Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Okay.
No, you should start Jiu Jitsu, bro.
[00:00:03] Speaker B: You think so?
[00:00:04] Speaker A: Yeah, it's way more like chess than it is, like, wrestling.
[00:00:09] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:00:10] Speaker A: For real?
[00:00:11] Speaker B: I never got a concussion in playing chess. I feel like I'd get a concussion in Jiu Jitsu.
[00:00:16] Speaker A: No, only if you're a.
[00:00:18] Speaker B: If you're an.
[00:00:19] Speaker A: You'll get for real, dude.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: Why is that?
[00:00:22] Speaker A: Because, like, it's one of those things, like, if you go.
Especially not if you're. If you don't compete. Like, if you just train, dude. Like, no one wants to hurt you.
Like, everybody that you train with, like, you don't want to break your own toys, so, like, you don't hurt your training partners, so you're not gonna. You're. You're pretty safe, dude, especially with people that know what they're doing, you know?
Like, you gotta. You get guys that don't know what they're doing. Like, yeah, you could probably up pretty good, but, like, if you're just training and, like, learning the skills, it's. It's pretty safe, dude. That's why a lot of people do it, so.
[00:01:03] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't know. We'll see, bro.
[00:01:06] Speaker A: You. You. It's one of those things. I feel like if you started doing it, you'd be like, I wish I did this 10 years ago.
[00:01:14] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[00:01:15] Speaker A: Yeah. Tell you that's fun, man. Dude, knowing you can kick the. Out of, like, anybody that you encounter other than the people that you train with is. It's pretty cool, dude. It's like a cool, cool, super.
Not really. I mean, it's how it's. However much you put into it, dude, you can go an hour a day, like two days, three days a week.
That's all it is.
They match you up with your own skill, your skill level, so. So you'll probably be rolling with children.
Yeah, my nephew started. He started, dude. They opened it. There's a gym in Ocean City now, and he started training in Ocean City.
[00:02:04] Speaker B: Oh, yeah?
[00:02:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:02:05] Speaker B: Which. Who's. Whose son?
[00:02:07] Speaker A: My Sean. Jeff's. Jeff's kid.
[00:02:10] Speaker B: Jeff's kid?
[00:02:11] Speaker A: Yeah.
Yeah, he works. Really? And he, like. He works at the shore, but he, like, you know, telecommutes or whatever.
He does something for the Navy, like Department of Defense or something like that.
[00:02:24] Speaker B: That's what Liam works for.
[00:02:26] Speaker A: I know. I think, dude, I think that they might work at the same place, like, his job. And what Liam's job is sounds incredibly similar.
[00:02:35] Speaker B: He was like, it's Sean Ardo.
[00:02:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:02:39] Speaker B: There's no way Liam would come across an iron out and not make a connection.
[00:02:44] Speaker A: No, I know, I. I realize that, but they are in the same. They're in. Definitely in the same.
Well, you. I think it's based out of the navy yard. He works in any.
[00:02:54] Speaker B: Yeah, it could be, but there's, like, you know, bunch of buildings down there.
[00:02:58] Speaker A: Well, I don't know. Something about security.
Yeah, that security.
[00:03:04] Speaker B: How's work?
[00:03:05] Speaker A: It's good, dude. It's good. It's actually really good.
There's a lot of shit, bro. AI has breathed, like, a new breath of life into, like, the business, which is crazy, dude. It's like.
Yeah, it's insane, man.
[00:03:30] Speaker B: You're listening to Selling the Dream. This isn't an interview, and we're not journalists, but each week we'll ask our guests to open up and share their secrets to business success.
Let's have a conversation and have some fun. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Selling the Dream, your favorite podcast about sales, about leadership, about entrepreneurship. I'm joined by my serial entrepreneur and good friend, Joe Iredell.
Joe, how are you?
[00:03:56] Speaker A: I'm doing good, man. How are you?
[00:03:58] Speaker B: I'm doing fantastic.
We have a great show today. We have a returning guest today, one of our favorites, someone who I had the pleasure of seeing and hanging out with last week at the North 10 third annual gala, and that is our good friend, Maria Quattrone. Maria, what's happening?
[00:04:19] Speaker C: What's up, guys?
Thanks for having me today.
[00:04:23] Speaker B: You're on a very short list of people that have been on twice now.
It could be because we're very selective on who we have on twice, or it could be because no one ever wants.
I like to think it's because we're selective.
[00:04:39] Speaker C: I. I think people want to come back.
[00:04:41] Speaker A: I don't think those facts are mutually exclusive.
[00:04:44] Speaker B: But that's true. That's true. Could both. Both could be true.
[00:04:50] Speaker C: So.
[00:04:50] Speaker B: So a lot's happened since the last time we were together. Maria. And I want to get into all of that, but I also want to kind of slow it down a little bit.
And really, I want to learn more about kind of your early career and how you got into real estate and kind of go from there.
There's a lot of people.
I like to think that our target audience are real estate centric.
We have a lot of connections in the real estate world. And, you know, we have an awesome webinar together couple months ago where you talked about last year's success. 192 listings in one year.
And I think that stuff resonates. People want to hear more about who you are and how you do what you do. And I think it all starts at the beginning. How did you get into real estate?
[00:05:43] Speaker C: I was in radio advertising for 10 years at the time, and a good friend of mine suggested that I look into getting into real estate. And I thought, I don't really. Nah, I don't know.
And I didn't really know much about that career.
And I ended up sitting down with his business partner at the time, who had a small brokerage here in Center City, Philadelphia.
And I literally like wrote 20 questions down and had coffee with him. And I asked him all these different questions about the industry.
And one of the reasons why I wanted to leave what I was doing after a decade was that I wanted to have more independence, freedom, and the opportunity to earn as much money as I wanted to. And I felt, even though I was in sales, I felt there was a glass ceiling in that industry.
And they only really let you make so much and they. They control it by different ways that they. They find to do that.
And so I had met with him in November of 2003, and by December, I decided to sign to take the real estate class. The next classes weren't till January. There was no online at that time.
And so I took the first classes that came up in Bensalem, Pennsylvania. Drove up there on the weekends while I was still working at the radio station.
And by March I was licensed. I had my first closing March 31, 2004.
[00:07:25] Speaker B: So you were licensed in November of 20? No, no. You were licensed in March of 2024 and had your first closing in March?
[00:07:31] Speaker C: That's correct.
[00:07:33] Speaker B: That's pretty impressive.
What did you learn in the radio ad business? Because Joe and I have ad sales in our background as well. I don't know if you remember, but we started in yellow page ad sales.
So I know that one of the difficult things in ad sales is the return on investment, how to prove that it's working. Sometimes it's not that easy to do.
But what did you learn in radio ad sales that immediately translated into real estate sales conversation that helped your early success?
[00:08:07] Speaker C: Dials equal contacts. Contacts equal conversations. Conversations equals appointments set. Appointments set equals contracts. In this case, it was radio ad sale contracts.
It's the same exact thing, except I had to make more dials and more contacts to get a result than I did in real estate.
Because everybody needs to live somebody somewhere, somebody needs to buy, right? Not everybody needs to buy or sell. Every single day, somebody's buying and selling, right? Hundreds of people and or more than Hundreds of people, but let's just say hundreds of people in Center City. Okay, in radio, who's the buyer? There are business owners.
They're entrepreneurs. They are colleges, universities, nightclubs, Acme, supermarkets, hospitals. So the pool of people, obviously is much, much smaller that can afford radio advertising and. Or even want to do radio advertising.
So. So I learned very early in my career, when I started my career, I worked at a very small TV station in Lynwood, New Jersey, wmgmtv.
They were in Linwood, but it was Atlantic City. And so that is how I started. And it was in May of 1993.
[00:09:53] Speaker B: We were. I'm going to take a side note. We were at that North 10 event and it was two cable tycoons.
Keynote speaker was the president of Comcast. When they were talking about the early days of cable television, was that kind of bringing back. Was there any parallels there? Bringing back any memories when you were working at the TV station? Like, or was it two separate worlds?
[00:10:21] Speaker C: No, there was some parallel there for sure. I mean, they went back. Like, it went back back, those two.
Which was really, really an amazing story and very powerful. I really appreciated Chase's talk and Brian's as well. I didn't know that they were that close in age, and I didn't know that they had grown up other families, but pretty much side by side. So it was super interesting.
[00:10:49] Speaker B: Yeah, it really was.
So you, where did you grow up?
[00:10:54] Speaker C: In Northeast Philadelphia, in a row home with three bedrooms, one bathroom, and then, you know, like, they had the toilet in the basement kind of thing.
And I'm the oldest of five. At that time there was four of us because my brother is 17 years old, younger than myself.
He wasn't born then. In fact, he was born. And then my family moved to Medford, New Jersey. And that was in 1988. He was born in 87. We moved in 88. After I graduated high school, I literally graduated and like, I went to senior week. That was a thing then in Wildwood. Yeah. And my. My family actually, like, moved in that week when I was down there doing whatever I was doing.
[00:11:41] Speaker B: Wow.
Senior week was a thing for us too. Wildwood, New Jersey.
[00:11:44] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:11:45] Speaker B: Now these kids go to, like, Cancun and it's crazy. Like, the whole school hops on a plane and goes to the Dominican Republic.
[00:11:53] Speaker C: Oh, good for them.
[00:11:55] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:55] Speaker A: Is that true?
Is that true? That happens?
[00:11:59] Speaker B: Yes, around here it does. I don't know, like, the Ridley kids all. They all go to Cancun.
[00:12:04] Speaker A: Wow, man.
They go back or what?
[00:12:10] Speaker B: No, I Don't know.
So you grew up with. You grew up in a household and that's St. Joe. Big family. Myself, three bedroom house, four brothers. Well, three brothers, four kids.
Everybody fighting and jostling for space for attention, for resources, for seconds.
How did that influence your, your career in sales?
[00:12:36] Speaker C: It certainly did because there was a time it was confusing. Like sometimes we had money, sometimes we didn't have money.
Sometimes I had a fur coat and then other times I had holes in my shoes. So I just woke up when I was young, maybe 11 or 12, and I said, you know what stops here with me?
Meaning that I was going to make my way and I was going to be the solution.
And that my mantra be the solution started in what month was it? May of April of 20. 2020. But I was that I had that mentality of being the solution.
My as long as I can remember, if I really think back and in fact I can't even believe I'm saying this right now because I didn't until right this moment actually put that together two and two.
And so I decided I am going to be. I'm going to be somebody. I'm going to become somebody. I knew I could do it. My parents always told me anything you want to do, you set your mind to do, you can do.
And I carried that belief with me through my entire life, even right now to sit at and I truly believe that. I believe if you have the confidence and maybe, maybe you don't have it 100 but you take a borrowed belief from somebody else that came before you and you go, so for example, there was this woman here in Philadelphia that I admired when I first got into the real estate business. Turns out she really not a great human. But anyway, that's another story.
[00:14:16] Speaker B: I was going to ask who she was.
[00:14:17] Speaker C: Now we're not going to put any names but what happened was I saw what she did and I saw that she had the listings and I saw how successful she was. And then because I saw that she did it, I knew I could do it too. And that goes for anybody. If there is somebody that has come before you and did it, you can do it too. And you got to take that bar bleed and you have to be willing to be uncomfortable in your day to day. And I know that a lot of people want to don't like feeling uncomfortable because it's uncomfortable, it really is uncomfortable. But you have to learn how to be uncomfortable and just do it and, and don't let the fear stop you. And I see so many times that people get completely paralyzed by. What are they going to think? What's this one going to say? I don't know what to say, blah, blah. All these different reasons and excuses. By taking the action, it actually creates momentum that pushes you through the uncomfortable time.
But you have to take that action. So I say courage comes before confidence.
Having the courage to put yourself out there and maybe somebody will point a finger at you, and maybe they'll laugh at you, and maybe you won't get that listing, or maybe you won't get that sale. But you know what?
You made the effort. And if that's progress, we don't need perfection.
[00:15:45] Speaker B: You're stronger as a result.
[00:15:46] Speaker C: Yes. And progress over perfection every single day. That's something I Learned in circa 2006. I had a coach. This lady was my coach, and she was saying, maria, don't worry about being perfect. Progress over perfection.
And, you know, that was early in. In 2006, was early in my real estate career. And so. And I was focused on that time of learning how to work with expired listings, learning how to be the solution for them. That's how the name came to be. Because when we were talking about names for the podcast, they'd asked me, my team said, well, what. What is it you do for people? And I'm like, well, I bring solutions.
I'm the solution. And then, then we. I said, okay, that's gonna be called be the solution.
And so we are all our own solution in life, whether it's life or business, it's up to us.
We're the only one that can do the work. Nobody and nobody's coming for us or nobody's coming to save us outside of Jesus Christ our Lord. But besides that, we, we'll leave that aside. There's nobody going to come today and do the work for you. You have to do it. And it's inner work, too.
It's not just picking up the phone, but you have to start somewhere. Everybody starts. You know, I started one day and I had no listings and I had no buyers and I had no sales. And then I did, and then I did again, and then I did again. And by doing the reps, I got better and better and better and better.
It's impossible not to. You're going to fail forward. Many people don't realize failure is 100% part of the process.
There's absolutely no way to succeed in anything, whether it's mortgage, insurance, title, real estate, any kind of sales, anything in life, whether you're taking taekwondo or you're Learning to be a bodybuilder, you have to fail your way forward.
[00:17:52] Speaker B: Taking the reps is something that, that's a common theme with Joe and I in our conversations is, you know, reps is the single most important thing you can do, especially in sales.
And we learned that early in our career working together. One of the things Joe and I used to do is we used to go on each other's appointments, which sounds like a huge waste of time. Like, if he was on appointment, I should be prospecting. If I was on appointment, he should be prospecting. But the reality was that gave me access to his reps. He had access to my reps. And we watched each other navigate the sales call and watched where we tripped up, watched where something worked. And both of us learned from each other's reps.
And that's where mentorship, you know, I know for you, Maria is a big thing and, and reps it. Another thing you mentioned, fear.
I read that someone can fact check me on this if I'm wrong, but I did see this just today.
If you look back at all of the religious texts, Luke, the Bible, the Torah, you know, Quran, the ancient Far Eastern ancient texts, one of the most common phrases, and it's versions of the phrase, don't be afraid, fear not, be not afraid. That phrase, that a version of that phrase shows up so many times in ancient texts, it's probably the most common theme. I know the Bible, I think the word love is the most. At least in the New Testament, the word love is the most used word. But I thought that was pretty interesting and that you just, you just touched on that.
You know, fear stops so many people.
It stops so many.
[00:19:42] Speaker C: Yeah. And you know, even myself included, I have been looking to launch my community More listings now. The listing agents playbook for success for years.
And it was the. It was who do I need to become in order to shift my identity?
[00:20:08] Speaker B: Because we talked about this. We talked about this at the event.
[00:20:13] Speaker C: Yeah. Who do I need to become today to walk into that position?
Because first it was Maria, you know, the oldest child, the first grandchild on both sides.
Then it was Maria, the big sister. Then Maria worked at the bank at 14 years old counting checks. I was a check counter, stuffing them in envelopes. And then I worked at the Sofro fabric store, cutting fabric. Oh, both jobs, same timing in high school.
Then after high school, Maria, the rose girl. I actually sold roses, like in like that get up. I don't know if you remember, like fishnets and a basket of roses.
And I Would drive, I would drive from bar to bar in this get up tuxedo shirt, bow tie, cummerbund, like brief, like, like, like underwear, fishnets and black high heels. Come on.
[00:21:20] Speaker B: And you were selling roses to guys who were hoping to use them.
[00:21:23] Speaker A: You like shame, you shame all the guys into buying them for their girls, and then you trick all the guys into thinking that if they buy them, they're gonna get a girl. I get it.
[00:21:32] Speaker C: Do you like rose for the pretty lady?
And then sometimes they didn't have, they're like, I don't really want to buy it for them. Like, you could buy me a rose.
[00:21:42] Speaker B: There you go. Who's gonna say none of that?
[00:21:44] Speaker C: I got, I mean, daily I would get like a dozen roses from 12 different guys.
I can't make this up.
Then it was. I worked in the bar business as well, simultaneously waitressing, bartending, inlay clubs. While I'm going to college, full time, full time work for a full time college. Then went into advertising sales for a decade, then landed into real estate sales for 23 years. And now moving into the next trajectory of my career.
So I have an enormous amount of sales experience.
And really what allowed me to hit the ground running when I entered in real estate in 2004 was the 10 years, the decade before that, the 11 years before that, that is where the foundation was built. So, you know, you can't compare yourself to other people.
You don't know what they, where they came from or what they did before.
I had an enormous amount of sales experience. I was selling business to business.
And so I lean on a little more on the business to business side of the business. That's why I like commercial real estate. That's why I like multifamily than the direct consumer. Although I do do a lot of that. Obviously I do enjoy and even, you know, working with large organizations and helping them go through, for example, like people that are buying. I had a client a couple years, few years ago, they bought, I think I sold them in one year, like 60 some properties.
But that was a business client. That wasn't a, you know, they're, it's. It's a different mentality, it's a different mindset. You have to have a different set of skills also to work with those people.
And you just have to decide what it is you want.
[00:23:36] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm gonna come back to pause because I did it. I do it. Every time I get so excited, I jump right in and I forgot to do the two truths and a lie. Even though I reminded You. As soon as we got on that, I forgot. So I'm gonna take a quick break here. Let's go back to the two truths and a lie. And then we'll. We'll move on to. I want to. I want to get into next. I want to get into how your business operate. And then I want to get into some of the new ventures that you're getting into you've already touched on.
[00:24:06] Speaker C: So.
[00:24:06] Speaker B: So two truths and a lie. What are they?
[00:24:08] Speaker C: Okay, so just give me three facts. Yeah. My chip and I, we have four kitty cats.
I went to. I went to burning man in 2008 and I've been to Italy more than 22 times.
[00:24:32] Speaker B: Okay.
More than 22 times. I think I know the answer, Joe. I don't know if you'll know, but we'll see. We'll come back to that here at the end. That's my favorite part of the show.
Tell me for the agents that are listening, some of them are in a position where they are ready to scale, some aren't. But they still need a vision of what is possible.
What does your team look like mechanically? Like, how does it set up?
[00:24:58] Speaker C: So we have a field service person that goes out, does all of our signs, our boxes, our photography, our videos.
That's very important position.
[00:25:15] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:25:16] Speaker C: Then I have Apple who lives in the Philippines, who assists me on things like I need to get done. I said, I want to send this email out or I want you to. I did a webinar last week and I asked her this morning, I want you to run the webinar through OPUS and give me teaching moments. Get as many teaching moments through that webinar so she'll do all that kind of stuff for me. I don't ask her to write my post. I write my own post. Because what I found was she was writing posts and because they weren't in my voice, they did not perform well.
So I'm the only one that writes does content.
So she'll also work on the marketing content for the database. Like today I have four emails to write for the database. I will write it and I send it to her and then she does all the prep. So she's the one pushing this stuff out.
Like. So she's kind of like my marketing assistant because I'm the director of marketing at my company.
And then Eliza's handling with Dara. They handle the listings and the closings.
They work in tandem.
And she also, with I have a part time bookkeeper and she'll also do operational things with the Bookkeeper.
And then I have. We have another woman, Riza, who works also in the Philippines. And she will. She'll get all of our direct mail letters prepped, put listings in the system.
She doesn't write any descriptions or anything that. But she does all, like, the mechanical work behind the marketing. On the administrative side, she'll write listing contracts.
What else does she do? She'll write, she'll prep offers, and then we. Because everything's prepped through the office, our listing contracts. So she'll prep everything, and then the office reviews it, and then the office signs it because we sign our contracts before they go out.
[00:27:19] Speaker B: Okay.
Now, how do you work buyers?
[00:27:27] Speaker C: That's a good question.
That's a good question. So I'll give you an example.
I have a client, they have to sell to buy. And so I represented them on the cell. I assign them to Juan, and I have one do the legwork out in the field, and then we handle the transaction internally.
Okay. So most of the time, the contract,
[00:27:51] Speaker B: you or Juan or someone in your office drop the contract.
[00:27:53] Speaker C: It depends on the client.
So Juan can draw the contract up or Reza will draw it up, and then Eliza will proof it before it goes out to the client.
So it all depends on what I were. Whether it's Juan or Tanya or dawn, whoever. It all depends on that client and their level of involvement, the agent's level of involvement. So some I'll just assign and they'll handle it all. And then some I'm still in charge of because, like, if it's a buy sell, for example, I'm in. I'm. I'm involved because it's complicated and nothing can get messed up.
They're closing on the same day, both houses.
So the office is more involved in those cases than the ones that are just, you know, they're bought, first time buyer. But I'll get people that will come in. And I gave another one just every week. I give out. I literally give out deals and listings. I give out listings, too, to my agents because I may not be able to go to that appointment for whatever reason, and I may not want to go to the appointment because I have other things that I'm doing.
So I'll assign. For example, if it's West Philly or North Philly, I'll sign Tanya. She lives in West Philly.
You know, it just depends on every. There's no hard roll on it. It just depends on what it is, who I think the best fit's going to be, and who's coming in. My Office and doing the work and making the calls.
I have so much business that I can give agents. You know, I haven't found any lately that, you know, I haven't been really focused on recruiting.
But if there's anybody out there who wants to actually, like, get layups, I'm a good source.
[00:29:55] Speaker B: Now, you recently made a switch from ReMax to real LPT.
[00:30:03] Speaker C: That's okay. It doesn't. It doesn't even matter. That's the thing.
[00:30:06] Speaker B: Well, I was going to say, right. That was a big deal.
But the reality is, and I think we talked about this, you learned that, like, your brand is you and that the name of the company wasn't as much of an impact as you might have.
[00:30:23] Speaker C: So the thing is that the company that you go to is more for the agent than it is for the consumer.
So I was at another company years ago, and when I left that company, everybody thought I was with.
Not everybody, but a lot of my clients didn't even know I was at that company. They thought I was at the other blue company.
I'm like, no, I was at this one. They're like, what? Oh, I thought you were with Prudential. I'm like, I wasn't with Prudential. But they, they don't know. They just know it's Maria. It's the person behind it who's the operator is the most important part. And LPT is kind of cool. Like yesterday, our CEO Robert Palmer, we do. He does a motivational Monday at 11 o' clock every Monday.
And I got the email yesterday morning that it was happening. I was like, well, Memorial Day. I'm like, that's cool. So I get on and it was very patriotic. He gave the update like he always does. But then at the end, like, it was beautiful tribute for Memorial Day. He had. Who is it? Ray Charles.
O. Pete.
A beautiful first. That song, that song, I can't think of the name.
[00:31:38] Speaker A: America the Beautiful.
[00:31:39] Speaker C: America the Beautiful. That it was beautiful. And then he did. It's a great rendition, huh?
[00:31:44] Speaker B: Yeah, that Ray Charles is a great one.
[00:31:47] Speaker C: It's a great rendition. I had like the goosebumps. I was making breakfast at the beach.
I had goosebumps. It was, it was really beautiful. But he's, he's a good guy. I mean, he's a good operator and it's a growing company.
And I thought, what the heck? I didn't want to resign with ReMax because it was a five year commitment for the franchise and I just didn't want to do it. I don't want to be tied into anything.
And so that was one of the things and I didn't see ReMax really moving towards the times I felt anyway.
And so here we are.
And it is what it is.
[00:32:35] Speaker B: Well, I know your team executes at a high level and it allows you to do some of these other things that you've been getting into that really I'm excited to talk about.
Tell me more about the. You know, you had to become this person you said. So we're, you know, you're now Maria.
[00:32:55] Speaker C: The what.
[00:32:56] Speaker B: What have you become?
[00:32:57] Speaker C: Like.
[00:32:57] Speaker B: What do you consider. Like, how do you identify now?
[00:33:00] Speaker C: Well, identify as she.
I'm still she.
That did not change. Let's. Let's put that out there kidding aside.
Identify with the person who is able to help and assist other real estate agents in growing their listings. And that's what the whole community is about. More listings now. And it's not.
It's not a course.
It's a community. It's an operating system of you want to. This is the thing with the listings you get. We don't buy buyer leads.
None 000000 realtor.com 000 no spend, no marketing spend on that because the listings give us the buyers organically.
[00:33:54] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:33:56] Speaker C: So I in. I'll go back for a moment in 2000 and let's say 1112, I decided that I hated Zillow back then because I saw what they were doing. They were giving agents websites their name with Zillow and that's. That's how they built. They built their brand. Right now they have that agent named Zillow all over the whole country.
And we did work with them back then. And then they raised their prices and they were. Did some things in my opinion were shady because they didn't explain it 100% the way that they raised the prices. And then they gave you less too.
And it was. They switched but in hell they called it. So I decided right then and there, nope. No more. No more buy no buyer leads.
We are going to focus on building brand, getting listings, getting more listings. And ironically I named the whole community more get more. More listings. Now you have more listings. You have freedom. I can go to the beach and work. I worked all weekend on my stuff.
[00:35:09] Speaker B: You could probably go to Italy 22 times or 23.
[00:35:16] Speaker C: But it's all about. It's all about listings. And I had to say to myself this is. I knew a long while ago that I wouldn't be.
That someday would come where I would evolve to the next Thing I knew just when was it going to happen.
And I had put this out to the universe six years ago.
But then life happened.
Personal things in my personal life took my focus away from me wanting to get this out there, right, to build this. And I had to take care of things in my family. I'll leave it at that.
And that was a good four years of a lot of.
And so about a year ago, I was really able to start to focus on what I knew I was set to do in my heart.
And when I think about, I think about this and I say, what you want wants you.
You just have the courage, you just have to have the courage to step into it.
[00:36:37] Speaker B: Hold on, I gotta write that one down.
That's good. What you want wants you.
[00:36:45] Speaker C: What you want wants you.
And I have 33 years of real life sales experience.
There's not many people in the real estate industry that can say that.
There's hardly any people that could say they did 192 listings in 2020.
[00:37:09] Speaker B: That's what I was going to say. That's the proof in the pudding. It's not necessarily the time you put in because, you know, anyone who has, you know, I guess, what do you call that?
Electrician. You can stick around for a long time and honestly, in this business, you stick around for a long time, you might almost get successful by accident.
But to be able to say you did 192 listings in a year, that's the difference maker to me. 100%.
[00:37:37] Speaker C: That's it was it.
[00:37:38] Speaker B: That's district.
[00:37:39] Speaker C: It was a strict trajectory. It was in 23, 130 and 24, 160, and in 25, 192.
It wasn't like a fluke.
I was operating at 100 plus listings a year.
[00:37:53] Speaker B: Joe, that's a huge number.
[00:37:54] Speaker A: Just so you know, that's crazy. That is insane.
[00:37:59] Speaker C: So if it's possible, anything you want is possible if you work towards it.
You know, it's crazy because I didn't set out 100% to do 192 listings.
I looked at a, at the, the office. I said, how many? It was in like November or something. I said, how many listings do we have? I mean, did we take this year? They told me and I, whatever the number was, I said, oh, we'll probably end up at 180.
And I ended up at 192 documented month by month, exactly how many written down in Excel spreadsheet.
And the 192 happened because I took.
There's one thing that I did different in 20, 25. And I spent one month and I set out to do 100 listing appointments in one month.
Do you know this story?
[00:38:58] Speaker B: I, I do, but do you know the school? How do you share it? Anyway, I don't know the story.
[00:39:02] Speaker C: So I set out to do 100 listing, 100 listing appointments for the month of March.
And on average I was hitting about 41amonth. 42.
I think 42 was the documenting. I might have done more, I don't know, but I don't think so. Document it. I have to go by document it because I really wasn't tracking things like I am now with follow up loss. Like years, Years.
[00:39:32] Speaker A: What you're doing like three or four a day every day for a month?
[00:39:37] Speaker C: Well, it was 21 business days because I don't work on Saturday or Sunday in real estate.
I work now on my other and on what I'm doing, but I don't. My appointments are Monday and Friday. I work business hours and then later than business hours. But I, I don't usually take appointments on Saturdays or Sundays.
So once in a while I do, but rarely.
So I said, okay, what could I, what do I think I can really do?
And it was a, this is all part of my program. And not even knowing that this is going to be part of my program.
It's, it's, it's the proof, right? I was doing it.
Did it.
So I said, I asked my husband, I said, what do you think's a good number?
He said, a hundred.
And I said, that's what I was thinking. That's what I was thinking.
And then I was scared.
I'm like, oh man, 100 appointments. That sound like a lot.
How am I going to do it?
So I know that for every hour I call, I can set at least one appointment.
So I looked at the month and I put in my calendar all the hours I was going to call, which added up to 100 hours.
Just said 100 appointments.
And every time I got an appointment, I would go up to my board and I would write it on my board, the name of the appointment and the time.
And so I had this board filled and I kept. I'm like, oh my God, another appointment, another appointment. One day, I think I said like seven appointments or something.
Some crazy. I meant, by the way, it's not just on the appointment. I actually had to do the work.
I'm setting it and then I had to do it.
End of week three, Bam. I hit a hundred appointments.
Everybody in the office was like, oh my God. So how did I do this mindset, Everything happens. The most important real estate between ear to ear to ear. This is the most important real estate you own ever.
Is your mind, is your thoughts, is your mindset fold property, this, that. No, it means nothing. Your intellectual property and the. Your mind is worth billions.
More than billions. Irreplaceable.
So by the end of that week, I did a hundred.
And what I did, though, every day I would do a video about this, okay? I proclaimed it to the world on Facebook. I'm doing 100 appointments in the month of March.
[00:42:38] Speaker B: I remember that.
[00:42:39] Speaker C: So I now I have.
I told people I'm accountable. So accountability.
This is why it's really important when you're working, you know, with a coach and training. Accountability is huge. You have to be held accountable or we just don't do shit. It's human nature.
So accountability, social proof.
Am I going to look like a fool in front of my family, in front of my team, in front of my colleagues in real estate, in front of my friends in real estate?
No, I'm not. I'm not going to not do it.
I'm not knocking not do it because I have integrity and I follow through with the shit I say I'm going to do. Sometimes it might take me a little longer to get stuff done, but I get it done usually.
[00:43:27] Speaker B: I remember when I ran my marathon and my stepdad says to me the night before, ken, listen, if you. If you don't feel right, something feels off, you don't have to finish. Like, you know, just. And I. I looked him dead in the eye. I said, russ, I would rather die than not finish this marathon. Like, there was no way.
I was not gonna.
[00:43:46] Speaker C: Exactly.
[00:43:47] Speaker B: That was exactly. Not even a question.
[00:43:49] Speaker C: Not even a question.
[00:43:50] Speaker B: Not even.
[00:43:51] Speaker C: That is internal fortitude. See, you. You're.
You have to trust yourself. And when you don't stay in integrity and do the things that you say you're gonna do, like, let's just say that thing you're supposed to do is 10 conversations a day, which I don't think is enough, but let's just say it is.
It's better than zero if you're not doing any. Getting a 10 is good. You should work your way up to 20.
But if you say I'm going to do 10, that's a commitment, not a goal. A commitment.
When you start not honoring your commitment, it eats away your integrity. It eats away your integrity.
[00:44:28] Speaker A: You.
[00:44:28] Speaker C: You don't trust yourself. And if you don't trust yourself, you don't Follow through. It's all tied together.
We don't.
[00:44:35] Speaker B: So you talk about, you talk about non negotiable.
[00:44:38] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, non negotiable.
[00:44:41] Speaker A: It's interesting because this all kind of ties together. The, what you were saying before about becoming comfortable in the uncomfortable and that's really like just the human nature, the way that we get better and the way that we get stronger. Whether it's lifting weights or mentally. It's like your body adapts to resistance so it gets stronger through resistance. So the more that you're doing these reps and the more that you're uncomfortable, the less uncomfortable you become in the situations and the easier it becomes to do these things over and over and over. And then you start to plateau, you start to level up on being able to achieve these. What seemingly to a normal person seems impossible. But the more that you do it it's like ah, hundred appointments. That's nothing. I did that before.
My question though is what, how do you continue like once you reach a goal like that? I know a lot of high performing people like you go all out, you empty the tank, you hit this goal and then it's kind of like ah, the, the, the drive and the adrenaline and the motivation to do another goal or to sustain because now it's like, it's, you know, you've done it. Like what do you do to push to the next level once you've hit a goal like that, to you know, set a higher goal or not just have that adrenaline dump after, after you hit it.
[00:45:59] Speaker C: So that's the rest of that story. Was that the last week of that I didn't stop.
So I had another week to go and I had 132 appointments.
I blew past 100.
So it was an experiment. I wanted to see what was possible. It literally was an experiment. I did an experiment on myself.
I wanted to see really what people could do if they really worked. Really. And I would say I had conversation with some of my girlfriends in real estate and I said, well I'm trying now. Like we're not even like really trying before. Like we're just doing. We're not. I'm gonna try, I'm gonna try harder.
[00:46:49] Speaker B: Was there ever a time in that month, Maria, where you got a gut punch that you could have quit but didn't?
[00:47:00] Speaker C: No, I wasn't quitting.
I got nervous a couple times.
I got nervous. I'm sorry, I got nervous a couple times but I wasn't quitting. I would not suggest though somebody do 132 appointments booked in a month because I had enormous amount of work to do and it was too much, meaning I didn't have at that time, like a strong admin to help me.
And so I couldn't keep up. And I probably could have done things maybe a little bit better in regards to my next following up.
So some things kind of fell through the cracks. It was. It was too much.
It was too much. But again, it was an experiment and that's how I ended up getting the additional 32 listings.
It was a season.
So this doesn't. You don't have to operate like this on every day, but you could.
And how much more successful would you be?
So you take this and you do it once a year, twice a year, three times a year, four times a year, once a quarter.
This is something that we're. We're going to be doing in the month of July because July, notoriously, is not the best for new business coming in.
But we're going to do it in the month of July, 100 listings.
[00:48:32] Speaker A: Do these types of things make you just like, way less empathetic when people come to you and they're like, I can't do this. This is hard. And you know this business, Joe, you know what's hard?
[00:48:46] Speaker C: Hard's living in a country where you're getting bombed and you don't know if the siren is going to go off and you're going to have to go into bomb shelter.
That's hard.
[00:48:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:48:58] Speaker C: And when people say, I don't know what to do, I'm down the dump, blah, blah. You know what I tell them?
Go help somebody else.
They're like, what? I'm like, yeah, go help somebody else. Because if you help somebody else, it's going to make you feel better because you help them and you actually help somebody.
Don't go and make more phone calls. You're a miserable person right now.
Not that it's going to come off. Go help somebody else.
[00:49:29] Speaker B: I like that.
[00:49:30] Speaker A: Yeah, that's awesome.
[00:49:31] Speaker B: I like that a lot.
So much good stuff here, Maria.
[00:49:37] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:49:39] Speaker B: Now, before we get into two truce and a lot. Last thing I wanted to ask you about and really give you an opportunity to promote is your book coming out.
[00:49:48] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:49:49] Speaker B: What's it called? And when. When will it.
[00:49:51] Speaker C: So it's a. I'm going to create a series, Be the Solution series. And this is the first volume. It's called More Listings Now.
And I am praying that this comes out in early July.
It's very tight, but I'm going to do my Best to have it out in early July and then.
[00:50:12] Speaker B: And people will be able to buy it on Amazon.
[00:50:14] Speaker C: Yeah, and be able to buy it on Amazon. We'll do some launch parties. And I was even thinking, like, you know, would be great, you know, with mortgage companies, you can have me come speak, do a launch party, have a couple dozen agents there.
It'd be. That'd be probably a fun thing to do, I would think, but lots of,
[00:50:39] Speaker B: like, something we're gonna. Definitely.
[00:50:40] Speaker C: Yeah. Lots of opportunities for that. And then the more listings now, the listing agents.
Blueprint for Success is gonna open June 5th.
[00:50:54] Speaker B: June 5th. That's the community.
[00:50:55] Speaker C: Yeah, we're gonna open June 5th, and that'll be a monthly subscription.
And super excited about it. I mean, I put like my life's work into this, literally for people.
[00:51:10] Speaker B: For people that don't follow you already. Where's the best place to follow?
[00:51:13] Speaker C: I think Facebook is great. I'm on Instagram, LinkedIn. It's great places to follow me. I also have a YouTube channel that I'm growing, and I have about 10,000 subscribers right now. So you can subscribe and find me on YouTube. And I have a couple thousand videos up there.
So I gave it away for free. And now we are putting it into a whole. I'm gonna say I don't like the whole school thing, so to speak, because if the community is action oriented, like you actually, if you just want to come and just, like, watch a video, it's really not the place.
It's more about. Here's what we got. This is what we're working on this week. Here's what we got going. There's so many things that are involved in it. I have. I have a couple times a month, it's Q and A. We have teaching labs where I'm going into doing, like, deep master classes.
Guest. We have guest speakers coming into the community.
There's a tremendous amount of things, but at the end of the day, you gotta, you know, you gotta do the work. And if you want more listings now, there's nothing else like it in the real estate space.
Doesn't exist.
I'm it.
[00:52:37] Speaker B: You are it. You're always it, Maria.
All right, let's get the two truths and a lie. We have three facts here.
You and Chip have four cats.
You were at Burning Man 2008, and you've been to Italy over 22 times. Joe, which one do you think is the lie?
[00:53:00] Speaker A: So I. I believe she's been the burning man in 2008, because that's like Such a random most. I don't think that that's like a thing that most people know about Burning Man. Like that's like a. That's a one off kind of. Kind of deal, if you know what that's about too. That's pretty wild place. So I think that's true.
The cats gonna have more than one? You probably have four. All right, so I think that's true. Wait, hold on.
Italy 22 times. The specific. We always find that when, that when the details get in, the devils are always in the detail. So 22 times to Italy.
I think I remember something about the last time though, that this was. This was thrown in the mix. And I can't remember if that was the truth of the lie, but it had something to do with the last one.
I'm gonna say that the lie is you've been to Italy 22 times.
[00:54:02] Speaker B: I think I agree. Maria, what's the lie?
[00:54:05] Speaker C: We have four cats.
Me too.
[00:54:08] Speaker B: You don't have four cats.
[00:54:09] Speaker A: Nope.
[00:54:11] Speaker B: There's. The devil is in the number. Right.
So two cats.
[00:54:16] Speaker C: Not.
[00:54:17] Speaker B: What are their names?
[00:54:18] Speaker C: Toby and Sam.
[00:54:20] Speaker B: Toby and Sam. I am a big fan of human names for animals. Like, I think that's hilarious and a riot. We named our dog Topper, even though my wife wanted to name him Chase Utley.
Toby was our former husky's name.
We had a husky named Toby and Sam.
[00:54:41] Speaker A: I got a chihuahua named little Kenny Jordan.
[00:54:43] Speaker C: Oh God.
[00:54:47] Speaker B: He's got. Joe has a rabbit.
[00:54:49] Speaker A: I got a rabbit. I got a dog too now, but I got a rabbit. The thing's awesome.
[00:54:53] Speaker C: A rabbit.
[00:54:55] Speaker A: It's. It's like a free rain rabbit. It's potty trained. It like. It doesn't bite, doesn't bark, doesn't shed. It's like runs around the house. It's nice. It's big too. It's like £60.
[00:55:07] Speaker C: Really?
[00:55:09] Speaker A: It's huge. Yeah.
[00:55:10] Speaker C: £60 pound rabbit.
[00:55:12] Speaker A: Well, maybe I. I'm not good at estimations, but it's very large. I don't know how big £60 is, but it's like. I don't know. It's like, like.
[00:55:20] Speaker C: What's the rabbit's name?
[00:55:23] Speaker A: The rabbit's name is Sunny.
[00:55:24] Speaker C: Sunny.
[00:55:26] Speaker A: Sunny. Like S O N N Y Sonny. It's.
It's like tan and white.
[00:55:34] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:55:35] Speaker A: It's an English. It's an English lop. I think that's what it's called.
[00:55:38] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:55:40] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a cool. I've had it for. We've had it for a couple years now. It's a good. They're good. They're good pets to have.
Yeah.
[00:55:48] Speaker B: My wife. My wife grew up, had a Vietnamese pot belly pig named Charlotte.
That's not a good pet.
[00:55:58] Speaker C: They're a lot of work.
[00:56:01] Speaker B: Yeah. Imagine being a teenage girl and, you know, you're known in the neighborhood as having a pet pig. Like, she was not a fan of Charlotte. And it would get out, it would like get into heat and it would get out of the yard and be like walking down McNay Boulevard. What? You know. Oh, yeah, yeah, it was. It was crazy.
[00:56:21] Speaker C: Who had the pig?
[00:56:23] Speaker B: Mason bought it. He bought it as a little tiny little thing and it was supposed to be a pet, but you know, he probably didn't do enough research.
And instead of staying little, like it was like he thought it would. It grew out to this massive, you know, fat roll over its eyes. Really couldn't see it, like charge at you when you were in the yard.
Crazy.
[00:56:42] Speaker C: Oh my gosh.
Crazy. Yeah, crazy stuff.
[00:56:46] Speaker B: I'll take a. I'll take my labradoodle any day of the week.
So you've been to Italy over 22 times?
[00:56:54] Speaker C: I have.
[00:56:55] Speaker B: And you were at Burning Man.
[00:56:57] Speaker C: That's correct.
[00:56:59] Speaker B: How was Burning man like?
[00:57:01] Speaker A: Yeah, tell us.
[00:57:02] Speaker C: It was crazy.
It was crazy. And there was a couple sandstorms. I've never seen anything like it. I had a complete panic attack there.
Like, literally I woke up. So I went to bed, like at a normal time in my one person, two person tent by myself.
And I woke up and it's probably like 7 o' clock in the morning. And in like this tent, open air tent. It had all these couches around and all these people were passed out like half naked on the couches. And I was afraid to sit on the couch.
And guess what? The phones didn't even work.
No. And I wanted to leave.
And the girl that I came with lost the keys to the car.
We had to have the car towed.
So I had no way even to get out of there.
I had a hitch, a ride.
I literally. It was the craziest experience of my life.
This guy I'm looking for, my friend Nigel. Can't find him here. He's like up on this couch at two to two stories in the air, sleeping. I'm like, not going up there.
So this other guy's there and this other guy's all effed up, right? And I'm like, listen, I need your truck. He's like, I said, I gotta go. I gotta go to the airport. It's like 6:30 in the morning. I just seen three massive rainbows. I've never seen anything like it in my life. I probably will never see anything like it in my life ever again. They're massive. And then they were one on top of each other.
It was. And. And behind the mountains.
It was crazy.
So I get the truck. I tell the girl, okay, listen, this is what we're gonna do. I said, you asked the people as we're driving now, are they going to the Reno airport?
So I'm driving the truck. There's no. By the way, there's, like, no lanes. Like, you're just driving, like, out of the place in this big playa.
And we have the suitcases. I had, like, a suitcase. The suitcases and the tent or whatever thrown in the back of the truck.
So this one guy, he's like, I can take you. Got you ladies there. And I'm like, cool. I, like, stopped to put the truck in park. I said to dude, he going to have to drive yourself back, because I got a ride now, and I got to get out of here. And I got out of the car. I told the girl, let's go, because I was so mad at herself for losing the keys. And we grabbed our stuff. We got into the car. The guy was super nice, and he took. He was going to the airport, so we hitched a ride with him, and I got the heck. That was at the last day when it was time to leave. I wanted to leave before the masses of people were leaving.
It was one of the craziest things that I. I got talked into, but an experience. Would I go again?
I don't know. It's so different now. It was more real back then. Now it's, like, really fancy and probably not.
And I went. I was. This is. That was the labor day weekend of 2008.
And then in January, I met my husband in 2009. So that was, like, the end of the last hurrah period of my life that I didn't know was. And ending at that course at that time.
[01:00:40] Speaker B: That's a love, that story.
[01:00:42] Speaker C: Well, yeah, it's not, by the way. It's not just all about real estate. I have a life, and I do.
[01:00:49] Speaker B: Exactly.
That's one of my favorite parts about two truths and a lie.
[01:00:54] Speaker A: I knew the second you said Burning Man. I'm like, no one just says, oh, yeah, it was cool. I don't know. There's always like a. Oh, wait till you hear about this.
[01:01:06] Speaker C: There's so many other stories, but that's like, we'll tell. We'll talk about them on another time when you bring me back.
You asked me about Burning man, and I'll tell you some other stories that happened.
[01:01:16] Speaker A: We don't need to start a podcast
[01:01:17] Speaker B: called we can't talk about this on Selling the Dream. It's gonna be a.
[01:01:24] Speaker A: I use that for bribery purposes only.
[01:01:27] Speaker B: A spin off. A podcast spin off.
Well, thank you, Maria. I really appreciate it. An hour of your time is worth
[01:01:33] Speaker C: the world to me.
[01:01:34] Speaker B: And I can't thank you enough for sharing all your stories. I look forward to continuing to work with you and hopefully a lot of success with your community and with your group and with your real estate career.
[01:01:48] Speaker C: Thank you so much, guys. I really appreciate being on today and I'm thankful and blessed for our relationship. And let's go get them. Let's go get more listings now.
[01:02:02] Speaker B: All right.
