Justin Stoddart
Welcome back to the Think Bigger Real Estate Show. A quick reminder, if you have clients that are looking to move to Portland, Oregon, please reach out to me, I'm not a licensed real estate agent, but I do know the best here in town, and I would be happy to make an introduction for you. So let me begin by saying first and foremost, Erik hatch, thank you for coming on the show today.
Erik Hatch
Ah, Justin, my man, if I'm here for the second time, it means I wasn't terrible the first time. So glad to be back.
Justin Stoddart
It's a pleasure, man. I'll tell you what, for those that don't know, Eric, his team is the 49th highest producing real estate team in the country. They sold 664 homes in 2018 and are getting after it again in 2019. And amidst all of that, the you know, one of the my favorite things about you, Eric, is that a lot of really high producing teams, you walk into their office, and there's listings all over the place. There's goals and metrics. As you know, these thermometers have Are we almost there, describe to the audience what is on your wall, in kind of one of your conference rooms?
Erik Hatch
Well, our goal is to create champions with what we do. And so of course, we do have some things up there that that are tracking, we believe in scorecards comes from the four Disciplines of Execution, which has been a great book in our world. But what's the main thing in our training room is over the whiteboard that says we're in the business of helping people, we just happen to sell real estate. And then on our back wall, what I've done is I've taken a picture of every person's family or pets, whatever they deem most important to them. And we have that up in our training room as a reminder and as the constant watchers of what we do and how we do it. So we make sure that we're consistently serving instead of being selfish.
Justin Stoddart
And it's so consistent with what what this is all about, right is that even the think bigger real estate show, it's about thinking bigger than real estate, the real estate can be a vehicle through which you can bless the serve a lot of people I know you, Eric, you even had a passion, one point in your life, to be part of the ministry. But you felt like you're called to serve through real estate, also impacting people's lives and deep and meaningful ways. Talk to us a little bit about how that came about.
Erik Hatch
Well, I still feel like I'm in a service based ministry-esque kind of environment. Ministry, for me was what I did right out of college, it was the best job you could ever have. That doesn't pay you well at all. And I was in the ministry, I did youth ministry and lead worship for about eight years, built some nonprofit movements throughout the community as well and was just fired up about it. But I needed to take better care of my family. And what it came down to was and my wife and I desperately want to kids. In fact, my son Simon is in the room right now. He's three and just had his tonsils taken up this last week. So he may jump on camera and say what's up. But we wanted so desperately to have kids and we ran into major infertility. And the only way I could be a dad was if I was able to fund it. And the other way I could fund it was not by working at a nonprofit. But by working in real estate, I was selling real estate part time. And I needed that financial acumen in order to really be a dad. Now I have two kids, my daughter spent almost my daughter Finley is almost five, my son Simon just turned three. And I am just saying smiling from ear to ear with where we're going.
Justin Stoddart
You know, it's really fun to see somebody like you who's who has a heart like that, that was willing to at one point, you know, work for not much money, but just to impact but then you realize how much more impact can one have? When you take you know, you take that hard and put it into a you know, a business that can impact even more people. And I see your beautiful son right here on the candidate. Let's introduce him this is Simon
Erik Hatch
Simon Simon, Can you say hi? No, gotta be shy.
Justin Stoddart
Simon, it is a pleasure to have you on the think bigger real estate show my friend. You know what a lot of what we do Simon is is is for people like you it's to inspire the next generation inspire all of us to be a little bit more like you
Erik Hatch
He's not listening. But I am.
Justin Stoddart
Thanks for making a guest appearance, Simon. So let's jump into again, your book, right. So you have this heart to, to serve people to be a servant leader, you realize that real estate is the vehicle through which you can do that and provide you for your family in the way that you want to. Let's talk a little bit about how the book came to be.
Erik Hatch
You know, I'll hold it up here so people can see it's like, it's like a double twin with me right here, I'll just try to shade some of my face as well. So I'll just match it. It's called play for the person next to you a guide to servant leadership. And it had been on my heart to write a book for probably five or six years. There's this interesting thing that happens, Justin, when you decide to write a book, because what you're doing is you're saying, I'm an expert in something. And I actually don't think of myself as an expert, I think of myself as a student. And I have studied leadership. And what happened was, I got into real estate full time from the ministry in 2011. I built a team in 2012, and the beginning of 2013, everything crashed down on me, I failed. So tremendously, I got kicked out of the brokerage that I was at, I went from a team of 13 people down to a two team of three people, myself and to others. Overnight, I invited everybody on the team to come with and nobody said yes, except for two of them. And I realized that I was chasing transactions. And I was failing to think about transformation. It was all about me instead of all about we. And so I buckled down and I put my head down and I said, Eric, you are you are still that servant that you were made to be. And I had really lost that my first couple years of jumping into the for profit lifestyle. I was chasing things that were empty promises, and they really weren't life giving. I think things like this, I think of the idea of profit. And if you ask most people, what's the purpose of business people will say, profit. But I think that that's is maybe foundational is saying that the purpose of life is breathing. It's absolutely essential to what you're doing. But it's not the purpose, the purpose of businesses not profit, the purpose of business is to live out your purpose. And to make it difference, just like the purpose of your life is not breathing, but it's to serve. And in fact, that work has already been set aside for you to do. And so I've made the conscious decision from six years ago that I was going to restart. And at that time, I recognize what I'm saying is maybe a little bit different than what the main stream of business and real estate is saying. And so from that, God put it on my heart to write a book and I didn't know what it was going to look like. And I didn't know when I was going to write it. But I finally said enough is enough enough about talking about your dreams and said start actually acting on them. And so here I am now, six years later, and I have my first book in my hand.
Justin Stoddart
Talk to us about the process of writing a book. Was it as challenging as many people say?
Erik Hatch
It sucks. I don't know how else to spin it. It is not a sexy thing by any means. I worked with a publishing company out of Charleston, South Carolina called advantage. And so I went went out to I went up to Charleston for a couple of...
