I'm excited today about today's topic because I think it's essential to what's happening in the real estate market in order for real estate agents to continue to thrive and offer the value to consumers that they'll respect and appreciate enough to allow you to have a business with the margins that you want to have. We're going to go into a topic about how to become the CEO of your business and I have with me today somebody who's brilliant at this topic. Those of you who know him probably admire him first as a loving husband and father, which is something that is very dear to me. Those that work along with him, despite the accomplishments I'm about ready to read, all those that know him best say he's a very humble man to which I would attest to that as well. So, Chris Suarez, he's a real estate agent here in Portland. He's sold himself over a thousand transactions and over $250 million in volume. He actually didn't ask me to say that, so he's probably a little bit embarrassed that I did say that, but nevertheless someone with great accomplishments. He's somebody who has ownership as a broker owner in five different offices for Keller Williams up and down the I-5 corridor, he has an expansion team, meaning other brokers around the country of which he's the CEO. In addition to that, he still goes on buyer and seller appointments and balances that out with his other responsibilities of being a CEO and a big thinker. So Chris Suarez, thank you so much for joining us today. It's a great pleasure of mine to get to spend some time with you and share your genius with the think bigger real estate audience.
Awesome. Well, I appreciate being here. I appreciate the opportunity to connect. We talk a lot face to face, but now we're talking screen to screen and happy to share anything I can. But also I'm really thankful for what you continue to do for the community and our industry as well. It's a love for the real estate industry. I think that drives us both. So I'm happy to be here.
Yeah, no, it's true. I've been asked before "Justin, have you ever thought about getting your real estate license?" And that comes up often and I think my passion isn't necessarily to be with buyers and sellers, it's to be with real estate agents. So all day every day, in my role, I get the opportunity to be knee to knee talking strategy and finding ways to add value to agents. So, I appreciate that, Chris, that means a lot coming from you. Let's get into a little bit here about this topic of becoming a CEO. I've studied your teachings on this and others where there's a real difference between an entrepreneur and a CEO. Would you just share for the audience, what are some tactical differences in mindset in their activities, and just how they show up and be, that really differentiates somebody from being an entrepreneur. Which a lot of people embrace and love, but maybe they're hitting a ceiling and they're tired of hitting a hitting a ceiling and they want to do more in their business and/or just have a better quality of life. Let's talk about the how embracing the role of a CEO will help them.
Yeah. Justin, I think one of the interesting things about our industry is everybody starts as an entrepreneur. Like if that wasn't, if that wasn't our core, we wouldn't be in real estate. And so typically you look at a founder of any, any company, real estate or non real estate, and they have incredible drive. They have natural ability, right? They have intuition. They have enthusiasm. And depending on your level of any one of those things, that's sort of the level of your natural ceiling of achievement or the size of the business that we're going to create that makes a phenomenal entrepreneur. And then as we're really, really good at that, and as we care about people, our business is going to grow naturally. And at a certain point in time, I think our industry has told us, "Well then, you'll naturally be the owner of the business."
And so since you own it, we start putting three letters on our business card and it just says, you know, Chris Suarez, CEO and by nature, the fact that we call ourselves that, we just think that we'll just continue doing what we've always done. And now we're just the CEO of a business because we hired someone or we added people or we've grown. Interestingly enough, I think that was me, early on, right? I sold real estate and I sold more real estate and then more real estate. And I thought, well, "Gosh, I'm going to have people now because I need them to deliver service." And so now I was just automatically a CEO and as I started researching founders of different companies outside of our industry and the founders that, that stayed CEOs of their business versus the founders that hired CEOs of their business--and there are incredible companies that went either way--the founders that stayed as a CEO had to change dramatically what they did, what their skill set was, what they focused on. In fact, they had to go from like dry, natural ability, intuition, enthusiasm. And then all of a sudden their skillset flipped to focus, strategic options, systems, models, accountability. And that's not natural. And one of the things I came across in my research was this statement that the number one reason why tech, I was researching tech, which we might as well just call that real estate now anyway, but I was researching tech and it said, "The number one reason why tech companies failed was because the founder stayed a founder." They didn't become a CEO. And so I thought, "Gosh, well how do we become a CEO?" And the four things that showed up was the CEO is responsible for creating.
And you think, well, so is a founder. A CEO is responsible for truly planning. And you think, well "Yeah, so is a founder," but the next two was implementing and integrating. And that's where I think most real estate agents, right, entrepreneurs fall down. We are great at creating. We love creating. In fact, we create too much and we love planning. And so we all have goals, but it's the implementation and integration that falls on the shoulders of a CEO that ultimately takes a lot of time and we just don't typically put enough time into becoming that CEO or being the CEO for a business. So I know that's a lot, but that, that really sort of reframed my thinking of who do I want to be for my business or any business that I'm involved in. Am I the founder? Like am I the entrepreneur? Like I love being that. But if I'm going to put a CEO title or those letters on any organization that I run, I have to be something different for the business and for the people that I've invited into the business.
It's powerful that you say that, Chris. You're right, there's this concept that an entrepreneur is a noble role, to, which I agree. I think it is. I think many of the problems that are solved in the world come about because of entrepreneurs and business owners who are willing to take a risk in order to create a solution for the market; however, you've pointed out something interesting here, which is that one can't stay in that mode forever or their impact will be limited if they simply get to a certain place where now they've got to become something else and they refuse. And so it's easier to jump to a new venture, which you see oftentimes, which is an entrepreneur jumping from thing to thing to thing without necessarily either bringing in somebody else or becoming somebody else to take that business and impact to the next level. And so what you're saying is you've studied that in big businesses. But you're seeing that even on a micro level within the real estate community, that real estate agents themselves need to become something different than what maybe got them started in the business.
Yeah. I think just going back one second and you said, "Well, we see people that jump from one thing to the next thing, to the next thing." Those are called serial entrepre...
