HOW TO MAKE $10,000 PER HOUR!

As the title suggests, I’m going to teach you with this episode how to earn $10,000 per hour. I’m not being deliberately hyperbolic and Its not some kind of scam. It’s a way of thinking that has never been taught to most people and doesn’t make sense unless or until you hear me out, and then actually put it into practice. Before we do that, however, we need to go over the whole dollars per hour concept that I talk so much about in coaching calls and even on this show. Most of you get the idea that there are things in your business that are sucking your time and also lowering your dollars per hour. These are the low value and low cost tasks like email, data entry, and running errands. These are things that you could pay somebody $4 to around $15 per hour and they’ll gladly take care of them for you. When you offload those tasks to somebody else, you’re freeing yourself up to focus your time on more valuable tasks like getting more business, marketing yourself and your company, producing those parts of the appraisal that pay the most, etcetera. We talk about this concept and teach it because its 101 level stuff that many need to hear and implement before taking them to the next level. If I cant get somebody to stop doing the $10 and $15 per hour stuff, its going to be tough to take them to the next level, which is where they’re earning $50 to $100 per hour consistently. For context, lets put a little math to this idea. Let’s say last year you billed out $100,000. of course, you had some expenses with that, so lets be conservative and say that you had to spend $15,000, or 15%, of that to make that $100,000 happen. Now you’re left with $85,000. Of course, you have to give the tax man his due, so lets subtract, say, 20% of the $85,000, which is $17,000. That leaves you with $68,000 that’s yours to spend. If you work 60 hours per week for 50 weeks, that’s 3000 hours worked that year. If you take your net of $68,000 and divide it into your 3000 hours worked, that means you averaged about $23 per hour net. If you want to use gross, ($85,000), then you averaged $28 per hour. 

Now, just knowing those numbers is super important because before that, most appraisers tend to think they earn $50 or $100 per hour because they tend to just look at the fee they’re getting for an appraisal, divided by the number of hours they spend on that appraisal, say 8 on average, and that leaves them with $50 per hour on a $400 appraisal fee. In addition to giving you a false sense of your hourly rate, it also programs your subconscious mind to believe you’re worth $50 per hour. Of course, that’s better than $23 per hour, but its only half of $100 per hour and 200 times less than $10,000 per hour. What it also does is considerably lower the bar on entrepreneurial thinking because you tend to set your sights on trying to earn that much for each hour of the day. This belief in the $50 hour is limiting for a variety of ways, one of which is that every hour is not created equally. Some hours might only be worth $20 per hour (like when you’re running errands or doing data entry) while the next hour might be worth $163. So, not only does it skew how you look at your hours, it considerably skews what you don’t look for, and that’s the $1000, the $5000, or the $10,000 hour! Once you go through the level 101 exercise of tracking your hours each day for at least a week or two to find all of your hidden time wasters, its like you’ve just graduated from grade school. You’ve learned how much time you waste, which drags down your dollars per hour because every hour you spend doing $10 per hour tasks drags your $50 or $100 hour downward. You feel enlightened now that you’re armed with that valuable information so you start to offload the low dollar tasks to a virtual assistant or an office manager. Great, you’ve moved your checkers piece one square. Most people think they’re done at this point because they think to themselves, “Gosh, I was only doing $20 per hour stuff for so long and now, armed with this new information, I can start ramping up my dollars per hour and get them to $50 or $100 per hour! I’m a big shooter now!”

Sorry friends, not a big shooter yet. You’re an average shooter who has just been exposed to a very basic concept of the value of time and your worth. I cant stress enough that this is basic stuff friends! You are not done once you learn this basic concept, you have only just begun. Of course, if you stop there, you’ll still be better off than when you were earning $23 per hour, but remember, all hours are not created equal. What this means is that you have more to learn and more for your subconscious mind to grasp to go to the next level. Remember, if we’ve programmed our mind to believe that we’re now worth $50 per hour instead of $23, that’s great news, but it says nothing about the $75 hour, the $257 hour, the $1000 hour, or the $10,000. We tend to get what we focus on so if your new $50 belief is what you focus on, that’s all you’ll ever get and you will miss the moonwalking bear. What do I mean? I’m referring to a short video called an awareness test. It shows 8 men lined up next to each other. 4 of them have on white, four of them have on black. Each team has a basketball and the narrator asks, “how many passes does the white team make?” As soon as he says that all of the men start scrambling around like the Harlem Globetrotters tossing and passing their respective basketballs to the members of their team. You focus heavily on the white team trying to count how many passes they make when, at about the 15 second mark, a man dressed in a bear costume enters into the middle of all the players tossing their basketballs around. The bear stands in the middle of everybody for a second or two and then proceeds to moonwalk backwards out of the other side of the screen. I completely missed it the first time I watched it. Why? Because I was doing what I told my brain to do: count the number of passes the team dressed in white makes. I was so focused on it that I never saw the moonwalking bear. And that’s what happens when we start to focus on something, anything. That tends to be all we see. Focus on $50 per hour work and you’ll never see the $10,000 hour that moonwalks right past you. 

The other big problem with the $50 or $100 per hour mindset is that people tend to think in terms of hours, and they tend to think in terms of consistent hours. What that means is that, because we tend to back into a number ex post facto, or after the fact, we tend to falsely believe that all of those hours were equal. After-all, isnt that the exercise we just did? We found out how much you billed out last year, subtracted some expenses and taxes, and then solved for your dollars per hour by dividing your average number of hours into that number. That makes each hour an average in your mind of $50, $100, or some other factor. You then begin to tell yourself that, if you’re efficient with your time, you’re pumping out $50 or $100 work. But that’s not the way it works friends, and that’s the good news! I don’t mean to denigrate factory work or production line work, but dollars per hour thinking is factory work thinking. Its hourly worker thinking. Every hour worked is the same regardless of your output. If you’re lazy in the factory, they’re probably paying you too much per hour. If you’re super productive, they’re paying you too little, but you’re only getting paid $X per hour no matter your effort and your output. With that kind of thinking you’re only ever going to make money by putting in hours. You don’t put in hours, you don’t make any money. This is one of the most insidious traps in income generation and wealth building because our time is finite. We all only have 24 hours each day to put into the things that matter to us. For most of us, 6-10 of those 24 hours are meant for sleep. That leaves 14-18 hours for other things like eating, shopping, hobbies, family, and work. If all of your income is dependent on some kind of activity from you for some period of time, say 8-10 hours each day, you would naturally want to maximize each of those hours to earn as much as you possibly can. 

The challenge comes in a variety of forms, depending on who you are and what you believe. One of those challenges I’ve already mentioned: most people get stuck in thinking they are only worth a certain amount per hour and so they don’t really strive for much more. If they get a bonus deal thrown at them that they think will earn them 1.5 times or 2 times their normal hourly rate, they’re happier than a butchers dog thinking they’re almost stealing something. In fact, so happy that some of them will go on social media and announce to the world how they just got handed the gift of the year with this particular order. Without even realizing it they’ve actually announced to the world their limitations because we all now know that you’ll never earn more than that figure per hour. They will be stuck working on that particular deal, making them unable to work on something worth 5 or 10 times that amount. Now, I’m not saying that what you may earn on any given day, week, or month is anything to sneeze at. Nor am I saying that working in a factory is demeaning or ‘less than’ type of work. I’m simply pointing out how we can get fenced into limited thinking, especially when it’s a dollars per hour mentality that cant go beyond a certain dollar figure. One of the other challenges already mentioned is thinking in terms of every hour being the same. To take that a step further, one of the other errors in thinking this way is that the whole hour has to be devoted to that particular task so as to earn that particular dollars per hour. So the first thing we need to do is break that mentality and one of the ways we do that is to shift to minutes thinking instead of hours thinking. You see, if you come at this from only one direction you’ll only ever see one side of things. We have to come at this from a different direction to poke the subconscious mind a bit and open up a new view of things. What I mean by minutes thinking is that most people running their own businesses, on any given day or week, do something that earns them $1000 or more per hour, they just don’t recognize it because the thing they did is disguised as something else. And since they may have only done this particular thing for, say, 10 minutes and not a whole hour, they tend to not think of that thing as contributing all that much to their hourly rate. I’ll give you an example: lets say one of your good clients calls you up because they’re upset about something within your business. You could avoid them, pass them off to your assistant or office manager, or you could take the call yourself. You decide to take the call yourself and chat with your client and you solve this particular issue, future business saved. Your ten minute phone call saved $500 on that particular deal and insured you’ll get another order from them. You don’t think of that way because most people don’t think of putting out fires as valuable work. Its busy work and most hate it. 

However, big thinkers and 1%ers think of it this way: 10 minutes work, $500, 10 minutes is 1/6th of an hour, $500 to 6 is a $3000 hour. Let that sink in for a minute. You didn’t necessarily earn $3000 for that hour, you earned a hard $50 per minute for 10 minutes of that day. What you also did was all but guarantee that you’ll get another $500 order and future business worth thousands. That 10 minute phone call may end up being a $10,000 hour when all of the benefits of your actions come to life over the next 3 to 6 months. If all you did all day was handle 10 minute phone calls that saved or earned you more business, you’d probably have your most profitable year ever! Again, most people don’t categorize that kind of work as valuable or contributing to their hourly rate because its busy work, maybe drudgery for you. You must start thinking about your day in terms of profitable minutes instead of just, ‘what’s on my plate today?’ If I took you to an area to pan for gold, you wouldn’t look at every rock or every clump of dirt the same. You’d turn on your prospector eyes and brain and start scanning each rock, each clump of dirt, and you’d scour each pan in the river for the little shiny flecks gold tends to look like. You’d be very aware of the fact that most gold doesn’t come in the form of a huge nugget, but instead in the form of tiny little flecks that just happen to be heavier than the silt, dirt, and sand so they sink to the bottom of the pan when you’re washing the pay dirt. And its the same idea with our days. You don’t look at each hour as the same, you open your eyes and your mind for the little flecks in your day that are more profitable than the others. Most $100,000 per year people spend a majority of their day on $10 per hour tasks, some time on $100 per hour tasks, and occasionally, albeit accidentally and rarely recognized, a few minutes on $1000 per hour tasks. So stop thinking in terms of $50 or $100 per hour and instead, start thinking in terms of $167 per minute. If you could earn $167 per minute for one hour per day, you’d earn $10,000 in that hour. Can’t think of what those minutes would consist of? That’s the next step after changing your thinking!

After retooling your brain to think in terms of gold mining the minutes of your day, I highly recommend hauling out a sheet of paper, turning it sideways so that its in the horizontal orientation, making three lines equally across the page, thus giving your 4 columns, and at the top of each column going from left to right, you write the numbers $10, $100, $1000, and $10,000. What you then put in each column are all of the things you can think of that might correspond with the dollar amount per hour in activity. Its pretty easy to fill out the first two columns because most of you already know what $10 per hour work looks like, and even what $100 per hour might look like. It gets a little tougher when you move to $1000 and $10,000 per hour because most people have never thought themselves capable of earning that kind of money, nor have they thought in terms of minutes, instead of hours. To earn $1000 per hour, all you have to do is find an activity that will net you $16.67 per minute for some period of time. If you could sustain that earn rate for a whole hour, you’d have earned $1000 for that hour. I’ll give you some examples of $1000 and $10,000 hours so that you have some context. We’ve already talked about your hypothetical 10 minute phone call saving $500, which is a $3000 hour, and potentially a $10,000 hour when you factor in all the future business. So we can draw from that that taking time to talk with clients is very valuable time spent, even if it doesn’t directly earn you $50 or $100 for that hour’s worth of effort. The fact that you don’t see the return on those ten minutes in terms of what you’ve billed out for that day is what tricks your brain into categorizing that time as drudgery. However, I would say that any time spent reassuring clients, solving problems, giving them more confidence in you, talking to potential new clients, and so on, is very valuable and highly profitable time spent. Put that kind of work at least in the $100 and in the $1000 per hour categories. So fill out those categories the best you can at this point and then walk away. Come back to it a few days later and see what bubbles up. Does speaking to a group of real estate agents for one hour fall in the $10 per hour category or the $100, $1000, or $10,000 per hour category? “But Blaine, when I’m out doing that stuff I cant be working on files so I’m losing money!” Ok, you stay in the office and do what you do best! I’m going to seek out and create every opportunity I can to be in front of people who have the ability to send us more work. I can tell you from lots of experience of doing that kind of thing that that time is usually $10,000 per hour kind of work. We have been sent more business right after those meetings, as well as have gotten invited to be on new lender panels after our talks, more times than I can remember and many of those panels have turned into $30,000 to $70,000 or $80,000 per year in continuous work. One or two hours spent talking with and educating new potential clients and you end up with a lifetime client. Even if they only send you 10 orders per year at $400 per order. That’s $4000 per year times the lifetime value of that clients, say 10 years, and that’s $40,000 dollars lifetime value. Technically, that hour was a $40,000 hour then, it just came over multiple years but the hour was only spent once. 

I hope you’re following the thinking here my friends because its this type of thinking that will help you have breakout years in your current business, but may also help you see opportunities in other areas. So, before we finish this episode, let me give you some ideas for filling out your categories. You can disagree with me on where they should go in the dollars per hour categories, but put them somewhere. Let’s start with stuff I tend to think of as very expensive time because its low value work that takes up your time you could be doing high value work. Driving is a big one! Windshield time may be great relaxation and meditation or podcast time, but its still low value time. You might have an occasional $3000 per hour phone call while your driving, or, if you’re the kind of person who thinks deeply while driving, you might be able to turn that time into high value time, but it takes effort and a special mindset to do so. Any other day, driving is low value wasted time. Running errands, cleaning, organizing your office, scrolling social media, browsing the internet, shopping on Amazon, debating online with others about things that don’t really matter, answering emails, data entry, all of it $10 per hour work. How about $100 per hour stuff? Solving problems, outsourcing, working on the high value parts of an appraisal after your assistant did all of the $10 per hour stuff, talking with potential new clients, thank you cards, making a Google My Business post, working on one of your social media groups, not just random posting about your view or your lunch. All of those things have the potential to be $100 or more hours. How about the $1000 per hour stuff? Remember, we now think in terms of the minutes that make up our hours so as we move up to the $1000 per hour category, this really comes into play because most people have never thought in terms of $1000 or more per hour. You could, however, grasp earning $16.67 per minute or $167 for, say, 10 or 15 minutes. When you start thinking this way, your least valuable minute will be worth 16 cents and your most valuable minute will be worth south of $167. The $1000 per hour category, in my opinion, consists of leadership and inspiration work. Leading others in your organization to be more productive, happier, more client focused, or more inspired is $1000 per hour work that happens in 10 minute increments. Prioritizing your day so that you’re on the lookout for high value opportunities is $1000 per hour work. Reviewing the work of the other appraisers in your office that you receive some kind of revenue split from is $1000 per hour work. Writing killer copy for your website, sending out 5 or 10 BombBomb videos to clients and customers, speaking to other people and larger groups, coaching your people, making videos for your facebook group, and so on. What does the $10,000 per hour category look like? Similar to the $1000 per hour category except that it may entail an increase in a skillset. For example, your hour of speaking to a group of 20 agents may be a $1000 hour where I may be able to turn that hour into a $10,000 or $20,000 hour because of my past speaking, sales, and networking experience. Same activity, different skill sets being applied. Its no different than asking a beginner to sit at a $50,000 drum set and bang out a rhythm versus asking a pro drummer to sit at a $200 drum kit with two broken broom sticks and bang out a tune. The pro will always sound like a pro regardless of the situation, while the beginner simple doesn’t have the chops yet to make use of the expensive gear. 

So take that and do something with it because the line between the $1000 per hour activities and the $10,000 per hour activities is very thin, almost transparent because it’s a line built more on perception, mindset, and skillset than on activity. Its how the pro uses those minutes or hours and the opportunities that they can either identify, or create for themselves, that moves you from one category to the next higher category. Developing a killer USP is $10,000 per hour work. Taking time to sit down and plan or come up with new business ideas is $10,000 per hour work. Maybe not when you first sit down to do it, but over time and with practice and constant effort, it turns into that. Understand, if you come up with what you think is a great idea that will net you $10,000 for your hour of thinking time and it fails, you’ve lost an hour, maybe a few mores in the implementation. But for every $10,000 per hour idea that fails, you have 199 or so more $50 hours. At $50 per hour, it takes you 200 hours to earn $10,000. I’ll play that table at the casino all day long! I’ll take my chances on a bunch of $10,000 per hour failures over 200 $50 hours because 2 or 3 wins on the $10,000 side leaves all of the unused $50 hours to spend doing something else, like turning them into $100 or $1000 hours. Improving your systems in some way is likely $10,000 per hour work. When you find a problem that is costing you time, which is money, and you fix it, you aren’t just saving the dollars it was costing you once, you’re saving those dollars forever into perpetuity! A $100 per month problem fixed isnt $100 saved, its $100 per month for forever! Its $1200 per year saved for 20 years, that’s $24,000 saved in one hour’s time fixing the problem. And that, my friends, is the way you need to start thinking! 

Start to retool and recategorize how you think of time and how much you believe you are worth and can earn. Until you clear your head of $50 or even $100 hour thinking, you’ll never be able to earn $1000 or $10,000 per hour because your brain will not allow you to see the moonwalking bear while you’re tossing basketballs around. After making a mindset shift you must write down what you believe all of those categories are filled with in terms of activities that can lead to higher value time. Its only after you’ve begun to identify what activities should go into which category that you’ll begin to see, and then take advantage of higher value activities to fill your minutes and hours with.  Thank you for investing your most valuable currency with me again this week my friends, my wish is for this hour to become a $10,000 hour for you with a mindset shift alone! Speaking of mindset shifts, we’re coming to the end of another killer year for all of our coaching members having record years. I mean, who in the appraisal business hasn’t had a record year? However, I have no doubt in my mind that if you saw what we mean by record years for our members, you’d be in absolute awe with what they’ve been able to create accomplish in a short amount of time, with most of them working less than they did before they started with us. New Black belt coaching teams are forming for the 2021 year so if you truly want to have your best year ever, lets set up a time to chat and see what it could be like for you. All of our coaching programs are 100% money back guaranteed so the only risk to you is in not taking action. I will look forward to chatting with those of you who are ready to live their best lives and have their best year ever and, until next week my friends, I’m out…