Brett: 

Please welcome to the show. My next guest, he's actually originally from New York, and he started in the brokerage world, had a great start moved to North Carolina got some bumps and bruises trying to go into a new market, found an amazing coach, established a system, and has become a rockstar agent. So much so that he became a coach and now he is passionate about helping people who are in the brokerage world create passive income through the eXp model and solve a lot of residential real estate agent brokerage challenges. Please welcome to show with me, John Mikesh. Hey, John, how you doing?

John:

Hey, I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me, Brett.

Brett:

Absolutely. Glad to have you on the show and get to get to know you a little bit more. Would you give our listeners maybe a little bit more about your background and your current focus?

John:

Yeah, absolutely. So like you said, I started out in residential real estate in New York and did real well out of the gate and moved down in North Carolina, I thought, hey, it's a bigger area than where I'm from, I should naturally do better and be able to sell more. That wasn't the case and that led me on a journey to find answers to questions that I had, which was how do I do this thing? How do I make this a sustainable career for myself and ultimately, it was that training and coaching that I got, that enabled me to go from struggling agent to Top Producing agent to then having a Top Producing team and I think it's applicable, whether it's residential or commercial, once we know how to take the right steps in the right order, we can do anything, anything we want. And if we will just believe in our ability to figure things out, and what's possible, my goal, similar to what you teach was always to have a passive income opportunity. And the way that I thought I was going to do that prior to eXp was to have a fully leveraged residential brokerage, where I wasn't working in the day to day I wasn't selling the houses, but I was able to earn a significant income that I could then invest into real estate long term, build wealth, and still doing that to this day, and still believe that model is great. I just was fortunate enough to come into the eXp opportunity. And I think what eXp does is it allows us a passive income piece, while we're doing the same things that we're already going to do to build this long term real estate portfolio and it just allows us to capture some passive income along the way, which I think is really neat.

Brett:

It's amazing, actually, and if you think about it in the same, same like light, likewise, story, in commercial real estate, we always call it getting on the other side of the phone and the goal was to learn and sir, learn from your clients and serve enough clients, and close enough deals that you can earn a lot of commissions and then you can start buying these multifamily properties or buying these commercial properties. Right and, and adding value and making a bunch of wealth there and that was really always the goal, right? As well as loving brokerage and competing in the business and serving clients. But yeah, the other one was some folks would want to own the brokerage or start their own brokerage, not so much in commercial because it's kind of like these typically big players in the industry, and there's some independence. But likewise, you go, oh, why don't just keep doing what you're doing now and be an owner by getting stock in a company. That's amazing, right? So talk about that mindset of shifting from ownership having to be on the brokerage on the real estate, versus oh, I can become basically like a partner inside of eXp and how that's transformed your career.

John:

Yeah. It's really interesting. It's the thing that actually kept me away from eXp for as long as it did. For four years, I've been pushing eXp aside and saying not for me and the reason that I was saying that, looking back was really mainly just ego and a misunderstanding. My ego was like, well, I already have a real estate company, why would I partner with you? Like, I'm proud of the independent brand that I built, what do I need you for? And then I just didn't understand their model. And I didn't understand that they actually wanted me to continue with that brand that I built, just use their platform to do it. So once I took a really hard look at what the information was and how eXp worked, I didn't see it as a replacement for my brokerage. I saw it as an addition to an ability to scale at a great you know level not be geographically limited nor have thoughts, headaches and pains that it would take for me to grow my real estate business to multiple office locations. And for that reason I hadn't done it, I had plenty of opportunities to scale my independent real estate brand to multiple markets. But when you looked at the weight of the cost of doing that, and the challenges and everything that would have to be set up to me, it just wasn't worth the effort. So now that I'm with eXp, I not only have the ability to increase my brand awareness in my market, but I can take it to other markets, and I can share the things that worked with me, with other people around the country. And I think that when you really understand eXp, whether it's residential or commercial, the collaboration effect that they're putting in place is what's going to drive this company to 100, 200, 300,000 agents and beyond.

Brett:

Amazing, we're gonna dive into those maybe three secrets to understanding the model in a minute here. And also getting out of the way of your own ego because likewise, John, I struggle with that too. Hi, my name is Brett. I'm an entrepreneur in real estate, a brokerage junkie, and I love investment, real estate. I love brokerage. I love capital gains, tax deferral, I love everything investments, I'm really competitive. But guess what, I got a big ego and I got a lot of pride, right? And I gotta be humble and get out of the way. So we're gonna dive into that in a minute. But I want to take a step back, John, I want help to listen to get to know you a little bit more. You know, I believe we've all been given certain gifts in this life. And I believe these are God-given gifts, I believe these gifts are given to us in order to be a blessing or help to others. Some people might call them superpowers, some might call them strengths. So I'm curious, John, take a step back, maybe the high school days, maybe the junior high days? And what are those one or two strengths that you believe you were given? And how do they help how you help and bless people today?

John:

Man, if I look at myself in my high school days, I don't know what gifts I would really come up with. I definitely wasn't the person that looked like they were most likely to succeed at any level. In fact, when I graduated high school by the skin of my teeth, I actually relocated at that time, and I moved down to St. Simons island for a couple of years, really, I was just trying to get out of the environment that I was in. And looking back along my journey, I can say with absolute certainty, that environment is everything. And if you're in an environment that's not conducive to success, you're never going to have success in that environment. So I got myself out of that environment, I put myself into a new environment, I challenged myself, and I was able to find a great family down there. And they introduced me to God and religion and just a whole wealth of things that I wasn't exposed to prior to. And that really changed me. And through that process, what I learned is that I'm really good at assimilating with people of any walk of life wherever I am. And if I had to look, what is my skill set, now, it's like, I feel like I can relate to people at very diverse and different levels. And that's allowed me in residential real estate to really connect with people. And when say, one of my skills is that I can connect with people and being able to connect with people and build rapport allows you to enter into relationships, and those relationships, like you just said, when you really care about the person and you build a relationship with them, you can serve them at a higher level. And that is really the crux of the challenge that I had in my residential real estate company. My biggest challenge and the challenge that was so big that I didn't know if I even want to continue down the path anymore, was that I would bring agents in, that had no real estate background or past experience at all. And I would teach them a model of a system of doing business that would allow them to be so successful if I could just get them to follow my model. And because of the ability to connect and build rapport, I could help them do that, that they would ultimately achieve levels of success, they didn't think were possible for themselves, again, new environment, and then in that new environment, they would want more. The challenge I had as a residential real estate broker-owner is that I didn't have more to give them the only thing more beyond doing extremely well selling real estate within my brokerage was to move to that next level and have their own brokerage or team and because I couldn't solve that problem, ultimately what happened is I became an incubator for talent that would then ascend beyond me and become my competition in my marketplace. And eXp solves that problem.

Brett:

So let's pause there because I think that is so so well said and they wanted more and you weren't able to give it to him because your ceiling was you had owned the brokerage and that's how you had to send it to more and, and in fact, I call this the 5050 scratch my back I'll scratch your back type of model which most. By the way, commercial real estate brokerages are probably even tougher on this, where you come in and you have this mentor and he's gonna give you his secrets but he's gonna give you enough secrets to be successful so that he can you know, earn what she should because they've earned it by bringing you in and mentoring you. But at the same time, there's this apprehension that is this someone gonna leave me and all of a sudden start cold calling next to me on the same people and or even worse leave the entire company and go to like a CB Richard Ellis or GLL or Cushman Wakefield. And my story is that Marcus and Millichap, I was sitting there and I literally was so excited about all the mentors, all the people coaching and teaching me that I started recruiting people and bringing them in and coaching them up and training them up. And I found that if you have a guy that is just a few steps ahead of you, that's the best way to learn that someone necessarily that's so far ahead of you. But, I was adding value to them. But guess what happened all of a sudden looking around, like, I brought that guy in, that guy in, trained that guy, coached that guy, mentor that guy. And now they're now competing on the same listings. And I was like, well, that's great for Marcus and Millichap because they're the owner of the company, right? But it's not so great for Brett. And so it was this weird tension. And during that time, too, I had five mentors. I don't know if you relate to this, the first mentor was fired. I was with him for three months, he was amazing. He was fired. I was like, totally bummed out. The second mentor fired me within about a year and a half of the mentorship. The next mentor, he got along great, he was so good that he got promoted. This is all within the same office, by the way, the broker-owner or broker of the office was fired. And then, and then I had another mentor who was always my mentor, but he was never paid on any deals because he was my cousin. So I'm looking at all these people who poured into me and coached me up and some of them got paid. Some of them didn't, someone got more than the value. And it was this whole thing of it was always kind of 5050 except for one mentor who was my cousin. And he was always 100% in but he was in retail, he wasn't in multifamily. And so the model that they had set up was you specialize and you follow that one product type. And again, we created this sense where he always wanted me to succeed. But the other folks wanted me to succeed enough for them to get their business. It was just a weird dynamic. And so fast forward, I joined eXp about six months ago. And literally, it's transformational. What I've seen on how to align financially. And as collaboration and team members, right? Versus just this weird competition thing. So would you speak to that, John? Or does that resonate with you?

John:

Yeah, I mean, it resonates at my core, because I think if we're being honest with ourselves, if we're the mentor in that scenario, and we're helping somebody, and we can only help them so much without hurting ourselves, we're actually not giving all of what we have to somebody, and that doesn't feel authentic. And I think that when you look at the brokerage model, whether it's commercial or residential, and you start to see what's broken about that model, it's just that we're in an information technology era where information is so readily available. And if somebody has the hunger and desire, they can go find that mentor, they can go find that information, and they can become successful. Now, when we're mentoring somebody, or we have a mentor, it's a weird thing if we want to go a different direction. You know, it was a struggle for me because I've had many different mentors, and I spent countless dollars on personal development and coaching. And it's always a weird thing when somebody really helps you, and you use that information to grow. But then you want to grow in maybe a slightly different direction. And all of a sudden, you're not paying that mentor anymore. And that relationship evaporates overnight. I don't think that's good for the mentee or the mentor. And when you look at the model that he has put in place, it's so perfect, because it allows you to be a mentor to somebody and give them all that you have, and sponsor them into the business. And then ultimately, if they want to grow a little bit different than you, if they want to go get some different training, they can do that. And we have all of that in this collaboration world that we've created. And you're not losing the relationship with them, because there's no payment between them and you eXp and the model provides the benefit to do so. And I've just seen it. I mean, it's one thing to say it and hear it on a podcast like this, it's another thing to experience it. Since I've been with the eXp, I've gotten on the phone with people that have no vested interest in me whatsoever, but they're willing to get on a call and help me or help one of my people, because it's just that kind of an environment we're being so well taken care of that nobody needs to have a hand in the cookie jar, so to speak.