I Stopped Doing It All. Here’s What Happened.

When I started in real estate, I did everything myself.

I needed control. I believed nobody could do the work as well as I could, and my ego grew right alongside that belief. For a while it worked. Then it stopped working.

In my first year I ran straight into my own ceiling. I was out of time and out of energy. If I kept refusing help, the most I would ever produce was whatever I could squeeze out of one exhausted person. Me.

I had watched that story play out for other people. The slow grind backward into fatigue. I had also watched agents pour everything into the business and quietly lose their families in the process. I wanted no part of either ending.

There had to be another way.

To break through, I needed two things. Talented people around me, and the discipline to be far more selective about what I said yes to.

So I built a plan to reinvent myself. To shed my skin and evolve one more time.

What follows is what actually worked for me. I am not promising it will work for you. I am telling you it changed my life and my family’s life, and you might pull an idea or two out of it.

One warning. The plan only worked because I was willing to do the work and stay coachable. Your thinking can change overnight. Your results cannot. Actions are what move the numbers.

The whole thing also hinges on what you do with the time you win back.

It is easy to buy back ten hours and then waste all ten. Seneca said it plainly a long time ago. It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.

I am obsessed, and I refuse to waste it. Maybe you are too.

Here is what I stopped doing to buy back time.

• No more showings. I hired showing agents and buyer agents. Instantly I got 10 to 15 hours back every week from a very low dollar per hour activity. It was basically Uber driving.

• No more setting appointments. I hired an inside sales agent to book them for me. That saved about 10 hours a week.

• No more marketing. I hired marketing help and used Fiverr for one off projects.

• No more social and networking events built around drinking. I put that time into my family and my close friends instead.

• No more answering email. I hired a transaction coordinator and a virtual assistant.

• I reinvested every hour I bought back. I spent it having more business conversations, and my production doubled from $12M in my first year to $20M in my second to $36M in my third.

Over time I did the same thing in my personal life.

• No more grocery shopping. Brittany and I set up Instacart through Costco and pickup from Target. That erased hours of wandering the aisles.

• No more picking up dog poop. We have two rescue dogs, so we hired a company called Doody Daddy. I wasn’t scooping in 105 degree heat. Easy call.

• No more mowing the lawn. I hired someone to mow and trim.

• No more cleaning and organizing. I hired a house cleaner who also handles the laundry and the dishes.

• No more scrambling for last minute child care. We keep three babysitters on speed dial, which gives our schedules real flexibility.

• No more getting sick. I became intentional to stay on top of diet, exercise, and supplements. Being sick every other week carried an insane cost for me and my family. I added a sauna with red light therapy at home and use it almost every day. Avoid getting sick at all cost.

At some point Brittany thought I was crazy, or lazy, or both. I had stopped doing a dozen things most people do without thinking. But she watched me pour that reclaimed time into higher value work, and she watched the results show up. Instead of doing everything and calling it busy, I was doing a few things extremely well with a web of support underneath me.

The results compounded. The business climbed faster and faster while I did less, not more. And the work I kept, creating opportunities and converting new clients, became the thing I got truly great at.

By saying no, I finally had room to say yes to what mattered most. The mindset took time to settle in. The proof showed up in the numbers.

That path turned us into one of the most profitable real estate teams in the country, with what I believe is the best lifestyle attached to it. It led to invitations to speak at national and local brokerage events. Today we teach the same tactics and strategies at our company, Momentum Realty, which grew from zero in 2020 to nearly $600,000,000 in sales last year.

Momentum is now the number two brokerage office by sales production out of roughly 1,400 brokerages in Northeast Florida.

This worked for me, and it has worked for plenty of our agents who adopted it and asked to be held accountable to it.

So here is my challenge to you. What are the low cost things you can stop doing that would hand you back a pile of time, so you can pour it into the things that actually matter?

Start there.

-JB / jon@movewithmomentum.com movewithmomentum.com