The Problem Isn’t Motivation – It’s Focus • Breakthrough With Michael • Michael Opyd

Keeping It Real Podcast • Secrets Of Top 1% REALTORS ® • Interviews With Real Estate Brokers & Agents

David Farrell, a high-performing real estate agent from Chicagoland with five years of experience, shares his journey of building a successful business through relationships and referrals while

Key takeaways

• Scaling a real estate business is not primarily a strategy problem—it's a 'you' problem rooted in identity and habits.
• Overcommitment to multiple roles (volunteering, brokerage work, athletic training) creates mental bandwidth issues that hinder focus and follow-through.

Main topics

• Focus vs. Motivation
• Overcommitment and Time Management

Notable quotes

"Real estate doesn't have a strategy problem. It has a you problem." – Michael Opitz

Conclusion

David realizes that scaling his business requires deep self-awareness, intentional

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) This agent is up at 3.30 in the morning to drive Uber, doing showings at night, sitting on two different boards, and training for his first Ironman. And he wants to know why he can't scale his real estate business. Coach Michael Opid has an answer for him today, and it's not the one he walked in expecting. Stay tuned. Speaker 3 (0:18) This episode of Speaker 2 (0:19) Keeping It Real is brought to you by Real Geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads into interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren't converting? Well, RealGeeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose RealGeeks as their technology partner. RealGeeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built Speaker 2 (1:06) Real Geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness. Visit realgeeks.com forward slash keepingitrealpod and find out why realtors come to Real Geeks to generate more business. Again, Visit realgeeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now onto our show. Today's episode is brought to you by Corded.io. Are you looking for agents to join your brokerage or team? Now, as a real estate recruiter, I can tell you the answer is always yes. but most agents aren't looking to move right now. So how do you know who to contact? Well, what if I were to tell you there's a recruiting and retention tool powered by artificial intelligence that shows you exactly which agents in your local market are looking to leave their brokerage right now and which agents at your own firm are also looking to leave you. Now, I've been recruiting realtors for 15 years and I've hired over 2,000 agents. I can tell you with no exaggeration, this is the tool I've been waiting. for. Corded's AI looks for trends across dozens of variables for each agent in your market and shows you which agents they believe are likely to move. Not only does it do that, but Corded's AI went and visited my recruiting website and read everything I offer. So now when I'm recruiting, Corded's AI tells me exactly what to say based on that agent's needs and what my brokerage can offer. It even writes emails for me. I've never seen anything like it, and I use it every single day. Now, if you are looking to grow your brokerage, Corded.io is the best tool out there. Visit Corded.io to schedule a demo. Again, that's Corded.io. And now, on to the show. Speaker 2 (3:03) All right, welcome to Keeping It Real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show. And we have our monthly series today, which is called Breakthrough with Michael. Now, here's how it works. Every month, coach Michael Opitz sits with one agent, not for an interview, but for a chat. and really a live coaching session. This is a real breakthrough on camera, unscripted, whatever comes up, comes up. So. Hear a little bit about Michael in case you're unfamiliar. Michael Opet is a realtor mental performance strategist with over 20 years of real estate experience, 10 of those as a brokerage owner, running over $200 million in annual sales. But what makes him different and the reason we built this series around him is that he spent more than 25,000 hours studying high performers. not systems, not scripts, the actual psychology of what separates the top 1 % from everyone else. His take is pretty blunt. Real estate doesn't have a strategy problem. It has a you problem. And his work goes after the identity and belief patterns underneath everything else, the stuff most coaches never touch. Please follow him on Instagram at Michael Opid. That's O-P-Y-D, Michael Opid, O-P-Y-D. And before we get started, if you are a real estate agent and you'd like to be coached here on this program we have a form that is linked in the description and the show notes and we are selecting real agents dealing with real challenges putting them through a live on camera coaching session you're about to hear that today and if this would be helpful for you and i know that it would please apply we're always looking for great candidates so i want to tell you a little bit about our guest today david so David Farrell is a realtor. He's been in practice for five years. He's in the Chicagoland area. And he has really done a lot of amazing things in his career as a real estate agent. Not only has he been a successful producer, on top of that, he has volunteered at a lot of the local and state levels, probably someday in the national level as well. He has been on many different committees. He also... even before being a realtor, was working at our local MLS, the software that we use here in the Chicagoland area. So he is really well-versed in those systems. And then he became a broker himself and also started volunteering like crazy at the state level, at the local level. And he is also an Ironman athlete doing his first Ironman triathlon here in the next week or two, which is amazing. And he is also a husband and just... juggling a lot of different things right now. So we're going to talk about that and really help him in scalability. How do you get to the level where you can really scale up? His business is entirely organic. He doesn't advertise or pay for leads. He does it all through word of mouth. And he wants to learn how to get to that next level and figure out what he's missing or what he could do differently. So without further ado, David, by the way, thank you for your time and your vulnerability and your honesty. Michael, I will turn it over to you. Welcome back to the show and welcome both guys. And I will stay in the background here. I might chime in from time to time, but this is your show. And I am excited to watch just like and listen, just like our audience. Speaker 1 (6:38) All right, cool. Thank you, DJ. Appreciate you always for the intro on that. David, welcome, man. I'm excited to talk to you today. Speaker 3 (6:45) Awesome. Thank you, DJ. And thanks, Michael. Thanks for having me over. I appreciate it. Speaker 1 (6:49) Yeah, man. So this is going to be fun, right? So we'll walk through a bunch of stuff today. But I think from listeners' perspective, it's always good to find out. first of all, just, you know, kind of the background of real estate. You know, we all have different journeys, different ways to enter this industry. I know you did the MRED stuff, but like you could have done anything, man. You're a motivated person. You could have done anything you want in your life. You know, give me a little bit of background. Tell me a little bit more about your journey into real estate. Speaker 3 (7:16) So, I mean, one of the reasons why I got into the business is because of the love that I have for the work itself. And so I think even just with sports or my background in sports, You know, it's a very honest business, just like with a performance sport. If you put in the work, if you show up, if you care for your clients, if you build the relationships with your peers, eventually the quality of the work that you put in comes back. And so when I was working with Emirate, I realized that. And then what was missing for me was that aspect of independence. that I wanted to be in the driver's seat as far as my business. Now, when it comes to us as brokers working with our clients, we're just the GPS. They tell us what their final destination is, and we're going to find a way, just like your GPS, to find the route that's going to get you there in the smoothest, most pleasant way, right? But as a broker owner or as an owner of my own business, I wanted to have that flexibility. I wanted to have ownership of my time. I wanted to... have control of the direction that I took my business to have ownership of every decision that I made. And the results that that came with that. So that's why, you know, after my experience with them read, I decided to take a leap of faith, believed in myself and went at it with to take my my broker's license. And here we are five years later. So. Speaker 1 (8:45) No, that's awesome, man. So obviously motivated, driven behind it. You could, I mean, I could see it. I mean, I know people listening can't see it, but I can tell you, David has those eyes of someone who is driven, motivated. You just heard that firsthand. So I love that. Cause that's, I mean, we're not, you're an entrepreneur, right? I mean, real estate agents aren't looked at it as entrepreneurs. You know, we're not the Silicon valleys, but like you said, you own your own business. You are an entrepreneur. You basically you're betting on yourself. I love that. I think that's one of the coolest ways to look at it. I think the GPS, great analogy. I love that. I love that. I think that's a great way to look at how you serve as clients. So let's talk a little bit about your current business. OK, so you got your background now. You're in the business. Let's start with just simply, you know, what feels easy for you? Like what parts of your business are you just like this clicks? This is smooth. You know, this feels easy for me. Speaker 3 (9:38) You know, the relationship building aspect of the business to me comes very naturally. So I'm a first generation immigrant. I came to the country when I was 15 years of age. I had to adjust a lot. So number one skill that an entrepreneur or a realtor or anyone that's starting their business needs to have, I believe, is adaptability. Through adaptability, you are able to also put yourself in the shoes of the client, making sure like you try to really... feel and understand what it is that they're looking for, where they're coming from, why they're doing what they're doing. And so, you know, to me, that's important. Speaker 1 (10:16) So just being able to have those connections, like you could build connections quickly with people. That's kind of your relationships. Yeah. And you build trust. You build trust with Speaker 3 (10:24) those people. They're going to trust you to guide them through one of the most important and biggest, probably, financial decisions of their lives. Why should they trust you? Right? And so when I am able to build that foundation of trust with them and show them the value that I bring to the table, again, by being that GPS and maybe talk to them about my own self-experience of things that I've been through and relate that to their process, I think that that really helps a lot. Speaker 1 (10:53) Cool. Yeah. I mean, obviously relationships are huge in this. industry so that's that's awesome that that becomes natural for you as you made this transition in so now let's counter that all right so what's been the most difficult then there were the parts that seemed the most difficult yeah Speaker 3 (11:11) so i mean in this market it's been tough after covid when the interest rates went so low it felt like you know the trees were just the fruit was pouring in and like everyone was just getting deals and stuff like that started connecting with people. And I think before we even started that podcast here, maybe I started taking on way too much of like things that I was diverting my attention to and not solely focusing on my business. I think that that's been my biggest area of opportunity is connecting with clients in every way possible. You know, not just through social media, but reaching out to them, calling them. When I close a client, following up with them, seeing how things are going in the new house, sending those market reports to potentially farms and stuff like that. Like consistency has been something that I need to focus on in the next couple of months for sure. After after I make some adjustments and again, as I said, after I have reached some of my personal goals. Speaker 1 (12:17) No, it makes sense, man. And that's a really good segue too. So, you know, one of the things that I, I talk about agents all the time and one of the things that separates the, let's just say the most, I don't want to, I don't want to categorize people, but let's just say the most successful agents, the ones that are always seem to be at the top of the leaderboard. There are ones every single year seem to see the same names up there. One of the biggest things that I've seen in my research is consistency. You know, they do the things consistently that they need to do for their business. So, Question for you then is like, what's something that you know you should be doing? Okay, but you struggle to stay consistent with it. Speaker 3 (12:55) Oh, absolutely. 1000%. So, you know, to keep it 100 % real with you, like, I needed to get the experience of what the market cycles feel like. And now that I am there five years in, I need to follow up with those mailers. Past clients need to send them out maybe some Market reports of what's happening in their area Those are the things that I feel like I kind of have been slacking a little bit on and that I need to like really focus my attention on coming next because organically, you know, as I said the last three years have been great for me in terms of Clients coming to me versus me chasing after the business, which I think is It attests to a lot of the work that I did maybe the first three years in building that trust with those clients. And so if I could do a little bit more now with the time that I have to get more business. Yes. Let's refocus and direct that energy there. Speaker 1 (13:52) So it's the it's more of the follow up, right? You just you don't have a consistent kind of follow up going on right now. You're kind of all over the place with a little bit scattered. Speaker 3 (14:01) A little bit, yeah. Like last year, and there's been a lot of change in my business. I mean, last year I was doing it monthly with every single client. I was touching them at least once a month. And then obviously the holidays and whatnot. This year I changed brokerages. So I kind of have just been readjusting to that. And now that I'm a year in into my new office, then I for sure can start taking advantage of some of those tools and ways to contact my clients. Speaker 1 (14:29) Cool, man. Now, next thing, you know, is I want to know from people like, you know, what are some of the things you really enjoy doing? Like what gives you energy? You know, what what are the things that when you know you got to do it, you're just like, OK, cool, let's go, because you enjoy doing those things. Speaker 3 (14:45) Yeah. Well, when a client reaches out, that gives me energy. Okay, let's get you to a free approval. Who do you know? Who can you contact? Getting the process started, that gives me energy. I think I'm a very hands-on type of person. Doing the work gets me energy. I want to get my hands in it. I want to see what's happening in the market. I want to see what kind of houses you're looking for and stuff like that. The process itself is what energizes me. Speaker 1 (15:15) Okay. So let me just counter that too because every agent can say the same thing, right? Yeah. You get energy when someone wants you to help them. Absolutely. But what part of your business is... our business energize stuff that you basis because obviously you're your relationship person you love that yeah Speaker 3 (15:35) yeah Speaker 1 (15:35) but that piece doesn't happen without other pieces so like what else in your business really energizes you like really think about it Speaker 3 (15:43) think about think about that i mean again right like so when we when we go to the houses when i see my client wants to get into that house when they put in an offer start the negotiation aspect of it I base it off of the data. So a little bit of my background, and I have my master's in business administration. I do have an MBA, but I focused a lot of my