Strategies For Spending More Time With Your Family (While Still Growing Your GCI)

Brandon Hedlund: You and I sat down here a while back and we were talking about various ad ideas and things and we came up with the postcard idea. I don't know if you remember that. It took me forever to implement because I've been so busy with all my real estate things, but 1.5 something million people impressions is what I received in 2023 on my Facebook ads. 1.5 million. That's insane when you're talking the size, the town that we are. That means people are seeing my ads, I don't even know. Do the math on that one. What is that? 30 times on average? Let's say there's 50,000 people. That's 30 times per year that people are seeing my stuff. That's insane. And if we know that real estate is a numbers game and it takes, on average, you'll talk to most industry professionals, on average about eight touches before you can get a conversion, I'm set up for success now and in the future. 

Tim Chermak: This is The Platform Marketing Show, where we interview the most creative and ambitious real estate agents in the country, dissect their local marketing strategy, and get the behind the scenes scoop on how they're generating listing leads and warm referrals. We'll dive into the specifics of what marketing campaigns are working for them, how much they're spending on those campaigns, and figure out how they have perfected what we call the Platform Marketing strategy. This is your host, Tim Chermak. I'm the founder and CEO of Platform. I love marketing and I talk too much, so let's dive in. 

Tim Chermak: Hey guys, it's Tim Chermak. Welcome back to another episode of The Platform Marketing Show. I'm joined today by my good friend Brandon Hedlund coming at you from the Brainerd Lakes area up in, well, not really central Minnesota, but northern Minnesota, right? 

Brandon Hedlund: We're in northern– yeah, I consider us Northern Minnesota. You know, it's weird to consider yourself living in Northern Minnesota because everyone else is like, “Oh no, this is just home,” but yeah, we're up there. We’re three hours from the Canadian border. 

Tim Chermak: Yeah, when you're in the Brainerd Lakes area, my family used to vacation there a lot when I lived in Minnesota, I know that people there don't necessarily think of it as Northern Minnesota because, well, there's towns that are way farther north than us, but to the rest of Minnesota, you guys are Northern Minnesota. Brandon is in a small town, obviously, in Northern Minnesota there. Are you born and raised in that area? 

Brandon Hedlund: Born and raised. I'm one of the lucky ones. I get to live where people vacation. 

Tim Chermak: Exactly, so you know the area inside and out. Honestly, even before you joined the Platform Marketing program, you had pretty good marketing yourself. I was following you on social media, that's how we initially got connected as we were Facebook friends, I think for several years before you ever signed up for Platform. I tried to get you to sign up. I think you actually went to lunch with Andrew, I think, at some point. 

Brandon Hedlund: Yeah, I got both of the Andrews up–

Tim Chermak: Okay, yeah. We're like, “Brandon would be perfect for Platform. We've got to get him to sign up for Platform,” but the timing wasn't right. You had other things going on, and really, which leads us into what we'll talk about in this podcast episode is you were convinced at the time that “I can do all this marketing stuff myself. I don't really need to hire a marketing company like Platform,” which is true. 

Tim Chermak: I think that's the paradox of so much business growth when it comes to small businesses is that is true and it's why that belief is so alluring, but it's also why if you have that belief, it holds you back from growth because you are correct in that, yeah, you could have kept doing all the marketing yourself, but the time it takes to do that marketing is now time you can't spend actually working with clients and getting paid. 

Brandon Hedlund: 1,000%.

Tim Chermak: That's gonna be the story of what we talk about in this episode today with Brandon Headlund is, and I know it's a cliche, I know it's a stereotype, but what happens when you actually step back and get to work on the business versus in the business. So, Brandon, you signed up for a Platform– 

Brandon Hedlund: I'm the poster boy for hamster wheel right there, getting stuck working in the business. So if you have that feeling, give me a shout, I'm happy to talk more. 

Tim Chermak: Again, you were already successful. I want to preface all this by this isn't one of those rags to riches stories of a struggling realtor who was barely paying the bills and they sign up for Platform Marketing and all of a sudden, they have wildest riches beyond their dreams or something. Brandon was already pretty successful. He was already one of the most well-known, most respected agents in his area before Platform, but the problem was your business was kind of plateauing because you were running out of hours in the day to do what you needed to do. 

Brandon Hedlund: Yeah, no, absolutely. I think that's a great way to put it. Looking at it, I had the ability to do this stuff for a season, for a period. Life comes in seasons. My life changed dramatically the moment I had kids about five years ago. So, I was on this rocket ship journey about seven and a half years ago when I got into the industry of like, okay, we're crushing it. Now what? Oh, wow, now there's all these obligations that are coming up. Now there's all these things. I cannot juggle all of these plates. For a little bit. 

Tim Chermak: I've gone through this myself in the last year and a half. As of this recording, Rosie's about to turn 20 months. It's crazy how fast all that happens. I remember, it wasn't that long ago, I could work 12 hours or 14 hours a day if I had to, to get done whatever had to get done. My wife really wouldn't care if I worked 12 hours because, hey, we have the time. If we can make some extra money by just hustling and grinding, it is what it is. But when you have kids, it's not only inconvenient to do that, it's just not an option at all. As a husband, you can't be working 14 hours a day. Or if you're the wife and you have kids, you can't be working 14 hours a day. It forces you to become more efficient.

Tim Chermak: I don't know where I read this, Brandon, but this stuck with me. I'm sorry I can't attribute it to the proper source. In some book or some podcast, I read that someone said having kids was actually the most powerful time management hack that I ever implemented because unlike all the books about time management or how to become a better planner or get through your to-do list, whatever, having kids just forces you to realize, “What is the fluff in my day I'm spending time doing that's not actually moving me forward?” and then you just ruthlessly have to eliminate that stuff to focus on what actually works. For you, you joined Platform in 2022. How did Platform factor into all this of freeing up your time so that your business could grow to that next level?

Brandon Hedlund: Well, stepping back here one second. You're from Minnesota. You're a Minnesota boy. Did you have grandma's house with the old gas stove where you tried to turn on all the burners to super high and you couldn't get them all to be on full blast? You know what I'm talking about? 

Tim Chermak: Sure. 

Brandon Hedlund: Okay, so there's this book, Family-First Entrepreneur. It talks about this conundrum that we get into. It talks about it in the various seasons of life. At any given point, you have four main burners. You got family, friends, health, and then– family, friends, work, and health, okay? At any given point, usually you can have about two of those burners on at full blast, but here's the problem. Kids enter, you can no longer have the burners on that you want to at full blast. You have to figure out, it's this constant adjusting of the burners, trying to get the maximum output out of every single burner. 

Brandon Hedlund: I think what it came down to, going back to your question, is I can't do the things that I used to be able to do with that burner in marketing. I could do it for a while and for a season, but for an extended period of time, it's just not possible. Allowing myself to step back and look at it prospectively, like, okay, where am I in the best role? The right person, right team. Business owners talk about that all the time, entrepreneurial operating system. Well, for me and for almost any real estate agent out there, it's talking to people. It's not coming up with the marketing ideas. It's not sitting back and taking the time to write ad copy that is well done, that gets people's attention, to make ads that don't look like ads that get people's attention long-term. It's just not that scene. 

Brandon Hedlund: So about two years ago, I realized this. I'm like, I've been a big dummy. Pride got in the way, youth, arrogance, whatever you wanna call it. It kicked in and I realized Platform is my separator that takes me from having to have my marketing burner on full blast and step back and just work the leads themselves. I hope that answers your question. That's the best way that I can explain it. It's a visual. 

Tim Chermak: Yeah. I know in restaurants, there's this old expression or saying amongst restaurant owners that when you think about your business model as a food service business, there's three variables that you can compete on. You can be fast, good, or cheap, but the expression is pick two. If you open a restaurant, it can't be fast, good, and cheap. It can be fast and cheap, like McDonald's, but it can't be good than if you're gonna make it fast and sell it cheap. 

Tim Chermak: It's always a trade off. In business and life, there are trade offs. The sooner you realize that, I think it actually is very freeing to realize, oh, I can't do it all. If I'm wasting my time or I'm getting stressed trying to be a perfect dad, a perfect husband, a perfect real estate agent, a perfect marketer, have six pack abs, or whatever, it's like, well, you're not going to be able to do all those things at the same time. You can have everything you want, you just can't have it all at once. 

Tim Chermak: Realizing that, once you get to a successful enough point in your real estate career, the cool thing is you can buy your way out of some of these problems with actually pre-tax dollars. This is what I tell people so often is before you go out and hire a full-time nanny for your kids or a house cleaner or a maid, you're spending all this money in your personal life trying to free up hours of hiring a chef to cook your meals or people to clean your house or mow your lawn or whatever. Spend as much money as possible to free up your time in your business as business expenses because you can write those things off. 

Tim Chermak: If a business expense like hiring Platform, obviously, or any of the other services that you can hire, like hiring a transaction coordinator, all the things you can do to save hours in the week, you can write those off. That's obviously tax deductible from the business income. Do all that before you ever think about hiring a full-time nanny or someone to cook your meals or clean your house or mow your lawn because you can't write that off your taxes. Let's just conservatively say that, I mean, I don't know. How many hours a week do you think Platform saves you from not having to think about the marketing ideas launch? Five hours a week, three hours a week? What do you think it is? 

Brandon Hedlund: I personally find it closer to 20. Because I was already a successful agent, I knew the amount of time that it was taking me to do all these things and come up with the ideas and put the plans in place for them to go live. It's easily 20 hours. Honestly, I was working two full-time jobs. I was doing marketing and I was being a real estate agent and a transaction coordinator.

Tim Chermak: For those listening that are like, “There's no way that's true. He must be exaggerating,” what you get with Platform isn't just Facebook ads management or whatever, we edit all of your videos for you. So if you send us five listing videos or 10 listing videos in a month, we edit all those videos for you. We obviously write the ads. It's a lot more than just launching a Facebook post here and there. 20 hours sounds like a lot. I was gonna say more like maybe five hours or even 10 hours, but you really think it's 20. 

Brandon Hedlund: I 100% believe it's around 20 hours a week that I'm truly no longer spending. I know that because I talked to my wife and I talked to my kids. I talked to my wife yesterday at five o'clock when I got home on a Monday after being gone for five days essentially. I mean, what the heck was 4th of July on a Thursday for? Can we shift that? ‘Cause that whole week was whack. Wednesday, we have the Nisswa Parade. 40,000 people rained down on our town, then it's 4th of July, then it's Friday. Who works Friday the day after, you know. 

Brandon Hedlund: So, I was gone for almost five days in my business and I still got to go home at five o'clock on a Monday after I put out sold signs, I signed two new listings. That's the kind of time savings that I have because I can focus on the stuff that I'm best at and it is not doing marketing. It was easily 20 hours a week between all the things that I was doing. 

Tim Chermak: Now, to be fair again, for those listening who are skeptical of “Really? Is it actually saving Brandon 20 hours a week?” you were probably in the top one percentile of agents who took their marketing very, very seriously even before you signed up for Platform. When I was following your page on Facebook because we're from a similar area in Minnesota, we were Facebook friends for years before you ever actually joined Platforms, your videos were epic. You were filming lifestyle videos, listing videos. You were really thinking of yourself as a content marketer for the community who just happened to be a real estate agent. You were doing content marketing at an extremely high level, maybe not even top 1%, maybe the top 1% of 1% of agents. That just sets the stage for your business was already there. You were doing an epic job. Therefore, because you knew you were really good at it, you didn't really want to sign up for Platform because you're like, “Well, I can do this on my own.” 

Tim Chermak: This year, we're recording this here in 2024. I'm not sure when someone's gonna be listening to this episode. Maybe they're listening to it years in the future, but we're recording this episode in summer of 2024, and just to give context again, if you're not listening to it right now, the real estate market has sucked in 2023 and still in 2024. Rates are high, people are not wanting to buy and sell if they don't absolutely have to move. It's just a weird vibe. 

Tim Chermak: You're in a market where, yes, there are people who live there year round, but there's a lot of vacation homes, second homes, the million-dollar homes on the lakes there. The market has just been weird. We could definitely say that it's been like swimming upstream or like running uphill. The market is more hurting us than it is helping us right now. All that being said, what are you projecting you'll finish this year at, Brandon, in terms of sales volume or GCI, however you track that? 

Brandon Hedlund: I talked with my account manager a little bit about this earlier today. I just re-ran the projections and I keep good track of it, but I never look at it because it matters, but it doesn't matter right now with where I'm at in my stage of the group development. It's going to be around $400,000 GCI. That's insane compared to– 

Brandon Hedlund: You know, I briefly shared with you, we didn't get a chance to even talk about this before the show here today, last year was almost $200,000. Last year was a down year and I shared some of the reasonings why. I stepped back from what I was doing, which was more active real estate last year with a brokerage. I stepped into growing my own brokerage and I laid the foundational path from about June to the end of the year last year. I took about six months of my business where I wasn't actively working in it as much so that I could lay the foundational steps so that this year would be the rocket year. I'm going to do $150,000 GCI more than 2022, which was a bonkers year for most people. I'm pretty excited about the direction and the things that have happened for this year. 

Tim Chermak: And also, let's add that in the midst of all that, you acquired a local small business and ran that for a couple of years and then just sold that here in the last year. Throughout that whole time, you were also managing and rebuilding and ultimately flipping and selling a local small business that you just saw an opportunity for. It would be fair to say that before Platform, your GCI was $200,000 to $250,000 depending on the year. That's probably accurate?

Brandon Hedlund: Yup.

Tim Chermak: And now this year, you're on pace to do $400,000, potentially more, but the most important thing isn't– I mean, by the way, that's phenomenal. Growing from $250,000 to $400,000 is life-changing money because for those counting at home– 

Brandon Hedlund: That's a big plateau to break through. 

Tim Chermak: Yeah, that's over $12,000 a month increase. And the cool thing about when you get $250,000, I've said this on several Platform podcast episodes, when you get to $200,000, for sure $250,000, in almost any American town, maybe not San Francisco or New York City, but basically any American town, all of your financial bases are covered. You can pay your bills, pay your mortgage. You're not worried about buying groceries. You're not worried when you go out to eat about what the prices are on the menu. You can definitely take a nice family vacation every year. You can set money aside for long-term saving investment retirement. Once you get to $200,000, $250,000, you're definitely upper middle class and you're financially comfortable.

Brandon Hedlund: Which is weird. It's a weird spot to be. Sorry to interrupt, but the impostor syndrome. 

Tim Chermak: The cool thing though is that any growth you experience above and beyond $200,000, $250,000 in GCI because all of your fixed expenses are already taken care of, that basically becomes disposable income that you can just save and invest all of it. Or, I mean, if you want to, I suppose you could spend all of it and just massively increase your lifestyle. But up until that point, you can't really just, hey, we made an extra $10,000 or $20,000 this month unexpectedly. Let's put it all into long-term retirement savings. You can't do that until you get to that point because the money coming in is needed to actually fund your lifestyle, pay your mortgage, pay your student loans, credit cards, your car payment, whatever. That's really the magical point, I think, in small business ownership, when you get beyond about $250,000 GCI, because then you can actually really start rolling the snowball of generational wealth building. You actually are really increasing your family's net worth. That's really cool. So Brandon, A, congratulations. That's incredible. 

Brandon Hedlund: Thank you. 

Tim Chermak: B, let's double click on this work-life balance topic here because it's impressive as hell that you grew from $200,000, $250,000 to $400,000, but the most impressive thing about that is that not many realtors can say that their work-life balance and the amount of time they spend with their family actually increased when they went from $200,000 to $400,000 GCI. 

Tim Chermak: When we hear stories like that, it's really impressive in whatever podcast or whatever, hey, a realtor doubled their business from $200,000 to $400,000 in GCI, they usually don't say the quiet part out loud. Usually it's because they're really not being super present with their family. They're not home for dinner. They're not spending weekends or Sunday afternoons with their families, or Saturday afternoons. They wouldn't want to admit this out loud because it's emotionally uncomfortable, but they have compromised part of their family obligations to make more money. That's not just realtors. That's any small business owners. 

Brandon Hedlund: That’s every industry. Yep, 100%. You're going to hear that from almost everyone that in order for me to hit that next level, I had to sacrifice something. Don't get me wrong, I had those stages and I had those seasons, but usually it was where I was trying to figure it all out on my own. The realization, like I said, came about two years ago when I realized I can't do all the things. I can't be all the things to all the people. I only want to do real estate well. When I realized that, it allowed me to focus my energy better, show up, do the things well, clock in, clock out, and truly, I feel sometimes I can clock out in this industry, which I don't feel like many realtors can probably say. There is hope. If you're feeling that way, there is hope, but you got to really look at your systems and where you're spending your time. 

For more of this episode, listen on Apple or Spotify Podcasts.