Ep 166: How We're Strategically Moving Into 2024 and Why It's Important for You to Focus On Too
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Hi, I'm Joanne Bull and I am obsessed with all things podcasting and creating an unapologetically big revenue business with it. From podcast guesting to podcast hosting and everything in between, we're going to dive into it all and show you step by step how to build a big business.

by Awesome Step, how using a podcast can and will grow your business. So grab a glass of wine and pop your headphones on because girlfriend happy hour has begun here on The B Word.

Hey guys, and welcome back to the B word. Grab your cup of chamomile tea because I'm going to take you back 20 something years ago and tell you how everything got started, where we are today, and how I'm using that to strategically move into 2024. You ready? All right, hang on. So

Back when I was 24 years old and I started out in real estate, many of you guys have probably heard the story of I walked into the office and my broker at the time, Mike Coffey, still remember his name. He told me that the only way to be successful as an agent was to take this big list of expired listings and start calling them.

Now, if you don't know what an expired listing is, that means that the contract the agent had with a seller to put their home on the market for sale, the contract expired because the house didn't sell. And I remember looking at him and going, yeah, no, that's not going to happen. I hate when people cold call me.

I hated it then. I still hate it now. And so I said, I am not going to just start calling these people and being like the 900th real estate agent, you know, calling them up, leaving them voice messages, trying to get ahold of them because their poor house didn't sell. And I should be the agent, you know, for them. Now keep in mind, I was 24 years old at the time.

So Mike also told me I was going to have a very hard time connecting with sellers because I'd only bought one home myself. I mean, I was young. And then he said, well, Joanne, if you're not going to cold call, um,

expired listings. The only other way to get listings is by going door to door and knocking and talking to the homeowners about putting their home on the market. And again, I rolled my eyes and I was like, yeah, nope, not gonna do that. I am absolutely not gonna be the person who knocks on the door, takes two steps back, hopes that you answer, knowing I interrupted you doing whatever you were doing, and then tries to, again, cold pitch you on using me. In my head, I was mentally thinking about

The guy last week that came to my house asking me to do a roof replacement two weeks before that asking to, you know, do the lawn. Like I slammed the door in those people's faces. No offense to you if that's what you do to get business, but I personally don't like it. And so for me having to go into an industry and generate leads in a way that I repelled

It just didn't feel good to me. It didn't feel aligned or authentic, even though those words back then weren't really being thrown around. I just couldn't get behind it. And here's the thing. I knew I wanted to do things a little bit differently.

I knew I didn't want to be that older real estate agent who was stuck in the mud, only doing things one way. And again, bear in mind, this was 20 something years ago. So social media just wasn't the big way to get leads like it is today. But I also knew one thing. I really enjoyed buyers.

I enjoyed buyers for a few reasons. One, they were more fun. It was way more fun to work with a buyer, even though I had to give up my weekends and I had to give up my weeknights to be, you know, shuffling around all the houses with them, but getting to go in all the homes, getting to see the excitement on the buyer's face when they finally found the one and then working through a contract for them. And, oh my gosh, you guys, closing the tables and

We're so much more fun with the buyers because you got to hand them the keys to their new home. And so during that first year of real estate, I started working on buyers.

I learned all about buyers. I learned everything there was to know about buyers. I knew all the financing options. I knew that I had to get buyers in different ways because obviously the only thing a real estate agent really knows about someone who's putting their home on the market is when they put the home on the market. And the only way that they knew then to get a new lead was to call someone who was unsuccessful at selling their home.

So I had to figure out how to go find leads. And I started working my sphere of influence. I started looking at the neighborhoods that I wanted to sell in. And I would find friends in those neighborhoods and take those people out for a cup of coffee or a martini. And I did it in a really non-salesy way. I was the queen at coming up with a way for you to meet with me where you did not think you were going to be pitched because I wasn't going to pitch you.

One of my best ways was just to call someone up that I knew and say, Hey, listen, I was out showing homes the other day. Now see, I've told you I'm a real estate agent and I saw this new little cocktail bar. I would love to take you. Let's go get a new martini. Let's get a glass of wine. Let's try it out.

Now who's going to turn that down? My friends loved it because I would meet with them. It would be about them. I worked that relationship and I wasn't pitching real estate. I was just casually reminding them by saying, I saw this new place when I was out showing homes. I just infused into their brain that I was in fact a real estate agent.

And here's what happened. I'm going to land the plane here, folks. Here's what happened as a result. I sold over $10 million in real estate my very first year, just focusing on sphere of influence and the buyers very, very specifically.

To my broker's astonishment, I mean, he loved me for it. I was rookie of the year, but I didn't do what the older generations were telling me to do. I did what felt right and good to me. And I focused on one thing. Now, Gary and Jay Papasan have written a book called The One Thing. And of course, as a Keller Williams agent at the time, I read it and it really resounded for me on here.

Gary and Jay say that in order to be the best, you have to focus on only one thing. That's it. Everything else flows from that one thing. And guys, I found that in real estate to be super, super true. Here's what happened.

When everyone else in the real estate landscape was saying, listings are king. You have to have listings. Without listings, you won't make money. Listings bring the buyers. Listings are your real estate currency. I focused on the buyers and I didn't worry about the listings. In fact, I didn't even have a listing presentation to give a seller until probably three years into the business is when I started kind of like putting my thoughts together on that.

By focusing on buyers and buyers only, I niched down and I got really, really good at it. And the buyers started coming my way, even when they had worked with agents on the listing side that wasn't me. As a result, and here's where a lot of people get lost because they think that niching down and doing one thing really, really well will prevent them from making money in all the areas. And they want the cash from everything.

I actually then in about year three, started leveling the business up to where 50% of my business was buyers and 50% was listings. And here's why. Without even mentioning to someone that I could also list their home, without going and attempting to go after listings, I became one of the best listing agents in our area. And I truly believe that there was one secret sauce behind that.

It was because while all the other real estate agents were focusing on how to market a home, I focused on how to sell a home from the buyer's perspective.

Why? Because I'd gotten so damn good at the buyer. I knew what they were thinking. I could legitimately take one buyer out three to four times and nail it on which house they, you know, that they were going to purchase because I understood them so well. I knew how to get into their thought process. I knew what questions to ask. I really drilled down into them and I took that into the listing side and became a fantastic listing agent as a result.

So by focusing on buyers, I actually built my business up because the listings came naturally. All right. How does that lead us to where we are right now today, getting ready for 2024?

It's something I've been seeing a lot in the online world. Amy Porterfield was talking about it, you know, focusing on just one offer. My mentor, Natalie Ellis, and I got off the phone last week and we were talking about focusing on one offer and it dawned on me.

That same concept that made me so good as a real estate agent is still applicable today. In fact, Jay's book, The One Thing, isn't just applicable to real estate agents. It's applicable to any entrepreneur who's running a business. We are going to focus in 2024 on one offer. And that offer is Press Record, the digital online course for starting a podcast.

Is it my biggest money offer? No, it's not.

It's actually the lowest ticket thing that I've got in my offer suite, but I'm going to focus on it and really push it and push being a relative word, but it's going to consume almost everything that we do because it is the catalyst and the starting point for you. My podcasters, the women that I am here to serve, the women podcast hosts that want to create mighty, mighty empires from a podcast.

You have to have one in order to get there. So instead of re-teaching you things from other digital courses or from the DIY efforts you've made yourself and getting your mindset straight, I'm going to teach you from the ground up how to do it, how to do it right. And then as you move with me through the process into joining the studio for all the templates and the resources, and finally finding your place as a network member,

I will have built up with you, your mighty, mighty podcast empire, but it all starts with that one offer. And it's the digital course of press record. So next year in 2024, that's where we're going to focus.

And it feels so good. Like it feels so good to have a rhythm of when the course will be presented on a webinar versus when it will be evergreen, when it will shift into talking about the studio, when we'll do X, Y, Z, because now I feel like I can breathe again.

As an entrepreneur, I feel like, okay, that rhythm works for me. It works for my team. I can really watch what I'm doing. Now I've got a better way to do content for the B word podcast. Does it all have to be about starting a podcast? No, it's building the business in general. So the content that we're going to produce here on the B word, is it going to change?

but I feel better about it. I feel more aligned. It's coming easier. It's flowing out. In fact, I sat down

yesterday, and I just jotted down 10 new episode thought processes, like 10 new content ideas for episodes that we could produce over the next few weeks. Whereas I used to struggle. I'm just like anybody else. I used to struggle a little bit with what the content was going to look like, sound like, and how are we going to reach that audience? And now I'm like, no, I'm focusing on the one thing, the one avatar, the one path.

And as a result, everything else is flowing easier. And I know I've told you guys to do something similar to that in the past. It's putting it into practice. That's the hard part. So as we strategically look to 2024, here's the biggest change we're going to make on the podcast. We're going to do video.

With Google podcast sunsetting and YouTube, you know, picking up your RSS feed, YouTube becoming really the bigger place for that area of podcasting. I thought, okay, I love to experiment. Y'all know that. So we are going to be incorporating video into the B word podcast. Whereas we used to be a very audio first. I was super nervous to always be on video. I mean, I'm 45 years old.

Video is not always my friend. I'm not in my early twenties. I didn't grow up with a phone in my hand, but those are my own limiting beliefs. So we're doing video. We're going to be on YouTube. You can find me at Joanne Bull on the YouTube channel. Everything else will stay the same for the podcast because we want to be very consistent for you, but we're narrowing down to be really focusing on the one thing, the one offer that

From it, everything else flows. From it, all the value we can add, the way we service you as the female ambitious podcaster, nothing else really changes. So stick around. I'll give you an update every couple months of how it's going, but I'm feeling so good about where we're heading in 2024 to get that freedom-based business that I was actually craving as a real estate agent and didn't find until I found podcasting. All right, guys, until

Until next time, keep it real and I'll see you same time, same place. We just finished another episode of the B word podcast and it was so good. I mean, how many nuggets of info did you grab from that one episode? I know I got at least three.

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