227. “Ask Better Questions” with Garrett Maroon

Dawn talks with  Garrett Maroon, a Southeast Virginia real estate agent of 12+ years, about weighing key variables to build a business aligned with who you are rather than following cookie-cutter industry advice like cold calling or buying leads. Garrett explains he filtered every tactic through whether it fit his wiring and whether it gave or drained energy, ultimately mastering a relationship- and referral-based system that he refined over three and a half years while still achieving early success (27 homes year one, 50 year two) despite being told it wasn’t possible. He credits consistent inputs, building trust through consistent care, and asking better, constrained questions—sparked by his wife’s “under 40 hours” challenge—for sustainable results across market shifts. He also discusses coaching, cutting nonessential activities, and changing entrenched habits with patience and focus.

Who is  Garrett Maroon and whom does he serve?  (00:45)

Rejecting Cookie Cutter Real Estate (01:24)

Energy Audit and Personal Fit (02:58)

Early Wins and Long Runway (04:25)

Pushing Back on Shoulds (09:02)

Markets Change Trust Stays (12:00)

Proving 50 Deals Under 40 Hours (15:46)

Define Success With Constraints (19:21)

Naivete That Sparked Focus (21:57)

Guardrails Create Freedom (22:43)

Question the Hours Myth (23:29)

Resetting a Busy Business (25:21)

Why Change Takes Time (28:39)

Belief and a North Star (31:46)

Elimination Beats Guessing (36:04)

Rebuilding the Titanic (38:47)

Ten Year Overnight Success (41:55)

Where to Find Garrett (42:37)

Garrett Maroon's Information: 
Website: https://www.garrettmaroon.com/about-garrett

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garrett-maroon-50b06135/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@faithfulagent

Facebook: https://web.facebook.com/gmaroon/?_rdc=1&_rdr#

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/garrettmaroon/

Podcast: https://thefaithfulagent.buzzsprout.com/

Transcript

Intro/Outro: 0:03

Welcome to Business Mastery with Dawn Kennedy, your quick under forty five minute dose of expert insights and strategies to make a positive impact on your business and life. Let's get started.

Dawn Kennedy: 0:18

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Business Mastery Podcast. Today we're going to talk about different variables that you would weigh and look at how to do business differently and do it your way. And I have Garrett here to talk to us about how he does it differently in real estate and the variables that he's weighed to make his way very successful real estate business. So thank you so much for joining me today.

Garrett Maroon: 0:41

Yeah, thanks for having me,Dawn. Excited to be here.

Dawn Kennedy: 0:44

Can you tell everyone who you are and who you serve?

Garrett Maroon: 0:47

Yep. So Garrett Maroon I'm in Southeast Virginia. I've been in real estate for twelve, a little over twelve years, married to my wife, Rachel. We've got five little kiddos, so not that I have any extra time to serve people right on or that I sleep, but I serve our consumers. And then I've also shifted in the past two years to also focus on serving other agents at the same time.

Dawn Kennedy: 1:09

Amazing. All right. So in full disclosure, we're rerecording this part.

Garrett Maroon: 1:15

That's right.

Dawn Kennedy: 1:15

All the issues today. So as this comes through, I hope it doesn't do anything to the recording there. But all right. So we were talking before and I want to start there again about the variables that you looked at, because there is a particular way that people are expected to do real estate. And that's sort of where we were. You don't do real estate that way at all.

Garrett Maroon: 1:39

Yeah, yeah, I think so. The very first variable is the what I had to look at. And I was only twenty seven. Right. This is in twenty fourteen. I didn't know anything. I still barely know anything. Right. I just don't tell my clients that. Right. But it was I had to look and say there's, you know, it's pretty common for any industry, but certainly in real estate, you come into the industry, you're a brand new agent. They say this is how you have to build your business. Cold call, go door knock, host, open houses, go buy leaves, social media, all the things. Of course, referrals and relationships, which is what I've done. But what I first Wade was the first variable was does it even align with who I am? Right. Because I had, I had enough understanding that if I was going to try to build a business off of cold calling like they told me to, which is so counter to my personality and how I'm naturally wired that maybe I would be able to do it. But if I did succeed in that industry or I succeed in that way, it would burn me out. Right? Because it's just totally counter to who I am. It's impossible to show up and be someone you're not every single day. That's impossible. And so the first variable for me was, how am I actually uniquely wired? And let me go try to become excellent at that. Right? So I had to navigate through what is that and who am I and what does that look like for me? And so that was number one when I decided that was relationships. The second variable was in the world of relationships, how am I going to do it? So even in that world, there's differences and there's variables and what people would choose to do. So for me, for example, I hate being on the phone. And so what I had to learn this is over years, but what I had to learn was at the end of anything I did to generate business, I stopped and I asked myself, did it give me energy or did it drain my energy? Right? It was just an awareness of we're already innately wired to understand what are the things I like to do and what are the things I don't like to do? And my lineage and on my team loves to fish. I don't I don't think he chose that. He just likes to fish and I don't. Right. So I love podcasting. I love being a guest on podcasts. That's just because it's something I love to do. Love being on stage. A lot of people don't, right? There's so many variables there. So all I was doing was paying attention to instead of simply following what everyone said I needed to do, I was listening and I was taking their advice and their system and their wisdom, but I was running it through a filter of, okay, of everything they're telling me what actually makes sense for me as an individual, because we're not a one size fits all. There's a copycat trap in our industry, probably in every industry. And so how do I actually take what they're saying, match it to who I am, and then go pursue excellence in that. So within that context, tons of variables that I just kept honing and honing took me three and a half years to finally figure out exactly how it should work for me. And that's what I've been doing for the last nine years.

Dawn Kennedy: 4:24

So three and a half years, not doing that cookie cutter approach or the copycat approach, or the dedication that it must take to do for three and a half years just what works for you. Can you talk a little bit about when you started to see success trickle in? I can hear people now driving around and going three and a half years of just trying and testing. When people are telling me how to do this might feel a little counterintuitive to somebody who's been in business for a while and it's stalled, or they're just starting a business and they're trying to do sort of what the conventional wisdom in the industry is telling them to do.

Garrett Maroon: 5:04

Yeah. Great question. So I would say first, it didn't take me three and a half years to start succeeding, right? That way, if it did, I would have quit way sooner than that. Once I. So my first full year I was fortunate, sold twenty seven homes. My second full year sold fifty. So I was in the top one percent in our entire region. Age twenty nine. That was such a blessing. When I say it took me three and a half years, the hardest challenge was first and foremost, everyone told me when I said, I'm going to sell fifty homes, that was my goal. I want to do it exclusively by relationship. Every single person said it's not possible. Even the leader of our office, Don, who is supposed to be the cheerleader for agents, she literally laughed in my face and said, you're not going to be able to do that. You need to do something else. And so I was twenty nine and stubborn, and so I was like, well, I'm going to go figure it out. When I say it took me three and a half years. What I mean is to fine tune and create the most perfect system for me. It took me three and a half years when I'm teaching it now. So I've got a group that I'm coaching right now, right when I'm teaching and I'm saying, look, here's what I want you to do. You're going to implement my system and you're going to do that for a year. It's going to be a B level for you because it's not personalized yet. It's just going to be, I need to see that you can implement a system and you can consistently execute. That's the problem that every agent has. So if they'll show up and consistently execute, then you earn the right to be creative and personalize it. So maybe you don't love video text. That's fine. What do you love more of? And we'll elevate that. But when someone's listening and saying, well, I don't want to take that long or excuse me, what if they're telling me to build the business this way right now? I would challenge any agent and any business owner, quite honestly, and say, number one, you might have success right now, but if it's counter to who you are, you will either burn out or you'll hit a plateau, right? You just will. Because I'm not naturally showing up trying to get better at cold calling because I can't stand cold calling. If you understand and will give yourself a long enough runway, you will find success. Right. So the agent, I mean, it is so common in our industry when I'm coaching an agent and they say, I've been doing well, but I've spent the last two years or year or three years whatever, and I've been doing social media and buying leads and all the things they tell me to do. I'm exhausted. I have no margin in my life. I feel like I'm always on. I really want to work my relationships, but everybody tells me I have to do these other things. And so when I show up and say no, we get to simplify and focus on what actually works. Instead of having multiple ways to generate business. One powerful stream is what we're going for. And then they say, okay, that's what I wanted to do from the beginning. Now. Great. We're going to start implementing. And if it takes you three years to get to the point where you can sell fifty homes and only work two to three hours a week in your business, you would take that. Everyone would take that. Right? So we make the mistake that any tree that is powerful and will last through the storms that you're having literally right now, right dawn and all the things that get thrown at it, we make the mistake that those trees grow quickly and they don't, they need years to develop the root system to withstand whatever comes. And so as agents, we have bought in, and I think any business owner, but we bought into this idea that business is like a, a Pez dispenser. You can put you go, I don't even know the vending machine. That's a better one. Does anybody use Pez? I have no idea.

Dawn Kennedy: 8:27

I don't know.

Garrett Maroon: 8:28

Anybody. Probably not. But the vending machine. Right. You put money in, you get a business out. That's not how real life works. And that's certainly not how sustainability works. So yeah, it's the right question. But I would say what you're doing right now, if an agent is questioning what you're doing right now, can you sustain it for three years? Does it match who you are? Right? And is it draining you or is it giving you life? And if you answered no to any of those, or you said it's draining you. You're on the wrong path. It's going to burn you out. There's no sustainability. We've got to get you back on the right path. Understand those variables. And that's how you're going to have long term success.

Dawn Kennedy: 9:00

So variables when building right up front, when you started and you were asking the question, is this working for me? Is this not working for me? Were you following the conventional wisdom, if you will, or the way that you start? I'm gonna use air quotes and video. You'll see the air quotes. If not, if you're just listening, I air quoted starting the way you're supposed to, because I'm sure that there are lots of supposed tos. And we hear that again across industries, right? This is how you do it. How did you find yourself really evaluating that and then feeling comfortable enough to push back against those supposed tos as you were refining what worked for you?

Garrett Maroon: 9:39

Yeah. Great question. I, I was benefited by being young and naive and stubborn. Honestly, that was very helpful. But I would say, and I tell people all the time now, the word should is a very bad word in business, right? I should. Oh, look at what they're doing. I should be doing social media too. I should be doing that as well. I had enough awareness of myself that when I just stopped to think, okay, cold calling works for that person, cool. Could I do it? I don't know, probably right. You can pretty much do anything. Just enough awareness to say, but is that how I want to build this? I didn't know what I was, I didn't even know I was an entrepreneur, right? I was brand new. I was out of higher education, Don. There was no commission structure, right? It's like you're on a state job. And so I didn't know I was a business owner, but I knew that I didn't want to grow the business that way. And so I just had enough gumption to push back long enough to see it start to work. Now, it took me five and a half months to make a sale, so it was hard. There were so many times where friends around me were selling homes quicker, doing it in a way that they now don't like to do, but have built that habit, and it was difficult for me to stay on that path. But whatever was going on inside my head was, if this is going to work, it's gotta work the way that makes sense to you. There's no sustainability. That's the those twelve years ago. So I don't know everything I was thinking, right. But I remember thinking that clearly, if it's going to work, it's got to be built around who you are or else you're going to burn out. I didn't know if that was true. I assumed that was true. And then the last thing I'd say is I hired a coach really early, and so I was in the red. I wasn't making any money or I didn't make a dime until five and a half months in. But I hired a coach really quickly because I at least understood that business was my brain versus your brain and really my brain versus my brain. Right. And what I was willing to believe, and could I borrow someone else's belief long enough who said, no, you can build by relationships. Can I borrow that long enough? Until it actually started working for me. And then I saw for myself and I started believing it for myself. So having a coach, someone in my corner who understood what my heart and my passion was and had seen it work for other people. That was wildly helpful to just stay on that narrow path. Honestly, when everyone was telling me to do something else.

Dawn Kennedy: 11:58

Right, and being in twelve years now you've been through the buyer market, the seller market, the pandemic market, like the.

Garrett Maroon: 12:06

Yeah, sure.

Dawn Kennedy: 12:07

All of the interest rate changes, all of the different financing things that have gone on in banking and real estate in the industry. So were you consistent, even though all of these outside forces, do you feel that they had any sort of impact on maybe where or how you evolved certain things as you were going, or were you pretty much working in those outside things were influencing where you were evolving, or do you feel like they happened where you were evolving and you applied that to the external forces?

Garrett Maroon: 12:46

Yeah. Good question. So I would say the only time I changed anything was during the pandemic. And the only thing that changed was instead of doing in-person client events, which we do for a year, we were coming up with virtual events. Right. That was it. But what's been fascinating. So in my second year in the industry, I sold fifty homes, and I've done that literally every year since. Doesn't matter what the market is, doesn't matter what's happening in interest rates, right? Because what is what I know to be true now and through study and personal experience is humans make decisions the same way. Who do I trust? Right? Who cares about me? And so when we were in a really, really busy market, like Covid in the pandemic, when we're in a super busy market, they were looking around and yes, speed mattered, but they were looking around and say, okay, this market's crazy. People paying one hundred grand over list price. I need somebody I can trust who you guys know. Oh, you can call Garrett. They'll take care of you. Right? When the interest rates went way sky high and someone was thinking, I need to move, but I don't know if this makes sense. Like, how do I process this out? Who can I trust? Will they call us? Why? Because we've always been there when it was a really heavy buyer's market and they could take their time. It's, well, who can I trust that's not going to push me into a decision that I don't want and it's going to help me. So everything comes down to trust. And so what I've seen is trust is built by the consistency of care. And so for me, that's when I talk about the system that I built for myself for the last eleven years, I've done the input, the lead generation, the input that I set out to do every single month for eleven years, and I haven't missed. That is why my business has been consistent, because I've been consistent in the input. Right. And so therefore, the output has been consistent. Doesn't matter what market we're in, in a market where there were, you know, we had twenty three, twenty four. Those were the worst documented years in real estate history. When you adjusted for there were seventy million more people, even though we sold the same amount of homes as we did in ninety five. Seventy million more people. Those were tough years. Well, what happened? If your business is built on cold calling and your business is built on numbers and dials, and if I call one thousand, I get one. What if there's only five hundred to call now? And those now, you don't have as many opportunities. Well, whether the consumer is going to do better. I said, wait a minute. All of these agents. Now every single one of them needs business. Now I can take my time and really figure out who is it that I want to work with. So that's going to increase the amount of referrals coming in. AI jumps in the game. And what have we seen an increase in referrals, right? Because now it's like, yeah, it's cool and it's fun and I use it too. But then it's, I don't know if I can trust it. Gosh, who can I trust? I need a person. So trust is the only currency in business that I've ever seen. And I think that trust is built by that consistency of care because I've been that consistent for eleven years. That's why my business is consistent. And I just think that's the easiest math equation. Consistency equals consistency and Inconsistency equals inconsistency. And it doesn't matter what the market's doing. You can still have a good business and you can still win.

Dawn Kennedy: 15:50

So the person who told you you couldn't sell fifty houses in a year in your second year, what was the response after you've done that? Because obviously there had to have been that consistent input going in. That was earlier on versus now. It's kind of I think as business owners, it's a little easier to go, well, yeah, after five years, eight years, ten years, we become more efficient, we become more confident. It's a little easier to be consistent with those inputs, right? That's all we can control the input. So what did that look like though, that second year when you were like, I hit the goal that I set for myself, my inputs were my inputs and I'm in control. How did that impact or change really your own view? And then also the view of people around you about your methodology.

Garrett Maroon: 16:39

Yeah. Great question. So as I think most of us would assume, it went from, you can't do it to when I did it to, hey, can you teach us how to do that? And it was there's so much assumption happening in any business. If this is what's possible, this is what you can do or you got to look like this. You gotta act this way if you want to succeed. And just none of that's true, right? Like, yeah, you can succeed in those ways, if that makes sense for who you already are. But all kinds of people can win in any business, right? So I set out to do it. I wanted to prove it. And really it came down to I'd come up with this idea on, how could I sell fifty homes that year? I thought it was going to take me seventy hours a week. And so I sit down with my wife one night. Excuse me. We didn't have any kids at the time, and I just said, her name is Rachel. I said, babe, I think I can sell fifty homes this year. It's going to take me seventy hours a week. What do you think? And she looks at me and her one question changed everything. She said, I love it. Can you figure out how to do it in under thirty hours a week? Right. And it was just this reframing of the question. And so I didn't understand at the time the way I do now and the research I've done, but I teach everybody. They gotta go create a guiding question. And so what is it that really matters to you? And so, for example, maybe somebody says, someone recently asked me on a podcast and they said, what would you tell the agent who asked you? How do I sell thirty homes this year? And I said, I would tell them, that answer is really easy. Go work one hundred hours a week, spend one hundred grand, you find your way there. I think what they mean is, how do I sell thirty homes this year without missing family dinner and coaching my son's soccer team, or whatever their scenario is? When we create a more intentional question, we create a better answer, right? Our brain goes to work on that. So my question was no longer, how do I sell fifty homes? It was, how do I do it in under forty hours a week? Forced me to double down on what was going to work, forced me to get rid of the things that weren't working. And so because of that mentality, because I was moving forward on that, I was averaging thirty six hours a week. How do I do this? How do I sustain this? I really started to see this is not a fluke. I'm actually building a process that I can follow that's going to create a natural outcome. So I didn't know that I could do fifty deals in one year, right? Certainly my second year, I had no idea. I just so happened to hit fifty on the money. And for me, it was, okay, this works. What I'm doing is working. Let's double down. Let's get better at it. How little time can I spend? How little money can I spend? Let me understand what inputs actually make the difference. And as I started to believe it more deeply, I felt more confident telling other people how to do the same. And we were starting to see similar results for them too. So yeah, it definitely changed. It went from there's no way we can do it to, wow, how did you do that? I want to do that too. And so definitely that was the result of that.

Dawn Kennedy: 19:20

That is very interesting because what it sounds like is your wife, in her wisdom, kind of closed an open ended question, right? Yeah. She there were some conditions on that because I think sometimes we do walk around with these open ended questions like, well, how are we going to do this? And without those limitations, without those conditions without putting sort of that the closing side on that open ended question. I think we give ourselves maybe too many variables to look at, because there's nothing actually like forcing us to funnel down to what's working because we maybe still feel like we have more time to test and experiment.

Garrett Maroon: 19:58

It's good. Yeah, I think that's one hundred percent right. If you don't define success for yourself, someone else will do it for you. And in my industry, I'll tell a quick story. In my industry, it wasn't that long ago where, and I won't say a name, but the top agent in our market was winning the award at the end of the year, sold the most homes on the stage at our awards ceremony, taking selfies, congratulating people, whatever. But it was widely known that he and this is not gossip. It was widely known that his company had actually lost money. But worse, he had gotten divorced that year, was no longer talking to his oldest son. Right. And but yet he's up there getting congratulated. And so my point in saying that is if I asked an agent, do you want to be the number one agent in your market? They'd probably say yes. But if I said, well, if it took losing your mind, I'm not saying that the only way to become number one agent is to do great things, but if it took losing a marriage and not talking to your oldest son and you didn't actually make money, do you still want to be the number one agent? Like, well, that's not what I mean. Okay, then define it for me. Right. Because if I said, how do I make one hundred thousand dollars this year? Again, to your point, there are a it makes it harder because there's so many variables. You could do a hundred different things to hit one hundred thousand dollars. But if you say, as my wife gave me, how do I sell fifty homes in under forty hours a week? The only way I could solve that problem was I had to master the art of referral. I couldn't do anything else. I couldn't spend three hours a day on cold calls. I couldn't be working open houses on the weekends. There was no way for me to solve that problem except one way, which forced focus, which created mastery. And mastery is the whole reason. Now I can do it consistently, right? So we just allow ourselves to your point. Such a big net as if we can do all of these things all the time, we're going to hit it with great accuracy. And none of it's true to, again, to use your word, too many variables in that process. So ask a better question. It's going to force you into the right answer.

Dawn Kennedy: 21:55

Now did she ask this question? And this is going to sound crazy and I don't mean it, but it wasn't a naive question. Like she's asking the question because she doesn't know really the industry at that point, because you're only in your second year. And so it's just a naive question of, well, can we do it? And maybe that naive it's, hey, actually helped you sort of close that loop a little faster. I wonder if we don't ask those questions because we don't know or we're in business for so long, we don't believe we can change it.

Speaker 4: 22:28

Yeah.

Garrett Maroon: 22:28

So I definitely, again, there's so much that I look back and say. So I was twenty eight. She was twenty five. We didn't know anything about anything, right, let alone business. And so I don't know. She doesn't even remember that moment. Right. Which is that's a pivotal moment for me. But it really was the crazy reality of it is if she had said, yeah, let's do it. Sell fifty homes in seventy hours, I would probably still today be working a business that was really highly productive, but I'd be gone all the time. I'd be working a ton of hours, right? I'd be missing my kids growing up if she had not put the constraints on it and the best way possible. When I set out and said, I want to honor my wife, right? She's way more important than my business success. So how do I do it? I wanted to solve that problem. If she had not asked me to put those rails on it and said, can you do it in under forty hours a week out of being naive or whatever it was, neither of us knew anything about the industry. If she hadn't asked me that, I wouldn't have figured out how to do it. And so it is exactly true to your point. If someone said, I have coaching clients now that are making tons of money, doing really well in the industry, working sixty, seventy hours a week. And I said, what if I told you it's actually possible for you to make the same amount of money or more and work half the time? Like, I don't think that's true. I don't think that's possible. Let me show you how it is. And then when they see it and they say, oh my gosh, this is possible, I could do this right. Most of us have become accustomed to exactly what you said, Don, that in order for me to succeed at whatever level I am, this is how long it takes. Or I see a lot of, especially specifically in the real estate industry, agents who say, I'm only selling ten homes a year, I want to sell twenty, but I can't double my hours. Well, that's not the equation. You don't have to. We've just allowed ourselves to believe a narrative that isn't true, and it's because we're not questioning it. Right. Question everything. Question. How long does it take? Question how much can you make and how much amount of time? And the people that do that are the ones that come up with the right answer. And the right answer is what gives them the freedom that they're looking for.

Dawn Kennedy: 24:31

So I'm going to bring this back to the fact that you initially really honored the fact in yourself of what do I like? What do I like to do? How do I want to do this work? And you took that and you married it almost to like a closed loop question rather than how can we possibly do this? It was two conditions. I want to do it my way. Right. This is Burger King, and I'm going to do it under forty hours because that's my wife's condition. Right. And I'm going to honor that. Do you think someone who's now been in business and has been a habit for years and years, and this is for the audience, can we ask that question midstream? Five years in, eight years in and with some good decision discipline and with looking at the variables, can we make those changes? Or do you think we get so into habit that it's almost like this little warning of when you first start, you need to ask these questions and put these guardrails up because once you get going, the train's leaving, it's out of the station. It's harder to turn.

Speaker 4: 25:32

Yeah.

Dawn Kennedy: 25:32

So people have been in the industry a lot longer before they find you.

Speaker 4: 25:37

Yeah. So such a good question.

Garrett Maroon: 25:40

And I would say the honest answer is yes, they absolutely can change. But it's going to be harder, right? Because you have to the first thing I do with and I'll give you an example from today, this morning. But the first thing I have to do with anybody is cut out all the things they're doing that don't matter, that they've just become convinced do matter. Right? And it's like, why are you doing that? Oh, I don't know. I just do it. Stop doing it. Okay, great. Just bought back an hour, whatever the scenario is. And so I was meeting this morning with an amazing agent who's been in the business for twenty three years. Right. I actually started on his team in twenty fourteen, been in the business for twenty three years, an amazing man. And we were sitting down and talking. He was like, I need to reset my business around your system and the way that you teach it, right? I'm still working too many hours. I've been working too many hours. He's been one of the best agents. I mean, he's widely known in our market and just a great reputation. It's done really good business. But he's saying I need a reset. And I the first thing he said, all right, it's totally possible. Let's look at what you're doing now. Let's cut out most of it and let's install something super simple that is going to move the needle for you, but not take nearly as much time as you've taken now. Right? So it's just again, to your point, is it hard? Absolutely. It's hard. It's hard mostly because we it is hard for a human to come back and accept that all those things I did for all those years didn't actually matter. Right? It was time that I spent that didn't move the needle in my business at all. I missed, you know, plays and dinners and dates and all the things. It's hard for me to accept that and say, you're right. I just didn't know better. Those things weren't necessary. So is that hard? One hundred percent it is, but can you change it? Absolutely. And it doesn't take that long to immediately buy back ten to fifteen hours a week, right? Not for a top agent, because most of the things they're doing don't matter, or they should be delegated and leveraged out. and then really installing. Okay, let's look at what actually works. What actually is creating the business. Let's double down and get better at that. And you're going to be fine. And six months to a year, someone can dramatically change that. I've seen that a lot.

Dawn Kennedy: 27:42

So six months to a year flies a little bit in the face of the internet. Within two months, if you these five things and I want to say that I agree with you that changing habits, changing yourself, changing your perspective probably takes a little more time. Why do you think we're in such a rush when we're finally waking up and realizing, hey, this is not how I want to do this anymore? Yeah, how I wanted to do it in the first place. The only way I knew how to do it.

Speaker 4: 28:09

Sure.

Dawn Kennedy: 28:10

Because lots of business owners start there. They end up there, they stay there. And again, this is the Business mastery podcast, meaning we evolve as human beings.

Speaker 4: 28:17

Yeah.

Dawn Kennedy: 28:17

Business owners. So let's talk a little bit about really the process and what it takes versus the CliffsNotes version that people get sucked into that maybe still doesn't allow them to examine why they're doing what they're doing.

Garrett Maroon: 28:33

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's hard to break. First of all, we live in a culture where Amazon now could deliver something to me in two hours, right? Or I'll tell you a story. On the other day, I bought a book for my best buddy and it wasn't on Amazon for some reason. And so I get an email. It's like, thanks for your order. It will arrive in seven to ten business days. And I was like, this is uncomfortable, right? Like it's supposed to be there tomorrow. I don't understand where's the prime delivery, right? I don't get it. We have become accustomed that good things come quickly. And in some ways they do. Right? Amazon and deliveries and all the things. What a blessing that is. On demand training all the things. But what we forget is that again, the human condition, the ability for me to change my mindset is absolutely there. But it takes time because I've been conditioned in one way. Just like if someone is like, I gotta get healthy and they eat a salad, well, all of a sudden you're not healthy, right? It's the compounding Effect of the micro choices every single day. There's a great book called Soundtracks by Jon Acuff. He talks about each morning when you wake up, do you chance your mindset or do you choose it? And so even though I full on agree and I love self-development and all the things, I still wake up and chance it sometimes, right? Because it's hard. It's easy to fall into bad habits and just habits in general. It's hard to change what we've known and always done, right, because it's our identity is wrapped up to. So the hardest part is not the action of it. The hardest part is the mental change that comes with it. And so six months to a year. Yeah. Because it's going to take you a while to really start to believe what's right and true and possible. You either have to see it, you have to experience it, or something crazy has to happen in your life and force you to do it right. If you're I have a friend who now is super healthy, but it's because he had terrible health problem and all of a sudden it's like, wow, I got to do something about it, right? So let's hope that we don't get into that position. But if you wake up one day And you say, okay, I've been doing really well in business and for example, but yet I'm missing everything about my kids, right? I'm just missing everything. I can't do that anymore. How do I do this? How do I change? Well, the nature is I either just keep going or I give up, right? Neither of those is the right answer. The right answer is I just need to start asking a better question. And every single day run it through that filter. Maybe I've been working eighty hours a week. So I just say, here's my new question. How do I sell fifty homes? Or how will I is a better question, but how will I sell fifty homes in under forty hours a week? And so every single thing that comes at me that day, I just run it through a filter. Can I still accomplish this if I go do X, Y, and Z? If I do that open house this weekend, can I still do it in under forty hours a week? Does it actually matter? And so we just get to the point where I become convinced and I've convinced myself, which is the worst and hardest part, that everything I've done is necessary up to this point. When we start to challenge that, it is a challenge to our mindset to say there was a better way the whole time. I feel that way when someone shows me whatever it is that I'm doing, say guess what, Gareth, there was a better way. You're like, what? Why did it take me five years? I've been podcasting for six years, right? You've been doing it a long time. Why did it take me four and a half years to find that out? It's disappointing. I can either sit there and be disappointed, but like, you know what? I'm just going to ignore it. Just keep doing what I'm doing. Or I can say, I want to get better. I want to change. I want to be more productive. I want to be more present. What does that look like? It's time for me to make that change. And it's just changes hard, changes long. And we've got to give ourselves grace in that process or we'll never get to the other side.

Dawn Kennedy: 32:02

What's interesting about asking the better questions is I'm hearing you give examples of better questions. Most of the time. Seems like it comes from the perspective of not is this possible? It's how would I do it within this constraint? Right? So in other words, you already believe it's possible to do it within that constraint. You just have to be the creative being that does the execution within those constraints. So would you say that the belief has to come first, or do you really think that you can just set something and creatively figure out, or is it both?

Garrett Maroon: 32:37

Yeah, so such a good question. I would say you either are borrowing the belief from someone else who has done it before and say, okay, I didn't think I feel like that happens when I'm coaching. Is there like, all right, you say you can do it, you've done it. I just trust you that this is possible, right? Or you are literally setting out and just saying, so a couple months ago, I'm in this group of guys that are business owners and CEOs, young guys like me, and we wrote our obituaries, right? I'm thirty nine years old. That was pretty intense. Yeah. And it still freaks me out a little bit. And like, what we've been doing is, and I would say eighty percent of the time, I'm sitting there every morning and I read it. And the reason being is because it is pulling me in the direction that I intend to go. Right? So it doesn't mean that every single decision I make that day is perfectly in line with what I want to end up. Of course, not every single plane is something like off track ninety eight percent of the time, but they still remain where they're supposed to go, right? So the reality is, I think the alternative, because I don't know that I know that answer, right? Do I have to believe it first or do I have to see it? I don't know that I know, but I do know. The alternative is if you have no endpoint, then how the heck do you know where you're going? How do you know how to get there? You have no idea. And so when you give yourself a destination and you say, this is where I'm trying to go, I maybe you won't get there in a year. Maybe you don't get there in three. But I don't personally know anyone that has set out to say, this is my intent, right? For good reason. It's because for me, I want to make as much as I can in as little as I can, because I don't want to miss my kids growing up. My oldest is nine. My youngest is a baby, right? I don't want to miss that. I'm not willing to miss that. And so in the constraints of what I have, how big can I build something? And I don't know the answer. Nobody knows. I find it fascinating that none of us know what our potential is, right? You don't know what your potential is. I don't know, my potential is I hate every single human is fully aware that I haven't maxed out my potential. And so if that's true, what question am I asking myself that's going to draw me to max out my potential? It's giving me that North Star to say, pull me in that direction. How will I do this? Or write your obituary again, a little intense wasn't my idea, dog. But write it and say, how do I get pulled in the direction that I intend to go? What am I telling my brain? Here's the problem brain. Go work on this. This is where I want to end up. And most of the time we're not telling ourselves anything. And so then when we sit there and wonder, why am I not heading in any direction? Because you haven't given yourself a direction. I think it's that simple. And then the amazing reality is your brain will solve problems that we never thought possible because we just ask it the question. And that, I think is the single most powerful thing we can do is ask yourself a better question and it'll pull you in that direction. And at some point you'll believe it when you start to do it. But just keep asking and your brain's going to go to work and it's going to figure it out. I really think it's not easy, but it's simple, right? When you get to that point.

Dawn Kennedy: 35:40

And it's incredibly important, I think we sometimes don't want to ask the question because we don't have an answer, meaning that there's nothing that we can pull to immediately that says, oh, if I ask this, I will have this slate of five different options, and then I'll just test each one. I think sometimes we don't ask the question because we literally have no idea, and it's uncomfortable to marinate in the question. We don't have any idea if it hasn't been revealed or if you haven't evolved enough yet.

Garrett Maroon: 36:11

So good. I'm looking at my question, Dawn, literally right here behind my screen. It is right in front of me and I have no idea how to solve it. right? I just don't. But I will say what's been so helpful as I sit down and I've thought about how do I solve this problem? I'll come up with an idea and then I play that idea out and I'm like, that doesn't work, right? I can't for me, part of it is how do I make X amount a year without selling a house and taking every seventh week off with my family? So I'll get to the point, say, wait a minute, I would still have to do this, or I would not be able to take that many weeks off or whatever the scenario is. And so right now, the question is less of, I told people this all the time when they were buying houses, consumers, I'd say, look, the process of buying a house is a process of elimination, not selection. You're eliminating things that don't work until you find the one that does. It's the same concept here. I look at that question and I come up with an idea and I run it through. I'm like, that doesn't work. I'm going to eliminate it. And I'm just going to as long as I eliminate enough, I'll eventually find the solution. I don't know what it is. And I've been looking at that question since January first, and I still don't know what it is. But until I've tried literally everything, which is probably not possible, I'm just going to keep trying because this is what I want to accomplish. Right. And so how do I do it? I don't know yet. That's okay. I'll just keep asking till I figure it out. And so because of that, it's going to restrain me to your point. It's going to remove first me to remove variables. So it becomes clear this is there's one way or there's two ways. This is it. And you got to pick one and be really good at it. There's no other option. Okay, that's a little bit simpler then. Well, you could solve that in eighteen different ways. Well, great. Now what do I do? Right. That's confusing.

Dawn Kennedy: 37:48

Yeah. No, absolutely. I and to your point, I don't know of too many systems that talk about problem solving as a process of elimination. In other words, everything that comes up gets tested and gets a yes or a no. Or maybe not now or never, right? Most of the time we are looking for a solution rather than a slate of options. And I think that also kind of gets us funneling down sometimes into these places that develop the habits that make it harder later on to.

Speaker 5: 38:20

You're right.

Dawn Kennedy: 38:21

Turn the Titanic. So to your point, I would say asking the better questions, but then being super open to looking at options with an eye towards elimination versus grabbing the one that's a fifty percent fit or seventy percent fit. Because I think that's another thing that we do is we grab the one that it's, it's an almost fit because we don't want to feel stagnant.

Garrett Maroon: 38:45

So true. Yeah. I mean, it's such, I love that I just the imagery of the Titanic turning around was such good imagery, right? Because it's. So now what happened to the Titanic when it sank eventually. But the reality of we've created our own Titanic. No one else told us to do it. No one else made us do it. Nobody else could make us do it. The question is, did you build the boat that you meant to build? And are you brave enough to cut half of it off and say, this is not what I meant? I need to figure that out. Right? Some of the hardest things I've ever done in my career have been when I had a big team and I realized this is not what I wanted. What I wanted was to get out of day to day production, spend more time with my kids. And again, it was another example, Don, where everyone told me, you can't get out of day to day production if you only have one agent and one admin. It's not possible. You got to have a big, massive machine. And then I literally just said, okay. And I started asking myself, how do I get out of day to day production with one agent and one admin and still make the same amount of money? I just asked myself the question and guess what? I solved the problem. It wasn't easy, I solved it. Now the hard part was I had to let all the other people go. And that was the most terrible thing I've ever had to do in this industry, right? Is people I love saying this just is not what I meant to do, and I'm so sorry about it and the bravery to say, I just got to do it because this is what's best for my family. And I absolutely believe it'll be what's best for you long term too. But then everyone said, wait a minute, how did you do that? Teach me how to do it. I didn't want a big, massive machine. Right? So it's not that I'm definitely not smarter than most people I'm in a room with. It's just that I've learned to ask myself more intentional questions. Right. This is the whole theme of what we've been talking about. But because of that, I solved the problem that everyone told me wasn't possible. And what I look back now and I say it's only has not been possible. I'm the guy that's done it. And you guys are now asking me simply because no one else asked themselves the question before me. I don't know why, but because they didn't. I could easily have been sitting here and saying, oh, they did it, I'll do it too. But no one asked the question. And so I think for everything, it doesn't matter if you're in real estate or you're in any other business, you're at home or you're a parent or whatever it is, your scenario. If we really hone in and ask the right question, we will start to find incredible answers. And because of that, it starts to change everything. So be careful and intentional with what goes in because your brain's going to solve that problem. Give it the right problem to solve.

Dawn Kennedy: 41:04

Yeah, what a great wrap up. Give it the right problem to solve. Ask the right question, put the constraints on there that are meaningful. And don't don't think it happens in five minutes because you've read a book, right? Or it's oh two two viral posts, you'll be fine keeping the reality right for for, for business in front of us as well. Not that things don't happen quickly, but just the expectation that they're going to be solved long term means that we should maybe give a little bit of expectation runway, even if it happens overnight. We're not setting ourselves up and looking at ourselves as if I asked the wrong question. I asked the right question. I'm going to give it time to marinate, right? Give it a little time to germinate before.

Speaker 5: 41:48

You're.

Dawn Kennedy: 41:49

Picking up that plant seed every time to see if it's growing.

Garrett Maroon: 41:52

Right, right right, right. Yeah, I heard it real quick. I heard it now. I can't remember who it was, but it was on a podcast. It was a really famous musician. I don't know why the name's escaping me, but he said, everyone's always asked. Me how did you become an overnight success? And he says, well, I wasn't. I tell them I was a ten year overnight success. What do you mean you didn't see me playing shows out of my garage where no one cared. Right? And so, yeah, we've become convinced that you can become viral and there's like one percent of one percent of one percent of people that do that. That's not how it works. Don't pursue that. Right. Pursue the guy in the garage playing shows to nobody. Eventually, over time, everyone cares, right? Like that's just how it actually works. And we've got to have the gumption long enough to do that.

Dawn Kennedy: 42:33

Yes, absolutely. All right. Where can everyone find you? Reach out to you if they're a real estate professional, maybe talk to you about your methodology. Where can people from the podcast reach out?

Garrett Maroon: 42:46

Yeah. So well first go to Garrett dot com backslash podcast. There's a free gift. So the book I wrote would give you the audiobook for free. Would love for it to be a blessing to you. So go check that out. First. You can email me at Garrett at Garrett dot com or check me out on social media. My name, I'm not that interesting, but you can find me there too, and would love to chat with anybody.

Dawn Kennedy: 43:06

Amazing. We're gonna put all that down in the show notes. So if you find this on the day Garrett goes live on YouTube. Or if you find it two years later, you will be able to find all of the information so that you can lurk on social media and of course, listen to the audiobook. So thank you so much for being here today. It's such an important conversation and your perspective is phenomenal. I appreciate you sharing your wisdom.

Garrett Maroon: 43:30

Thanks for having me, Don, I appreciate it.

Dawn Kennedy: 43:32

All right. We'll talk to you all next time on the next episode of the Business Mastery Podcast. Take care. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Business Mastery Podcast. If you want to learn more about me, you can go to Don k Kennedy dot com and you can now check us out on YouTube as well as, of course, any of your favorite platforms that host podcasts. Take care.