Every Agent Has A Story: Josh Phegan

Our next story comes from Josh Phegan, real estate coach, trainer and speaker, who shares the two key lessons he learned after an untimely accident during preparation for a video shoot.

• Plan your time. Always be looking at your calendar. Look months to years ahead, not just days.
• Despite mistakes or mishaps in your day, they will eventually work themselves out and are invaluable experiences to learn from.

Transcript

Hi there. It’s real estate coach Josh Phegan. Today I’m going to talk about something that happened to me when I was first starting out in my real estate training business.

One day I was working and I had a key client ring me. This client was booking about half of my event days that I was selling at that point in the start of my business. He rang me to let me know that after three great years with us, they’d made the decision to use someone else and that they really wish me all the success in my training business. It was the first week of December.

Then I started freaking out that I wasn’t going to have any work for the next year and maybe people wouldn’t even need real estate trainers and I wouldn’t be any value to anyone and maybe I was in real trouble.

I went to work one day and I thought, well, what I’m going to do is I’m going to get my video team in. I’m going to record a little video and maybe send it out to some of my clients and see what can happen. Anyway, the video team turned up nice and early and I had to go back into my office to go and grab a few things.

When I went to come out of the office, rather than going through the door I actually managed to run through a 3.5m x 3.5m plate glass window.

I ended up in St. Vincent’s Hospital in the emergency department. It was really full on. I don’t know if you’ve even been through a 1970s plate glass window, but lots of big glass pieces kind of broke down, tore apart all the suit and all that sort of stuff and the video guy didn’t even get it on video. Can you believe it?

The nurse asked me what was going wrong in life. You know why had I done this thing because they couldn’t kind of work out what had happened. You know was it alcohol or was it pressures at home or financial stuff or any of those things? I said, “Look. It wasn’t any of those.”

Then she said, “Is it work place stress?” I’m like, “No. I don’t get stressed. There’s no way it could be that.” She’s like, “Yeah, it is.”

Then I told her what had happened and she gave me the best piece of advice that I’ve now used in my business and that’s to plan. She said you need to plan ahead. She said in your business why are you in December looking for work in January, February and March when you know that your customers actually plan maybe based on the financial year and you should be talking to them in maybe April and May about what the work might be for the financial year ahead in July onwards.

I thought that was such a great lesson. Now in my business, what I do is I plan as much as I can to really work ahead. I look at my calendar about 18 months ahead. Holidays are already booked in. I know when the low seasons are in my market when people aren’t going to be using me. I know when the high seasons are when there’s a high level of demand to make sure that I’m at my best in those times.

A couple of actual tips here for you. Number one: make sure that you always go and have a look at your diary. How you run your diary is how you run your life. Make sure that you work with your existing customers and really see where the value is in your business. That could be past clients, past market appraisals. If you’re in property management it could be landlords as well who might have additional properties that need to be leased.

The other great lesson here, too, is that no matter what happens and how bad it is for you, things always work out. We’re now seven years on from that incident and we’ve got a great growing business and many happy customers that we get to do work with. That’s all you need to do to be a great agent. I hope you’ve enjoyed my story.