Think Big, Add Value with Justin Stoddart

Becoming a big thinker can go a long way when it comes to adding value for your clients. That’s one of the main topics Justin Stoddart talks about in this episode. Justin is the Founder of Think Bigger Real Estate. He discusses how you can connect inspiration with purpose. He talks about what he thinks real estate professionals actually need versus what most people think they need. He also discusses the strategies he educates realtors on and what they are missing that they should be sharing with their clients. Justin is passionate about the relationship between financial advisors and real estate agents. He insists that becoming versatile and adaptable can and should be done to avoid being replaced by technology.

Our guest is the Founder of Think Bigger Real Estate. Let’s be honest, most realtors struggle with their value proposition and an ever-increasing automated technology revolution. Our guest educates, inspires, provides tools and most of all, pure passion to help these realtors increase their value proposition and earn the right to be well-paid at the center of the real estate transaction. He’s an author and a nationally recognized award-winning producer, speaker and trainer. He also has owned, ran and grown multiple small businesses. He’s become an expert over the years of helping people and coaching people. He’s a thought leader in marketing, branding and business strategy. Please welcome, Justin Stoddart.

It’s good to be on the show. Thanks for the opportunity.

Justin, I’m excited to interview you and share some of the wealth of knowledge that you have. What is more challenging, inspiring six kids under the age of ten or thousands of realtors with less than five years of experience?

That’s a toss-up. I find more joy with the family, although my passion has become helping real estate agents. There’s a lot of similarities. You’re helping them find a deeper purpose. My son is probably my weakest link when it comes to work ethic. We pride ourselves on being workers in the family and he’s always finding a way out. I have always remembered the quote, “There’s no such thing as a lazy person, just an uninspired one.” He’s been trying to get me into this Pokémon GO and I’m the farthest thing from a video gamer that you’ve ever seen so I’ve been fighting it. I’m always like, “Let’s go play catch. Let’s do this.” Finally, I said, “Corbin, I need your help raking leaves in the yard.” He saw and his eyes rolled and I said, “What if you teach me how to play Pokémon GO afterward?” His eyes lit up and he was out in the yard grabbing leaf bags.

Afterward, my daughter messaged me and she said, “Dad, where are you guys?” It was FaceTime. I said, “I’m out with Corbin playing Pokémon GO.” She goes, “I didn’t know you like Pokémon GO.” I said, “I don’t, but I love Corbin and I’ll do whatever it takes to spend time with him.” The moral of that story is that at the end of the day, getting people to realize their potential has a lot to do with helping them find their passion, what they’re excited about and what gets them going. Being a father is my favorite, but I also absolutely love what I do. I see myself as someone who is helping to tap into the most untapped natural resource in the world, which is human potential.

How do you connect inspiration with purpose? How do you bring those two together? I imagine part of what you do is helping people to think bigger and beyond what their natural tendencies are or think beyond what the marketplace in circumstances are. How do you help with that? What is a tool or strategy you use to help the business professionals that you help?

We’re in the thick of business planning season so it’s been enlightening to go through the process. I see a lot of people making a mistake when it comes to putting a plan together. You probably find this as well in your line of business of helping people commit to bigger financial plans and better strategies to help them get there. Nobody’s inspired by numbers. Maybe that’s just me. Maybe there are engineer types, mathematicians out there that totally are but I find that all put together using the economic model built out by Gary Keller in his book, The Millionaire Real Estate Agent. There’s a clear path as far as how to build a sizable business and I see agent after agent going through that process or similar. At the end of the day, their business plan is nothing more than an annual reference point. After they created the plan, they didn’t even know what they wrote down and they’re not inspired by it.

I always teach that this can’t be an annual event. It has to be an ongoing process. The best way to bring enough inspiration is when people find a deeper purpose. The first question I ask in this process is, “What are you about? When you get to the end of your life, how do you want to be described? How would you want people to describe you and the impact that you had upon the world and their life and your life?” Those two are deeply correlated. It’s interesting when people start to think longer-term like that. They start to think bigger about the impact they want to have. They start to get some buy-in and then we break it down from there to go 10, 5 or 1 year.

From there, all of a sudden, they’ve got to know the numbers because that one year becomes compelling. It’s a pathway to get to the five years, which is a pathway to get to the ten years, which is a pathway to get to how you want your life to end up. At that point, numbers become inspiring because they’re a means to an end as opposed to an end in and of themselves. It goes back to helping people ask that question, what do I want? What am I about? How do I want to be remembered? What’s the impact or legacy I want to leave when I’m gone? It’s long -term, but if you can then back it up, it gets real to people.

Would it be fair to say that in order to think bigger or have a bigger impact or inspiration, in the beginning, you need to think longer-term or start with the end in mind? It’s in one of Stephen Covey’s books. Work your way back and hopefully, that’s a big enough why and a big enough inspiration, which is going to help you get into the details. Sometimes it’s hard to get inspired by the nitty-gritty day-to-day details, but if it’s a big enough why and a big enough vision for the future, you can be more inspired.

Yes. From Steve Jobs to Stephen Covey to Bill Gates and everybody that’s done some remarkable work will say that it’s quite boring. Gary Keller teaches this as well. It’s quite mundane and quite boring. That’s where most people go wrong. They think that it’s always going to be super exciting. The excitement comes as you step back and look at the bigger picture of what you’re working on. My mom gives a great analogy of a tapestry. She said, “When you look at life on a day-to-day basis, it looks like the backside of a tapestry where you’ve got these strings and knots, and nothing looks good. Occasionally, if you’re brought around to look at the other side, you’ll be like, ‘That’s why I’m going through these struggles. That’s what I’m working on. That’s why I have to do this boring work because I’m becoming something so that I can create something.’” That’s a great perspective. It comes down to you having a longer-term perspective and being able to zoom out and be like, “That’s right. That’s what I’m working on. That’s what I’m becoming in this process. Get back to the super boring, mundane stuff.”

Talk a little bit about the practical stuff. Give our readers a little bit about your story, where you started your business and how it moved to your focus.

I was raised by entrepreneurial parents, who had little to nothing beyond high school education. They were younger parents than what they would have planned out originally and they beat all statistics with great work ethic, great determination and a lot of grit. They built great businesses and I always admired them. In my DNA, I was to be an entrepreneur. I always thought that I was working for somebody else. It was because I failed and I couldn’t do it on my own. I went into business on my own. I went to work for a high-end home builder until I could leave and start my own high-end home building company. I did that for years until the market crashed. Finally, I closed the company in 2009 when my high-end custom home business turned into a kitchen and bath and/or even a fence repair business. At that point, I was like, “I never like building anyway and I don’t like doing this kind of work.”

It was a time of introspection for me. It’s that time for a lot of people in 2008 and 2009. I realized that my passion wasn’t building homes. It was building business and building people. I was hired to run a marketing company in Oregon back where I was from. I moved back home and from there, I had a conversation with a friend of mine, who had become the sales manager in a title and escrow company. I talked to a few sources who said, “You don’t want to do that. You don’t want to be a business development person within a title company. You’d be super bored. Those are customer service personnel. All they do is schmooze, hand out pens and notepads, and put little apps on your phone that offer minor bits of help. It’s not super interesting. That would make you bored.”

I wanted to get together with my friend. We sat down because he was well connected. He’s in the real estate industry and he offered me a job at that point. In my head, I’m thinking like, “This isn’t what I was expecting or intending this to go.” It was a time when, frankly, I needed a job. I was coming out of a downturn and hadn’t yet figured out what my next move was going to be. Although I had been employed by a regional marketing company, I’m still trying to find what I was passionate about. All of this, at one point or another, goes through maybe multiple times in our career saying, “What do I want to be when I grow up?” That NBA basketball ballplayer dream from grade school didn’t quite work out. I’m also not an astronaut. I didn’t pursue that route.

Tom Cruise in Top Gun, becoming a fighter pilot was one of mine. Was that one of yours?

When I was 35 years old, I had four going on five kids at the time. This is past the point of like, “I should have figured this out by now.” I had a four-year college degree. I had my own businesses and it was like, “Now what?” I went to work for the title company. In my head, it’s an interim stepping stone to get to the next point of starting my own business. A few months into it, I realized, “There’s a big opportunity here,” because my role is to get new business from real estate agents and I saw limitless potential in helping real estate agents. It’s a tough job being a real estate agent. It’s tough creating boundaries. There’s a constant need for lead generation and downward price pressure for massive tech companies. There are all kinds of reasons why it’s tough to be a real estate agent.

I saw an opportunity to step in and take the lessons that I learned from being a business owner and running small businesses to be able to offer some help. It wasn’t too long ago that I started to dig in deeper and realize, “Rather than always having my sights on being an entrepreneur and seeing this as a setup for something else, what if I dug in it and became an intrapreneur and transformative inside of a Fortune 500 company?” That’s where my aim has gone. I’m doubling down on all of the activities. Number one, get awareness. The Think Bigger Real Estate show builds awareness and then from there, I have a funnel that gets me in front of people through live events that I teach. The next step is getting face-to-face with people and offering superior help that makes them want to partner and be in business with us in our title company. That’s the pathway to here.

I’m grateful for the path. It’s different than the one that I would have expected to be on, but I do see tons of opportunities. Many people believe that unless their name is on the door, they’re somehow subpar. I’ve had to come to grips with that coming from an entrepreneurial family. At the end of the day, I don’t have to impress anybody but my wife and six children. Ultimately, my life’s mission is to help others have a tremendous life of impact. Wherever I can best do that is where I need to be, not somewhere that’s just good for my ego. That’s the journey to where I’m at.

Will you give our readers an example of your service? Speaking mainly to the business professionals, realtors and entrepreneurs that you’re working with. Give us a sense of working with Justin and his team. What are the 1 or 2 things that you’ve helped to hone in and focus on? What tools do you give them to help increase their value proposition?

The end result that I want for people that work with me is to say that they have clarity and they’re getting results. All too often, partnership from vendor type relationships looks more like a cheerleader. It’s like, “Let’s be friends. I’ll take you to lunch. We’ll become chummy.” You send me business because we’re friends. I don’t think that’s what the industry needs. Real estate agents have plenty of friends. What they need are real business insights and help when it comes to growing their business. I respect my real estate agents’ client time by setting appointments with them and digging into what are the biggest challenges that they’re facing so that in our next meeting, I’m not coming in to just be chummy. I’m coming in with real solutions, whether it be an added knowledge or added network that can help them get the results that they want.

I was having a happy hour one night with a friend of mine who’s a lender and I said, “You and I have become friends after the fact that I started adding value to your business.” That’s what it should go. All too often, the value proposition is friendship. I said, “The value proposition needs to be, ‘I’m here to grow a business.’” Afterward, if we’re like, “I like you. We should spend more time together,” then it becomes a friendship after that. It’s turning that on its head and I was like, “Let me create results and clarity for you and you create the business that you want.” If after the process, we become good friends. Most of the people who accept that value proposition for me, they’re like me so we tend to like each other, a friendship develops out of that. That’s what I offer to people are clarity and results.

To Listen to the Full Podcast Episode Click Link Here: https://bit.ly/3jrqTdp

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