Steps to Success with Jess Lenouvel

eorge grombacher 0:15
I’m left with this is George G. And the time is right welcome today’s guest strong and powerful just Lenovo Bell, just so you’re ready to do this.

Unknown Speaker 0:22
I am ready. Thank you so much for having me

george grombacher 0:24
excited to have you back on let’s go just as the founder of the listings lab, she’s a business and marketing real estate coach. She is the author of more money, less hustle, becoming a seven figure real estate agent. Just excited to have you back on. Tell us a little about your personal lives more about your work, why you do what you do?

Unknown Speaker 0:42
Yeah, absolutely. So I grew up in the industry. So I grew up in real estate mom’s been a real estate agent for about 35 years, I sold real estate myself for 14 years in the Greater Toronto Area, built a multi seven figure team I had a little bit of like, early 30s midlife crisis, I think that I just, you know, I, I matured early. And then realized I felt really, really strongly about helping other agents. So made the made the shift, I wanted to show agents, how I did what I did, and how I built the business that I built. And now I have clients who are more successful than I ever was, which is also super cool. Move to the Bahamas in January of this year. So we’ve been here for about 10 months. And yeah, speaking on stages, live in my best Bahamas life I’ve become I’ve literally embraced the beach bum life. It’s, it’s, it’s been a it’s been a good year, it’s been a good time, since I talked to you last.

george grombacher 1:46
Well, I’m glad to hear that. So the promise of entrepreneurship, and the promise of being a realtor is

Unknown Speaker 1:56
freedom, you’re going Yeah, freedom, money impact, you know, all of the things that we get everybody gets into any kind of business for right I want to have, I don’t want to have an income ceiling, I want to be able to set my own schedule, I want to help people, and 95% of people who get into business or real estate specifically end up trading their life, their lifestyle, their relationships, their families, for success in the industry. And I’ve always felt like that was really the wrong way to look at look at it. What actually sparked the, the, you know, the the book itself was I went back and I read the Five Regrets of the Dying, again, a little heavy. But yeah, real realized that, like, there’s just so many people who lose perspective, while they’re in the day to day of their business and don’t realize that they’re gonna have these huge regrets at the end, that they work too much. And they didn’t spend enough time with the people that they loved, and that they didn’t experience life in the world. And, you know, everything that makes this one thing that we get to do one time super worth it. So I had a bit of like an emotional epiphany. And I said, you know, I think that I need to, I need to at least be the loud voice in the industry telling people that that trade off isn’t worth it. And a lot of a lot of people have resonated with it. And that’s really why we help agents build businesses, the way that we do is so that they’re not creating that golden cage, they’re actually able to work less create a really, really impactful business be monetarily successful, and create a ripple effect, whether it’s in their own family, in their communities, whatever actually matters the most to them, and that they’re living fully, that they’re able to, you know, have the business serve their life, as opposed to, you know, losing their life in order to serve the business.

george grombacher 4:02
Are they good? That’s great. Is that available to everyone?

Unknown Speaker 4:06
Yes, of course. I think I definitely think so. I think that there’s a lot of real estate specifically tends to be very archaic, I’ll say, right, like, it tends to be kind of stuck in the 80s. And, you know, I think that we have access to things today that we didn’t have 20 years ago, I remember when I got my real estate license, I got my pager that I was like, so proud of Let’s go, right and you know, as a kid being in the backseat of mom’s car with her MacBook, and she would give me an address and I would court I would like coordinate it. And you know, now we live in a world where we’re so connected. We have technology that can make our lives easier. We have ways to automate and make things really efficient. And it just like the opposite. Unity’s that we have to create more with less time are astronomically huge, huge compared to what we, you know, what we had access to even 20 years ago. So, I think that the fact that so many people in real estate are still operating as though it’s 85. You know, I was born in 84. So, you know, I, I think that you know, what we had access to back then versus now like, it’s, it’s, it’s crazy. And we’re all running around with computers in our pockets, and so many people just aren’t taking advantage of the opportunities and the technology that we actually have available to us quite easily Actually, today.

george grombacher 5:41
How do you think about? And do you do you think about and concern? Are you concerned about, I’m sure your students are losing the personal touch by reading too much tech,

Unknown Speaker 5:55
for sure. And I’m a really big believer that tech actually makes the personal stuff tighter. Because when human beings are doing things that are that a piece of tech can do, that’s not a human side of things. Right. So what I believe it does is it frees up time and energy and bandwidth for you to actually connect with human beings to actually have the time and the attention and the brain space to pay it pay better attention to the people who you’re actually face to face with or actually on on a on a phone call with. And that you’re not wasting time pushing buttons. And so I love technology, because I think it frees up so much of that time. And it allows us to create consistency, which builds trust and makes people feel safe without a human having to be responsible for remembering, I mean, there’s no human being on the planet that is consistent 100% of the time. And there’s also and I say this to people a lot, like no one is motivated every single day. And so a lot of the time we put so much pressure on on ourselves, especially in real estate, there’s so much pressure to be motivated, baited every day and be consistent every day, and the technology side of it can take that pressure off of us, so that the human side of us is actually taken care of. Right? I have so many people who are like, Oh, I have COVID. And I’m, you know, I’m trying to get this like marketing piece out. And I’m like, why is this happening? Like this is this, this is purely because the back end systems automations in your business are not tight. And if they were, you have the space and the freedom to have a bad day, and everything keeps keeps moving and keeps rolling, whether or not you are pushing the button or not.

george grombacher 7:53
That makes a ton of sense, consistency, motivation. Combine that with some pressure, shake it up, and you have a recipe for things not running sustainably,

Unknown Speaker 8:04
and burnout. I think that there’s just so many burnt out anxious human beings out there right now. And not everybody wants to move to the beach. And I think that, you know, being able to create when no matter where what business you’re in, or where you are, or you know, what your what your your Service Delivery looks like. It can’t be at the expense of your mental health, because it’s also not sustainable. Right, I think most people can can burn the candle at both ends for a period of time. But eventually, you’re going to feel empty and burnt out and anxious and you’re not going to be able to you will become the bottleneck of the business one way or another. And so if you don’t pay attention to your systems, the standard operating procedures, the unsexy business stuff, then a lot then what ends up happening is the business either stalls or it actually ends up dropping off. And I see this so often where agents will say like, I just got so burnt out, I took six months off. And so I feel like I’m starting from scratch again. And then they live they perpetuate the cycle again, where they’re like, Okay, I took six months off, I feel better. And now I’m going to hustle and grind and do the same things that didn’t serve me before. I’m going to just do it again. Right? So it becomes this this cycle of unhealthy basically just unhealthy behavior in order to make money. And so a lot of this comes down to how do we get you to where you want to go from a financial standpoint for business success standpoint, and make it sustainable, make it easier, make it efficient, make it leveraged so that every single person in the business and I don’t mean like when I say leverage, I think a lot of people start to think, okay, but then I have to take advantage of people on my team or I have to take advantage of people, you know that I’m hiring. And that’s not right for anybody. So how do we create efficiencies, I mean, every single almost every single person on my team has a VA, right? And the VA is are taken care of, and my teammate members are taken care of, and no one is overworked. And if someone is getting to a point where they’re feeling overworked, they raise their hand and they say, I need help. Right. And so that is what actually creates longevity. And long term success is when everybody, everybody’s basic human needs are being taken care of on a regular

george grombacher 10:41
basis. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. And I could see how it’d be easy to fall into that trap. Just because

Unknown Speaker 10:48
and I’ve done it, I’ve done it definitely the first time I remember. And I’ve talked about this a lot. The first time I hit seven figures in real estate, when I was selling real estate, I did it as a single agent with no team. It was probably one of the worst times in my life. phone would ring. Everyone’s like, she’s so successful. Look at her numbers. And it like the reality of my life was that my phone would ring and I would cry. And I would hand my phone to my husband and say, I need you to answer it. I cannot talk to another human being today.

george grombacher 11:21
What do I say? Just say anything, say hello,

Unknown Speaker 11:23
take a message, say hi. Tell them I’m I don’t know, tell them I’m busy. It was It was horrible. And I think that so many people wait until that moment before they actually ask for help. Or they actually build efficiency or, you know, they actually bring people on for support. I was doing everything I was doing paperwork, I was doing phone call, I was I was doing the $10 an hour tasks. And I was doing the $1,000 an hour tasks. And so I didn’t have any space left for me.

george grombacher 11:59
So you said people would look and say she’s so successful. Hmm. And that’s outside looking in, is that the starting point is just figuring out what success looks like?

Unknown Speaker 12:09
Yeah, I think everybody you know, there’s not one way to be successful. And success looks different for every single person. And the mistake that I made initially. And I that I see so so many other people make is that they’re only really looking 90 days ahead. Right? You’re so in the business that you’re you’re not even building something, particularly intentionally. So I always say and in my book, the very last chapter of the book is vision. What are you building? Where are you going to be in 510 years? And once you’re really clear on that you’re, you’re clear on like the ultimate and it can’t just be numbers. Because money comes and goes, right? It has to be like What is your day to day look like? What’s your ideal calendar? Where are you living? What are the experiences that you’re having. And then from there, we get to figure out how the business ties into it or makes the business becomes the vehicle to that life. And then we can reverse engineer it. And that is, I think one of the most frustrating parts about most businesses, but especially real estate, is that people are only making like one year goals, or they’re making, they’re making 90 day increments in terms of planning. And then you end up five years later, and you think, how did I get here? This isn’t what I wanted. But if you’re only focused on 90 days, then you’re always going to be focused on the immediate fires in the business, you’re never actually going to be building towards an ultimate vision of what you want. And it’s very easy to get shiny object syndrome, because you’re not actually making decisions based on where you want to be ultimately. And so I am a really big believer, if you know where you want to be in 510 years, that every single decision you make, every single thing that you put in place is either getting you closer to that or it’s not. And it’s so much easier to make decisions, it’s so much easier to focus and put things into perspective and ultimately end up where you want to be as opposed to you know, five years down the road thinking I don’t I don’t want this

george grombacher 14:29
makes it gets. I observed people having having trouble prioritizing and utilizing them making decisions and then how I’m going to allocate the resources that I have available to me we all have the same amount of time and similar amount of energy. And then money is obviously a very, very finite thing. So the tension. So knowing where it is that I want to end up. Yeah, that becomes a wonderful tool, an essential tool for making me help me figure out how I’m making these small decisions throughout my day, which will then either get me to that place I want to go or take me further away from it.

Unknown Speaker 15:08
Absolutely. And it provides an element of clarity that so many people feel that they don’t have. But it’s just a matter of zooming out. And then zooming back in with keeping in mind what it looked like when you zoomed out.

george grombacher 15:26
It seems like such an easy thing. But yeah, I don’t why, why don’t people do it,

Unknown Speaker 15:31
I think it’s just, you know, we get so wrapped up in the day to day that it gets forgotten, and it is soup, it’s so simple. But in, especially in small businesses, and in small, smaller service based businesses, it’s very difficult to have some like to get to a point where you’re truly sitting in that seat of visionary, where you’re driving your business, or your team or your company in the, in the direction of the vision that you have for what you’re building. And so, you know, if we’re, if you want to talk like the E Myth review, the E Myth concept, right? It’s, it’s still so relevant today. I mean, some of the examples are a little bit outdated. But it’s still so relevant, because people in small businesses, for the most part, or service based businesses, like real estate, they’re wearing all the hats. And so they’re only good at certain things. No one is good at everything. And so you’re what they’re not doing is they’re not making the space or the time to delegate times for each hat. They’re literally just throwing hats on and off all day. And they’re putting out fires, and they’re talking to people, there’s, it’s, it’s an extremely stressful way to like operate to operate a business, but it’s necessary to get to a certain point. And then once you get to that point, a lot of the time people are used to operating that way. It’s what they know. And it’s the concept of what got you here won’t get you there. And so, instead of switching gears and realizing, okay, now my role in this company is going to change. They just keep doing what they’ve always done, because it’s habit, which never allows them to like properly zoom out. And then a lot of the time too, people get focused on the wrong things. They get focused on the awards, or the numbers or without understanding what the what the numbers are for. And the numbers, the money, the revenue, the profit is for something. It’s not just to it’s not an ego

Unknown Speaker 17:50
accumulation. And if you don’t know what it’s for, then we’re building we’re building for ego, which is never a good thing.

george grombacher 18:02
Right? Just end up chasing your tail, and you’re stuck in that cycle.

Unknown Speaker 18:06
And you’re never happy.

george grombacher 18:09
By the way. Yeah. And you got into the business for the opposite reasons. Because you want freedom and flexibility and happiness. Yeah, yeah.

Unknown Speaker 18:23
Yeah. I mean, I fell into the business. I definitely didn’t choose real estate. It was like, I came out of school and my mom was like, Okay, you have gone to school for something very useless. What are you gonna do with your life? And I was like, I don’t know. She’s like, I think you should get a real estate license and try it. And honestly,

george grombacher 18:46
best thing. How funny. Yeah, your mom, you got a worthless degree. Great job. What do you gotta do? I gotta get the car. Yeah, figure it out. I love it. Well, just thank you so much for coming back on. Where can people learn more about you? How can they engage? Where can they get a copy of more money? Less hustle?

Unknown Speaker 19:10
Thank you. Yeah. So book is available on Amazon. Super easy. You can just type in more money less hustle. Best place to act with me probably Instagram. My, my handle is just at Jessalyn ravel. And I’m active on it every day.

george grombacher 19:30
Excellent. Well, if you enjoyed as much as I did, show, just your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciates good ideas. Pick up a copy of more money less hustle, Amazon, I will link that in the notes of the show and follow just on Instagram at just Lenovo. Well. I think I got it that time. Maybe not. You did. That was good. Nice. And I will link that in the notes of the show as well. Thanks. Good, Jess. Thank you. And until next time, remember to your part by doing your best