, he always says, “No, no, no. It’s not a time management problem. It’s a choice management problem.” Guys, we have to make time for things.

In the last four weeks I evaluated what part of our business that I think we need to improve in, and what part that I think– Guess what, here’s the truth, it happens to be an area that I’ve been spending less time in, in the last 90 days. I was on a pretty good track, consistently doing the activities for that particular area of the company, and over the last two months, because we’ve had so much going on, I even fell off the tracks.

Now I’m looking ahead saying, “No. I don’t want to just get back on the tracks. I want to double it. I want to do even more.” What I’m doing now is I’m evaluating, “Okay. What am I going to do differently in 2020 than I did in 2019?” Guess the first place I went, my schedule. I looked at the way my week lays out, meetings, meetings, meetings. Meetings after meetings, every day different meetings.

I said, “You know what? I’m going to reorganize the way I do this.” My management meetings with department heads instead of being three on Tuesday, three on Thursday, I’m switching them to be Fridays the whole day. That way I free up the other times, and I can have more focus time.

I had talked to you guys a while back how I use power hours, and I make a lot of dials. I call people that are in our company. I call people that I would like to be in our company. I call brokers, and agents at other companies that I just like to connect with, and maybe someday they’ll want to join us. The more I pick up the phone, the more we grow. It happens every single time.

I’m looking at my schedule saying, “How do I create more time for that? What do I have to adjust?” That’s my recommendation to all of you, is something has to come out or something has to get moved or readjusted in order to create time to do more of what you know you need to do. Most of the time, if you listen to Tony Robbins, or Bob Proctor or some of those guys, I’ve been getting a little more into that stuff, I never have been.

I don’t exactly need motivation, but I’ve been listening to them, especially Bob Proctor. Bob Proctor is a big mindset coach. He’s helped me. I’ve been paying close attention to it. One of the things that he says is most humans, they don’t have a problem knowing what they need to do to improve. That’s not their issue. Their issue is actually executing it, actually doing it. Heck, we all struggle with that.

I don’t care how big, and strong, and tough you are in business, and how motivated you are, it doesn’t matter, we all have that issue, but you have to buckle down. Here you are on the doorstep of 2020, if you’ve said, “I sold this many homes this year, but next year I’m going to sell this many.” Maybe you own a brokerage and you’re saying, “Okay, I have this many agents. Next year, I want that many because I want that many sales.” I have news for you, if you haven’t changed your day to day schedule, if you haven’t made substantial changes, you’re not going to hit your goals. Not going to happen.

You can’t go from here to here if you haven’t made real changes. You have to make real changes to your schedule, to the way that you do things to create time so that you’re not using that excuse of, “Well. I don’t have the time. I’m just too busy. I don’t know when I would fit that in. I’m too busy.” It fascinates me. It absolutely fascinates me how people think.

Then what agents do, as soon as they get a little bit busy, is they avoid things that will help their business because, “I had a home inspection”, or “I had this, I had that.” No, no, no. You have to get your priorities in order. It’s very important that you do things that affect your entire business. Don’t let anyone client get in the way of you going to a training that will help with all your clients. Don’t let anyone client get in the way of you having a marketing meeting with maybe a marketing company to grow your business, because that’s going to affect all your clients and give you many more clients.

A lot of times what agents do is make the mistake of allowing their clients to run their schedule. I’ve run into situations with agents that– Let’s say we have something scheduled or something planned or whatever, and they’ll call me and be like, “Hey–“, or bump into me in the hallway, “I was planning on coming on Wednesday, but now I’ve got a home inspection.” I say, “Oh, really? Jeez, you’ve been looking forward to that for a few weeks and we’ve been looking forward to having you. Do you think you can change the home inspection?” “I can’t. They said it’s the only day they can do it.” I go, “Really?”

Imagine if you told them, “Yes, I can’t do it on that day. I can’t do it. The one day this week that I can’t do that home inspection with you is on Thursday.” Guess what the client would do? The client would change the schedule. The client would change the appointment. You’re the doctor, they’re the patient. The tail doesn’t wag the dog. You don’t let them run your schedule.

When you call the doctor, and you say, “Hey, my elbow is hurting and I’d like to come in to see you tomorrow at two o’clock because that’s the only time I have available.” Tell me how that goes over with the doctor. They’re like, “What? You’re not coming in tomorrow at two, you’re coming in when I say you’re coming in.” That’s their attitude and we socially accept that, but for some reason, realtors make the mistake of putting themselves in a position where they let everybody else run their schedule. That’s how they never get from here to here.

The number one reason that a lot of agents don’t substantially grow– God, my hair looks horrible. Don’t substantially grow, is time. They don’t know how to– Like I said, Jon calls it choice management, I’ve called it time management, more commonly known as time management. They don’t know how to manage their time to create more time for them to do things that will grow their business. That’s the key. You have to create more time.

As your business grows, you have to pivot. You might spend time on a certain activity, you get up to here, and then all of a sudden, that time that you’re spending doesn’t work. Now you need to spend some time somewhere else. I look at my job, my job has completely and dramatically changed in the last 10 years. There was all this talk, I was just watching the news about how we’re entering a new decade and I was thinking to myself, “Jeez, what’s the difference in my life between a decade ago and now?” Major difference? I was doing listing appointments almost every single day, 10 years ago. I haven’t done a listing appointment since 2011.

My job changes as the company grows. We’re close to 300 people, when we have 500 people, my job will change even more. When we have 1000 people, it’ll change even more. When we have 5000 people, it’ll change even more. If you don’t change with it, you won’t get to those next levels. The levels that I just mentioned, 500, 1000, 5000, whatever numbers I said, I won’t get there if I don’t adjust before, in order to do that.

Think about this stuff as you go into 2020. You should be evaluating if you haven’t already. Evaluate right now, this weekend, what are you going to do differently with your calendar to make sure that you have more time to do what you know you should be doing in 2020 and how are you going to handle that and how are you going to stay in control of your schedule and not let other people control it.

That’s all my friends. I got to go eat some breakfast, I’m starving. I’ve been up since quarter past four, and I need to eat. Thanks, guys. Have a good day.