How Steven Futch went from 4 to 7 deals a year to over 100 with a daily schedule

Steven Futch00:00

90% of the transactions are being closed by a mere 10% of the agents year after year after year. You have to decide if you’re gonna remain in the 90% of unproductive agents, relatively unproductive, or if you’re going to ascend into the top producer ranks. And if you wanna be in those ranks, then it’s going to require you to make some changes.

00:25I’ve been able to exceed 200 deals a year and break 300 deals a year many times. So the question is, are you willing to learn some new things and get rid of some of the old things that you’re doing that are making you unproductive?

Melissa Zurin00:48

Hey, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. We are here today for one reason, and that is to give you the competitive edge in this market. We have a true industry powerhouse with us, Steven Futch. Steven is a highly sought-after real estate coach, dynamic instructor, and a proven leader known to deliver high-impact, results-oriented training.

01:18So with a career built on principles of discipline and precision, Steven transitioned into real estate after serving 28 years in the United States Marine Corps as an officer. I can’t think of anybody more disciplined and focused than you when it comes to building a business model based on the skills that I just mentioned.

01:38So thank you for joining us today.

Steven Futch01:40

Well, thanks for having me. What I’d like to cover today are basic principles, and I call them the five distinguishing characteristics of a professional real estate salesperson. Let’s sober up a little bit here first. What is our challenge? Our challenge is that 90% of the transactions are being closed by a mere 10% of the agents, year after year after year.

02:05That only varies about 1% every now and then. So you have to make a choice. Are you happy being in that 90% that’s struggling to find some share of the leftover 10% of the business, or do you wanna join that 10% of the elite agents who are knocking down big time money? How many people in the audience today have done 200 closed transactions in one year?

02:40Probably very few. But it’s certainly attainable in almost any market. Even in the depressed market of Shreveport Bossier City, Louisiana, I’ve been able to exceed 200 deals a year and break 300 deals a year many times. So I know that if it can be done in this market, and if a country bumpkin like me can do it, certainly you’re capable of doing it.

03:10So the question is, are you willing to learn some new things and get rid of some of the old things that you’re doing that are making you unproductive? The first one we wanna write down is structured. What does it mean to be structured? I think the best way to illustrate it is to look at two people, one agent who is structured and one who isn’t.

03:36So let’s run through that right quick. Let’s look at the unstructured agent first. The alarm goes off in the morning, and that unstructured agent reaches out into the darkness without ever opening their eyes, and they slap that snooze button. And they’ve done it thousands of times because they never get up on time.

03:56They don’t have any way of being on schedule or staying on schedule, unless you get up on time. That’s the first and most elementary thing that you could possibly achieve. And sometime later, they roll out of the rack, and they shuffle into the kitchen, and they start drizzling their coffee down. And at about nine thirty or ten, “Well, I guess I better get ready to go to the office.”

04:27And they go stumbling into the brokerage at ten or ten thirty, and they go to the coffee break room, and they have another cup of coffee as they tell jokes or exchange personal data with some other unproductive agent. And then one of them looks at the clock, says, “Oh my gosh, it’s eleven o’clock.

04:45It’s time for our two-hour lunch break.” So away they go for a two-hour lunch break. And then they roll back in around one o’clock, and they actually turn on their computer to see if they have any messages, and if they don’t, they start surfing the internet or playing computer games. And then at about three thirty or four, it’s time to go home and start getting into the evening routine.

05:10So what are we looking at here? We’re looking at somebody who has no discipline, who has no scheduled activities that they do relentlessly every day, and they’re sort of like a yacht on the open ocean with a broken rudder and no sail. They’re just going wherever the events or the tides take them every single day with no plan, no purpose, and no commitment.

05:38Write down those three words, plan, purpose, and commitment, because without those three, you will never become structured. Let’s look at the structured agent. The alarm goes off, boom, feet hit the floor. They immediately go into preparing to get to the office on time or get into their own office on time. If you’re like me, you have your own office at home, and you don’t have a bunch of distractions around you.

06:05You can actually focus, and you can actually concentrate on the challenges at hand. They take out a schedule, and we’re gonna cover that next. The next thing we’re gonna cover is scheduled. But they look at that schedule, and they start executing income-producing activities that have been ordered in priority, and they have time slots that they have to operate on each one of those functions.

06:35And by the time the day is over, it flies by. Why? Because you’re absorbed in what you’re supposed to be doing. And guess what? Those are the people that are walking down the aisle and receiving the awards every year at your brokerage awards banquet. These are the people who understand what it takes to be productive.

06:55So you have to decide if you’re gonna remain in the 90% of unproductive agents, relatively unproductive, or if you’re going to ascend into the top producer ranks. And if you wanna be in those ranks, then it’s going to require you to make some changes, and therein lies the challenge. Because by the time we’re eighteen to twenty-two years old, we’re set in our ways.

07:25We’ve developed habits, good and bad, mostly bad, that we need to modify or change, and some are completely flushed down the toilet, be rid of them, because they’re keeping us from succeeding at the level that we know that we’re capable of. So does anyone have any questions about what the difference in an unstructured person and a structured agent looks like?

07:52Okay, I’ll assume that there’s no questions there. Let’s go on to number two, scheduled. What does it mean to be scheduled? It simply means that you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing when you’re supposed to be doing it, capital letters, no matter what. Now, we all know what we’re supposed to be doing, and we know when we’re supposed to be doing it because we have a schedule.

08:21And for those of you who don’t have a schedule, hopefully after today you’ll have one, because without it, you’re driving without a compass. You’re all over the road, and anything’s possible. But the one thing that’s not likely is that you’re gonna be productive at the end of the day. So what’s important about being scheduled?

08:43How do we come up with a schedule? Well, the first thing we have to do is we have to set a goal. What is a goal? It’s a dream with a deadline in writing. Why does it have to be in writing? Because if it isn’t in writing, you’ll forget about it. It’ll be something that’s not important to you and it’ll be gone from your mind in no time.

09:08I have my daily schedule in three places. I have it on the dash of my automobile. I have it on the ceiling above my bed, which is right here in the next room behind that wall. It’s the first thing I see in the morning when I open my eyes. It’s the last thing I see at night before I go to sleep. It’s two big time reminders that I am a scheduled individual, and the money that I’m gonna make this year and the goals that I’m going to achieve this year are totally dependent on me adhering to that schedule.

09:40And no one’s gonna do it for me, and no one can make me do it. Not even your coach can make you do it. You have to get up and be a self-starter and get on schedule and stay on schedule in order to achieve your goals and to be productive. Where does a schedule come from? It starts with a goal, and a goal is a dream with a deadline in writing.

10:06So we already covered why it has to be in writing. What about the deadline? Well, if something is open-ended, what do we tend to do? We tend to procrastinate, and we tend to allow ourselves the luxury of taking ourselves off of our own schedule in order to squander our own time, in order to lose our own money.

10:31It’s crazy, but it’s also rampant in this industry for some reason. I come from a highly disciplined family background. My father was a World War II veteran, and he believed in hard work all day long, daylight till dark. And he didn’t tolerate any departure from his instruction, maybe we should say.

10:57And there were severe punishment if you didn’t toe the line. And then from there, I went into the Marine Corps, which is also a highly disciplinarian environment, where you have to perform at a certain level every day or you’re out. They don’t countenance any non-performers in the Marine Corps.

11:17So why is this important? If you don’t set goals, then you don’t need a schedule. So it starts with setting a goal. What is my goal? What do I wanna produce? How much money do I wanna make this year? It has to be realistic. It has to be achievable. Don’t shoot for the moon on day one, and then you can constantly improve from there because you’re going to be learning skills as you go, and you’re gonna be learning from experience as you progress through the years in your career.

11:57Now, my own experience, I spent my first three years in the real estate industry sitting at the brokerage waiting for the phone to ring for someone to let me know that they wanted to buy a home or sell a home. That didn’t work out too well. I was doing somewhere between four and seven deals a year for my first three years.

12:18And then I met another broker who said… I’d already decided to get out of the business. That was in October. I was gonna let my license expire at the end of December and not renew it. I was talking to a broker about that, a broker from a different brokerage, and he said, “Why don’t you come over for the last three months and let me see if I can help you?

12:41I think you have everything it takes to be productive and successful in this business. You just haven’t had any instruction. You don’t know what you’re doing, and you can’t be responsible for what you don’t know.” So I figured I had nothing to lose. I switched brokerages. The guy says, “Steve, be here Sunday evening with a backpack for three days.”

13:11I said, “Where are we going?” He said, “You just be here in three days with your backpack.” So that’s what I did. I showed up Sunday afternoon, and so did three other agents, which I had no knowledge that were gonna be there. And we all got in this big car, and we headed to Dallas, Texas, which is about a three-hour drive, and we went to a Mike Ferry seminar starting the next morning, Monday morning.

13:40I sat on the front row. I was looking up at Mike Ferry all day for three days. I was totally mesmerized, and he was outlining what it takes to be successful in the real estate business. And for me, that was manna from heaven. I was eating it like chocolate cake and washing it down with resolve. I left there.

14:01I came back. I was on fire. I started prospecting daily. I started doing lead follow-up daily. In the last three months of that year, October, November, and December, I tripled my production, which I think was 16 transactions. The following year, as a full-time coaching client, guess what happened? I broke 100 deals my first year doing what I was supposed to be doing every day rather than sitting around some brokerage telling jokes and answering the phone.

14:39So you have to develop a schedule. Now, what are the three things we have to have for a schedule? First, we have to have specific functions that we have to perform every day in order to cover all our bases. What’s the second thing we need? We have to put them in order of precedence. We wanna do the most important thing first, the second most important thing second, and right on down the line.

15:06Whether you have five things or 25 things, they have to be spelled out, and they have to be printed out so that you can post that schedule and keep one with you at all times. It’s also a great listing aid. I use it all the time. As a matter of fact, I listed three properties last week. Two of them are already under contract.

15:30How did I use my schedule for that? “Mr. and Mrs. Seller, what time do you have right now?” “Well, Steve, it’s Wednesday afternoon at 3:00 PM.” “This is my daily schedule. Would you take a quick look at it and tell me what I should be doing at 3:00 PM on any weekday afternoon?” “Well, it says here that you’re prospecting for sale by owners and expireds.”

16:01They were for sale by owners. So I look up at them, I smile, and I’m nodding affirmatively. “Can you see that I’m doing exactly what my schedule says I’m supposed to be doing when I’m supposed to be doing it?” They said, “Yeah, that’s pretty impressive.” “Thank you, and isn’t that what you deserve and what you expect from someone that you’re going to turn this home over to get it sold?”

16:26“Well, yeah, that’s exactly what we expect.” “Great. All we need to do now is simply sign the contract so I can get started.” They listed with me. You can use that daily schedule as a huge listing aid if you have the discipline, which we’re gonna talk about later, to be on that schedule. The schedule is worthless if you’re not using it to your advantage and if you’re not following it.

16:51Does everyone see the value in being scheduled? So you set the goal, you come up with the specific functions that you need to perform every day, you list them, then you go back and put them in order of precedence, and you’re all set. You print it out. Now, you have to put it in some obvious places where you’re constantly reminded that you should be on schedule.

17:22And I have a wonderful assistant, admin assistant and showing agent who keep me on schedule. “Excuse me, Steve, I don’t think that doing what you’re doing right now is on your schedule.” Thank you for that reminder. Every time they correct me, every time they slap my hand, I thank them, because I need to be on schedule.

17:46I understand the essential role of that schedule. If you don’t have a schedule, I would invite you to have one by this time tomorrow, because if you don’t, you’re gonna continue to be like that yacht on the open ocean with no rudder, no sail, and you’re gonna be drifting through the day aimlessly going in all the directions except for the right direction.

18:16Well, again, thanks for joining us today. It was an honor and a privilege, and I would love to hear from some or all of you, and it doesn’t have to be immediate. If six months from now you say, “Yeah, maybe I’ll give that guy a call,” you can go to the website. There’s a little thing there where you can send me a…

18:36You can call me or you can send me an email, and if you’ll put your phone number in that email, I will follow up in 24 hours or less. It’s one of the first things I check for when I knock off in the evening is to see if I have any pending matters or people to address.

Melissa Zurin18:54

Awesome. Okay, guys. Thank you so much for attending.

18:58Hope you reach out to Steven Futch, and you will learn so many wonderful things with him. And we also hope that you consider Vulcan7 for your seller leads.