The Top 1% Life

Shift from Chaos to Calm in Your Business & Life

Kathleen Black

• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780814438855
• eBook ISBN: 9781631950995
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Development
• Index: Business

The Top 1% Life helps real estate agents leave their "overworked underachiever" concept behind.

Kathleen Black, one of North America's leading real estate coaches, has worked with thousands of agents and hundreds of teams to solve this problem. After transforming 80% of her clients into top 1% producers, her tried, tested, and true KBCC Ultimate Expansion Strategy shown within The Top 1% Life helps real estate agents:

• Make it home in time for dinner
• Spend their nights and weekends with their children, spouse, and loved ones
• Find some help that actually makes a difference
• Get their business organized and self-sufficient so everything doesn't depend on them
• Quit being on call 24/7
• Take an actual vacation – without their phone

Chapter 1

IN THE EYE OF THE STORM

Remember that time you hustled to make it to your family dinner on time? Usually, you’re late or miss dinner altogether, but you were determined to make it to this one. You hustled to get there only to be glued to your phone, constantly excusing yourself for calls, emails, texts, and personal messages. The frustration was mounting for everyone. You couldn’t help but feel the shame of a business that was so “successful” it was out of control.

It is hard to pinpoint the exact moment when things moved from working so hard to build your business, to making enough to support your family, to getting to a place where you just want a break. How does it shift so quickly?

I remember meeting with clients on New Year’s Day in a snowstorm. It was my first year in the business. Mark and Nancy really needed a place to live. They were desperate, scared, and worried. They had a family and house to look after. They had little children and were going into a brand-new year that should have been full of what all New Year’s days should hold: hope, excitement, and anticipation for the beautiful gifts a fresh start would bring. Instead, they were paralyzed with fear, and I was feeling the pressure. They were given very little notice to leave the rental home they lived in for several years and were never confident enough to buy. They just got by financially with the rate of rent and family expenses. Now, they had no choice but to move, and without the resources to buy, they would once again succumb to a rental market where rates skyrocketed. They would now be further behind with less monthly cash flow.

Here I was, driving through streets void of cars or people, hoping their vehicle would make it through the snow, that we would find them a place to feel safe and rebuild; and that I could be enough to solve their problem, take care of them, and figure it all out. If this was year two in the business, I would not have been there. A single mother myself with two young children, I knew the pressure of having to make one minute into two. I knew how to get by with not quite enough, and my heart went out to these people. In year two, I was no longer the woman I was in year one. I built better boundaries. The world knew Mark and Nancy needed help, and the world brought them to me. In that first year, in that moment, I could help them. And I did.

I had this small window where I could help them rebuild, to feel safe, to move forward. And when I did, I completed a cycle that they did not even know existed. This time, I got to be the guide. Last time, I was the desperate one, needing but lacking a guide for myself. I never entertained the thought that I needed a guide, though. Why wish for gumballs without quarters? The desperate do not dream as much as they hustle. Dreaming requires time without urgency or a calm in a storm when you have finally broken from carrying all this world has asked of you. A break in time or a break in spirit—that is where dreaming lives. While some dream of gumballs, we collect change on the floor. Magically, eventually, we have quarters.

I was relieved to end the cycle I knew so well. Relieved that I got to give back. That is what I believe we were all brought into this world to do. We have moments and experiences where things are taken from us. Sometimes, the cruelest experiences can be out of your control, and life will rip your most delicate gifts from your hands. The loss of time, people, and circumstances carved my life. I have a feeling loss carves the best of us, and it carved the best of my clients that day.

I did help them find a lease, and once we had a break from the urgency of the situation, I connected them with the resources to build the dream of owning a home of their own. I so wanted them to have the power to choose, to carve out the life that was just beyond the horizon waiting for them. I so wanted them to know that they were worthy and capable. That they, too, could morph from this experience into people who cast a light for others. A gift they gave me.

A few years later, I would find out that Mark was sick. He was battling cancer and had to step away from his job and income. I would discover later that they saw the decision to lease as a saving grace as they could not bear to find a home only to lose it and have to walk away. Nancy shared the heavyweight of their lives before the illness. She shared the tight rope that was the journey of keeping a broken marriage together to house their children without the means to do so on their own, apart from each other. Nancy would eventually leave Mark after he was well, back to work, and they were on their feet again. She rebuilt in the end. She eventually even bought a home. She caught the same strength to make big changes at a rare, quiet moment. She told me that she had to make a leap exactly when she knew she was strong enough to go. Leaving was a glimpse, a fraction of a second when her mind, body, and soul found resolve, and she took that moment of calm, and she jumped. It was the perfect timing for a change. She clawed her way back onto her feet and she found a way to get out of debt, so she would have enough to make her own choices.

I did not tell Nancy how much we had in common. I was a successful real estate agent. I made more money than I ever made before. I helped forty-five people buy and sell homes in my first year in real estate. I signed thirteen beautiful people to work with me exclusively as buyers in my first month in the business. But just months before I helped Nancy, I had a dirty little secret. I was showing up at the office. I was helping my clients. I never missed a meeting or an appointment. But I was not living in my own home anymore.

I was sharing a room in my mother’s and stepfather’s home with my two children. I would answer ad calls in the hallway, feed my children McDonald’s on the go, and buy a small toddler bed to sit on the floor beside me when Children’s Aid Society (CAS) said it was too dangerous to let my 2.5-year-old daughter who nursed for over two years and co-slept with ease, sleep in bed with my son and me. I still resent that part. CAS stayed on me and kept my file open for two years as I desperately tried to navigate the path out of marriage into separation and, after five long years, finally, a divorce. But they stayed on to support me. They knew I needed someone to help me decipher what was happening. How do you go from building a small empire, with retirement in sight within ten years, being dubbed the “no money miracle” of investment acquisition, leaning into sweat equity with every fiber of your being, to frozen accounts, locked doors, and restraining orders?

You force yourself to continue despite the storm.

This situation got me back into my family home for now. It allowed me to find some sense of normalcy while I ramped up my energy into my real estate business. I would be the breadwinner now. There was no financial support. There was no help.

Nancy’s situation happened months later. Helping them brought up my own sense of protection for my children and family. It all felt too familiar. So, I moved myself. With two weeks’ notice, we packed our home, found a rental, and moved into a house.

Why do we lean so hard into building successful businesses? Because we know life happens, and we want to be prepared. We want to be more than prepared for that next surprise around the corner. We get stuck in the feeling of needing to build far beyond the point of financial security. So, we answer the call. We reply to the email. We miss the birthday party. We sit in the living room during holidays while our minds sit far away in the office. We hope no one notices, and if they do notice, we hope they understand. We hope they can see the sacrifices to feel safe, capable, and well-resourced. We hope they know we are well-intentioned in never wanting them to go through what we did, ever again.

So, it makes sense that we fail to notice the shift. It makes sense that we are so conditioned to jump and react, to fear the day we do not hear the phone ringing or have a client that needs us, leaving us to sit in mental scarcity without noticing the world shifted around us.

We fail to notice the bank accounts growing, the clients referring, and the time sliding away from us. We miss the moments when we dreamed of making this much. No champagne. No celebration. We were naive when we set those goals, naive to think this would be enough to risk pulling back or slowing down.

So, we forge on. We set new goals that we never acknowledge achieving and consistently feel it is all so very short of what we need, what we want, what we expected. We tell ourselves we still do not have enough—we still are not enough to fight the dragons if they were to ever show their faces again. So, we save more, do more, and give more. We beat the odds, we laugh in the face of statistics, and we sit in glass houses wishing they were concrete. We sit wishing our houses were dragon-proof while simultaneously believing we are fighting the dragon just one more call, one more client, and one more paycheck at a time.

The eye of the storm is when you have moments of clarity that provide windows into how to act in life and business. When you feel pressured for answers, the clarity that you have will give you a brief moment to change. Those moments change your life. They are a brief glimpse into what could be despite the noise. They are portals to the future. If you get one, take it.

Chapter 2

LEADERSHIP BY FIRE

It was December 25th, 2015, and I just said goodbye to my children as they left for some holiday time with their dad. I looked around my empty house, the unwrapped presents, the Christmas tree, and the remnants of chocolate wrappers. All I could see, taste, smell, and feel were silence. The silence started to creep into a crack that would become an end, a surrender to the recent months of unravelling. Unravelling sounds calm and beautiful. But, it wasn’t. That final surrender, and what resulted, became the catalyst for some of the best work of my life as well as the quickest business growth.

About five years prior, around 2010, I was ecstatic to start running the first team-specific coaching company for real estate in Canada. I was thrilled at the new challenge and opportunity. Eighteen months into the launch of the new company, I became director of coaching. With issues in two key areas, content and retention, I decided to pull back and strengthen both areas before launching any new growth initiatives. This was a risky move because the company was struggling. Cash flow is king, but client experience is queen, and if I know one thing about sales, it is that people sell what they believe in, both to potential clients and to themselves.

I wanted a company that I, our coaching team, and sales team believed in, and I insisted on a company our clients could believe in. This meant eighteen months of strict content creation and improvement before adding any additional programs, events, or new projects. Luckily, as a single mom selling over sixty houses a year, I knew all about refining systems and the efficiency and mindset needed to excel.

Our sales team manager would often ask me how I sold as many homes as our top producers in half the work hours. Now, I was selling the same plus coaching and running the coaching team. This took a massive amount of patience for me. I had so many dreams and visions for the company. I instantly devoted my foreseeable business future to leading the coaching team. I envisioned a point where I would only coach and no longer sell. I loved helping others to grow and succeed.

Over time, my goal shifted to being the head of all clients. Our mission was to carve the path ahead of our top producing teams to create an ever-increasing cohesive business, building systems to the top that others could easily follow while keeping our top teams thriving. It had to be efficient, profitable, deliver results, and make life better for our clients’ teams, clients, and leaders. We sought to elevate the team platform as the ultimate destination for a new agent, struggling agent, or well-established agent who was sick of doing it all to excel.

These teams started working with me at twenty-five resale deals exceeding 550 units annually. What was unique about this was the level of coaching and training. We sought to transfer knowledge, coach implementation, and maintain what we had built as we scaled into further growth. We were not looking for one-off success stories. It had to be real, consistent, and true. We built with our top clients step-by-step. We effectively reduced the cost of research and testing by 90% or altogether in some areas. We found a massive edge and even started to exceed our own internal best in class baselines. Teams at 300k Gross Commission Income (GCI) exceeded 1 million dollars GCI. Our coaching team mastered the compensation structure, allowing one of our clients to scale to over 1,000 homes sold a year.

The results were easy to see. When most companies were focused on 5 to 10% increases for their coaching clients per year, we sought best-in-class for our clients. We celebrated the doubling of units and gross earnings for clients every year. 10X and 20X business growth became a reality for our network, meaning we grew the businesses to ten and twenty times the size of the business compared to when we first started working with them. Over time, our results became difficult for the real estate industry to relate to and understand.

I always knew that the team concept was its own niche in any sales industry used to celebrating solo producers, but I never realized how vastly different the mentality and the results would be from those living in the team reality. We created our own events and stages when the industry would not welcome us on theirs, and largely, this is still the case today.

Less than a year after accepting my role as director of coaching, things changed again. I was needed as Director of Operations. Now, this title is misleading. Director of Operations was a culmination of Director of Coaching, Director of Marketing, Director of Finance, and Director of Operations all in one. The original Director of Coaching was let go and, as a result, I was getting my feet wet trying to run a whole company with no actual experience or training on running a business, let alone a business in the volatile and competitive coaching industry. Finally, I had the notion to ask to see the books. Now, how a company was able to get about $180k in debt in less than two years is beyond me. There was no line up of others looking to run the company, there was less than no money, and I was starting to understand that the weight of our rebound as a business fell on my shoulders.

In the middle of all of this, two of the three owners wanted out, were wanted out, or both. They each had various director roles, but none of them had all of them.

When we were rebuilding, I only focused on what it would take. I had no space to compare job descriptions, responsibilities, or contemplate the full weight of what I was taking on. If I failed to clean up this mess, it would be me to blame, and if I succeeded, it would not be my name taking that claim either. So, I was back picking up change on the ground, knowing I was relentless enough to find enough for a few quarters. The rest could wait.

My mentality was more like, “Run a business doing what I love? Sign me up!” I was not thinking about the debt or ridiculous amount of responsibilities and tasks. I was focused on the dream.

Taking a massive pay cut, I finally transitioned away from selling homes to continue to build content, support our clients, run national events, and keep it all in the black while we cleared debt.

I had the realization that I was now the company. I literally obtained 50% ownership with 100% decision-making as the two owners transitioned out. I saw the mess that came with multiple owners and wanted no part of it. If I was going to clear the full amount of debt, including the 50% I now owned, and find a way out to where we could grow, I needed to move fast, straight, and reduce sideline interference.

I cleared the debt. We built phenomenal businesses with our clients where their growth was evident and a direct reflection of the new approach of the company. But then my silent partner suddenly grew less silent.

We agreed upfront that I was to earn a “fairer” income once the debt was cleared, the company was on its feet again, and I could forge ahead with my dreams for expansion, being rewarded as we grew. But suddenly, he felt we should go in a different direction. That I should take a pay cut, again, and automate the company so it was more plug and play. I made offer after offer to buy him out, to license the content I already technically owned, and come to some agreement so we could get back to what we should have been doing all along: helping people build their dream business and life.

No offers were countered, and on October 1st, 2015, I arrived at locked doors. I quickly was informed that my clients were told I was fired. Now, anyone who knows about business understands the impossibility of this. I was a 50% owner who was not consulted in firing the CEO, who held 100% decision-making power, and that person, the CEO in question, happened to be me.

None of the legal issues changed the immediate reality that I was scared and thought I lost everything I worked for. Every missed night of my children’s sporting or school events, every missed meal, all the financial sacrifices were for nothing.

How could I look my children in the face? How could I stand tall or proud? I was tricked. Despite the high odds of being screwed, this was a fire sale I had to jump on. Something in me waged the internal war with risk and knew that I was at a disadvantage, but the possibility of building something great and the experience of running my own company was impossible to turn down.

We had sent all ownership agreements to the lawyer long ago, signed by both me and the other silent partner. The ownership was all done, but we still spent months negotiating the prior owner out of the business—a business I n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 In the Eye of the Storm
• Chapter 2 Leadership by Fire
• Chapter 3 How Do I Get My Time Back?
• Chapter 4 Bullseye! That is the Business I Want!
• Chapter 5 The Mindset Matrix to Success!
• Chapter 6 Addicted to Leverage: The GENIUS Method
• Chapter 7 Your Values, Your Standards, Your Reputation, Done Your Way
• Chapter 8 Stop Babysitting! Get Help Without Hiring Sales Agents
• Chapter 9 Avoiding Common and Costly Mistakes
• Chapter 10 How to Create a Performance Culture
• Chapter 11 Built to Win: Team Synergy
• Chapter 12 Now or Never, Your Problem is the Solution
• Chapter 13 Forget a Top 1% Business, I Want a Top 1% Life
• Acknowledgments
• Thank You
• About the Author