The Business of Homes Podcast

The Business of Homes Podcast
Episode #001 With Marie Lee

Marie Lee
I got told very early on, Hey, you've got to focus on the moneymaking activities. Cold call, doorknock, go host open houses. And I tried those things and I just did not enjoy them. They didn't seem very fruitful or beneficial to me and I just started posting on social with in the first month, month and a half, I got my first client.

Michael Conrad
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Business of Homes podcast. This is Michael Conrad and I am so excited today because I get to interview someone that I feel like is really cutting new trail and forging ahead in new exciting ways and really doing it her own way and today's conversation is going to take us a couple of different directions.

Michael Conrad
But ultimately it's going to talk a lot about social media and how we use that in today's day and age. So I would like to welcome Marie Lee to the table. Thanks for coming out to our office today. Being here with you is awesome and I'm really excited to get to know a little bit more of that background that drove you.

Michael Conrad
Did this place because that's the interesting piece, right? Like we all come from such faraway places. So just kind of GIs kicked off here. You weren't a realtor forever. So what were you doing before that? So that we can better understand what drove you here?

Marie Lee
Sure. Thanks for the intro. Yeah, and to be honest, I'm relatively new to real estate. I don't think a lot of people would be very open with that on the front end. You know, a lot of people like to share their experience and whatnot. Yeah, but I got into real estate at the end of 2020. It was my COVID pivot and I was a teacher prior to that.

Marie Lee
So I actually taught here in Imanpa for a few years, taught elementary school, moved up to middle school math, and I got out right before virtual schooling was a thing, and I'm very glad I did. But in the midst of trying to figure that out, I was trying to figure out what to do. And at that time my husband was in mortgages, but he was working on the refinance side, so he was very much doing, I would call that sales, very much doing sales.

Marie Lee
And he told me, Hey, you should get into real estate. So at that point in time, I was fresh out of a job, gotten to nannying, like doing some private nannying, working on my real estate license at night and then got things going in September of 2020 and kicked off my real estate career officially.

Michael Conrad
Yeah. Did you track early on to become a teacher? Was that a long term goal for you, kind of coming up through school and whatnot?

Marie Lee
I study did education and what was wild was in college. I knew I wanted to do something different. Even in high school. I knew I wanted to try and do something on my own terms and on my own path, but I didn't know what that looked like. I remember having conversations with people like, I think I want to start my own business, but I was like, But I don't have skills that I can monetize.

Michael Conrad
Yeah, when you're a teenager, everybody's like, Sure, sure.

Marie Lee
Sure, yeah. And I would even talk to my parents and I'd be like, I think I want to run my own business. At that point in time was like a dog setting business. And they're like, Well, how are you going to do that? They gave me all these objections of why I couldn't do that, and I at that point in time couldn't find solutions to them.

Marie Lee
So I just kind of accepted, Hey, this isn't for me. I don't really know what else to do. I'm going to become a teacher. And my junior year in college, I had a professor that had us all share a reason why we were in education. I told her, I'm I really don't want to be a teacher, but I'm already too far ahead in my.

Michael Conrad
You said the thing that you're not supposed to say.

Marie Lee
And I told her that. And I was being very honest, like, Hey, I'm just here to get my degree. I'm on financial assistance. Like, I can extend my graduation any longer. And so she pulled me aside after that class. She's like, You need to change your major. You don't need to do this. And she I feel like she purposefully made that semester really hard on me.

Michael Conrad
Kind of trying to wash you out. Yeah.

Marie Lee
I have a point where I thought, All right, this isn't going to work, but we finished through with a bachelor's degree, ended up doing a program, brought me here to Nashville, Teach for America. Yeah. And got my master's degree in education, even though I knew. Hey, there's something else out there. I just don't know what it is. So I feel like my heart was in not set on education.

Marie Lee
I love teaching and I love sharing. But I also didn't know anything about real estate. So just I feel like both of them kind of happened and we're just run with it.

Michael Conrad
If you ask a lot of folks in the world, I think they might like this idea of educating others, teaching others. But we have such narrow understanding of what can I do with that interest, What can I do with that skill set? And you're someone that whether by accident or by on purpose, you've pivoted into a place where you're very much a teacher, quite literally, teaching both clients in the microcosm and now moving into a place where you're going to be standing up on stages and teaching many people, you know, in a macrocosm.

Michael Conrad
And so you've moved from a place where I didn't want to be a teacher because you had a narrow sense of what it was to I am a teacher because I found a subject that I'm passionate about teaching.

Marie Lee
Yes.

Michael Conrad
And that's the difference.

Marie Lee
I think I have always been obsessed with social media. I was on MySpace back in the day learning how to code my, you know, my profile and everything. Amazing. Probably like one of the first few people on YouTube. There's a channel out there of mine. I don't I'm not going to give anyone the handle. I don't need anyone to find it.

Marie Lee
But there are some pretty embarrassing content out there. But ever since, you know, I was in middle school, high school is like, I love this. And it's been fun to see how that has actually shifted into business and income for me. And I'm finally getting to merge my two passions together.

Michael Conrad
Yeah, the younger versions of ourselves could never have imagined what is possible today's day and age as you've been coming along and you were a teacher and then beginning to make transitions, this definition of success probably was weighing on you because even though you completed a program and you were sort of teaching, perhaps you weren't finding that definition of success or satisfaction, perhaps that was giving you what you needed and you were looking to make that change.

Michael Conrad
So how are you defining success now that you have made this big pivot, have ended up in your own business and are doing some of these lifelong turns out passions full time now? So what is this new definition of success for you these days?

Marie Lee
One thing I notice really quickly is I can put all the time, effort and energy into teaching, and I did, which I think eventually led me to burnout. But there was I don't want to say there was an impact. Obviously, I'm teaching children. I'm really trying to expand their skills, but I felt like as much work and effort that I was putting into it, there wasn't something tangible for me in return.

Marie Lee
It didn't seem very reciprocal. And when I got into real estate, it's really easy to start off with the idea of like, Oh, I'm going to try and reach a certain income goal or hit a certain number of transactions and being very numbers focused for success. Yeah, I think I feel like I've had a lot of experience in the short two and a half years that I've been in real estate to know if you do that, you are going to burn out.

Marie Lee
And I feel like right now success to me is really focused on like, am I living life on my own terms? I at this point in time, like if I want to work hard, I can work hard and enjoy the fruits of that labor. But if I want to relax, I can do the same thing and finally disconnect.

Marie Lee
I actually just took a trip to the Dominican Republic. It was the first trip I've ever taken where I left my laptop at home, which took a lot of trust and just hope that everything would be taken care of because I was in the middle of some really stressful deals and I just had to delegate that. And I feel like it's a true blessing to be able to have people make or to delegate.

Marie Lee
Yeah, you can relax and have fun. I think eventually I'd like to shift my focus on even having a more flexible schedule, and that's what success looks like to me. Yeah, living life on my own terms.

Michael Conrad
Okay, so you're you're getting at this idea that I think it's been boiling under the surface or maybe right in front of everything for a while, and that is that the American dream is changing, has changed. You know, once upon a time, stability. Is that white, that classic white picket fence and that job with a retirement and a pension, you know, that essence of stability coming out early, coming out of early America, that there was so much instability.

Michael Conrad
And over and over, I hear folks that are in this sort of sub 45 range are are sort of espousing a different goal, a different American dream. And that is predominantly connected to freedom time, freedom which is often connected to money, freedom. And so you fall right in line with that. But it is worth pointing out that you're not new to this idea, like maybe some are.

Michael Conrad
You have been someone who has sort of been thinking about a personal level of freedom, specifically in a career for like a long time and so it it's so lovely and interesting that you kind of found what the world was of wanting you to fall this box that wall was wanted to put you in, and then you sort of broke out of it after a couple attempts early on.

Michael Conrad
And so what is one of the earliest memories that you have about trying to say, No, I want to do it my way?

Marie Lee
I think I'd have to credit my husband for so I knew I wasn't getting the fulfillment that I wanted out of teaching and I was putting my heart and soul into this. And there, like I said, there was no reciprocity, like the amount of work and effort that I was putting in. It wasn't computing to, you know.

Michael Conrad
So much work on the teachings, right?

Marie Lee
So much. And I could get on to get into a conversation about that, but I'll save it for another day. But at that point in time, my husband was working in mortgages and we were living night and day lives. I'm over here putting in, you know, ten plus hours a day at school and I'm earning a pretty meager salary and I'm living with another mom, living with other 20 something year olds trying to break down on my rent.

Marie Lee
And I'm just feeling tired. And he is putting in ten plus hours a day at his job. But he was making in one month what I was making in one year. And I was like, Man, well, how do I do that? And I think it took me a while to finally have that mindset shift. He would push me time and time again, Hey, leave teaching, find something else.

Marie Lee
I'm like, Oh, I just got two degrees. So like, I need to use this. This is what I studied. If I don't do it, who else will? You know, there's a teaching crisis. Yeah. And he finally got me to separate myself from that. And he was like, Somebody else will do it. You need to find something else. And I was like, Okay.

Marie Lee
So I just took a leap of faith. I didn't know what I was going to do. I remember I told my principal, Hey, I'm head now, and she was like, Well, what are you going to do? And I was like, Um, yeah, I don't know. I really don't know. I have no jobs lined up. I've not applied anything, but this is an IT.

Marie Lee
And I remember feeling excited and scared when I didn't have anything lined up. My parents just felt like I was making an extremely dumb decision. And when I quit teaching, there were a few months where I didn't have anything lined up. I was kind of just taking gig work as it would come and applying to things, hoping for the best.

Marie Lee
I applied to be an FBI secret agent. I applied to work for Tesla Yelp. I applied to work for a bunch of jobs and I just couldn't get past the application process. So I actually traveled out to Arizona with my husband. We watch a friend of ours going to the e-commerce world, and that's where I feel like entrepreneurship was finally visualized to me.

Marie Lee
Like, what does it look like to have your own business? So he was kind of showing us the ins and outs of like starting up stores online, using social media to potentially sell. He was doing like a lot of paid Facebook ads and things like that, and I took it and ran with it. I started up my own stuff and it was starting to really break when I got myself in a lot of really influential spaces.

Marie Lee
But then when COVID hit and this train stopped, I had to stop because we.

Michael Conrad
Were doing a lot of Dropshipping.

Marie Lee
Yeah, I was doing like Dropshipping Amazon FBA Yeah, the works. And I feel like at that point in time, once I could see, all right, this is tangible for me to create my own reality and now I just have to find another way to do it right.

Michael Conrad
That the work I'm putting in is showing direct results, or at least is leading to illuminating a path for myself. And I think that that's the big disconnect with a lot of folks that are entering the workforce or maybe trying to change jobs at some sort of midpoint in their career. Is that the path in front of them?

Michael Conrad
Where do I go? What do I do? How do I do it? It's not illuminated and the fear and the risk is real around starting your own business, launching out on your own entrepreneurship, all of those sort of essences and ideas. It's American. It's very essentially American, but it is scary. And so the old risk index and how people sort of find themselves in that, I'm a nervous Nelly.

Michael Conrad
No, I'm a risk taker, whatever it is, you know, it really comes to bear because that first time that you don't get that paycheck coming in on that two week or one month sketch or whatever it is, like it's getting real.

Marie Lee
Oh yeah.

Jake Hall
Hey, everyone is Jake, director for the Business of Holmes podcast. I hope you have been enjoying today's episode, starting with Maria's journey from being a teacher to becoming a real estate agent, how she combined her passion for social media and real estate, and how she defined success. After the break, Michael and Marie dive into what her e-commerce background taught her, how she expertly spent money to make money, and how she learned her most recent lesson after losing a client.

Jake Hall
Don't forget to follow us on Facebook and Instagram @thebusinessofhomespod, where you can interact with us and see some great bite sized pieces from all of our episodes. For you listeners out there, did you know that our entire podcasts are filmed and are on our YouTube channel? Check it out next time you want to see our amazing guests tell their stories.

Jake Hall
And are you currently watching this episode in video format? Don't forget to follow us on your preferred audio streaming service to take us with you on the go. Lastly, do you have any feedback or want to suggest someone for the show? Email us at thebusinessofhomespodcast@gmail.com. Please enjoy the rest of today's episode with Marie Lee.

Jake Hall
Let's get back to it.

Marie Lee
I think I watched my savings dwindle from like 20 grand down to my last thousand and I'm like, This is really stressful.

Michael Conrad
And if you have parents who are like good savers and are always like the numbers in your savings account should always be going in the opposite direction or whatever. Yeah, I think the entrepreneur skill that you're not taught in entrepreneur school because there is no entrepreneur in school, is this concept of working backwards. You know, I had to learn this early on that if I wanted to have this, then I had to figure out the steps backwards to get it.

Michael Conrad
And that's not even just like goal making and how I get to Bora-Bora, that that's like, Oh, I have a need in my organization for someone to help me, but I don't know what to pay this person. I don't know how to delegate to this person. I don't know how to offload it off my own schedule. But if I want it to be offloaded eventually and I want to pay them something, I have to work backwards to make it make sense and put the work in accordingly.

Michael Conrad
And so that working backwards I think is an entrepreneurial skill that you learn as a muscle as you go, but it's not something that comes natural early on.

Marie Lee
Especially when you're in those uncharted territories and you're doing things like, I don't know how much money I should be putting towards marketing, I don't know how much I should be paying for this. I think that's where I like my Dropshipping and ecommerce background came to me. This was the first point in time where I ever had invest in myself and the true turning point was like, All right, I have to spend money to make money.

Marie Lee
Which was even more scary. The smaller and smaller my savings account was getting. And honestly, I feel like that really primed me for real estate because you got to spend money to make money in real estate. Yeah, you're going to go a couple months without either. Getting a deal for a lot of people. Takes time to get their first client close their first home.

Marie Lee
And there's a lot of start of expenses with real estate that nobody talks about when you're getting your license. So I'm thankful I had that experience before getting into real estate or else I think I would have been a little bit more shell shocked getting in.

Michael Conrad
Yeah, I think there's this general idea of it's more holding your breath. I have to spend money. I just have to kind of to hold my breath long enough before the money comes in. And I think it's a fallacy. I don't think that's true. It has not been true for my experience in multiple businesses. And most of the entrepreneurs I know would say exactly what gold nugget you just laid.

Michael Conrad
Listeners, listen up. You've got to spend money to make money. And there is another truism that I want all of the folks sitting here to know, and that is all profit is borne in risk. All profit is borne in risk. If you don't want any risk, there's no profit. You plug into someone else's machine. But if you want to profit, as in take money away from just the day to day transaction of time, then there is risk going to be involved.

Michael Conrad
And so that's been a helpful tool for me to keep my compass point in the right direction. It's been a helpful tool, as I've been discussing that with my leaders, that I'm hoping to develop, and that is if there is risk, there is benefit. Yeah, but if you want that benefit, you got a risk?

Marie Lee
Mm hmm. I think right now I actually just lost a listing today, and I'm okay with it. But I very much take on clients with the assumption that we're going to work together and that assumption comes with inherent risk. If I'm pouring into them, which I'm usually am on the front end, I'm spending money, you know, either.

Michael Conrad
Time, but money.

Marie Lee
Time and money and a lot of resources and counsel. Like I'm pushing a lot of value in giving a lot in the hopes that that will end up turning around in my favor. But I feel like I've had a really harness this abundance mindset. All right. I'm going to give I'm going to put my money into this. I'm going to make this risk and make it work.

Marie Lee
And this client decided to go route with another agent who's going to drastically cut their commission, and they were offering significantly higher numbers. I'll be honest, it was a sizable listing and I felt very good and confident that I was going to be able to get it sold over a list price, you know, like a really good deal for them.

Marie Lee
That's because I do a lot of my I do my research and I ground myself in the numbers, in the data. But he I got a text today, hey, we're moving forward with another agent. I was like, okay. And then a few hours later, I get a call, Hey, I've got a referral buyer for you that's making the move from Dallas.

Marie Lee
Their budget is 2.5 million. And I was like, Okay, well, that's like three times the amount of the listing that I just lost. So I think I was able to openly receive that because, you know, I all right, this wasn't for me. It's time to move on. What's the next thing? And, you know, like I said, what you put out there comes back out to you.

Michael Conrad
So I am very impressed that you are chasing that abundance mindset. That's a really hard one for me. I have certain people that influence me in my world that are talking a lot about that. We got to chase an abundance mindset. I struggle. I struggle still with classic scarcity mindset. So I do what you do, except I, I use different words.

Michael Conrad
I say I got to feed the machine and the machine will produce. Yeah, but I have to feed it first. And so eventually I put enough money and money will come out of it. But that abundance mindset, it's a real paradigm shift and you're wise to chase it because it not only can bring you the world's measurement of success, but it's going to bring you that personal satisfaction that's going to make it worth it along the way.

Michael Conrad
And quite honestly, you talk about burnout. If you're not getting the satisfaction along the way, this entrepreneurial chase, this journey. Ooh, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's real.

Marie Lee
It's tough.

Michael Conrad
You told me a story a while back when we were hanging out at a house one day about that a broker early on in your career gave you some just absolutely stellar advice, said, Oh, this social media thing, you have got to put that aside and focus on some good old fashioned moneymaking activity. MM Yeah. How did that go for you?

Marie Lee
Well, here since then hired me to help teach on social media. So the tables have turned and we've come full circle. But yeah, I got told very early on, Hey, you've got to focus on the moneymaking activities. Cold, call, doorknock, go host open houses. Yeah, And I tried those things. I tried them and I just did not enjoy them.

Marie Lee
They didn't seem very fruitful or beneficial to me and I just started posting on social. I really took to using stories to show like the behind the scenes, all those open houses that I was hosting, I was posting about them like, Hey guys, I'm at this open house.

Michael Conrad
Or do you wait for people to show up?

Marie Lee
Yeah, and I needed to also like, all right, I got to show people I'm out in the out in the world that I'm out doing real estate. And within the first month, month and a half, I got my first client and the crazy thing is, I don't think they realized how young I was in my real estate business, but they saw that I was out and out in the streets videoing myself, showing the show in the process, and that one client was making the move from Chicago.

Marie Lee
And that opened me up to the world of like, Oh, maybe I should start pitching myself as like a relocation realtor, because at that point in time, the market was really crazy, really crazy seller's market. I needed to work with people who had money and who had the funds to be able to buy homes at a really competitive level.

Marie Lee
And for me that was relocation clients. Generally, they're coming from significantly higher cost living areas, big city dollars. Yeah. And I was like, That's what I'm going to focus on. And that's where I started creating my content to center around. And that's the bulk of my clients generally relocation buyers that are moving from out of state into Tennessee.

Marie Lee
And yeah, it's worked out well for me.

Michael Conrad
There is good advice to be received from mentors and there is bad advice. And how do you know which is which When you're on your own entrepreneurial journey, when you're in a new vertical, when you're cutting new trail, it's very difficult. I've come up in a business that largely is young enough as an industry where there really is no Bible or rulebook of what to do.

Michael Conrad
So there's a there's a lot of making it up as you go along.

Marie Lee
Everyone's making it up as we go along. We just don't like to.

Michael Conrad
I know it's a hard truth.

Marie Lee
Yeah.

Michael Conrad
But there is some good old-fashioned stuff that's been working in real estate and. And I'm someone that I don't know. Maybe I'm just like a rebel without a cause or something. But if everyone's going left, like, I'm just like, I really feel compulsive compost to go right, you know, here. So, you know, this whole move into social media, is it right for everyone?

Michael Conrad
Because I'm not sure everyone's going to be able to take Marie Lee's recipe for success and rinse and repeat it and find the same success. And that's this difficult thing about someone cuts new trail and then does everyone follow? Is it repeatable? What's what's been some feedback that you've gotten from others that have tried to follow in your footsteps or have been giving you this conversation?

Marie Lee
Yes. So I get a lot of people asking me for help with real estate and social media. Often, and what I see them do is I see them try to recreate what I'm doing and I see them trying and I get a lot of people who copy and paste what I'm doing online and it's not working out for them.

Marie Lee
They are like, Hey, this isn't working out for me. And I'm like, This isn't authentic to you. Like you. You're not authentic to this message. That's why it's not working. Since I have started real estate and started using social, I've gotten to the point now where I will do branding sessions with people. But your brand message is completely different than my brand message.

Marie Lee
In your brand stories. Different than my brand story. And we sit down and we talk about brand archetypes. So this is really the kind of messaging that people should be centering themselves in. What is your persona and what's the message you want to convey? And then you have to frame the content that you're creating to basically echo those things.

Marie Lee
So for me, I've taken the brand archetypes quiz and I'm considered to be the sage. So the wisdom person, the educator bidding, right? Yeah. And so like when I am creating content, I'm usually trying to provide a lesson or a tangible piece of advice. I have done branding sessions with people where they're brand messages, the magician, like they're trying to show like the magic of real estate or people who have a very high, luxurious presence and, you know, they're trying to show the luxury of real estate.

Marie Lee
I think there is not a copy paste method for everyone. There's a huge market out there. There are a lot of companies that will create copy paste marketing materials. They never work. I do think the method that does work is finding what is your voice and then trying to create content that emulates sight, that takes time and effort.

Marie Lee
But that's the best winning strategy you could give.

Michael Conrad
And that's really if you kind of consider it only even one half of the time, because you're talking about creating your brand identity, right? But really, we're not even talking about an audience yet. And an audience is someone that has to believe and participate and consume your messaging, your brand, or it to be ultimately success. And so then we start to get into the complexity of the different channels of social media.

Michael Conrad
A funny thing I always find odd is that people lumped social media and all the different platforms into a single category when in reality they're wildly different, serving different audiences, giving you the ability to provide a different level of messaging on different platforms. And honestly, I mean, I feel like this is such a deep rabbit hole. We could almost do this, have you back for another podcast and talk about, I don't know, like the anatomy of social media and the different platforms and how you need to structure your brand if you are cross-platform a little differently on each one to make sure that you're hitting the right audiences and that you're providing the right messaging.

Michael Conrad
But I feel just blown away by all the cool and interesting stuff that we have chatted about today. Yeah, thank you so much for coming out. We will definitely have to have you back in the future. This was good and I hope that everyone listening here has gotten a lot out of it. If you want to get in touch with Marie Lee, you can find her on Instagram pretty easily.

Michael Conrad
Yeah, and I hope you guys will keep listening to the podcast. We've got a lot more great stories to tell here on the Business of Homes podcast. We'll catch you next time.

Jake Hall
Hey everyone. Jake, again, director for the Business of Homes podcast. I hope you've enjoyed today's episode. A huge thank you to Marilee for being a part of our original launch. And don't worry, we'll have another episode featuring her soon. Go follow her on Instagram @movemetotennessee, let her know how much you enjoyed her story. Don't forget to subscribe on your preferred listening platform and make sure to follow us on Instagram as well.
@thebusinessofhomespod. Do you have any feedback or want to suggest someone for the show? Email us at thebusinessofhomespodcast@gmail.com. Thank you for listening and we'll see you again soon.