The Top 1% Life. Kathleen Black
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in the end. She eventually even bought a home. She caught the same strength to make big changes at a rare, quiet moment. She told me that she had to make a leap exactly when she knew she was strong enough to go. Leaving was a glimpse, a fraction of a second when her mind, body, and soul found resolve, and she took that moment of calm, and she jumped. It was the perfect timing for a change. She clawed her way back onto her feet and she found a way to get out of debt, so she would have enough to make her own choices.
I did not tell Nancy how much we had in common. I was a successful real estate agent. I made more money than I ever made before. I helped forty-five people buy and sell homes in my first year in real estate. I signed thirteen beautiful people to work with me exclusively as buyers in my first month in the business. But just months before I helped Nancy, I had a dirty little secret. I was showing up at the office. I was helping my clients. I never missed a meeting or an appointment. But I was not living in my own home anymore.
I was sharing a room in my mother’s and stepfather’s home with my two children. I would answer ad calls in the hallway, feed my children McDonald’s on the go, and buy a small toddler bed to sit on the floor beside me when Children’s Aid Society (CAS) said it was too dangerous to let my 2.5-year-old daughter who nursed for over two years and co-slept with ease, sleep in bed with my son and me. I still resent that part. CAS stayed on me and kept my file open for two years as I desperately tried to navigate the path out of marriage into separation and, after five long years, finally, a divorce. But they stayed on to support me. They knew I needed someone to help me decipher what was happening. How do you go from building a small empire, with retirement in sight within ten years, being dubbed the “no money miracle” of investment acquisition, leaning into sweat equity with every fiber of your being, to frozen accounts, locked doors, and restraining orders?
You force yourself to continue despite the storm.
This situation got me back into my family home for now. It allowed me to find some sense of normalcy while I ramped up my energy into my real estate business. I would be the breadwinner now. There was no financial support. There was no help.
Nancy’s situation happened months later. Helping them brought up my own sense of protection for my children and family. It all felt too familiar. So, I moved myself. With two weeks’ notice, we packed our home, found a rental, and moved into a house.
Why do we lean so hard into building successful businesses? Because we know life happens, and we want to be prepared. We want to be more than prepared for that next surprise around the corner. We get stuck in the feeling of needing to build far beyond the point of financial security. So, we answer the call. We reply to the email. We miss the birthday party. We sit in the living room during holidays while our minds sit far away in the office. We hope no one notices, and if they do notice, we hope they understand. We hope they can see the sacrifices to feel safe, capable, and well-resourced. We hope they know we are well-intentioned in never wanting them to go through what we did, ever again.
So, it makes sense that we fail to notice the shift. It makes sense that we are so conditioned to jump and react, to fear the day we do not hear the phone ringing or have a client that needs us, leaving us to sit in mental scarcity without noticing the world shifted around us.
We fail to notice the bank accounts growing, the clients referring, and the time sliding away from us. We miss the moments when we dreamed of making this much. No champagne. No celebration. We were naive when we set those goals, naive to think this would be enough to risk pulling back or slowing down.
So, we forge on. We set new goals that we never acknowledge achieving and consistently feel it is all so very short of what we need, what we want, what we expected. We tell ourselves we still do not have enough—we still are not enough to fight the dragons if they were to ever show their faces again. So, we save more, do more, and give more. We beat the odds, we laugh in the face of statistics, and we sit in glass houses wishing they were concrete. We sit wishing our houses were dragon-proof while simultaneously believing we are fighting the dragon just one more call, one more client, and one more paycheck at a time.
The eye of the storm is when you have moments of clarity that provide windows into how to act in life and business. When you feel pressured for answers, the clarity that you have will give you a brief moment to change. Those moments change your life. They are a brief glimpse into what could be despite the noise. They are portals to the future. If you get one, take it.
Chapter 2
LEADERSHIP BY FIRE
It was December 25th, 2015, and I just said goodbye to my children as they left for some holiday time with their dad. I looked around my empty house, the unwrapped presents, the Christmas tree, and the remnants of chocolate wrappers. All I could see, taste, smell, and feel were silence. The silence started to creep into a crack that would become an end, a surrender to the recent months of unravelling. Unravelling sounds calm and beautiful. But, it wasn’t. That final surrender, and what resulted, became the catalyst for some of the best work of my life as well as the quickest business growth.
About five years prior, around 2010, I was ecstatic to start running the first team-specific coaching company for real estate in Canada. I was thrilled at the new challenge and opportunity. Eighteen months into the launch of the new company, I became director of coaching. With issues in two key areas, content and retention, I decided to pull back and strengthen both areas before launching any new growth initiatives. This was a risky move because the company was struggling. Cash flow is king, but client experience is queen, and if I know one thing about sales, it is that people sell what they believe in, both to potential clients and to themselves.
I wanted a company that I, our coaching team, and sales team believed in, and I insisted on a company our clients could believe in. This meant eighteen months of strict content creation and improvement before adding any additional programs, events, or new projects. Luckily, as a single mom selling over sixty houses a year, I knew all about refining systems and the efficiency and mindset needed to excel.
Our sales team manager would often ask me how I sold as many homes as our top producers in half the work hours. Now, I was selling the same plus coaching and running the coaching team. This took a massive amount of patience for me. I had so many dreams and visions for the company. I instantly devoted my foreseeable business future to leading the coaching team. I envisioned a point where I would only coach and no longer sell. I loved helping others to grow and succeed.
Over time, my goal shifted to being the head of all clients. Our mission was to carve the path ahead of our top producing teams to create an ever-increasing cohesive business, building systems to the top that others could easily follow while keeping our top teams thriving. It had to be efficient, profitable, deliver results, and make life better for our clients’ teams, clients, and leaders. We sought to elevate the team platform as the ultimate destination for a new agent, struggling agent, or well-established agent who was sick of doing it all to excel.
These teams started working with me at twenty-five resale deals exceeding 550 units annually. What was unique about this was the level of coaching and training. We sought to transfer knowledge, coach implementation, and maintain what we had built as we scaled into further growth. We were not looking for one-off success stories. It had to be real, consistent, and true. We built with our top clients step-by-step. We effectively reduced the cost of research and testing by 90% or altogether in some areas. We found a massive edge and even started to exceed our own internal best in class baselines. Teams at 300k Gross Commission Income (GCI) exceeded 1 million dollars GCI. Our coaching team mastered the compensation structure, allowing one of our clients to scale to over 1,000 homes sold a year.
The results were easy to see. When most companies were focused on 5 to 10% increases for their coaching clients per year, we sought best-in-class for our clients. We celebrated the doubling of units and gross earnings for clients every year. 10X and 20X business growth became a reality for our network, meaning we grew the businesses to ten and twenty times the size of the business compared to when