Transform Your Real Estate Game: Essential Consulting Tips for Client Success

John Harcar (00:00.971)
All right. Hey guys, welcome back to our show. I’m your host, John Harcar, and I’m here today with Robert Smith. And what we’re going to talk about besides his journey in real estate and business is how to really differentiate and set yourself apart from your competition, whether you’re realtor, whether you’re a broker, whether you’re a title agent, whatever it might be, how to really set yourself apart. Remember guys here at Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, service providers, really all real estate entrepreneurs.

two to five X their business by providing tools and resources to grow the business they want to grow, which gives them that life that they’ve always wanted to live. So Robert, welcome to our show.

Robert Smith(00:41.368)
Thanks for having me, I appreciate it John, thank you.

John Harcar (00:43.807)
Yeah, man, I’m excited to talk about your journey. I mean, I read your bio looks like you’re very accomplished. And, you know, I really think that differentiating yourself from your competition is a huge thing. But before we dive into the weeds and get into that, why you tell our audience a little bit about you, you know, your background and real estate, what got you here?

Robert Smith (01:02.408)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it’s funny. I kind of backed into real estate did a little bit different than everybody else, or probably everybody who was in your audience. I’ve been a financial advisor for decades and was fortunate to be number one worldwide with mutual of New York, the equitable, Exa Financial, set a bunch of records at John Hancock, New York Life. So the bottom line was I knew how to sell and I knew how to differentiate myself from the competition to get those clients to sell.

John Harcar (01:23.53)
Wow.

Robert Smith (01:29.87)
And I had a couple of elderly clients, an 80 year old couple with some water side property here in Florida 20 years ago. And they had a little bit of an issue is, you know, they were 80, so they needed to slow down a little bit in life. So they had a two and a half million dollar waterfront home in Sarasota and they had a $3 million property in Nantucket that they just built. they stopped working and they didn’t have a lot of passive income. So they weren’t going to be able to manage the finances for both properties. So I suggested they sell one of them.

John Harcar (01:46.859)
Mmm.

Robert Smith(02:00.494)
And they said, well, should we do a year listing with an agent? I said, absolutely not. Do six months and see if they can sell it. And if not, we’re going to move on to somebody else. So I did with someone and came through a referral. They thought a lot of them and in six months, not even one showing. So I said, ditch that person, go to somebody else. They gave that person six months and they had a couple of showings, but not even one single offer in six months. So now we’ve gone a year where they’ve not even close to selling their home.

John Harcar (02:09.269)
Mm-hmm.

Robert Smith (02:30.444)
And I told him, this is actually ridiculous. I don’t know what’s going on with the real estate people, but I can sell your home inside of a month. So I’m going to go spend a weekend, get licensed, and I’ll start showing your house. We’ll have it done in 30 days. And long in the short of it, took me a weekend to study for it, went, took the test and obviously passed that, put their house on the market and we sold it and closed it within two weeks. So it was a game changer. So.

The cool thing about that was that I believe anybody can sell real estate, anybody can invest in real estate and whether you’re a title agent, mortgage broker, whatever it is, we’ve all got the same issues. Number one, we have to learn to sell. But more importantly than that, to get the clients to sell and how do we do that? And that’s by establishing our authority. You know, how are we different from everybody else? And, you know, the one thing we do with every client that comes in to get them some quick wins is we do a press release form and get it out there.

we get it picked up on every major television network in the country. doesn’t matter if they’re left leaning, right leaning, we get them all covered. ABC, CBS, W, Fox, NBC, WGN, we get them all. And then you see people with their website, they’ve got all those logos on there. That’s one way we do it. And then if they’re polished and we want to get them on TV, whether they’re a real estate broker here in Orlando or a title agent in Tampa or an investor in Jacksonville or Miami,

You know, we do TV interviews for them. So we get them picked up on their local ABC, NBC, whatever it is. And it builds some authority. So they put those video clips on their site. Pardon me. Or, you know, they’ve got the logos on there. So it differentiates them. So like if I’m going to list a house and I say, do I want to go with Coldwell Banker? Do I want to go with Remax? Who do I want to go with? And I start looking around. The agents and brokers that are going to stand out are the ones with all the television logos. And they’re also going to be the ones that have videos of themselves.

John Harcar (04:24.523)
Yeah.

Robert Smith (04:25.25)
you as local expert in the market. So those are a couple of things we do. And we also consult with our clients and teach them how to get referrals. And the same people who we sold the house for, we do a little magazine or we did 20 years ago called Affluent Homeowner, where we get these and send them in their mailbox. They go through and it’s just, it’s not so much a puff piece, but it’s just to say, stop top of mind. And the interest was the very first issue we sent the first day we sent it out.

I get a call two days later and it’s this lady, 80 years old, and she says, hey, I’m at my mailbox with a friend of mine. We’re having lunch. And can you please come and see her? She’s got a million dollars to invest. Can you help her out? Cause she doesn’t know what to do. Can you please make time for her? And I’m thinking, well, I don’t know. I guess I can make time. So we set the appointment on the phone two days later. I’ve got a consulting check for three grand. I do her plan and she invested a million dollars with me inside of a week. And it’s just a matter of.

being top of mind and the funny thing was, you know, she called me 80 years old and it’s probably 95 degrees outside. She had to walk quite a ways from her front door to the, you her mailbox at the end of her drive. And she couldn’t even wait to get back inside in the AC. And she said, I’ve never had an agent or an advisor before with their picture on the front cover of magazines. So to you and I, it’s no big deal, but to some clients, you know, you’re an authority and she says, can you please turn out.

John Harcar (05:46.891)
Hmm

Great.

Yeah, of course.

Robert Smith(05:53.704)
And her friend right away said, yeah, whatever you want to do, you know, here’s a million dollars. And it’s kind of ridiculous, but that’s the way it works. And that’s just two ways you got TV. You’ve got magazines, obviously books. got a couple of number one bestsellers back there. So that’s one of the things we do. We’ve got people in all kinds of businesses that want to differentiate from their competition. We have them write a book and we turn that book into a number one bestseller. We bring them on TV. They talk about the book.

and they’ve got their local market cornered. And we get some people who say, hey man, I don’t know how to write. I can’t spend a year writing this damn book. What can you do for me faster? And we do anthologies where we’ll say, hey, can you write a chapter? And instead of taking a year, they get it done in two months. And then we take it to number one bestseller by the third month. And inside of 90 days, they’ve got the authority that they need. They’ve got a bestselling book and they’re probably the only person in their market who does. So when people are…

John Harcar (06:50.645)
Hmm, yeah.

Robert Smith (06:51.81)
you know deciding between this investor, that investor, this realtor, that realtor, this title agent, that title agent, they’re likely to go with the person who has more authority.

John Harcar (07:01.643)
For sure, for sure. Let’s go backwards. I wanna know what you did in two weeks to get that property sold versus what everybody else wasn’t doing before.

Robert Smith (07:11.478)
Yeah, we just marketed the hell out of it. We ran a bunch of ads and you know, I used not only authority, but scarcity. I said, hey, this house is going to be gone inside of 30 days. You better get out here and put a bid on it. And we just welcomed everyone to come out and put their bid in. you know, we had 40, 50 people come through in the first couple of weeks and we just let them know that, we were holding bids and

you know, we’re taking the highest bid. You know, first qualified buyer with the highest bid is gonna get this house and that’s what we did.

John Harcar (07:46.443)
Okay, well, you just started. How did you have authority?

Robert Smith(07:50.99)
Well, that’s the other thing. The authority that I had came over from the financial sector. So I just ran ads, number one investment advisor with all these companies. You know, we’re going to sell a multimillion dollar house for a client. They didn’t care if I had any experience with any other real estate company or whatever. They just said this guy, an advisor, he knows what he’s talking about. And it’s just a matter of getting out there, being the authority. And we’ve done a lot of television since then, a lot of different things and everything.

John Harcar (08:06.816)
Right

Robert Smith (08:19.33)
seems to work and anybody can do it, not just me. You can do it, anybody can do it.

John Harcar (08:24.255)
Right. When you started doing this, like when you, you know, when you started being, you know, a consultant for, you know, agents, brokers, what kind of challenges were you coming up against, you know, you know, versus you had your financial experience, right?

Robert Smith (08:37.388)
Right. Yeah, yeah. And the reason I went into consulting, I’ll backtrack just a little bit, is I was number one agent in the world with several different companies at the same time. We’d set a bunch of records with different Fortune 500 companies. I was stranded in a car accident and I broke my spine, broke my neck, broke my back. I couldn’t walk for quite a bit of time. So I had 25 different neurosurgeons say, you’re going to spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair. And I thought, well, if that’s going to be the case,

John Harcar (08:50.571)
Congratulations.

Robert Smith(09:05.582)
I can’t fly around the country, I can’t give speeches, I could, but it’s not gonna be easy to do. So what can I do that makes sense? And I thought, well, I can write. So I got a screenwriting degree, two degrees simultaneously, a master’s degree here at Full Sail and one at UCLA, got a writing degree there and did them at the same time, finished both of the class. And that’s helped me to write ads and do copywriting for people and help them sell their products.

so it’s really necessity more than anything else it shifted me from the retail market to you know b2b and consulting

John Harcar (09:40.619)
So what does your business look like now? What is your main focus and target? I know you talked a little bit about it, but give us a rundown on what that looks like and where you’re going.

Robert Smith (09:51.758)
Yeah, absolutely. Anybody can go to smithprofits.com and go to the contact page, book a 20 minute consult, doesn’t cost anything. And we look at what the client needs. So maybe they need a magazine to be top of mind. Maybe they need to go on television. For most people, it’s, get me those logos on my website. That’s the quickest way to build authority. And oddly enough, to be different, this is something we did in financial services. And this little comic book on the first sale was worth a $10,000 commission. It was the biggest commission I ever earned.

And I’ve had people say, you can’t do comic books. It’s not professional. It’s not about being professional. It’s about being different and about getting results. Exactly. Yeah. So you come in, you know, we can do a real estate investor magazine. We can do a real estate sales agent, you know, based on Wonder Woman, based on Batman, based on whatever. And it’ll sell like crazy. And the reason I know it is these clients with the home before we did the home.

John Harcar (10:29.259)
It’s about being remembered. Yep.

Robert Smith (10:49.71)
They had a giant tax problem. when either spouse died, obviously everything transfers unlimited. But then when the second spouse dies, the kids are going to have a massive tax bill to pay. And the only way to pay that was through life insurance. And I was in competition with a half dozen different big name companies and they all came in with six or seven people in suits. They had a lawyer, tax accountant, advisor, an insurance guy, you name it all the way through. And everybody had 150 to 200 page report.

John Harcar (10:51.755)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (11:12.875)
Mmm.

Robert Smith(11:19.83)
Super analytical and the people just didn’t get it just didn’t understand so I actually sat down with a legal pad This back before I broke my neck I could actually draw so I drew cartoons and I called it insurance man and I went through the whole thing about how I saved the day and pay their taxes and They’re 80 years old keep in mind and these are comics I’m drawing and I got 20 minutes through and the old man said I can’t believe it I said what’s matter? I thought I offended him or made him mad or something. He goes

John Harcar (11:48.341)
Yeah.

Robert Smith (11:49.646)
He goes, let’s do this plan and sign me up on the spot. And they gave me a massive check and everything right on the spot. And it was just because the comic book was a way to take something extremely complex and boil it down into something so simple anybody could understand it. And it didn’t matter if somebody was eight or 80, they were gonna get it. And this couple got it for the first time and that shut down all the competition. And I immediately started writing applications. And to this day,

John Harcar (12:05.76)
Mm-hmm.

Robert Smith (12:17.782)
It’s the biggest one day check I’ve ever seen of a six figures. I’ve never seen anything like that since. And I’m sure some of your investor clients do that all the time. It’s no big deal. But for your average insurance agent, they don’t make that much in a year.

John Harcar (12:31.689)
Yeah. Yeah, no, I get it. I get it. so when you’re helping these folks and, I know we talked about, you know, as far as different differentiating yourself, we talked about, you know, authority. Okay. What else, what other things can someone do? you know, even at the most basic level, just to, differentiate themselves from the next joke.

Robert Smith (12:44.877)
Right.

Robert Smith (12:54.094)
Yeah, and it’s all kinds of things. You any book you read on influence and strategy, it’s scarcity. You see scarcity all the time online and in every little sales funnel or whatever it is, and it’s always phony. Limited time only, sale ends at midnight. It’s all nonsense. So when I go out and say, we’re going to sell this house in 30 days, bring your offers, that’s dead serious. That’s a fact. And it wasn’t going to go 31 days, 32 days. It was going in 30 days. So

John Harcar (13:21.579)
Mm-hmm.

Robert Smith (13:21.87)
If you’re going to use scarcity, it’s got to be legitimate. And when you have legitimate scarcity, that beats anything else out there. you’ve got to have that. You’ve got to have social proof. Like, for example, when I showed the magazine and those clients referred me to another client, they said, hey, this guy saved us. We’re on the verge of bankruptcy. Now we’re managing, living in multimillion dollar homes and our retirement set. That’s social proof. So now you’ve got

John Harcar (13:49.546)
Yeah.

Robert Smith (13:50.19)
for you. So there are a lot of variables that go into it and that’s what we talk about, you know, in the 20 minutes in the consult that we give to everybody.

John Harcar (13:58.987)
Okay, so you do this consult and what’s a little bit more robust information? What do you ask in this consult? What are you trying to find out?

Robert Smith (14:08.322)
Yeah, we just drill down into their business. What are you doing now? What are you trying to do? What do you want to do? What’s been successful? What’s failed? And we get answers from all over the board. But for the most part, it’s people saying, I’ve never been able to break through. I’ve never made my first 100 grand, or I’ve never made my first half a mil, or I’ve never made my first mil. And we say, how do we get there? And when they hire us, and you can hire us anywhere from

know, a grand a month to 20 grand a month, depending how much time you want us to spend on your project. everybody that we’ve worked with in the last, you know, it’s been since 2010 was when I started doing the consulting. Every company we’ve worked with in the last 15 years, or I’m sorry, yeah, 15 years, they’ve exceeded their goals. They said, you know, I needed to make a hundred grand. Next thing you know, they’re making 200 or 250 and…

It’s just a minute. It’s nothing that I’m a genius on. It’s just people that you read, you know, Adam Smith or what’s been going on for two million years with, you know, or 200 years with, you know, economics and in the, you know, the field of influence and sales psychology and things like that. So I’ve probably read 200 to 220 books on sales, on influence, on authority, any of those subjects. And, you know, if you want to do the same thing, by all means, do it. I spent 40 years reading all that stuff.

John Harcar (15:30.347)
You want to go this long then do if you want to go this long then hire someone like you

Robert Smith(15:31.746)
So.

Yeah, exactly. So yeah, you know, take your pick, but they all it all works. And, know, if we find something that doesn’t work the way we want, we just fine tune it and tweak it and get it to work. And, you know, everything works if you know what works. So if track record of everybody else, it’s, you know, stand on the shoulders of giants. And that’s in one of the books that I wrote. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. It’s just see how someone in your industry did exactly what you want to do. And

John Harcar (15:50.613)
sure.

Robert Smith (16:03.554)
you know, put your own personal touch to it and just get it done.

John Harcar (16:08.169)
What mistakes do you think people are making when they’re going out there and trying to establish their own authority and their own presence and all that?

Robert Smith (16:16.546)
Yeah, the biggest mistake I see is they’re just taking too much time. They say, well, everybody tells me I should write a book because I’m so great. they’ve been writing that book for the last five years. It doesn’t do any good. We do a press release in a day, release it in anywhere two, three days. We get it covered all over the country and we get those logos back to them. So inside of a week, it’s not you telling your friends you’re an expert. It’s all the major networks saying, yeah, this guy knows what he’s talking about. And you can send clients like.

Well, the cool thing that’s always worked for me is we splash the whole country. So we go coast to coast, border to border. If I’ve got a consulting client in St. Louis, I’ll say, where did we land in St. Louis? So maybe it’s ABC or NBC. If they’re in San Diego, maybe it’s Fox. You know, if they’re Boston, maybe it was on CW, obviously in Chicago, it’s WGN. So we hit something that they’re familiar with and said, well, this is what we did backyard last week.

John Harcar (17:08.297)
Hmm

Right.

Robert Smith(17:13.568)
okay, and then they read the release and everything’s in there and it’s all your accomplishments or what you’re doing for your clients. it’s everything in the release is what makes you different from everybody else. But most importantly, what does your potential client get out of working with you? And if they say, hey, I’ve been sitting on this house for six months, I need to get out from this white elephant and they know you can sell it in a month to two months, they’re gonna call you.

John Harcar (17:39.179)
Okay. Is it for real estate only?

Robert Smith(17:44.118)
No, it’s any industry. I’ve done it with financial advisors is where most of my clients work, because you do what you know. So that’s where most of my referrals came from. But I did mortgage brokers. had, it’s funny in Tampa, a group of mortgage brokers. I think they had 15 originators in there. None of them had ever made six figures over the course of a year. Within six months, I had every single person in that office over 100 grand in six months. we’ve done it with.

John Harcar (17:50.783)
Mm-hmm. Okay.

John Harcar (18:08.907)
Incredible.

Robert Smith (18:11.53)
Realtors, we’ve done it with tax people, CPAs, doctors, lawyers, just about everybody. I can’t even think of all the… IT people, just about any person out there we’ve worked with.

John Harcar (18:28.927)
Got it. What do you think the keys to your success in sales or in building that differentiation or authority, type of things, what are your keys to success?

Robert Smith(18:37.9)
Yeah, the keys are just doing what works and repeat the process. So if I go out and make a million dollar sale, it’s like, how did I do that? Let me see if I can repeat that. And then with the next client, everything’s the same. And a lot of it is preconditioning your clients to want to do business with you. So like with this silly comic book, when we were doing insurance, if we’d book an appointment with somebody, we’d say, here, we’re going to send you digital comic. Take a look at it. Let us know what you think.

And by the way, these are all the things you need to bring for your interview, for your discovery meeting. We need your taxes. We need your mutual fund statements, stocks, whatever. And everybody comes in loaded for bear. And the cool thing is they always come in and say, hey, can I get some more of those comic books? I say, yeah, so we use physical comic books and they would pass them out to people. They’d be at the country club hitting golf balls and they’d say, hey, they’d go to their car and tell their buddies. And you get multimillion dollar clients that way off a comic book.

John Harcar (19:32.821)
How cool. Yeah. That’s awesome. So do you have, I mean, you have to have your website. How do people get ahold of you? know, give them the way that they can reach out if they want to talk about how to, you know, to use your services or maybe just have some ideas that they want to go over.

Robert Smith (19:33.87)
Stupid works.

Robert Smith(19:49.228)
Yeah, smithprofits.com, you can just go through and there’s a lot on there. You can spend probably a day on the website. I don’t recommend anybody do that. But smithprofits.com, you can book a no-cost consultation or just call me direct 407-508-0200.

John Harcar (20:06.355)
Awesome. And then what’s one last little tip of advice you would give someone who is looking to go out there and build authority or gain reputation?

Robert Smith (20:13.186)
Yeah, if you’re not out there just doing your best and just trying to own your competition, what are you doing in business? know, like I’m a Detroit Lions fan. It’s okay that we won the division. I want to win the NFC and then I want to win the Super Bowl. And I think everybody’s got to be the same way. It’s one thing to dominate your office, dominate your city, dominate your state. But, you know, when you’re number one in the country, it’s a different feel. When you’re number one worldwide with anything you’re doing.

It’s just a whole different feeling and you just once you get there you want to stay there. So just compete. And I guess what I would tell everybody is do whatever you want but just compete.

John Harcar (20:44.127)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (20:49.963)
Be in the game, don’t sit on the sidelines. I love it.

Robert Smith (20:51.608)
Yeah, yeah, don’t worry and don’t think it just just get out there and grind and just work at it.

John Harcar (20:58.365)
I love it. Man. Thank you so much for coming on here. Robert, thank you for sharing all that information. Guys, you know, we’ll put all his contact information in the show notes, but I hope you got some good information out of here. You know, I hope you took notes. Robert, thank you again. I greatly appreciate it and we’ll see you guys on the next one. Cheers.