Overcoming Self-Doubt as a Young Broker

Welcome back to another episode of CRE – The Unspoken Truth. I am Charlie Coppola, joined with my father, Craig. And today we’re talking about overcoming self-doubt as a young broker. Anyone young in your career probably could get value from this, not just brokerage. But I want to start, you know, tell me why. I know your background, you, you know, played baseball, wanted to get into finance, but why did you ultimately get into brokerage?

Well, I got into, I back-doored into brokerage. I tried to become a stock broker and no one would hire me. Merrill Lynch and Dean Witter were the two, and I just couldn’t even get an interview. So I pivoted to brokerage because I knew I wanted to be in commission-based sales. And how did I know that? That’s a, I think the deep questions we ask are really good. How did I know I wanted to be in sales?

Well, the story is I was playing professional baseball for the Minnesota Twins, and there was a guy at the time, the minor league director for the Twins was a guy named George Brophy. He married the daughter of the owner of the Twins. And so this is back in the early 80s, so it was a lot more wild west type stuff. But in the early 80s, George Brophy was, just because he married this daughter, he became the minor league director. And so he was this super heavy guy. It was not, he was really big, had never played baseball. And he had a big ego, and they said that when George Brophy came to town, he never left alone. And he would release guys. He’d come to town and he’d release somebody just because his ego was there and he could do it.

And I just started looking at that. When I got released by the Twins, they literally sent me a form letter saying, “Hey, your services are no longer required.” And I’m like, I don’t ever want to be put in this situation again. So I did not want to get a job. My whole focus at that point was I want to bet on myself, and I want to go into a commission-based deal, because I didn’t have any money. I want to go into a commission-based deal where I can better myself, and if I lose, I will always know that it was me, not George Brophy coming to town. So George Brophy drove me a lot in the early years, because I’m like, I don’t want the next George Brophy to fire me.

Were there moments before that where you’re like, I think I would do well in sales, I think I like the competitive or the bet-on-myself side? Or was that just truly that big of a pivotal moment for you?

Well, it was an ongoing thing where I was just looking at, I had other jobs. Wasn’t just the Twins, but that was the most poignant. But I, you know, I had done some jobs in the summer. I know I didn’t want to be a laborer. I went to college. I knew I, you know, I’d done some things other than play baseball, very little, but enough to know. And I don’t know, early on I just said, and I think, and I am, my brother, we’re the only ones who, one of my brothers, have really done that. Everybody else has worked for people, and I just knew that I wanted to take a shot myself. Because a part of this was, and this is one of the reasons why I didn’t have a partner until Andrew 23 years ago, is I felt like I was going to outwork everybody. Yeah. And you know, you feel like that, you don’t know if you’re going to or not.

Yeah. How long did that George Brophy, you know, drive you?

And it drove me in certain times, but more once I started selling, having commission dollars come in the door. You know, I was actually doing really well, and then I married your mom at 28, and you know, then two cannot live as cheap as one. That says that. And so it, and we had, you know, your older sister, we had Kate. And so very quickly it became, Tracy was stay-at-home mom, Kate was there, then, you know, Kelly, then you, then Claire. And very quickly, you know, by the time my early 30s, I’m the sole provider for a big family. And that was the, yeah, George Brophy was in my mind, but the “can we afford to eat” was more important.

Yeah.

And I was making good money. You know, it’s not like I was, I’d always made good money. But when you start, it’s not just making good money to make the rent payment, or the house payment in this case. It was also, we got to start putting money away for colleges, we have to start saving for retirement. There’s a whole different thing. And one of the things I’ve been really shocked about for this generation, the younger generation, is they’re not thinking about those things. They’re not thinking about setting, you’re a very unique unicorn in that case. Setting aside money for 529s for colleges, buying houses, putting money away for retirement, those kinds of things are very, very important. I knew I didn’t have any backstop. So I had to start early in terms of retirement as well. So it’s just really expensive.

Yeah. So George Brophy drove you at the beginning, and then getting married and having a family made…

Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep.

So what doubt did you face in those early days as a young broker?

Well, I wasn’t very successful in my first job. I took a job with Equit in Chicago, and it was a salary position, but I was leasing a building, and I was pretty unsuccessful at it. I didn’t like living in Chicago. I didn’t like the company. I didn’t like a lot of things about it. And so when I got back here, I did way better on my second job. I got a really good mentor, Rick Kfka, who’s Greg Kfka, one of our partners, his dad. And I learned a lot from working at Gaznell. And then when I started at Grubb & Ellis, I really started doing that, and I was pretty successful by that time. Now I’m, say, 26 years old.

I kind of knew that I could outwork everybody. And that was one of my secrets, is I simply outworked everybody. Yeah. I would look around in the marketplace, I’d look around at Grubb & Ellis, I’d look around and say, “Who’s the hardest working person that I know? And I’m going to work harder than them.” Yeah. And I had to have conversations with your mom about it. You know, obviously I’m going to work a lot of hours. She was on board.

Yep. When you moved back to Phoenix, you had grown up in southern Arizona. So did you have a network here, or, like, what? Yeah, because I’ve seen, I’ll say, and granted, I’m the opposite. I grew up in Phoenix, and you know, I went to Brophy, so I do have a network here just by growing up here. And I’ve seen other people my age have doubt around not being in the same shoes as me. So I’m curious, did you have doubt there? Country club or high school, as you know.

It wasn’t doubt. It wasn’t doubtable. It was frustration. Yeah. Frustration when I wouldn’t get a business and somebody else would because they were part of the old boy network. And I’ve spent 40 years working my way into the old boy network. And in Arizona you can. It’s really hard. It would have been really hard in Chicago. Chicago was really set, generational. But here, you know, you’re second generation now, and you’re really tied into the community. So we’ve been able to do that, and it took me, there’s still an old boy network that I’m not, you know, not that, but it’s okay. I’m okay with it now. It’s okay. But there was early frustration when, you know, I would lose transactions to people who had relationships. And, you know, I learned really early on that relationships matter. And that’s why we talk a lot about it.

Yeah. So what advice would you give someone who has self-doubt? Like, how would they overcome? And I would say the two that I’ve heard so far: just work harder, and then relationships matter, right? So it’s a recurring theme here, is just continue to invest in relationships. What else do you have?

Nothing solves self-doubt like pipeline. Nothing. Pipeline, man. If I would look at my TIP, transactions in progress, and I had a bunch of deals, I didn’t have any self-doubt. I’d start closing those deals and it’d start dropping down. You know, I used to, you know, when I was all by myself, I remember I was like, I’d have, I don’t know when I left. So the early first couple years, 30, 40 deals in my pipeline at any time. When I left Grubb & Ellis, I remember I had 62 transactions on the TIP. So I had, I was just me, 62 transactions. So I closed, the first year at Lee & Associates, I closed like 50 of those deals. I closed 50 of those deals while I was at Lee for Grubb & Ellis. It was a big, absolute disaster the first year.

And so I was just like, okay, if I, and I start, I was like, if I could have 50-plus real deals in my TIP at all times, I didn’t have any self-doubt. I was like, okay, I’m working. So when it got down below 50, I’m like, oh. Oh, was this, was this a, you know, you start feeling it. So I go, like, nothing solves the world like pipeline.

And then the second thing is wins. You know, the more I close, the better I got. The more, like, in fact, I have this presentation I’ve done, what I learned in my, and I learned this from Bill Lee. I actually turned it into a presentation. He gave it to me just as an anecdotal, and I thought that’s a great idea. What did I learn in my first hundred deals, my first 500 deals, my first thousand deals? And I’ve just built it up, and every time we just went past, I don’t know, over 4,000 now. And it’s like, what have I learned in my first 4,000 deals? Because it’s different every time. And there isn’t a lot of self-doubt anymore, certainly with commercial real estate transactions. There’s a lot of self-doubt when we started the software company, because it’s brand new. But zero self-doubt on betting on myself, zero self-doubt on the skill set that I bring to the table. So pipeline and wins are one. And then the hard work is a one.

And the last one I would say is reps. Yeah. Getting more reps. It’s like, I always felt like in baseball, if I wasn’t, I’d just get more reps. How can I get more reps? And then when I got into this business, what are more reps? More cold calls, more canvasses, more meetings, more of everything. How many more events can I go to? How many more people? I remember going to events and going, “All right, I’m going to literally talk to 50 people in the next hour, and they’re all going to feel like they got a one-on-one with me.”

Mhm. And I mean, you’d come home from those things exhausted, but you’d make it happen. Good reps. Yeah. Yeah. The pipeline, we felt that at OneSource. You know, like I said, early days, we were trying to close everything we could get our hands on, and we had pressure. We were pushing people to sign up when they probably weren’t good fits for us. And, you know, over time you were like, hey, if they’re not signing up, we’re building pipeline. And you had that longer-term view that we, you know, Sam and I and Brock didn’t have. And we now have a huge pipeline, which has enabled us to close deals every day. You know, almost every day this year we’ve closed at least, you just, you set, who did we close, the guy, when was the first time you got a demo time? We demoed him, it was 820 days ago. And so we’ve, you know, who knew he would ever sign up, but, you know, we just stayed in front and have pipeline. Now we have thousands of people on that boat, and some of them are signing up every day, every week. So being able to see that first year or two come back around, and actually, okay, we are building off of this, we are getting some wins, did ease, and obviously the numbers starting to improve, like, really eased some of that doubt for sure.

Yeah, I remember when I just, I would say it. I mean, you know how many times I said pipeline. And today, you know, our guys, our longest-tenured sales guys, Sam and Brock and Ben, they are getting pipeline closes, and they have these conversations, and I just hear them: hey dude, what happened here? What did this? And it’s like, okay, I’m in the right spot, right? We’ve paid the price. And we say to Sam Abselon, who is our longest-tenured salesperson, you should be reaping the benefits, man. You have worked your hard off to get this done. And so enjoy that. Yeah. And because we really believe in it, and now they do. They believe in it too, which is good.

Yeah. Yeah. More seeing it, which is awesome. So really the last question I have…

And I will tell you, Charlie, which is interesting, most young brokers think they’re going to lose self-doubt when they close deals. I really think it’s pipeline. Pipeline meaning, in our business, you get the win when they hire you. If you’re doing tenant rep, you know, on the landlord side you’re doing it, but if you have a bunch of landlord deals, you know you’re going to close it. So if two or three deals are looking at the same space, you know you’re going to get one of them done. And so I never put a lot of pressure on wins. I mean, there was a couple bigger deals that I did, but most of my pressure on myself was, do I have pipeline? Do I have TIP?

Yeah. And I think I’d add one caveat to that: the pipeline, once you see that it can convert and you can get them over the line, does help you, you know, get rid of that self-doubt.

Yeah. It has to be real pipeline. It can’t be, it can’t be “I’m representing the bank because I took out $100 and the teller said hi to me.” That’s not real pipeline. There’s a lot of fake pipeline out there. And what’s really good about being, you know, your own broker is that you shouldn’t lie to yourself. But there’s a lot, like, even now I’ll notice with my own team members that they’re pumping the pipeline, because we have a bigger team now. They’ll put deals in there. I’m like, that’s not a deal. Yeah. You just talked to somebody. Don’t put it in our pipeline. Put it as an inquiry. But let’s not fool ourselves.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the last question I have: you’ve been at it, you’ve been top producer in the office for decades. What doubt do you face today, if any?

Ah, I don’t have much doubt anymore, other, you know, now I think we’re feeling way good, way better about OneSource. The early days it was very doubtful, but I feel very comfortable on, you know, there are, I don’t miss a lot of sleep on that. It’s more team issues and people issues than it is doubt.

I would say, from my perspective, and chime in here if I’m wrong or correct me here, but you choosing to start OneSource four years ago was a vote towards trying to feel more doubt and ultimately grow more, right, for yourself?

Yeah. I, maybe not. Yeah. Yeah. No, no. You know, you have to continue to grow, because the world’s changing. And one of the reasons we started OneSource is because I watched over the last 40 years brokers become dinosaurs. And they become dinosaurs because the market’s changing, all the world. And I knew that technology is finally going to get into our business and change it. And I’m like, there’s no better way to see if you can not be a dinosaur in the brokerage business by starting a software company that solely focuses on commercial real estate brokers. And so there wasn’t necessarily a doubt. It certainly, you know, we’ve put way more money in than we thought we were going to do. It’s taken longer than we thought it would take. But the doubt wasn’t on can we execute or figure it out. The doubt was, are we going to be able to sell this? Which is way different.

And I will tell you that when we started, I’m looking out my window right here, I’m looking at the basketball hoop outside our pickleball court, and I think I told you the story. I was looking at it the other day, or right when we started this four years ago, and I’m like, hey, in high school I used to be able to dunk a volleyball, and I wonder if I can touch the rim. So I went out there one day, and I just went over there to try and just jump and touch the rim, and I barely got the net. I was like up and down. I had no hops. And I’m like, this is what happens when you’re 60-plus years old and you’re starting a new company. I know when I started Lee & Associates, no one worked harder than me. No one worked harder than me for 20 years or 30 years. But today, I don’t have that same kind of fire, because I’ve done well. And so I learned really quick after I touched that. I said, “Okay, I have to build this as my team, because it’s a different deal.” And we built it with you, Brock, Sam, and Ba, and Sam, and our core team, Caleb and Ben. We have a great team, and all of our callers. And so I built it a little bit differently, but I had to figure that out.

Yeah. Yeah. It’s a good story. Barely touched the rim. Barely touched the net. The net. You’re washed out, man.

You’re, I am old.

You lost your hops.

I did. I did. In fact, I’m going to work on it. See if I can get that.

Awesome. Well, thanks. So the tips for overcoming self-doubt, in summary: work hard, get real, you know, build relationships.

Relationships. Let’s talk about hard real quick. I want to jump in. It’s not 50 hours a week. It’s not 60. If you’re self-doubt, crank those hours. 70, 80 hours a week. You’ll get over your self-doubt really quick if you’re at 70 or 80 hours a week.

Yep. Yep. Yep. Nothing solves self-doubt like pipeline. And the more wins, the more confidence. So pipeline leads to wins. And then also get more reps. That was your last point. More reps helps you get more pipeline.

And reps of cold calls, of canvasses, meetings, going out trying to find, you know.

I like it. Nothing solves self-doubt like pipeline. We’ll end it with that. Thanks.

There you go. Bye.