Dr Fred Grosse will tell agents at AREC this month that the goals they are chasing are not somewhere out in front of them. They are already in their pocket, and have been the whole time.
“One of the key messages I’ll deliver at AREC is that everything that you need to become very wealthy in real estate is already inside of you,” he says. “Our job is to pull it out and implement it.”
Grosse is an ordained rabbi with a PhD in clinical psychology and forty years as a training therapist, working almost exclusively with business people and entrepreneurs. His stated aim is blunt: “My basic premise is to teach people how to achieve everything that’s important to them before they die.”
The 20-year plan
In practice, harvesting the unconscious is a planning exercise with an unusually long horizon.
“If I asked you to make a 20-year plan of what goals you’d like to achieve by the year 2034, I’d pull from you what you’d like to be in terms of fitness, what countries you’d visited, your wealth level, your company, your children and their ages,” he says.
“We could plan what’s going to happen 20 years from now – all of which is inside of you, but you just haven’t looked there as yet – and then we could actually implement it.”
The blockage is rarely ambition. “Agents have lots of dreams. They all have lots of goals. However, they may not know what they are because they cannot recognise them. They’re out doing a deal.”
“It is easy to focus on the detail and miss your bigger picture … You have to be willing to see the bigger picture – it’s already in your pocket.”
The $503 cup of coffee
Grosse puts a number on everything that isn’t the job.
“In my practice we do time logs to see what you do with your 168 hours a week. Say you’re making $500,000 per year in gross commission – you’ll discover that you are worth $500 an hour in a dollar-productive sense.”
From there the arithmetic does the arguing. “Rather than listening to a whinging colleague over coffee, at a cost of $503 in coffee and time, you’d be better off making 15 calls to customers.”
The job itself, he says, is a short list: “To prospect, list, negotiate, sell, keep a deal together and nothing else.”
Wealth is a skill, not a windfall
Earning well and staying wealthy are separate abilities, and Grosse argues the industry teaches neither.
“You can’t become wealthy if you have no concept of wealth … If you see people who win the lotto, most of them lose their money within a few years because they don’t have the skills to nurture, invest and protect money.”
His prescription for agents is unglamorous. “I urge them to become business people with budgets and wills and trusts and the skills to protect their investments. A good real estate office teaches people how to create a gross commission and how to invest parts of it in their future so that they can live off that when they choose not to work full-time.”
And he has no patience for the idea that going without is somehow more honourable. “Poverty sucks and I don’t think that anybody should participate in it. All you need to do is learn how to manage money and to create it, protect it, to grow it and then distribute it. That’s a learnable skill, just like playing basketball.”
Green and growing
Grosse takes three messages to the AREC stage. The first is that the wealth is already in the room. The second is structural: “Unless you live with an ideal day and week, you actively create chaos and lose yourself a lot of money.”
The third is about staying interested.
“You need a growing edge. I call it ‘green and growing’ rather than ‘ripe and rotting.’ I’ll be showing how you can have continuous excitement and a growing edge.”
Dr Fred Grosse will speak at AREC 2014.