What should you be doing right now?

It's a question I get all the time as a coach.

I'm going to hand to you right my 9 Point Ultimate Business Strategy for every single person that's listening to this.

If you just apply this by 30 days, I want you to email me personally and tell me exactly what happened. Feel free to DM me. I would love to hear how has a blown up your business because I know it will.

Nine points you can implement today in your business. Ready? Write these ideas down.

Here we go:

1. Implement the "5x5x5 Strategy"

This is five calls. Five texts, five cards every day. Okay. That's one strategy we can implement.

2. Networking

Networking is so important and it's one of the most missed opportunities. We should be doing 1-2 networking meetings a week with somebody in our sphere of influence. Where we're connecting human being to human being.

Ideally you want to go higher than that. But 1-2 would be the minimum. This is going to breakfast, dinner, coffee,...

If I were to ask you, what is your business strategy right now? Would you be able to write it down in two or three sentences — your specific strategy and how you're approaching the marketplace?

If not, you may have an issue because you might be market-driven and we don't want to be market-driven.

Why?

Because a market is kind of a high tide floats all boats kind of situation. What happens when the tide's not with you? And you're kind of fighting the market.

That's where you're going into a danger zone. And none of us want to be there. As Vince Lombardi said:

"Hope is not a strategy."

We absolutely have to have a strategy to survive and thrive in this business.

And one of the biggest things that we should be doing every day is understanding that we have a job that probably most people don't identify with. And our number one job isn't sales.

Our number one job is data collection. That is adding people to our funnel so that we can incubate them over the long haul. Getti...

There's a new study out that shows that 77% of homeowners believe now is a great time to sell their home.

And when you combine that with a recent study we talked about — which is that 1 in 10 homeowners is going to place their home on the market over the next 12 months. And 63% of those will do it in the next six months alone.

Question is:

What are you doing about it?

We know 80% of your business is going to come from a direct result of your sphere of influence. Either direct business or referred business. So we need to dive into that first and foremost.

I'm going to give you three ways to have impact at scale with these folks.

1. A weekly email into your database.

This doesn't cost you a dime, but it's one of the most powerful things you can do to stay top-of-mind.

But that email has to be value-orientated. It can't be garbage that people are going to look at it as spam. It has to be high value.

What's the highest value of content we can do? Sharing your opinion a...

What if there's one thing you could do that would have a massive impact on your business? And it was something that would feel like it wasn't work? It was almost rejection-proof. And it's something that you could do every single day. Would you like to know what it is?

The answer is networking. And what I mean by networking is going to coffee, dinner, drinks, lunch, breakfast, you name it. Whatever it is where you're meeting one-on-one with someone in your sphere of influence.

There's nothing more powerful than you can do for your business in terms of marketing than that.

Now it's not going to feel like you're doing anything — you're just having fun with somebody who you like to visit with. But by stretching yourself and meeting with more people in your sphere and getting outside your comfort zone, I can promise you the result of this will be referrals.

Now it's not instant gratification. It won't instantly happen. But when you commit yourself to this on a daily basis, wh...

Something super exciting happened in the last month that we haven't seen in the last 15 years:

Home prices on existing homes exceeded home prices for new homes.

Think about what I just said:

Existing home prices exceeded new home construction. So it was actually cheaper to go buy a brand new house nobody had ever lived in than buying an existing home. Absolutely amazing.

Lots of reasons behind that. But one of the reasons is normally when you're buying new construction, you're locking in a price six months earlier. And then they complete the new construction and you move in.

Well, the market has super accelerated in those last 6 months. And guess what's also happened:

Now, if you were to try to pull that off, what's happened with all kinds of lumber, supplies, and even appliances?

Prices have gone up.

So this will probably not be repeated anytime soon because now prices on new construction are beginning to rise again.

But what an interesting anomaly and just anothe...

What's one thing we all need to be concerned about?

Inflation.

We're starting to see inflation rise across many spectrums of the economy. And it is a little bit unnerving when we look at it. Inflation has actually crossed the 2% threshold it's actually past 4% right now.

It's different every month, but it's rising fast across all kinds of asset classes and employment. We're starting to see that real, serious pressure on wages. And a lot of wages have driven up.

We now have more job openings in our country than we've ever had recorded before. Think about what I just said: Job openings are wide open.

This idea that we have an unemployment rate is almost ridiculous because every American -- based on the amount of openings right now -- could be employed. They're choosing not to be employed in some areas or they're choosing not to go to work because of wages or whatever. But in a lot of areas, there's not just enough jobs, there's too many jobs, which causes wages to rise.

If you want a quick way to generate conversation through text with your Sphere of Influence, here's a great message that's resonating with a lot of my coaching students.

Look at your Sphere of Influence. Pull 5 or 10 people you're going to text today. And here's what you're going to say:

"Hey, have you ever looked at what your home is worth on Zillow? I'm curious as an agent, do you think it's sort of close, wrong, or right on the money?"

Watch what happens when you put this out to your Sphere of Influence.

Now, you can do it through a text or you could post it on social media. It's a great social media post and I guarantee you're going to get into a lot of conversations with people.

The end result of these conversations should be that Zillow is wrong 95% of the time.

In other words, 95% of the time, they don't get within 5% of their eventual sales price of the property. That Zillow's own data.

By the way, if you haven't looked at it, Zillow has an inaccuracy report th...

There's a question that we've had for a while now, which is: When are listing is going to come back in full force?

When can we have that expectation that we're going to start to see listings en masse start to come back to the marketplace?

We know there's been hesitancy because of COVID, but now that people are getting vaccines and the economy is strong. So when are we going to start to see people coming back and saying, Hey, I'm ready to make a sale. I'm ready to make a change.

There's an answer for us.

Zillow just did an extensive study talking to industry experts across the country. And the consensus is that it's going to be in the second half of 2021.

So we're coming right up onto that pretty soon here. And we're going to be right in the middle of 2021, which means we're going to start to see an acceleration of listings.

The question is: Are you ready for it? Are you out there lead generating to start stacking up that business now?

So here are three quick strategies...

Hey guys, quick question:

Are you a global REALTOR or a local REALTOR?

What do I mean by that? I just had a phone call from a guy that I worked with years ago. His name is Dick and he's an amazing guy. He called me and said, Jim, I've got a referral for you. He's living down in San Diego now. But we haven't seen or talked to each other in 15-20 years, but he has a referral for me.

Now, keep in mind: Dick is 83 years old and still out there selling real estate — so congratulations to Dick.

But when he referred that client to me, it just made me remember this concept of being a global realtor versus a local realtor.

Sometimes I have agents come to me that are in coaching and they say: 

"I've got my database, but it includes some people from my hometown or from a town I moved away from years ago, maybe in Texas, Florida, LA, or New York. Should I keep these people that are not local in my database? Why would I spend money on marketing to them or calling them or sending the...

What can you learn from Guns n Roses about real estate?

My wife and I took a road trip recently and I took the time to download a book for us to listen to. I don't think she was too impressed in the beginning, but she learned to love it. It was a great book by Duff McKagan talking about his experience as the bassist for Guns n Roses.

We learned his crazy biography of how he got started with the band and what he went through in his life. One thing that he talked about, which really fascinated me, was when Guns n Roses was beginning as a young LA band. They would have to go out and meet with club owners and lounge owners to try to talk them into using them as a band.

In other words, they had to sell themselves. And something the lounge owners and business owners did was instead of just paying these kids to come in and play -- and if they were terrible, make their guests run out -- they would make the bands pay them to play in the lounge or the bar.

And so the classic exampl...