Justin Stoddart
Hey, welcome back to the Think Bigger Real Estate Show. I’m your host, Justin Stoddart, excited to bring you today a couple of what I like to call icons. Somebody would say legends, guys who’ve done some amazing things in the digital media space when it comes to lending when it comes to real estate agents, really acting as a lighthouse, lighthouse to those of us in this industry saying what’s coming? And where should we be going? Where should we be moving our business so that all of us can continue to create profitable niches within our industry. So before I get into introducing who these characters are, who you’re going to love, it just really, really almost household names when it comes to this space. The purpose of my show, again, is to help you think bigger, most of the problems we face in life or because we’re not thinking big enough, as we think bigger as as we start to do that our activities change, our results follow and our impact follows that part of thinking bigger is surrounding yourself with people that are thinking bigger than we are. And the purpose of this show is to put you in contact with people that are doing exactly that. That can help you think bigger. So I want to welcome onto the think bigger real estate show, Ryan Hills and RC of the art of resource show. Is that right guys did I butcher that, or, I’m sorry,

Ryan Hills
We are called the resource, the RE Source, just Whatever, man. I’m Ryan. And that’s RC. So thanks for having us on Justin.

Justin Stoddart
I love it the resource, you can find them at the RE Source. So the resource.tv that’s where their show is hosted. They’ve been putting out again content for a decade. Yeah, they could see this thing coming. I mean, if that’s not an indicator in and of itself, as to how far ahead of the curve these guys are. 10 years ago, nobody was doing this stuff. Righ? Now there’s a lot more people that are doing it. It’s still not enough. And we’re going to talk about that today. 10 years ago, you guys saw you where this industry needed to go and you started leading the way so kudos to you guys for being pioneers. For for really teaching all of us the importance of standing out and really being a thought leader, right, which is, I think part of the future of being of remaining well paid to this industry. Would you guys agree?

Ryan Hills
I appreciate that man. And I love I love your mission and what you’re doing in your space as well. So it’s awesome to see that, as you said earlier, you know, I’d love and I think you would, too, for more people to kind of follow that model in real estate lending and title. appraisers, like even small business owners is crazy to me that 10 years later, I remember telling rc 10 years ago, like, Hey, we got to be quick, we got to be fast, because people are going to catch on. And a decade later, it’s still not being leveraged as much as it should. So that’s part of our mission is to continue to go out there and challenge realtors, lenders, entrepreneurs to leverage social, leverage video, because it’s such an awesome platform and you never been able to reach so many people so quick, and it’s actually relatively inexpensive now, versus kind of the old method. So, love what you’re doing, man. Thanks. Thanks for having us on again. Absolutely. Yes.

Justin Stoddart
Yeah, no, it’s my pleasure again I am. If there’s anything I do well, it’s because I’m standing on the shoulders of giants like you guys that saw this coming a long time ago. And you know, and probably similar to what you guys just described. At first, I was like, I gotta hurry like, I gotta get this out. Everyone’s got a copy of the reality is most people don’t and most people should right? Let’s talk about that, like why having an interesting that everybody needs to do their own show, right? But having a very strong presence in digital media, why do you think that matters now more than ever before?

Ryan Hills
Well, I mean, presence and brand to me like kind of same thing. And we’re going to talk about that at the OMBA coming up. And I don’t want to give away too much of what we’re going to talk about because I’d love to see you guys there. There’s only 75 spots, it’s going to fill up really, really quick. I told Justin before the before we started shooting, like I’d love to fill that up with realtors at a mortgage event. I just think that would be funny. So if you’re like listening, realtors make sure you you sign up real quick. I’m sure we’ll throw something in the comment section as far as the link to sign up, but we’re gonna we’re going to address that. Why is it important to have a brand? For us? Our origin story 10 years ago was just that like, great recession hit, we were young in the business, you know, we didn’t have gigantic databases or referral partners. How do we become relevant? How do we build a brand? That’s where we started 10 years ago. So we’re going to give 10 years of our lessons on building that brand becoming relevant. We’re just not going to give it today because I want to build desire. So I can see you guys in Oregon in a few weeks.

RC
Something that stops a lot of people, which is why I’m interested in coming on the show, is it’s a mental thing, right? And so fear plays a really big role in building a brand. Why me? Why does someone want to pay attention to me? There’s so many other people just killing it. So it starts, you know, starts in your head as far as answering like, Oh, I am good enough to do video. It doesn’t matter. I look what I look like I sound way sound like and I do have things inside of me that I need to share with people to make an impact positively. And that leverage of always adding value is where the influence begins. And so I think it’s a mind shift, not caring about yourself but realizing you have an obligation to serve your customers and your talk to your customers.

Ryan Hills
How did you say before we started? Because I think you, you got to the answer, and we’ll get to all of the How to stuff at our talk. But how did you say what was your phrase about having real estate in their head?

Justin Stoddart
Yeah, no, I appreciate asking. So I’m a firm believer that that you need to own a piece of real estate and people’s brain, which can also be described as mindshare, right? You like to read that concept but it’s definitely what it is. It’s it’s you own real estate someone’s brain. If you own zero real estate, in someone’s brain, there’s zero percent chance they will use you on the real estate transaction because they’ve forgotten about you. mean Case in point the first home My wife and I went to sell. I had a very good friend who would help me in my general contracting business, we’d moved out of state that turned our primary residence into a rental. We’re now moving back to Oregon. We’re from and we decided to sell the rental Wish I wouldn’t have looked at it what that homes worth nevertheless, My wife looks at me and says, Justin, Who should we use for real estate? I was like, like no names came to mind. I’d been out of the state for six months. Nobody really stayed in contact with me. But you know, I was a builder, right? I worked with agents. And so finally a name came to mind. It was a gentleman named John, John had put me on some really, in my opinion, terrible drip campaigns, but he’s the only guy communicated with me now owned, terrible real estate, my brain, but he was the only one that owned real estate in my brain, so I gave the listing to John. Within probably a few hours, my heart just sank. And I thought, what about my friend Craig? Oh, crap. I would have loved to have given this listing to Craig. Craig again, had added value to me as a builder. He was a friend of mine from college. Nevertheless, I had to make that uncomfortable call to Craig to say, Craig, I’m selling my house without you. I’m so sorry. I forgot. Shame on me. But then afterwards, I realized, you know, it’s not my responsibility to remember people. It’s their responsibility to remind me and so, you know, from that point on, I’ve always wanted to be the person who was proactively gobbling up real estate? people’s brain, right? And you have to do that in a way that’s not totally obnoxious in a way that adds value just like you guys have done, right? You’re in people’s brain because you’re consistently adding value and was a similar inspiration to what I’m doing here is how do you add value to people to where you’re the source of that so naturally, you own a piece when you know title and escrow comes up, I want to grow my business, not just have escrows but have more escrows I wanted to think of me, right.

Ryan Hills
Love that and we’re going to learn from our past mistakes. So when we’ve traveled in the past, we again, we’re just trying to come and bring as much valuable content as possible. For me, if we go away and people are, that was interesting, that’s a fail like I want to give, we want to give something that’s practical that you can take away and build their business with that’s really our sole goal. So in the past, trying to do that we pack in so much content and do an hour or two and it becomes sometimes lost. I can see it can look out people are getting kind of glassy eyed, and and we’re talking maybe two or three, four point O strategies that may just be over their head. And they’re starting to click out, especially for, you know, the veteran in the business. So we’re going to try to learn from our mistakes. And we’re actually going to start with what we call and we’re building a new piece of content just for this talk, building a brand 1.0 the blueprint.

RC
Yep.

Ryan Hills
And so if you don’t know what that even means, or where to start, we’re going to start with one point out now we’ll leave time for questions to get into 2.0. Yep. 3.0 4.0 for those realtors and lenders, entrepreneurs that have an established brand, and maybe are struggling with distribution, because that’s a big one. But we’re going to start with 1.0. So if you’re, if you’ve been in the business a while and you’re not really sure what we’re talking about right now, come to this event. And we’ll start with one point and we’ll go from there. I’m excited about that.

Justin Stoddart
You know, it’s interesting when you look at some of the greatest coaches in the world, and really, I see you guys, as that, obviously, you you’ve got some prominence in the lending space, but you’re really coaching and teaching and guiding an industry on what’s the pathway. Kind of like the lighthouse analogy that we use, right? And you look at some of the greatest coaches in the world, everything from Vince Lombardi on day one was, here’s a football gentleman right? or, or, you know, john wooden, let’s teach you how to put your socks on. You know, I mean, like, the greatest coaches in the world, I think they don’t overlook the fundamentals. Now they move on, like you said, 2.0 3.0 4.0. But, you know, I think even people who already have an established brand wouldn’t be, I’m eager, I’ve established a brand. But I’m super eager to go back and look at the fundamentals of like, Where’s my foundation maybe cracked, right? Where did I jumped at 2.0 and I should have like, four to five 1.0. So I think this is going to be super relevant for all of us that, that realize that the future of, of, again, having been well paid in our industry, like I’m confident that our industries will always need people. I’m also confident that that automation is going to take away the job of some people and it’s gonna it’s working to try and lower the pay of a lot of people know, so I think the future of our industry of people who want to remain well paid are those that have a voice and those that have a brand so that people recognize that voice and trust it and listen to it, and are willing to pay more because frankly, there’s more value there, and the fee that they’re charging.

Ryan Hills
And we’re going to talk about that too, hopefully, hopefully not too much, again, trying to learn from my past mistakes. And I’m not going to cram too much content in there. But big tech equals Consumer Direct. We all know that if you’ve watched our show, we’ve talked about it for years, warned about the Zillow challenge all that stuff. So Consumer Direct deserves to be respected. However, traditional realtors and lenders can leverage what we’ve been calling community direct, and the strategies of actually going deep community direct to combat that big tech company that’s going Consumer Direct

RC
and then kind of breaking that down on a daily, weekly monthly basis. What does that look like in your schedule? How are you time blocking for that hard activities, focus to get you the results you’re looking at, and not going too far down the path but just making sure that you execute your plan to thrive.

Justin Stoddart
So for those that don’t know, kind of the breakdown here between Ryan and RC, RC really kind of gets into the weeds of the distribution, the technical side of it. So it’s gonna be really fun to have both of you guys there, I’m assuming Is that right? Because there’s going to be a vision right of like, this is what branding does, the future of our industry looks like, and those that are going to thrive, not just survive, but thrive, their businesses are going to look like this. And then it sounds like from you RC. And from both you there’s going to be some very tactical, because sometimes you walk away and you got all these ideas, get a whole notebook, and you do this, this and this, but know how to, there’s no real blueprint and what it sounds like, you’re gonna get into the weeds a little bit as far as like, here’s how you actually put this in your schedule. Here’s what this here’s how this fits into an already busy schedule. Here’s why it fits, right. That’s Ryan, you sharing that, here’s, here’s why this is so important. If you don’t do this, your future is gonna look like this. And then RC is going to be falling right behind you to say it. here’s here’s how to actually implement this stuff.

RC
Correct. We’re all busy, right? And we’re all peak performers. We’ve coached and mentored and interviewed some of the most elite people on our space. You can learn a lot from that and I think it was needs needs a coach and needs to be a coach. Right? So this is just a way that we can share what we’ve learned and really, hopefully impact people in a very positive way. You know, we’re all going through the same motions, we have 24 hours in the day, what can we focus on really to, at the end of the day, say, did I did I matter today? Did I add value today? Those are big questions. I think that Ryan’s taught me over the years of just how to itemize your calendar to make sure you’re adding value and really making an impact.

Justin Stoddart
I love it. One of the analogies that I love to use I help agents create kind of a detailed business plan is one of my value offerings. And one of the things that we talked about as I help them actually calculate their dollar per hour by getting to the money that they need to make and how much time they’re going to commit to it and then from that dollar per hour a I enjoy asking and effect I’ve got one sitting here in front of me. I pull up the dollar per hour so this particular agent, newer agent just get started. He’s got a good network is dollar per hour is close to $100 an hour that’s probably low for most agents, right wants to make over $200,000 and Work. Let’s see, he wants to work 270 days out of the year. Okay, so that equates to about $100 an hour. And I told him, I said, there are certain activities during the day that I would, I would challenge you to then take that list of activities and say what I’d be willing right now, to go over to my computer and type into Craigslist, or indeed calm and posted ads, and I’m looking for administrative support. And I’m willing to pay $100 an hour to do these activities. And if you like, if your jaw drops, you say I would never pay anybody $100 an hour to do those things. And that’s a stark reminder to you of like you should then if you really want to make hundred dollars an hour, right? You can’t be doing those things. So what I hear you saying is that there are certain activities in this building a brand space that are high value, and some of them that are not right, like aimlessly perusing your Facebook newsfeed doing nothing but just liking stuff and being one of many that are liking people’s comments. That like not a very good use of time. You’re not going to get well paid for that.

Ryan Hills
What’s the return on your investment? I mean, it’s such a great I’m, we’re right there with you. And it’s so funny. realtors and lenders struggle with this both like they forget that they make good money for some reason. And then they forget to divide it by 2080 hours work hours a year. And if you most of that, like you said, that number is usually pretty big for both realtors and lenders. Yeah. And having that be top of mind is very important. Because if you’re spending time, maybe it’s 100 200 300 $400 an hour, whatever the number is, whatever your number is, on a failed strategy, like do you do you just like letting money on fire? Is that fun for you? Because that’s what you’re doing? And if you think, okay, I’m dedicating two hours to this, my number is four bucks an hour or whatever it is. Okay, I got $800 already invested into this. Am I gonna make 1600 from this? Am I gonna you know what I mean? That’s the just the quick conversation you can have in your head. But you got to do that that math equation like you said it and it’s got to be top of mind every day and ago. Is this worth my time? You know, am I going to get a return on my investment on my time and, and realtors and lenders just struggle with that concept.

RC
Yeah, I think it ties in right back to thinking bigger right? I mean literally Top of Mind understanding what you’re worth, and respecting yourself enough to to organize your day in that fashion

Ryan Hills
Respecting yourself like that’s a big one respect the fact that you make 100 bucks an hour 200 bucks an hour that’s, you know, those are big numbers. I don’t care you know if it gets bigger than that, but guys, that’s a lot of money that lenders or realtors make respect your own time. enough not to throw it away. Anyways, we’re getting sidetracked, but I love what you said and I’m very passionate about that.

Justin Stoddart
I love it, man. You know, we’re about at the end of our of our episode here. Are there any anything you guys want to share that would really further entice people to be there on February 13 here in the Portland Oregon market to come to the OMBA luncheon and hear you guys speak.

RC
Yeah, I think I think a lot of people just don’t know where to start right in. And so even if you do think you know where you’re going. There’s a big difference between like storytelling and story selling, right. And that really comes back to how you communicate. So if you respect yourself and you have big goals, but you need to know what to do, and how to position yourself with poise and authority, I think that’s something that we’re going to really, really knock out of the park with you, and help you build that brand faster, and become something you’re proud of.

Ryan Hills
Yeah, we’re guys, we’re going to get an hour with you. And it’s not a lot. And this isn’t, it is a shameful plug. But I would love for you guys to join our community of era source.tv because you get, you know, time with us every week, we can only talk and communicate so much in this hour in Oregon. Yep. But the biggest compliment we get frequently which just I love is people say, Hey, I watched the show. We take it into our office with 100 realtors or, you know, 20 loan officers. We play it, it starts a conversation of Hey, what should I do? What should I be doing and every every week is different. And so really, that’s that’s how everybody can be edified. The hour is going be great and we look forward to meeting everybody and getting new relationships through that. But joining the community is is really the next level thing for our viewers and for you know, the realtors and lenders that appreciate what we’re talking about and just want to address shortcomings and get better and look ahead.

Justin Stoddart
Love it man. So excited. I was I was excited about this event before we got on the show. And I came up with the intent to get people to come and fired up even more about being there. So thank you guys for that.

Ryan Hills
Bringing the heat and that’s what we that’s what we do. We are bringing it.

Justin Stoddart
Okay, my final question, the signature question of the show that I asked every one of my guests, you guys can look at each other decide which one’s gonna do a coin toss, or both. You wanna contribute to it, which is you’re both big thinkers you have been for over a decade now you’ve proven that. What do you do to continue to be a big thinker to continue to expand your own possibilities? Teach us.

Ryan Hills
I love that question. And I wasn’t prepared for that. I didn’t know that you throw that out there. But you said it earlier and again, like minded people you said I try to think big and helping me do that as think hang out with people that think bigger. I just spent three days and it’s cost me $5,000 to spend three days with the brightest minds in the entire industry from across the nation. It was a private event with 10 people. And those guys broke me down and push me like no other. These are guys that are doing 500 million in production by themselves or have national and international brands that you and I think alike like I’m thinking I want to think bigger. I want to continue to think big bigger 10 years later, how do I do that? There’s always another level baby and so I just spent a lot of time being refined by peers and and people that I look up to and and it’s no harder than that. You are You are the company you keep. Yep.

RC
And I would say I’m on there’s two answers for your waking quick. I’m on a different spectrum. When I was very young, I had a big surgery and it basically I ended up dying on the table and getting revived so I approach every day. So I corrective lenses. So whenever my glasses on, I feel like there’s a little ticker in the corner. And you don’t know when your time is obviously, you know with Coby and, and all of the situations and like horrific accident like you don’t know when your time is. So that’s one way to really understand you value the time that you do have and be very intentional to create a life worth living. And, you know, thankfully I’ve gone through that it’s one of the best lessons I’ve ever learned. And fortunately, Ryan and I mesh very well and very different ends of that spectrum. I think that’s where a lot of our drive comes by just respecting that you don’t know when your time is.

Justin Stoddart
Man you guys are giving me goosebumps. Again, super, super grateful. Number one for you guys taking the time to come on the show today. short notice. Secondly, for being willing to come down to teach us at the OMBA events and set up at the RE Source.TV and be a larger contributor to your community. And just want to thank you guys my final request of everybody listening here today are three simple words.I said every time and they are GO THINK BIGGER. So Ryan and RC thank you both so much for helping us today. Look forward to continue to build our friendship. And then we’ll see you soon.

Ryan Hills
Thanks so much, Jason.

RC
Thank you. Yeah.