SPECIAL EDITION

Chapter 1

UNstoppable: What Is The Power of ONE?

I make dreams come true… for a living. Seriously, that’s my job. I spend my days coming up with different ways to help families get out of a home that no longer suits their needs and into their dream home that fits them like the proverbial glove. Not only that, but I spend practically every waking minute of my life thinking up ways to help Realtors, entrepreneurs, self-starters, and business owners create a customized, picture-perfect, finely tuned dream job for themselves. I live my life—and I help other professionals live their lives—by Seth Godin’s maxim, “Instead of wondering where your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.” For me and the tens of thousands of people who work alongside me in my brokerage company, real estate is hands-down the best, most consistent, most reliable, and most fun way to “set up” that kind of life. It’s a dream job for us that positions us to make other people’s dreams come true. And I don’t use the term dream lightly. After all, homeownership has long been considered the very definition of “the American Dream”!

If all that is true (and it is), then why is it that so many real estate professionals seem to hate their jobs? It doesn’t take long for a brand-new, rookie real estate agent to spot all the common pain points in the industry. We feel trapped in someone else’s rule book and bound by their policies. We’re forced to use our brokerage’s scripts and follow their alleged “best practices” for how to sell a house. We have to sit in a cubicle in a boring business office when we’re not out in the field. We’re representing a brand we generally don’t care about, and we believe all real estate brokerages are interchangeable—the only thing that changes is the logo on our business cards. Worst of all, we work our butts off only to have our brokerage “mess with our check,” taking a big percentage of our commission checks for themselves.

It can often feel like most real estate brokerages have figured out how to squeeze all the joy and excitement out of what should be the best job in the world! I founded Realty ONE Group in 2005 to offer real estate professionals an alternative to the old, stale brokerage companies I’d grown tired of. Today, we’re a global brand with more than twenty thousand team members in over four hundred locations across the US and on five continents. We are a huge team of professionals living our dream of helping others make their dreams come true… ONE family, ONE home at a time.

ONE is not just a number; it’s our vision. It is who we are and how we conduct ourselves—ONE group united by ONE common goal: to change lives for the better. Whatever we do, we do it together. Whatever success we have, we achieve it together. Whatever challenges we have, we face them together. Because together, we do more, have more success, and overcome more challenges than any ONE of us ever could alone. That is the Power of ONE.

I wrote this book to share with you our ONE philosophy—the cornerstone of our business model—whether you are a real estate professional looking for something different; a potential franchisee anywhere on earth who dreams of becoming their own CEO; a homeowner or soon-to-be homeowner who wants to find a better way to buy or sell a home; an entrepreneur looking to take your existing business to the next level; or an individual in any field who wants to see how putting people first creates awesome outcomes for everyONE involved. The chapters ahead will reveal how I seized on my own dreams as an entrepreneur and made them into ONE reality—and how, if you want to, you can achieve the same for your business.