During our last Sales Mastery, I sat down with Wally Elibiary during his session titled Creating Residual Income and Achieving Financial Freedom. In this video, we discuss a time management process that brought Wally from earning $145 an hour to $2,700 an hour.
This conversation was so important, and so relevant to so many people, that I wanted to make sure it was recorded so more people could benefit from it.
Watch the highlights of this Sales Mastery session here:
One of the things Wally and I have talked about was an idea around when we think about labor into a business, and we think about revenue out of a business. The entire Todd Duncan coaching company is about helping originators and real estate agents earn more money per hour, not because it’s about the money, but it’s because the labor is labor either way.
You can put the labor in and make a dollar, or you can put the labor in and make $10, or you can put the labor in and make $100. Whatever we do, we have to start to think about the labor revenue exchange, and in a perfect world, it gets down to the point that I always ask people, “If you stopped originating loans today, would you have a sustainable income? If you stopped selling real estate today, would you have a sustainable income?”
Wally on Career Development and Football
In his 20s, Wally started in the mortgage business. He was 19 years old. Today, he’s 42, from his 20s he learned to be rookie of the year. He learned the business of how to be really great at a craft.
In his 30s, he wanted to go further. Let’s use football as a metaphor. The head quarterback plays a big role. Wally is not a big football fan, but he likes to talk about the Patriots as a metaphor. Let’s think of Tom Brady, he’s the head quarterback. Wally studied and learned how to be the head quarterback in my 30s in terms of his work. He learned how to guide the team around him.
Now in his 40s, he wants to be Bill Belichick. He wants to become the head coach of his team. In his 50s, he wants to become Robert Kraft, the owner of the business. To do that, he has to develop, and to be okay with falling back behind the curtains, which is super hard, super, duper hard, as a loan officer, where it is like, you want the trophies, you want to be on the stage, but he’d rather be home with my two sons and my wife than get all the trophies in the world.
Being the head coach is the vision that Wally has, so every mindset, every decision is built around that. “Is this a head coach activity? Is this a head coach task? Is this a head coach problem to solve? Or, is it the head coordinating coach? Or, is that the defense coach?”
How to Measure Your Time
You want to understand what you’re doing on a daily basis. A whole ago, I had asked Wally to do an activity once, which Wally thought I was cuckoo for Coco Puffs, but Wally says it’s probably some of the best advice I ever gave him. I said, “Work for 55 minutes, write down what you did for five minutes, work for 55 minutes, write down what you did for five minutes.”
I asked him to do that for a week, which felt like an eternity. Then, I challenged him a little bit more and said, “Hey, do that the last week of the month,” because we can all be great the first, second, third week of the month, but the last week of month, when you’ve got a ton of closings, that’s when the blank hits the fans, as we all know, right.
We went through it, and as I coached him, we went through it, and just started highlighting in red, yellow, and green. If you know me, I teach the philosophy of: red time is your non-dollar-productive activities, yellow time is what leads you to having dollar-productive activities, and then green time is dollar-productive activities.
Wally built for his goals to be to have 50% of his day be green time, then 75% of my day green time. Now, 95% of Wally’s day is green time. We’ll leave yearly incomes out of this conversation, but when I first challenged Wally on his hourly wage, what he made per hour was about $145 an hour. Now, Wally’s hourly wage is about $2,700 an hour.
And that was from a conversation we had was roughly about seven years ago.
Where does your pride come from?
Wally feels like it’s super cool that he pays millions of dollars in commissions out to his team, and he’s totally okay with that. Unfortunately, this business taught Wally that your pride comes from your W-2. That your pride comes from your accolades and your trophies.
What Wally’s learned over his career is that his pride comes from the smiles of his kids, and being home, and being a present father, and being a present husband.
One of the things that we set this conversation up to really address, and one of the things that we are completely passionate about, because we see that what’s at stake for people is life. I mean, really it is a sad, sad commentary on a business that has not run the right way, and to see how it robs people of their life experience, right.
When we went through an exercise, “What do we do as a company?” We came up with, we help people fall in love with their life, and one of the ways that you fall in love with your life, is you watch the value of your labor expand.
When Wally started that exercise, he was making $145 an hour, and now it’s $2,700 an hour.
You look at that journey over seven years, the moment people start to do that and they really understand it, the zeros that they add to their hourly rate, and the numbers that they add to how much they’re making, it’s extraordinary. We have hundreds of people that, in one year, go from $100 an hour to $800 an hour, because they understand and stick to this exercise.
Make Every Minute Count and Make More Money
What I want everybody to understand, as we’re going through this, this is the real deal. This is what the opportunity is. There’s nothing in any agreement you have with your company, there’s no ceiling to what you can make.
There’s no requirement to say, “I got to work this many hours.” You, you get to decide what you want your life to look like. You get to decide, “If I’m going to give a minute of life blood, that minute is gone forever.”
You can either choose to give that minute away to a red activity, or a yellow activity, or you can choose to do what Wally does, and that is, “You know what, the minute has to matter, and I’m not going to give my minute away to stuff I’m not good at.
I’m not going to give my minute away to stuff that could be delegated less expensively than it’s costing me. I’m not going to give my minute away to people that rob me of my joy, and my happiness, and my time. I’m going to work with people that I love. They’re going to love me, and we’re going to do business at level 10.”
Exchanging Time for Revenue
I get fired up on this thing, because I watch too many people crash and burn in. It is sad to me. It is sad to me to watch people labor for 40 years and get done what they could have gotten done in 10 years, if they had just paid attention to this.
This is the real deal; this is what life is about. It’s not about how many hours you work. It’s not about how many plaques you have on the wall. It’s not about that at all. It is about the joy and happiness that you experience, because you’re smart about how you exchange time for revenue, and you don’t do it because the money’s important. You do it because the life’s important, and money buys you margin, and margin is freedom.
Your Time is Money
Are you earning what you’re worth?
If you like this process and want to explore coaching, we are currently offering free coaching consultations so you can learn and stick to processes like this that will help you earn more in less time with less stress. You can’t afford not to do it!
Sign up for your Free Coaching Consultation here.
