Real Estate vs. Fitness
In 2017, I made the decision to obtain a real estate license with the understanding that I was going to start moving out of the health and fitness industry.
My reasoning was simple, I wanted to make more money than what I was doing in fitness. After working my butt off for a year or two after college and failing to see any potential income growth, I figured it was time to try something different. Patience has always been a struggle.
What ensued was a memorable summer. I failed my licensing exam and had to take it a second time a few weeks later. Needless to say, I was rushing into a new industry.
After getting my license, I listed my first home and closed it within sixty days. It was tough on me as the deal was a complicated one and I was living at my parents house trying to cash my first check as fast as possible. I couldn’t enjoy the new experience because I felt like I didn’t have time to be learning. Very stressful.
I actively sold real estate for three months while continuing to do personal training on the side. In that time, I started a podcast where I reviewed new listings daily and met a few real estate professionals, attorneys and mortgage officers whom I still talk to after leaving real estate full-time. The lessons that I gleaned from the experience and those relationships have helped me tremendously in my health and fitness career. Below are a few of those lessons.
Results come from follow-up
I spent a ton of time making cold calls in my first few months of real estate. I even went door knocking without the faintest clue of what I would say, who I was looking for or what I would do if I actually got the listing. It was blind chaos, and it led to failure.
First impressions are important. Meeting new people, shaking new hands and building new bridges would help my real estate career take off, but not until I could turn those handshakes into real, working relationships. It’s there that I learned the value of follow-up.
It’s not difficult to get someone to try personal training, just like it’s not difficult to book an appointment in real estate to state your case. What’s difficult is the relentless check-ins, problem-solving and off-hour conversation that create the lasting relationship that breeds successful outcomes.
The difference maker in producing great outcomes in health and fitness is the same difference between a great salesperson and an average one. Follow-up. How long can we stay the course to allow the other person to trust and benefit from us? How many “touchpoints” can we create?
Negotiation can be learned
There was a problem with the foundation in an outbuilding during my first listing. This problem went unnoticed by both the homeowners, myself and the initial property inspector. After the crack in the cement was found, the price reduction was the fastest and biggest number that I’ve seen in my life. Thousands and thousands of dollars just disappeared off the table and I didn’t know how to get it back for my home seller.
Never Split the Difference is a book by Chris Voss, one which I initially read to get better at real estate and later reread to get better within health and fitness. Training someone requires deal-making, negotiation and respecting the needs of others. Voss did a great job walking me through the fundamentals of negotiation and the foundation of learning to deal with objections. Realizing that I could learn to be a great negotiator has allowed me to continue to sharpen my skills with those that I work with today.
Technical knowledge matters
I purchased my first home in 2019, which means that my first year in real estate was one where I had no first-hand experience of real estate. I didn’t own property and it was apparent when I walked through my first property inspection. My mentor, Jason, had to walk me through various types of heating systems, how many square feet are in an acre and what the difference was between modular and manufactured housing. My lack of technical knowledge was apparent and it greatly affected my ability to help my clientele.
In health and fitness, I’ve seen many have success by having good people skills and a positive attitude. Coaching can be as simple as being there for someone, I can’t argue that. When it comes down to it, the best coaches that produce the best results for their people are the coaches who understand methods and mechanisms that produce results. Soft skills are great and needed! They’re severely lacking in any workplace, including health and fitness. With that said, there is no replacement for hard skills. If I don’t continue to learn the specifics of training methodologies, I won’t have a prayer in keeping up with the profession. .
Tracking progress is non-negotiable
I remember making calls to “FSBO” prospects in my first month of real estate (FSBO means “For Sale by Owner”). I was calling to try and convince them to list their homes with me but before I could even ask, I was usually met with a voicemail, an “I’m not interested” or a “who are you again?”. Striking out would be putting it lightly, I was struggling.
Then I got my first breakthrough. I called to let someone know that the pictures they had posted for their listing were upside down. The homeowner was impressed. I had come from a place of servitude and sought to help rather than sell. I was in!
After this minor success, I realized a trend. If I made enough phone calls, I could accurately predict how many appointments I could get and even guess how many people I could potentially get to work with me. There was order and direction to it. From there, I could fine tune my skills to improve these rates and by tracking every call and message, I could accurately see what was working.
In health and fitness, “what gets measured gets managed” rings true. For trainers working in the private sector, the client management systems from real estate can be a real difference maker. Outside of client acquisition and retention, tracking relevant data helps measure success and failure of a training program objectively. This way, we can narrow down exercise selection, improve our intensity and volume assignments and make adjustments on the fly that help an athlete train intelligently and consistently.
Some numbers that I track would include body fat percentage, body weight, resting heart rate, 60 second heart rate recovery, 2 minute heart rate recovery and training volume on compound lifts (weight x repetitions). These numbers help me determine how an athlete is responding to their training program along with making sure that I’m introducing a stimulus that is reasonable.
Real estate taught me a lot about what it takes to be a professional in any industry. I made a lot of mistakes early on and learned from them. It’s why I highly recommend anyone working in particular industries to read and learn outside of their industry. There are a ton of smart people out there to learn from and quite a few techniques that stand true across all workplaces.
Happy training!