My Routine: The Daily Grind - by Daniel Gardner
Successful commercial real estate brokerage relies on one principle, a routine, you must do this every day during the week. You can relax a bit on the weekend, but you need to have a plan every day or it is easy to get off track.
I get up at the same time every day at 6am, I would like to tell you that I make the bed, but I don’t, my wife beats me to it, to save time, I have a gym in my basement or one 5 minutes away. I work out for 75 minutes, sometimes more if a deal is stuck, I then finish around 8am, have breakfast and get to work around 9-930am.
Most successful people I know tell me they are at their desk at 7am, but for a commercial broker that is going to cold call building owners, the time to be at your desk is 930am, why fight traffic? My advice is to accomplish a challenging workout, this can be a walk, journaling, stretching, really whatever you need to get in the best possible mood to do something difficult for the next few hours. The job has been remote since cell phones came out. Your time is too valuable, why would you waste time driving?
Regardless, 10am is PRIMETIME, that’s when I get on the phone and I make calls, usually till 1230, then I go outside for a walk (or sneak in 9 holes) and then I return to work around 2 or 230. Then I get back on the phone till 4pm. My goal is to have two new conversations a day, that’s it. In the last column, I mentioned dialing 20-40 numbers a day, depending on what you want to earn, you must figure out how many people you want to reach out to.
I like to run with 9-13 active deals. Whenever I get lower than this number, I crank up the cold call factory wheel and push out 40 calls a day. If I’m around 13 deals, I’m pretty careful about my workload and may only do 5 new calls a day. Sometimes if I’m too jammed up, I pass up opportunities (only if they are less than the smallest deal on my plate).
Paperwork and compliance, makes you zero dollars. It’s highly important, but I do this stuff when business owners have typically gone home (around 4-530pm).
Our job is hard, and it’s wicked hard making cold calls. I like to accomplish something hard before I get to work, so at the very least, I’ve done something I’m proud of, and then I can deal with the hang ups and deals going sideways. The worst days in my career are when I don’t get a workout in before. Also, when I’ve had a hard workday, getting workout in first allows me to mentally get through deal challenges. I’ll take about those roadblocks in the next column.
I spend the weekends with my family with kids sports and travel tournaments. Golf and Tennis are hard to come by and if they do, it’s very early in the morning (630/7am).
Probably the hardest component of Commercial Real Estate brokerage is the commitment to making new connections and figuring out how many you need to make to support your lifestyle. When you first start in this business, you must figure out what your time is worth and how much you need to earn from each transaction. Regardless of what brokerage firm you join, this should be the first action item. How much can I earn on each transaction? In fact that should be a question you ask during the interview process.
If your goal is to make $120,000 a year, you need to earn $10,000 a month. Now, let’s say you’re cold-calling buildings that could generate $20,000 in commission per closing. On paper, you need six deals. In reality, you need to find about 24 opportunities. Those 24 listings represent $480,000 in potential commission income, but only about half will turn into executed deals. That brings the pipeline down to $240,000. Then come the contingencies, financing and permitting and roughly half of those deals will actually close. Cut it in half again, and there’s your $120,000. That is the math behind dialing for dollars.
My wife will tell you when I get amped up about a deal, she just multiplies that excitement by 25% and starts mentally spending those commission dollars.
Find your lifestyle amount and find the money you need to earn per deal and repeat this method daily. It’s just a numbers game, like a deck of cards, eventually you’ll find an ace.
Once you complete the repeatable routine, the next component is Social Energy. For the most part, working out and cold calling is isolation, that’s fine, but if you accompany that with people that elevate you, and that energy starts to multiply. In the next column I’ll talk about Social Energy.
Daniel Gardner is founder of DMG Brokerage, Norwood, Mass.