One giant opportunity that this crazy election is creating for real estate agents...

So in this case, and this is something that probably you've heard maybe even from your potential clients and stuff like, "Hey, I want to see how this election plays out before I make any big decisions with my home," or whatever it may be. That has also translated in the conversations that I've had with probably dozens of different real estate agents that are like, "Hey, I don't want to make any decisions with my business based on some unknowns with what's going to go on with the election. I just don't know," And this is the same thing that I saw when COVID first hit, right? Where people were like, pump the brakes, pull back on marketing. I don't really know how this is going to work out, right?

I think in the movie Days Of Thunder when there's a big crash in front of him and he doesn't know where to go and he just got to hit the pedal to the metal and go right through it and just hope for the best, and the agents that did that in February, March, April had record months in June, July, August. I think that the same opportunity is getting created right now, especially with some seasonality stuff that starts to hit and you just get this pullback effect from a lot of people.

It's a very somber time in America watching the news, but it felt a lot like that situation with COVID. Like, Oh my God, unprecedented territory, what will happen? And now we know, as you said, the people who pushed through, who continued to plan for success, crushed it. I mean, there were lots of articles about it.

I mean, there was a lot of market share to grab and there still is right now and I think that's the main point, to continue to persevere and push through, especially with your marketing. If you haven't done this yet in your real estate business, if you haven't proved the model of taking a lead and converting that into a commission, that's step one, okay?

Because you need to be able to do that. That gives you control over your business, which gives you control over your destiny. That gives you the ability to move the needle and call your shot anytime you want and if you have done that, well then you already know it's just a mathematical equation in what you need to be doing right now is the dang math, right? Because if people do get fearful, then that means that they're going to pull back, which is what we saw happen in COVID, right? The cost per lead for real estate agents, as far as online marketing was concerned, went down tremendously and it went down across all platforms and that's the time to gobble up market share. Warren Buffet says, "When people are fearful, be greedy. When people are greedy, be fearful."

If you're staying the course, you're doing the math and you understand how to take advertising dollars, turn them into commissions, you need to be pushing on that gas right now and if you can afford to doubling down on your marketing budget, your ad spend budget, getting more of your audience, more of your leads, more of the customers that you're going to do business with over the next quarter or two stacked up.

Collecting leads is never a bad decision. You increase the audience, you increase your database of people that you can push on later. It's never a bad thing. I remember I went to the University of Illinois and it was a top 20 business school in the country and the very first finance course. My professor, in the first five minutes of this class, told us that we are now going to be smarter than 95% of the investors in America. All he did was turn around on the board and wrote, "buy low, sell high." Since most people go into these emotional swings where once something's skyrocketing, then they buy, and then it's fallen out the sky and they're fearful of losing more. So, that's when they sell and he was like, "All you have to do is flip that and you'll be an amazing investor."

The only way to take your emotions out is to know the math. If the math starts getting fuzzy, then you can freak out. If you're spending the money now and you're not able to convert all of a sudden, it would be like the Canary in the coal mine, but if that continues over time, okay, now we need to re-adjust.

I think the only time that the conversations for market-maker ever get uneasy like stomach hurts type of uneasy is when we're unclear about the numbers. A number that we trust no longer has a trust factor and it's like, "Oh, I can't operate again until I know the truth." And that saying has always resonated with me. Men lie, women lie, numbers don't because it's just truth and you can make great decisions based off of that and like with this election, I have probably never seen so many political ads in my entire life on social media as I have in the last few weeks and so, the real estate comes down, there's less people going to be trying to advertise in the next few weeks.

When we had our marketing meeting, we're like, "Oh, well, let's bump the advertising budget 30%." This is significant because we spend a lot more than our customers do by factors and multiple. So, 30% is a huge number and we're doing that because the math is there, right? We can say, "Okay. Well, we want to increase. So, let's increase the marketing budget." It's the same way that I ran my real estate team.

Well, let's be clear about why we were bumping the budget. We were bumping the budget because for us, the cost per appointment was increasing and we're like, "Well, in order for us to grow, we have to increase our marketing budget." But the math for us to be able to increase the budget based on what we know, as far as the conversion rate, how many we need in order to sell is still solid, right? Of course, I'd want it to be lower. But, it takes money to make money in our business and arguably every real estate agent out there as well. If you want to have a business, if you don't track your numbers, all you got is hope. You're hoping for the next commission. You're not mathematically making it happen. You're not going to go out there. You don't have a business if you don't track the numbers.

I talk about when I first tracked it, which was the number of showings it took to get a sale. I didn't know what to track. I'm just going to count those because it seems like counting those and I had to count something.

And if you don't have a plan, you're planning to fail and it starts with a goal. We have a clear goal of what we're trying to hit. So, we know what numbers that it's going to take to hit the goal. How many leads? How many appointments? What the conversion rate is, right? How much time it takes, with the cash conversion cycle.

If you get me 100 appointments with real estate agents that have somewhat shown interest in growing their business, it doesn't matter what their GCI is. It doesn't matter where they're at in the business, how long they've been in the business. If you get me 100, on average, I know if I talk to 50, 10 of them will probably come on board with Market Maker, right?

I'm harping on this because you should have some of that math by now and if you do, then our point is you should strongly be considering turning that knob up while people are fearful because it's going to be advantageous. It's like buying low, and that's what we saw happen in COVID and that's what we suggested during COVID. And it worked.

The best Q1 and Q2 and as long as you just power through, that's how you gain momentum and keep momentum. It's just Michael Reese told me that one time. He was like, "Dude, everybody would always pull back and I would always double down in November, December because it just made me have the best January's and it kept my growth going because I would grow through the summer months and whatever in Dallas and then I would just maintain through the rest and then I would hit another growth spurt."

Here's what I experienced. In my market, it's a resort market, right? And so, I've always said, "People roll up steaks in the middle of winter." What I was always astounded with is although that was true as far as my competition was concerned, I could generate the same amount of leads no matter what the seasonality was pretty consistently year round and when I was first looking at trying to become number one, I would look at my competitors who were number one and you watch them, right? You watch them in that first quarter of the year even though it's seasonality, it's a second home market, it's a summertime place, that first quarter, they would get so far ahead, it would be impossible to catch up and so, how do you do that?

Well, you start thinking about it right now, arguably the last month, right? Beginning of Q4, you start planning for Q1 and you make sure that you have the money in the coffers and you have the math. So, you know how many leads it takes you, how many appointments it takes you to get a conversion? When you get a conversion, on average, how much that commission dollar is so that you can comfortably spend through the time, right? Pushing through, like you said, just plowing through it to be able to get so far ahead in the beginning of the year that your competitors can't catch up and if you want to be number one, that's what you have to do, right? If you want to, again, have a business instead of a job, that's what you need to do, right?

So, what you should be doing and it's even more exciting whenever there's a fear out there that you can take advantage of. So personally, I'm excited we started out our day with a marketing meeting. As soon as we get off of this, I'm going to be calling you again, "Hey, let's put this together. Let's get busy," because one of the things I think people probably don't realize is we take our own medicine. We're not just talking to talk. This is what we're talking. This is what we're doing and so, then we bring it to you and we're like, "Hey, this is what you all should do too because it's worked pretty good so far."

If you want some help with these things, go to marketmakercall.com. Watch the short video we made for you, how we generate leads for you. Nurture those leads in a way that elevates your status and authority in the mind of those leads and ultimately deliver them to you as a pre-positioned appointment. That word pre-positioned is very important. Go to marketmakercall.com. We'll explain it all to you and get on the train here of turning dollars into commissions consistently so that you can grow your business and have a lot of peace in your life. I find it very peaceful to know with some mathematics certainty that the future's going to be good.

Never worse than what it is. Never better than what it is. It's just what it is, regardless of who's in office. If we can keep acquiring customers for X dollars, I don't care who's in there.

So, like we always say at Market Maker, you are always just one preposition appointment away.

Every day.