The Morning Habits That Separate Top-Producing Agents

A few quotes have stuck with me for years, and they still encourage me. The first is “imitate, then innovate,” which means you do what the people you want to be like are doing, then create your own take on it. The second is that success leaves clues. Look at what successful people are doing and ask yourself what patterns keep showing up.

Only take advice from great people. I’ll add one more: you take their advice, you get their life. We see this all the time in real estate. Some people make no money and aren’t very good at the job, but they’re very good at sounding like an authority. Copy what they’re doing, and you’ll get their results, which honestly isn’t what you want. Make sure the advice you follow comes from great people.

Successful people tend to start early. A long time ago, when I first understood what it meant to imitate and innovate, I started looking for patterns in successful people. I love reading biographies and watching documentaries, and I noticed that everyone I looked up to had something in common. They tended to be early morning people, and I wasn’t one at all. In college, I went to bed around the time I wake up now.

Stop believing your own excuses. One of my buddies says he writes the best commercials because he always buys whatever he’s selling. Good salespeople have the same problem, because we tend to believe our own BS. Mine was telling myself I was so much more creative at night after the kids went to bed. Meanwhile, the most successful people in the world were waking up early, getting things done, and starting their day off well. Why would I assume I was the exception to something that works for everybody else?

Treat your business like game day. I was once talking about my morning routine in front of a big group, and afterward one of the agents on my team came up to me. She’d been an All-American field hockey player. She told me she’d heard me talk about this for a long time but never really applied it until she saw me on stage. Up there, she said, I just seemed to have more authority. I asked whether she’d been listening at all in our morning huddles, and she admitted she had.

Her realization stuck with me. In field hockey, she hydrated the night before, had a game plan, woke up early, got to the game early, and ran and stretched. In real estate, she rolled out of bed, came to work, started checking emails, and drifted into the flow of the day. She said she was playing defense instead of coming in with a game plan. She never would have been an All-American if she’d just shown up to the field and done whatever happened. I realized that’s exactly how most people run their careers.

Nobody competes for your 5:00 a.m. When you wake up early, you can get done the things you really care about. If you want energy, go to the gym, and honestly, the morning is the best time to do it, because otherwise it gets pushed, and pushed, and pushed again. Nobody’s competing with you for your time at 5:00 a.m. No one is calling you, and you don’t have fires to put out.

Make your prospecting time sacred. If you don’t protect your prospecting time, something else will take it. A mentor of mine told me something a long time ago that still feels powerful. You can tell what’s important to you by two things: your calendar and where you spend your money. Anything you say doesn’t matter, because what’s on your calendar, what you actually hold to, and where your money goes tell the real story.

If prospecting and talking to people matters to your business, and shocker, it matters to every single top producer, then it’ll be on your calendar. You won’t let things get in the way of it. You won’t tell yourself something came up and push it until later, because later becomes tomorrow, and tomorrow becomes the next day.

Real estate works like a garden. None of this is rocket science, but it does take being around other people who share your values and believe hard work brings a profit. A lot of people get into real estate thinking great things will just happen. In reality, it’s a lot like planting a garden. At the beginning, you really have to toil and prepare the soil, and it’s hard. Once you understand how it works, good things start to come, and you see the recurring fruit.

The easy calls take years. A few years ago, I interviewed someone whose mom had been a top producer and now gets lots of calls. She kept saying she wanted a business like her mom’s, where people just call and she helps them. I asked if she knew what her mom did to get there. For 20 years, her mom called people and stayed top of mind, so when they needed a second, third, or fourth transaction, they remembered she’d helped them.

It didn’t happen overnight. Everybody wants to get to the finish line, but they want to skip what got people there. As the saying goes, everybody wants to be the beast, but nobody wants to do what the beast does. The beast controls the day and makes it happen.

If you’d like to be part of a team like that, or you want to understand this at a higher level, reach out. We’re happy to send you a couple of our Redux huddles that explain exactly how we recommend sorting out your day for the best results. We’d also love to invite you to one of our huddles. You’ll get a feel for being around agents who push in a way that gets results the rest of the industry just doesn’t see. Book a Call with our team, email us at ChrisCraddock@ChrisCraddockLeadership.com, or visit chriscraddockleadership.com. Till next time, go kill it.