Learn the skills to build your business through free and current resources
Key Takeaways
- It’s difficult to find the right education options within the traditional real estate education model.
- Agents need to learn how to run their business as a one-person startup — a crash course in bootstrapping a business.
- You can acquire knowledge about anything related to building your business through books, podcasts, and online resources.
There’s an agent in my office who was studying to get her broker’s license. She traveled out of town to attend a three-day class called Broker Management. She was excited to attend and learn what she needed to advance her career — but when she returned and I asked her how it went, she said, “It was awful.”
She spent lots of money on this class and gave up three days she could have been working, only to sit in a classroom and have a teacher basically read from a textbook. Much of the information was dated and even misguided and inaccurate. It didn’t help her at all.
That’s similar to the experience many people have getting their real estate agent’s license. You might have a dynamic teacher who is good at teaching — but what are they teaching you? Are they the skills that are going to help you operate a business? Because that’s what you’re becoming: a business owner.
A lot of times what happens with school is that you get a lot of education, but that education is filtered down through books that have been prescribed for decades. It may or may not be helpful in building a one-person startup business, i.e. your real estate career.
DIY Education
You can skip school, but you can’t skip education. If you want to succeed in real estate at a high level, you’ve got to keep learning. Fortunately, you have a choice in how you educate yourself. You can spend thousands of dollars attending workshops and classes and getting certifications — or you can check out free books from your library.
It’s difficult to find the right education options within the traditional model. There are few to no education options available to show agents how to run their business as a one-person startup. Agents need a crash course in bootstrapping a business.
Does having a traditional MBA help you in real estate? I know many agents who came into the industry with an MBA from a former career. Some have done really well, and some have not. The MBA may have taught them hard work, discipline, and strategies for further learning. But they didn’t need an MBA to acquire those skills — they may have possessed them long before enrolling.
MBA programs usually don’t teach you how to employ sales and marketing strategies for a one-person startup or discuss the dynamics and challenges of a business you start yourself. They focus instead on how large corporate businesses operate. They might teach you how to write a business plan, but it will be the type of plan used by large companies to present to investors or to a bank when borrowing money.
As a real estate agent, you’re a bootstrap entrepreneur using your own funds and savings to make your business work. You need a different sort of business plan that is not taught in college and university classrooms.
The good news is that you can acquire the information about just about anything you want to learn through books, podcasts, and online resources. Even the details taught in real estate certification classes can be acquired on your own; you just have to go out and find them.
What do you want to get better at? Marketing? Sales? Social media? Productivity? Organization? Budgeting? Creativity? Negotiating? Leadership? Influencing others? Making connections? These are all important aspects of real estate, and there are so many books and other free sources of information out there on every imaginable topic. Find them, study them, and apply them to your business.