THE HOW2 COLLECTIVE
How2 Start. You just earned your real estate license or are new to the business, but you don’t know where to start. In this 14-week class, you receive expert guidance on how to get established in your business.
How2 Grow. You have been in business for at least a year, but you need a plan for sustainable growth. In our most popular class, learn how to implement the systems and processes needed for consistent lead generation and production throughout the year. In 8 weeks, you run through scenarios, set tactics, and are kept accountable for your plan.
How2 Execute. You have grown, but you have hit a ceiling on your revenue growth. You are ready for this 12-week, invitation-only class that teaches you how to systematically sprint toward your goals with accountability so you execute your plan (and see results) faster.
How2 Lead. You are at capacity and out of time to do all of the work yourself; it’s time to scale your team. In this 8-week, invitation-only class, our expert facilitators help you identify your natural voice order and leadership tendencies. Learn strategies for communicating more effectively, leading yourself and others, shifting your mindset, and activating your network.
How2 Finance. If you are interested in learning the intricacies of mortgage, I invite you to join our How2 Finance community. Take part in real-world mortgage scenarios, ask finance-related and mortgage questions in our private Facebook group, and join Leo’s KIP (Knowledge is Power) calls for real-time mortgage updates.
Text Leo at (202) 951-8484 if you are interested in enrolling in a class as an individual or are interested in group discounts for your whole team.
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Over the course of my professional career, I have collected hundreds of business and leadership tools. When I need one, for myself or to mentor another person, I just pull the most applicable resource “off the shelf.”
After several years of working with agents and business owners, I realized that I kept hearing the same questions and referring the same books and exercises.
That’s when I saw the opportunity to link these resources together (like the true Connector I am).
That is how the How2Collective came about. You can read more about its origin story on page 17, but in the next few pages, you will find exercises I consistently use with business owners in class and in one-to-one advising meetings.
@LeoAnzoleagaGroup
THE 12 WEEK YEAR
Executing Your Goals Systematically
If you were on a hot air balloon, with nothing weighing you down, what is the big, scary dream you would pursue? What is a huge, hairy goal that scares you? Think about your business, finances, and personal life - but don’t combine more than three items.
Write that big, hairy goal as your 5-YEAR goal. What does that mean you need to accomplish in three years, one year, and 12 weeks? Write it all down. Focus on the small, manageable piece for better focus and execution.
My 5-YEAR goal:
My 3-YEAR goal:
My 12-MONTH goal:
My 12-WEEK goal:
My challenge to you:
Reflect on this 12-week goal every single day until you have reached it. Then, recharge for a week and set the next 12-week goal.
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THE ONE THING
One book I feel like I’m constantly pulling off my shelf is The One Thing by Gary Keller. Whether I am goal-setting for myself or helping others set theirs, the practical advice in this book will push you forward faster.
The Domino Effect
Reflecting on the goals you just set, why are they important to you right now? How will you tackle them? The One Thing has a domino effect. When you focus and accomplish one thing, you create momentum that tackles other impactful items on your to-do list.
When I journal in the morning, I “line up my dominos” by listing out all of my tasks for the day. I then determine The One Thing I must get done that day and focus on knocking down that first domino.
Maintain High Energy
You cannot accomplish greatness if you neglect areas of energy in your life. Here are some practices I recommend for staying charged and productive:
• Meditate, journal, and/or pray for spiritual energy
• Eat right, exercise, and sleep sufficiently for physical energy
• Hug, kiss, and laugh with loved ones for emotional energy
• Dream, set goals, and plan for mental energy
• Time block your ONE Thing for business energy
Marry Your Goals
The concept from this book I love the most is the idea of marrying your goals. You should be waking up with your goals, looking at them every day, going to bed with them, strengthening your relationship with them. Reflect on your “why” every day to focus on the one thing you need to accomplish to get closer to your big goal.
TEN LIES EXERCISE
At the end of the day, success boils down to having a success mindset. This is one exercise I learned years ago and still use to this day to break through mental barriers.
On the left side, list out 10 lies you tell yourself. Then, on the right, turn the sentiment around to become your new charge (and truth). Reflect on this list daily to remind yourself of your potential. In fact, there is an extra copy of this page in the folder if you’d rather fill that out. I recommend you fold the page in half so only your Truths are visible. Tape it to your mirror to reflect on your truths every day.
Example: I cannot produce $10 million annually.
Example: I will build a path to $10 million in annual production.
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One of the best ways to develop yourself professionally and personally is by reading books and implementing strategies. As an avid reader, I have a short list of books that I often return to because of their huge impact on me and my professional journey.
The 12 Week Year by Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington
The One Thing by Gary Keller
The Power of Moments by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Switch by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke
Never Lose Another Customer by Joseph John Coleman
High Trust Selling by Todd Duncan
Time Traps by Todd Duncan
The Gold Standard by Mike Krzyzewski
Radical Candor by Kim Scott
Death by Meetings by Patrick Lencioni
Which books are critical to your development? Add them to the list!
See more of Leo’s Book Recommendations by following him on Instagram @LeoAnzoleagaGroup
LEO’S BOOK LIST
In a book that is all about building your career roadmap, it is only fair that I share with you how my roadmap (and subsequently this book) came to fruition. Leo’s Origin Story, if you will.
I had some chance meetings that changed my life, and I tested out various business tactics that proved to be successful. It felt very much like tripping into my own roadmap. My goal with all of my work – mortgage, coaching, classes, Leo’s Circle – is to provide professionals with the tools and resources needed to build roadmaps with intention, not luck.
I mention names in this chapter not to flex. Simply put, there is no way to share my professional journey without crediting the folks and programs that were instrumental in shaping it.
By sharing the sequence of how I built my business, you may better understand why I am passionate about all of the work that I do, and you may find pieces of my roadmap that help you build your own.
Let’s rewind back to 2003 so you can hear how I sort of “tripped” into the mortgage business.
A friend of mine, Moises Altamirano, was giving me guitar lessons. At every session, he would mention his career selling mortgages. He talked about his job, how he just bought a condo (at age 19), and how he thought I would be great at this job. I remember telling him it sounded like a pyramid scheme, which I had fallen victim to before. I demanded to see evidence before entertaining this idea any further.
I drove over to Moises’s house, and he showed me his work contract and commission check. I thought to myself, Is this legal? That’s a lot of money on one check.
It was time to see if this was a legitimate career path. I visited his
LEO’S STORY:
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HOW IT ALL GOT STARTED
company—which was owned by my friend Ali Kazmi, his brother Ahsan Kazmi, and their father Syed Kazmi and saw that they were training new loan officers, people completely new to the industry. Fair enough, I thought. It’s worth a shot.
I worked at a hotel during the day, so I attended the evening training sessions, where we manually calculated income, looked at rate sheets, etc. Once training ended, I left my job at the hotel and jumped into my new mortgage job.
I kept second-guessing whether or not this was a real, legit workplace. But I stayed with it, learning and applying the training to the client files I had in front of me. Little by little, I began to climb within the company. Since it felt like everyone and their dog was in mortgages back then, it did feel like I tripped into my success. Before I knew it, I was doing well for myself. I put in the work, and it worked.
Then, the liquidity crisis hit in 2006. Let me just say, up to that point in my career, mortgage was a completely different business model from what it is today. The tactics to be successful in financial and real estate markets pre-2006 no longer worked post-2008.
For example, when I started, we had a consistent flow of inbound calls from leads rather than having to make outbound calls to ask for referrals. It seemed like it was easy to find success, and I think that many real estate and mortgage professionals did well before the crisis.
Then overnight things changed. I moved to a different company called North Point Mortgage. Businesses just shut down. Banks closed overnight, and loans were no longer funded. I remember thinking, This is really bad.
CURIOSITY INTO THE HOW
During this time, I also remember walking into my boss Nathan’s office. He sat behind a desk, looking at a computer screen. A second computer screen was turned around to face me, and on it was this crazy looking chart. I asked him what it was, and he said that it was a candlestick chart tracking 30-year mortgage-backed securities to find the most optimal time to lock in the pipeline.
My mind was blown. For my entire career up to that point I thought rates were driven by how people competed for your business. In reality, I learned that rates were actually driven by how these mortgage-backed securities were traded. I walked away and went back to my desk, still thinking about this newfound knowledge. I was curious to learn more.
Later, Nathan walked past me in the hall, and I followed him. I had more questions. I asked him, “Where did you learn so much about mortgages?”
“I follow specific people,” he said. “One is Barry Habib” (founder of MBS Highway, previously with Mortgage Market Guide), “Two is Todd Duncan” (author of High Trust Selling), “And three is Tim Braheem” (CEO of Loan Toolbox at the time).
“I just consumed all of this information,” he said.
After that conversation, I learned it all. No exaggeration, I spent all of my free time consuming this information. I would work in the office from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., then just go home and absorb mortgage content.
I quickly learned that if you asked most people in real estate and mortgage what their unique selling proposition (USP) was, they’d say something along the lines of, “I will take care of you, this transaction will be smooth from start to finish, etc.” Everyone was focused on customer service.
Despite all of this studying and new knowledge, I still didn’t have many deals. In my opinion, I had mastered the customer service piece. I learned “ High Trust ,” the sequence of the loan, and how to guide both agents and clients through the mortgage process. If you gave me a chance, I had a high probability of landing that deal.
The problem was that I still didn’t know how to get more leads and how to sustainably build a business by referral.
What good is it to know how to service the deals if you can’t get the deals in the first place?
Little by little, I started cold calling real estate agents to drum up business. It absolutely sucked because every person on the other line perceived me as just a number. Lenders came off as leeches, looking for deals from these agents, so cold calling them was zero fun.
There’s got to be a different way to succeed, I thought.
LEARNING THE HOW
Around this time, a real estate agent named John, who my mortgage company often worked with, came by my office for a “pop-by.” He brought me an ice cream scoop with a tag that said, “I got the scoop on the real
estate market.”
I was embarrassed, for me and for John. At the time, I thought it was the cheesiest thing ever. I laughed, thanked him, and jokingly told him to get out of here. I kept thinking, I don’t want to be seen with this.
Later that day, my boss walked into my office and said, “Hey, what is that? This is a nice ice cream scoop! Do you mind if I keep it?”
“Absolutely,” I replied, surprised.
Besides dropping off random utensils, John also liked to stop by and encourage me to attend a Brian Buffini conference called the Turning Point Retreat. Because John was literally one of the few agents I was working with at the time, I begrudgingly said yes. I guess I’ll go see what this is all about.
So, I went to Philadelphia with John. A skeptic at heart, I was completely put off by the first part of the conference. I sat there all closed up, arms folded, waiting to be proven right. But when Brian Buffini walked onto that stage, he answered the most pressing question I had (and arguably the most pressing question for a majority of the audience): How do I bring in business?
Right? How do I get my phone to ring? What is the systematic approach to getting leads and clients?
The answer was in Buffini’s proverbial three-legged stool: marketing, customer service, and financial management.
Everyone works on the customer experience, and every business owner needs a handle on finances to survive. But to lead, you must give marketing five times the energy you spend on the other legs.
Buffini’s key to success isn’t over-the-top. Spend five times as much time on marketing as you do on each of the other legs, and you will see a return. It made total sense.
After that talk, I went outside and signed up for one-on-one coaching with someone from the Buffini Company. I remember leaving that conference thinking, Oh my gosh, I have found the how – it is this process. This is how I get more people to open their doors and give me a chance.
I called my Buffini Company coach and literally told him, “I’m going to run
as fast as you tell me to run. I’m going to jump as high as you tell me to jump. I’m going to give you nine months, and if this thing doesn’t work in nine months, I’m out of here.”
So I made my calls. I wrote my notes. I did the pop-bys (sans ice cream scoops, but now I understood the gesture). And it started to work.
In my mind, I wondered if the Buffini Company taught this stuff outside of the conferences. It was about that time when the Peak Producers program launched. Brian Buffini is a big part of that course, and the program had a huge impact on me. It literally shaped my career trajectory.
I’m going to get certified in coaching this Peak Producer program, I decided. And, I am going to teach it to real estate agents. Why? Because I was tired of cold calling referral prospects and leads. I was tired of getting less-than-stellar leads from the people who did respond to my calls. I was tired of seeing agents with no syllabus or sequence for their own success.
All of the knowledge, guidance, and application I had done up until this point showed me that the “how” was the most important piece of this puzzle.
TEACHING THE HOW
To start this new coaching venture, I needed to fill a room. I reached out to the title company with whom I did most of my business. The person there gave me the runaround. “I don’t need your money,” I told her. “I want to do a breakfast at Seasons 52 in Tysons Corner, and I want your help filling my class.”
She didn’t get it.
Lucky for me, an agent I knew named Elizabeth understood what I was trying to launch. When she met with Carlos Reyes, she told him to call me. Later, out of the blue, Carlos does call me. Somewhere in that conversation he said, “I am going to be the best title company in the country. I just wanted to call and introduce myself.”
“All right, well listen, bro, I have a relationship with another title company. I appreciate your time,” was my response.
My title company finally got back to me, only to turn down my pitch to partner up and train their real estate agents. They blamed it on “compliance,” but that was just the line they used to pass. Big mistake.
Time to call that Carlos guy again. When Carlos and I sit down, I tell him this idea, and he immediately gets it. He’s in.
The first day of our first class had 18 agents show up to see what it was all about. The audience included people I am still close with now.
So Carlos and I started teaching classes, like actual programs, to agents in the DC area. Some folks dropped off, as with most classes, but other agents began to excel. We started to see momentum. Large local brokerages like McEnearney Associates in Washington, D.C. began to take notice.
Why? Because some of their agents were experiencing success after applying what Carlos and I taught them. Early adopters like James experienced success. This was a missing piece for many agents, so some companies brought us in to teach our class to their team exclusively.
While our class was developing, I (a forever player-coach) was actually working the system myself. But, there are only so many times you can listen to the same modules and work the same steps. There was still room to improve my performance. As time went on, I realized one gap in my business was with consistent and high-quality execution. As I looked to the agents in our class, I saw they also had an opportunity to improve execution.
Brian Buffini often mentioned a book called The 12 Week Year by Brian P. Moran. For about a year, I kept hearing Brian Buffini talk about this book. Finally, the next winter over Christmas break, I picked up the book and read it. Thank goodness I did, because it was the piece I was missing.
I need to implement this book, and then I need to teach agents how to implement it, too. Carlos and I asked everyone in our Peak Producers class to read the book. And that’s how our How2 Execute class was born.
After about nine months, one of the agents in my classes and a good friend of mine Courtney Jordan told me that she was considering a transition into consulting. Not only was she a stellar agent, but she was also a strong referral partner of mine. “You can’t,” I remember saying, “That is a mistake.”
She said, “I feel it. I have a hunch that this GiANT Worldwide thing is what I need to be doing.” She told me about it. She told me about her being a Creative Feeler, about the 5 Voices – everything in this first conversation.
This is weird and it sounds like a cult, was my initial reaction. But I let it sit.
I was executing at a high level, but my mindset was not right. I kept hearing, I will never get to my hundred-million-dollar mark, in my head. You can’t do that. No one else was telling me this – it was me telling myself this.
If this negative self-talk is happening to me, then I knew it was happening to others. Again, as a player-coach, I thought, All right, let’s go through this work together.
By my second meeting with Courtney, I got it. I read 5 Voices and 5 Gears by Jeremie Kubicek and Steve Cockram. Eventually, I also read their book The 100X Leader . Then Courtney took the lead on developing our first 100X Agent class (now called How2 Lead).
I introduced 100X Agent and 5 Voices to my Peak Producer and How2 Execute agents. Like me, many didn’t get it at first. What’s the transformation here? What will I improve in my business by taking this class?
But the more they learned, the more they understood the value of this training. It boiled down to seeing their potential as influencers and leaders on their teams and with clients. In these classes, you learned more about how you should approach your business rather than what you can produce. Culture beats strategy any day of the week.
With all of this coaching work, my fellow facilitators and I created not only a sequence for building a successful real estate business but also relationships with agents that extended beyond asking for their business. This was a development system with impact. Once I realized this, I created additional classes that filled in their syllabus for building a referral-based business.
The How2 Start class teaches people at the beginning of their careers how to launch a strong business. From there, our How2 Grow class (formerly Peak Producers) teaches you how to sustainably generate leads throughout the year. Once an agent begins performing at a high level, they join the How2 Execute class to refine their referral system and process. At this point, many agents hit their capacity and want to start building a team, so they join the How2 Lead class to focus on their influence and leadership.
Marcus Lemonis says it best. The three keys to succeeding in business are
people, process and product – in that order. As you scale, the product and process mean nothing if you don’t have the right people to execute it.
You must be a leader worth following. Self-awareness is a critical piece of being an influential leader. I am by no means the perfect leader, but I work on being a better leader every day. Like most of you, I am admittedly a work in progress. But thanks to Courtney Jordan, I now have the how , the path to becoming a better leader.
With almost a decade of coaching real estate agents under my belt, the How2 Collective emerged. As the agents grew, our syllabus grew.
As I look at my journey over the past two decades, a lot of which is documented here in this book, I can’t help but once again thank all of the pivotal people I met along the way. Each key moment or time of growth (in my professional development and business) is tied to one of those people. By the Grace of God, my path intersected with theirs to give me the guidance I needed to reach different career levels. They may not all remember me or know who I am, but I certainly remember each of them and their impact.
In addition to the folks I have already mentioned, there are others who are ahead of me by miles. I look to them as role models for the type of business owner and leader I want to be. People like Lane Major, Rona Jobe, Joey Coleman, Mike Krzyzewski, Dan and Chip Heath, Ann McClure, Deniz Artemel, Lon Solomon, Rob Stuckey, and David Howell. With a curious mind and desire to learn, I look to them for guidance as I continue to design my career roadmap.
These authors, influencers, friends, mentors, and agents contributed to my success and to the career syllabus I put together for you. But let me just say that no one has played a bigger role in my success than my wife.
My wife witnessed the entire sequence I just laid out for you in this book. She helped me stuff envelopes for my items of value, she wrote early email templates, she offered advice on meaningful ways to show appreciation to my team.
Most importantly, my wife believed in me from Day 1, when this was just my vision with no path to prove it could work. And this was critical. I often
tell people that at the very beginning of their journey:
You need to believe what someone else is telling you about yourself. When you begin to gain traction, you start to believe in yourself, too. Later, you become the role model who inspires and motivates others to believe in themselves.
My wife believed in me, I believed in myself, and now I am sharing my story with you so that you can believe that your story is possible.
Working with me is about more than mortgage rates and financial advice; it’s an invitation to join the Leo community.
A community where we learn from those who came before us, collaborate with those who walk alongside us, and guide those who come up behind us.
A community where you learn and execute the sequence, tools, and resources.
A community you can plug into so your journey is intentional, not accidental.
Looking back at my career, I am so proud of the sequence we have built for our clients, agents, and financial advisors. To see my vision come to life – there are no words. But, the sequence is not yet complete. I will cross paths with insanely smart and talented folks who will inspire me to build pieces of the sequence that might be missing. I commit to continuously expanding and improving this sequence for all of us.
And together we will build the pathway to real estate success.
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Senior Vice President of Residential Mortgage Certified Mortgage Planning Specialist NMLS ID #251882 | Company NMLS ID #150953 Phone: (202) 951-8484 | Email: leo@apexhomeloans.com @leoanzoleagagroup | www.anzoleaga.com Copyright © 2023 The Leo Anzoleaga Group. All rights reserved. LEO ANZOLEAGA
Senior Vice President of Residential Lending
