Today we talk about the one thing that is a key ingredient to ANYONE that has succeeded consistently over time… WORK!

Maria has a passion to help women and minorities to create generational wealth. This clear vision has fueled the creation of an enviable real estate empire.

We’ll look specifically at what her work schedule looks like, the team that she’s built to get it all done and how she inspires others to also put in the work. Along with her hand-picked team of veteran professionals, Maria strives to provide quality service that operates similar to the private banking model.

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Justin Stoddart 0:03
So the big question is this. How do we those of us in the real estate industry with crazy amounts of ambition? How do we think bigger than the building of our own empires? How do we simultaneously see success and significance, income and impact? My name is Justin Stoddart. And this is the Think bigger real estate show. In order to get what you want out of business in life, you have to do the work today’s guests, we’re gonna go deeper on why she does the work and what helps her to continue doing the work. excited to introduce her here in just a minute. Stay with us.

Our Welcome back to the Think bigger real estate show. I’m excited to be here with Maria Quattrone. She is out of the Philadelphia market. Maria is such a pleasure to have you here.

Maria Quattrone 1:00
Thank you, Justin, I am so humbled and grateful to be with you today. Excited to chat with you all things real estate.

Justin Stoddart 1:07
Yes, it’s gonna be fantastic. Give us just a little bit of a background. I know you you have a real estate team, you also have a mortgage company like you’ve, you’ve done some impressive things. And before we kind of get into today’s topic, just give us some context, about your story about what you currently up to, and maybe a little bit about how you got there. Sure.

Maria Quattrone 1:31
So I’ve been in the business for 18 years, I came from the advertising and marketing backgrounds and entered into real estate. And I thought, oh my gosh, this is like the craziest business because Why does one person do seven jobs in a real estate transaction. So I immediately started a team when I started back in 2004. And in 2005, went full time, run a team and have a brokerage for about eight years or so, and opened up our brokerage REMAX at home in January 2014. And we upgraded the team office. So everybody in the company is under one big team. Agents are able to plug right into our systems. Through getting our all the opportunities I don’t like to call people lead. So opportunities, marketing, back office support, and all that all that good stuff that takes a lot of time out of that. And then in January of this year, we launched our mortgage company motto Mortgage Expert solutions, and that’s brand new, super exciting, lots of work to do, but very rewarding. And so yep, every day, all I’m doing is pushing things forward, just a little bit better, a little bit stronger, and going by the value of the compound effects.

Justin Stoddart 2:51
I love it. Maria, what a great story. I know. Today’s emphasis, right is really on doing the work, you and I both know people who have had opportunity absolutely placed in front of them. And they don’t take it. And there are other people who look like they have no opportunities. And they create something amazing for themselves. And I don’t know your entire backstory. But this topic is really interesting to me. Because I think no matter where people are at when people are listening to this, today, you have a choice, you have a choice to get in and do the work based on some of the things that Ray is going to teach us that make that easier, that make that more of a passion as opposed to a job. But again, that’s the essence of what we wanted to kind of drill into the minds and hearts of people that are with us here today. So let’s talk about this kind of your emphasis on doing the work. Marie, I know this is kind of an important point to you. You’ve offered up big opportunities and seen some taken and some not talk to us about about kind of your beliefs around this topic.

Maria Quattrone 3:44
So yeah, work works. If you put the work in, it certainly is going to work over time. So one of the things that’s really important that we teach from the very beginning is the value of the compound effect. In fact, it is a book that I give every new person in our company so they can understand what that means. And we take people from not knowing anything about real estate. And literally I say draw a line on the piece of paper and draw another line right next door to that line. And in 30 days, where are you? And then three months, where are you and look how far you’ve come. So over the course of a year, if you do the work, and you practice and focus every day you will have you wouldn’t even you won’t even believe where you could go. But we talked about taking micro commitments every day. So it’s just a little bit do a little bit more every single day focus on today, because that’s what we have is today. And if we think about things, and what I’ve seen happen that people write Justin is that they become paralyzed. So they have this big why and they won’t have as big dreams, which is great. But if you don’t do the day, you won’t make the week and if you don’t make the week you won’t make the month and if you don’t make the month you move won’t make your year. So we drill down to here’s what I have to do today. And I’ll just give you like a basic example right so if you make 2525 Are sessions a day about real estate, I’m pretty sure we’re a few months time and you’re building a back pipeline of business. So business and buyer side sales is 60 days out, or maybe a little longer now due to market conditions. And then our listing side of the business is 120 days out generally, again, a little bit different now because of market conditions, although that could be changing with the rising interest rates and everything else that’s going on. So we know that we know that if we can get somebody who wants this and into production and into action in the first 30 days and write a piece of business that we’re going to have success. So I talked about momentum, like it’s his big steel wheel, and it’s 5000 pounds, and it’s 20 feet tall. And in order to get that steel wheel to move, you need momentum. And how do you get momentum, you take little steps every single day to get it however, and our team, what we’ve done is we’ve made we have the steel wheel already moving for you, all you need to do is follow up on all the warm opportunities that have already come in. So it’s a lot easier than starting like 100% at scratch, because you’re not and then we know that if you do that work every single day, I said if you don’t have any appointments, what else you’re doing, okay? There’s nothing else to do but make phone calls, send video texts, send video messages, you know, nobody listens to the voicemail anymore. So forget about leaving voicemails, send them a video text or video, email and have wire while you’re reaching out to them. If they’re already they’ve reached out three months ago, hey, just call and see if something I can do for you. Are you still in looking to buy a home or looking to sell your house or whatever it is that they originally called for? And just putting that work and following up following up? And I said somebody looked at me last week and they’re like, What are you talking about? And I said, it’s boring. And they’re like, What do you mean, I go when you master something is repetitious boredom. But that is what makes you successful. So it’s doing these things every day, day in day out. And knowing that over time, you’ll get nose but you want you want more nose and you can get because over time, we know that those nose will turn into yeses. And that’s where business happens. So we know work works. And there’s no magic formula.

Justin Stoddart 7:13
I love what you shared there and actually brought to mind something interesting, Maria, so much of what you said is absolute gold. One thing you said about going back and reflecting on how far you’ve come. Sometimes this takes outside perspective, I’m part of a high level mastermind group and I was sharing how I didn’t get quite as far along as I wanted to in the past week. And the kind of lead mentor the group said stop, you’ve made more progress in the past year than most people will in an entire lifetime. Just appreciate that for a minute. It was like you’re right sometimes, especially when we’re when we have this uber ambition, right? We have high expectations for ourselves that we we tend to think in terms of these kind of short increments of time of how far do I get that I get to that next goal. And I think for those of us that are wired that way, it’s helpful to just stop pause ourselves for a second look back and be like, who was a year ago? Have I made progress? I have what about a month ago I have right and we we start to reflect differently. And we if we’re ever discouraged by the results not coming as quickly as we can you know what you shared about this, this flywheel and momentum effect, I want to kind of highlight something else you said, Just this weekend, I was listening to probably my life’s greatest spiritual mentor outside of God himself. He’s probably my is my greatest mentor. But he was talking about this concept of spiritual, excuse me spiritual momentum. And he talked about how in a basketball game that he was watching, just before the half, somebody shot a beautiful three pointer. And then immediately the inbound pass was stolen. And they made another bucket. And that momentum carried into halftime, they ended up carrying that throughout the rest of the game and ended up winning, they talked about this concept of momentum. And that, like took me back to when I was in high school, I had a coach who would always say get big mo on your team, or it’s like Big Mo momentum. If you can get momentum on our team. It’s like having a six man on the court with us. And I think what you shared Emery is this concept of how to get momentum, how to feel like your work isn’t isn’t availing to nothing. Because sometimes we can feel that way. Right? And kind of what you shared a couple of tips of again, looking back, and then also being a part of an organization that already has momentum. Like how cool is that? If you ever feel like you’re totally stuck, and like this isn’t for you, it might behoove you to take a look around to say what organization can I be a part of that might help me to catch momentum much faster than I could? On my own? Absolutely. Gold Nuggets. Thank you for sharing those.

Maria Quattrone 9:16
Absolutely.

Justin Stoddart 9:17
What do you find Maria? In fact, I want to talk a little bit about this for a minute here, that you have a deeper passion than just making money, right? Obviously, you have a very profitable business. You just started another one with a mortgage company, but you have a passion for really extending generational wealth, giving that opportunity to women and minority communities, which I think is absolutely beautiful. I love that. Tell me a little bit about how maybe that helps you to dig in and continue to do the work if we just look

Maria Quattrone 9:42
at things like how many sales do we do this month, this week today? This year? It’s kind of self defeating, at least for me, because I know I can just sit here and sell more real estate but my goal and my commitment is to build legacy builders. So teaching others how to do the same, because then they can teach others to do the same. And it multiplies. And also, one of the things I really want to stress, it’s super important, and I learned it about nine or 10 years ago is that you never reach the destination unless you die, then I guess you reach the destination. But in your career, you never reach a destination. And what does that mean? That means that all of these things that we’re doing is about the journey, it is about enjoying the journey along the way, helping others to enjoy the journey, helping others to be the best that they can be versus then just selling real estate. If you’d like, look on my Facebook page, I don’t hardly talk about real like real estate. And oh, I sold another house. Well, no kidding. We sell hundreds and hundreds of homes a year. Like I’d be posting all day long about that nonsense. And nobody really cares that much, I don’t think. But they do care, like I posted today. So I’ve been off sugar for 35 days since like February 28. And thanks. And it’s not some might not seem like a big deal. And I didn’t eat like a ton of sugar. But it’s the awareness of it of oh, let’s put a mint in your mouth or a piece of chocolate or you know, a scoop of ice cream at night. You know, just not a scoop a tablespoon of ice cream. I never like sit and eat like a bowl of ice cream, I think but all these little touches of sugar make you want more sugar. So it’s the awareness of not doing it and create an and that feels also stronger mental fortitude. But what else can you give up? Because no honey in the tea, honey is wet tea is way better. By the way, when you put honey in it, sorry, like tea, clean black tea. Actually, it sucks. It’s not good. But I committed to do this because I want it. It was an experiment. And I wanted to see like what I felt like so I got clarity, because I’m not I don’t feel foggy, I feel sharper. I’m coming up with like little ideas. Not that I’ll have big ideas. But I always have tons of ideas, but literally ideas that were right in front of me. And I’m like when I think of that before, that’s like I should have known what like it’s clear if I’ve been able to clear my head. And there’s something about that what we teach is how can we be the best version of ourselves through having focusing on our health and personal development, and then real estate is the vehicle to live our dreams? So how can you plug into that, and I talked about like his health and your personal development, as much as we do real estate when we get together or if sometimes more sometimes hold meetings on that. So I think those things focusing on the journey of it is really important. And focusing on how you can just be better every day, just a tiny, tiny bit, whether it’s in your health and wellness, your personal development, or just making a couple more calls, that maybe you were like, You know what I made my 20 today? Well, what if you pushed in me three more, or four more, five more, because the difference between being a top level person in real estate and kind of everybody else or at a certain point is not that much greater? So are you Three Feet From Gold Gold, and you don’t know it and you gave up because it could be sitting right there. So I have a thing in my phone it says in the morning at 630 It says I never ever, ever, ever, ever give up a lot ever. I love it. It is a lot of Evers I needed that

Justin Stoddart 13:24
I would imagine that people that are a part of your brokerage get a lot more than just being mentored in real estate. But they get a mentor and how to be a great person. My My mom has been a great mentor of mine my entire life. Always talks about it’s always about the people. If you can put the people first the business will take care of itself right now you have to have the right offering but ultimately, it’s about solving problems for people helping people to get better. I’m I’m a former land developer home builder. And now I get to what’s that? I saw that I checked. Yeah. So I’m I’m a now reformed, I guess you could say or altered. People developer, I get to develop people all day long. And I get to build businesses. So that really speaks to me kind of what you’re talking about here is that people again are deeply connected to your your accomplishments when it comes to real estate, we are deeply connected to your your growth as a human everybody can relate to that right? Well, they might be excited for the stuff that you’re doing in real estate like excited for you. They’re excited for themselves when you can start to develop people. That’s awesome. That’s it’s a whole nother level of growth and contribution. I think when it’s very much developing other people. Yes, so about contribution,

Maria Quattrone 14:32
leadership in regards to being having standards and principles and holding them for for everybody. We see time and time again. When we don’t do this. We were we suffer as a company, we suffer and it sets us back to waste time. So getting everybody on the same page and understanding what our business principles and standards are and that they’re the same for everybody and we have to hold everybody accountable to them. So not an easy thing to do, but unnecessary wants to do in order to grow an organization and being obsessed with human development, human personal development, that’s something that’s extremely important and something that I wasn’t used to doing. So I coach on that I coach, I am coached on that. And I listen very carefully, and continue to listen and find little things that I can add every day. And you know, hope I’m doing the right thing.

Justin Stoddart 15:24
Talk to us a little bit about that coaching, I know you have a program that you lead, people are like men, I think, I think Maria is my cup of tea with honey, however you want to sell honey with honey, what would they do to find you like, how would they go find kind of what you’ve built to help agents.

Maria Quattrone 15:40
So we have a scholarship program for women and minorities, something you mentioned a little bit ago. And we started to do that, because I looked at the Philadelphia marketplace. And I thought, I think we’re a little bit underserved in some of these communities, especially like in the Latino community, and some other communities. So we have new agents that have come into the business who are from all different backgrounds. And I know that there’s some of these communities have been underserved because the people consumers actually would call our office. And we didn’t have somebody that spoke that language. And they will say to us, like we could understand a little bit but we can’t really speak but I got the gist of it was that they couldn’t find a broker they couldn’t find an agent to work with. And so then that means that that consumer in the marketplace is underserved. So that means if they can’t buy a home, they can’t build generational wealth. So if they can’t build generational wealth, then they can’t leave legacy behind, right. And there’s several groups of people that for many, many, many years in America, were not able to be homeowners. And that’s disgusting. It’s and so what can I do to help move this momentum, this movement forward? How can I be the solution, which is our company’s number one core value, and also the name of my podcast be the solution. So that is like, you know, our mantra, how can we be the solution, how can be the solution internally and externally, for our clients, our buyers or sellers are investors, but being the solution internally for our office, you know, staff and our employees and our agents. And, you know, I look at it like we’re being one big family. And it’s important that we are there to help each other grow, right, and we learn from each other. So that’s what excites me every day. And that’s why we came up with the scholarship program. And in this scholarship program, what happens is, we bring the people that that make it through the program through school, and then we mentor them during school real estate school. And then afterwards, a few weeks later, we have the rise in Real Estate Academy, where we do a two week training program for them so that by the time they’re out, they actually have real estate appointment sets with set with consumers so that they can then go ahead and there’ll be boots on the ground, hit the ground running and selling real estate or leasing apartments, or whatever it is to start so we can help them at least achieve in the first 30 days one piece of business so they could you know, put money in their pocket and learn how to build their real estate career

Justin Stoddart 18:10
I heard a quote the other day is that, that reminds me of what you’re saying here, which is the man will get further who loves to walk than he who just loves to the destination like that there’s, there’s for those that actually love the journey, right, they’re gonna get a lot further than if you’re just focused on the destination and you don’t actually love the journey, you might turn back at some point you might not show up every day and be excited to be there and be willing to put in the work but he or she that shows up because they actually love the work and you learn to love the work, then all of a sudden it gets it gets very enjoyable even though it’s sometimes it’s hard, you’re still in love with the journey of what the journey is. And I think you define the journey very well which is identify what’s keeping people right like what what people need help with. And as our as our minds and our eyes start to stop looking at what’s in it for me and start looking at like what do other people need to get to their next level. Once that becomes our focus in life and our focus in our profession, whether it be real estate lending or anything else, all of a sudden, we’re unlocked to really enjoy that journey because we’re helping other people move along their journey. Any any kind of final words on this topic of work. I’ve got one last question that I want to ask you, Maria. But before I go there, is there anything else that you’d want to kind of add in here about this overall topic of actually enjoying the journey enjoying the work and doing the work because you and I both know that if you do the work, you’re gonna get the results. This is not rocket science, and it’s not uncharted territory, right? There is a recipe that if you do the work using good mentorship and good principles as are abundant out there, if you do the work, you’ll get the results.

Maria Quattrone 19:36
It’s really simple. So here is here’s how it goes. You make the contacts you set the appointment, the point to make the contact is to set the appointment is that the buyer strategy session or listing strategy session from there you go to do that appointment, then you can then that becomes a buyer agency agreement or listing contract, then we’re going to find them a home to buy and they’re going to be pending buy or sale Working to close, or we’re going to list their property, get to the table to help sell the property. And if you can take somebody, and just every day, nurture that and push them down through the system, right? It’s just like, from a real estate agent standpoint, we’re getting them started in the school, they’re being mentored, they’re going through the program, we’re helping them find opportunities in the database. They’re calling also their Soi. If there’s any opportunities there, and constantly just raising your hand is there anybody you wouldn’t know. So if you need to buy or sell real estate, it’s simple. Somebody is looking to buy, sell, lease, invest all the time, it’s one of the if you can just work that system every single day. It’s that’s why I said it’s boring and monotonous because it’s the same thing every single day, and everybody wants to make it like we’re going out. And it’s HGTV. And we’re going on all these crazy real estate shows, something like that, it is making those calls. And I gotta tell you, the people that are on this real estate show are making the calls. And they’re starting at like, they’re getting up at 6am to go in the gym, and they’re on the phone till nine o’clock at night. And you don’t see all that you don’t see all the rejection, you don’t see all the deals falling apart, all you see is like glamour and glory. So it’s like the iceberg, right? You want to see this for what are the other things that had happened, right? And getting clear on who you are, and getting clear on why you’re doing this. And going back to the micro commitments every single day. So I say during, after all the sales training is done, we do we do weekly training, because that’s when you develop skills. And the skills are what may allow you to move through that process faster with somebody because you develop the skills to ask the right questions and asking the right questions because you’re listening and trying to think of what you need to say next is what eventually and then studying the trade and the industry is what makes you an expert. That takes time. And it takes practice. It takes still diligence, and it takes every single day doing it day in and day out with a smile and know that if you do that work, it will work period,

Justin Stoddart 22:08
back to the compound effect of unreal. Alright, final question of the show, which everybody that comes on the stage gets to answer this question. And let’s do this. You are a big thinker. What does Maria do to continue to be a big thinker to continue to expand your possibilities? What does that look like for you?

Maria Quattrone 22:23
Okay, so we open the mortgage company, we’re growing that this year, I am opening an insurance company in second quarter. So sometime it will be open by the end of June this year, we’ve already have things in motion, we’re just recruiting for it. And we’re also doing a joint venture with Title Company. I have all my debt this year to write a book. So I want to accomplish that by the end of the year so I can get the message out to more people would love to take some of the info on Verizon Real Estate Academy on the road. Also to develop some some additional curriculum around it, I have it all right now it actually just needs to be produced with video. What else some of the other things I’m looking to do is to get healthier, get tremor of travel more with my husband. But we have a lot of work to do in the meantime. So and also this year, we purchased one house that we want to purchase for Mark that some

Justin Stoddart 23:20
big goals girl, I love it. There’s no doubt that with your ambition and your commitment to doing the work that we’ll be talking again here and you will be telling us about not your goals but those accomplishments and the next goal so I want to thank you Maria for coming on the show and sharing what you’ve shared. It’s a great pleasure to get to know you better and to hear your passion not just for the business that you’re building but for the opportunity that you’re you’re passing to others as one of my friends Lou Rogers says once you get to the once you get the elevator to the top floor, it’s nice when you can set it back down for others down below so for for everything for coming on for all those that are listening live. Thank you so much. Give Maria some love. Say thank you, Maria, and go find her on social media etc. And to everybody listening whether live or later. My final request is this. Go think bigger. Thank you so much for helping us do that today. Maria,

Maria Quattrone 24:06
thank you so much. I’m humbled and grateful for the opportunity. Just

Justin Stoddart 24:11
I want to thank you for tuning in to this episode of the fake bigger real estate show. If you found value here, I asked three things. Number one, give us a review. Number two, go to Facebook and in groups search, think bigger real estate and apply to join. Here you will find a community of big thinking professionals that will help you grow your income, your independence and your impact. And my third request is go think bigger.