Justin Stoddart 0:00
Hey, welcome back to the Think Bigger Real Estate Show. I'm your host Justin Stoddart
partnerships. Are they a good idea, are they not? Today we're going to talk about how partnerships can leverage can be a powerful source of leverage to allow you to take your business to the next level. I want to, first of all, thank James Becker, owner and founder of fusion growth partners for being on the show today. James has spoken at Inman before. He's built Fusion Growth Partners and is a business incubator for emerging mega agents. You probably have not heard that before. So we're going to talk all about what partnership could look like. James, first and foremost, thank you for being on the show today.
James Becker 0:38
Thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to it.
Justin Stoddart 0:40
Yeah, good stuff. So, James, we were talking here before, and I kind of wish we would have started the broadcast a few minutes ago because so the stuff that he was sharing was absolutely fantastic. So I'm hoping to be able to pull that out of him again.
But here's what I think of James, when I think of a partnership, or how most real estate agents think of a partnership is they think, boy, I'm getting busy. Susie over there in the office doesn't look as busy. Hey, Susie, why don't we team up and let's go list. I go on vacation, you can cover my stuff, you go on vacation off cover your stuff. That's about as complex of a partnership that you typically see in real estate. And really what you guys are doing is coming in creating partnerships, almost investing in real estate agent businesses to take them to the next level, like less of a mom and pop shop, and more into a really established business that offers big value to the clients. So I'm interested really interested in having you share kind of your story. How did Fusion Growth Partners come about?
James Becker 1:40
Well, I started selling real estate back in 1989, we had a great market in 1989. And then we had Desert Shield when we had the first Iraqi war. We had boots on the ground, the market literally went to a stop. I was newly married, I have a pregnant wife, and I needed to pay some bills. And so I sat down and I cold called until my fingers bled. And I did very well doing kind of the mike ferry process. Yeah. And. And back in 1990. Before there are mega-agents, my best year I did about 65 transactions with one TC. And those do all the prospecting myself, I was in 1% of the agents across the country as far as volume was concerned. And, and then after that last year, then 1997 year I was just completely burned out. And I hadn't leveraged it, everything in a was
the amount of business that I did was strictly correlated to the amount of energy that I had every day that I could put into prospecting, burnout being and so I started thinking about, okay, need to do something different. And I opened up another business, that business was kind of Fusion 1.0 was not successful. And I ran into a guy running a mortgage company who became a mentor of mine, I shut down my business went to work for him, learn some corporate structure and some additional business stuff for five to six years and then opened up future.
Justin Stoddart 3:27
So talk to us a little bit about what Fusion offers. Again, it's very different than just offering an agent or even offering an assistant, but when I went through the presentation really can understand your model, I was super impressed when I thought all the stuff that I try and recommend to real estate agents that they should do to grow their business. I mean, it was you know, it could be a menu of like, dozens of things to really get their business showing up in the right places, with the right touch with the right look. And like I think about every good idea that I had heard or ever promoted, you're saying, we do that, with companies invest in companies to help them on day one, be able to turn the switch and have this stuff rolling. Right?
James Becker 4:07
Right. Well, not day one, it takes 60 to 90 days to build out a factory. And that's one of the things that keeps agents from doing and there's a huge commitment to building up all the systems and the processes so that they can run on a regular basis and have consistency. We believe the number one reason why people don't have long term growing sustainable businesses is the lack of consistency in just the fundamentals, and the basic business development stuff. Because the works, they produce some business, they get busy, they stopped doing that. And so they're in business, and they're out of business, they're in business, and they're out of business. And so for us, we want to build up this particular factory. So it's not particularly day one. But when people ask us what we do, it's impossible to explain in five minutes, but the best way to explain it is most of these people have been to a family reunion or mega agent or Tom Ferry seminar. And they come out of those seminars just like if I set this system up, and this system up and this system up, man, I'm going to kill it because I see these other agents that have done that. And then what they find out is six months later, they're signing up for maybe the same seminar, or very similar seminar and they haven't executed anything on a consistent basis. That is the problem that we solve. We look around and I cannot see or find one business, it's one person that does everything themselves. That's a healthy long term business. And so but that's what we do, as agents, we tried to hoard all of the money ourselves, and we're going to do all the work ourselves, keep everything ourselves. And what ends up happening is you have a very unstable, unsustainable business model, that, you know, someone gets sick, or they're hired, or they're burned out the businesses
Justin Stoddart 6:05
that you know, grow. So, you know, I couldn't agree with you more again, I get the good privilege of day in and day out spending needed spending my days,
my days sitting next to agents helping them become more consistent with systems in place, and by night thinking about how I can help them improve that. And what I mentioned that I think is really interesting, is it that agents unwillingness, or at least lack of education on what it takes to actually scale a business that is sustainable, that it's, you can't look at the commission check as income, right, or as your paycheck rather.
Like its revenue.
James Becker 6:44
Revenue. It's not a paycheck. That's such a good, such a good way of looking at, I'm gonna have to borrow that from you. Please, paycheck, its revenue, you're absolutely correct.
Justin Stoddart 6:57
But yeah, they see it. And I think that's why many agents go right on kind of the further end of the spectrum, like forget about taxes, there's, they're used to coming out of a job where when someone gives you a check that you put it in the bank, and that's what you get to spend. But there's this education of what about the taxes. And then what you're saying is there's this other component, that if you were actually business savvy, or like any scalable business, you would take a percentage of that and gladly invest it back in the business and people systems tools in order to get you to where that service you just offered number one doesn't burn you out personally, and continues to allow for a consistent lead generation effort as well as customer service effort moving forward.
James Becker 7:37
Right. Now, I agree with that. So I did some research a few years ago, and I went into US government list of percentages, and you look at the margins that most businesses have the very top, the highest margin by industry was the banks, the banks...
