Ryan Serhant
Appearances
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I subconsciously told myself, one day I'm going to figure out what my thing is. And once I do, everybody better watch the out because I am going to go so hard. I don't know what it's going to be. Once I figure out what I want and what I'm great at, I will never, ever, ever let it go.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I spend all of my time thinking about everybody else between our clients, our customers, our producers, our agents, our employees, that like by the end of the day, I'm so mentally exhausted worrying about everybody else who I feel responsible for. that I'm like, as long as I'm eating, breathing, and I can scroll on TikTok before bed, like I'm good, man. Yeah, I hear you. I'm good.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I do, although I will tell you, man, I think something did happen to me this summer. Like every age I've ever turned, nothing changes. But then when I turned 40- It's a different unlock. Yeah, it's not that I felt old. It's that I thought, okay, the next time I do this, I'm 80. So remind me again, Ryan, why I wake up every day. Like, what am I doing all this for?
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Why am I flying to this place and that place? And why am I so anxious about answering emails and cleaning things out? Why am I like, what should... what is wrong with me? And I realized in that moment in July that I'd spent the last 20 years waking up every day to feel important instead of waking up every day to feel happy. And I attached importance to happiness.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
The more important I am, whether I'm being, we were nominated for two Emmys for a reality TV show. I was able to build a billion dollar business just by selling real estate, a career that used to be a third career for most people, right? I'd expanded, I'd built from the ground up and the importance of it all, I thought made me happy.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
And then I was sitting there and saying to myself, but wait, what really, makes me happy? Is it my daughter? Is it my wife? Is it family time? Is it like, is it the work? What is it? Is it the work? I mean, all of them make me happy, right? Various ways. My superpower is my capacity. You know, you say consistency, I really think about capacity.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
And I do get very, very excited about the building and about the work. Like I do like work. I wouldn't be at the office all the time. I wouldn't be working all the time if I didn't really like it. Like I wouldn't have to, like I'm fine. I do get passionate about the work and about building and about creating more tomorrow than I did today. I don't know why it's totally a disease.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Like I have friends who like check out at five o'clock They drink beer. They go to baseball games. They have like- They coach their kids.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I'm like, I want that. I don't hate it at all. I literally stare at people who do that and who have those lives and I'm like, I want, how do I have that? I don't have that. It's not in my DNA. I wish it was. On a scale. Like you see a dog.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Dude. It's just playing. And the dog is like, everything in my life is everything I've ever known, and I'm good. The dog just doesn't know. I'm not comparing people to dogs, but it's like, man, why do I need to do the things that I do
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I reset the level of importance with every like growth hurdle. So in 2019, before we started our company, in the world of real estate salespeople, I was a 10. And where do you go from there? You don't rebuild a chart. That's stupid. So I took myself down to a one and said, now I'm going to go be a CEO. Because I did it. I did the real estate brokerage thing. I sold the most expensive properties.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I did them in all the markets. You're on TV. So I'm going to go do it again. I'm gonna leave Million Dollar List in New York, this reality TV show that gave me a career. I have education. I'm gonna go try to build my own company. And if it works, great. If it doesn't work, I guess I go back to doing what I was doing anyway. But what's the worst that can happen?
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Unless you die or go to jail, like those are the two worst things that can happen. Anything else, you're just not taking the right swing. Yeah, that was five years ago. Yeah, with 2019, I made that decision.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
So then in 2020, September 2020, we went off on our own and we started our own thing with a couple of us and like a rented townhouse in the city with SWAT outside and windows boarded up and masks and no vaccine, the whole nine yards. We're like, as long as we just go hard every day and we take it one day at a time, it's all gonna work.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
If I think too much about all the things, it'll never work because I'll have analysis paralysis and I'll let perfect become the enemy of good. I just need to be as good as impossible so I can get to great, you know, and I can go from good to great.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I guess I'm like, I'm feeling.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I feel like a number, I feel like a four right now.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I think if I've able to build, if I've been able to build from scratch, the new definition of real estate brokerage on a global scale, which is really what we're doing. Plus really use simple to redefine sales workflow automations for all salespeople, not just real estate agents. Then I'll come back and do this podcast and say 10. It's gonna take me a minute though.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Yeah, I think Bluey's nine. I think Toy Story right now is a phase. I think that's a hard 10. The bunny, her mom, right? My wife is definitely up there with a 10. Yeah, my mother-in-law lives with us. My sister-in-law lives with us. Her husband lives with us. We have one big Greek household and then there's me. And I just like, yeah, I come home and I'm like, how's everyone doing?
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Everyone doing good? That's fun, man. I'm there though. I'm like the guy, you know, I'm the dad. That's good, man.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I feel happier today than I definitely did for a good period of time.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I think very rarely do I feel a 10 and I almost do it on purpose. Because if I say 10 all the time, it's like, you know, we rate meetings. People rate meetings at nines or tens. I'm like, you don't understand. That's insane. This was a seven, right? We always have to grow somehow. But I also don't want to be like... some stubborn asshole.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I don't know, on a scale of happiness today, I think I'm like a solid six and a half. There's good things, there's bad things, but that's every decision you make. Like every day you wake up, there's gonna be good and bad. As long as you're moving forward. Every pivot you're gonna have is gonna have positive and negative.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
And something I also realized was I used to think things that were in my way were obstacles. And then I realized that, no, wait, what stands in the way becomes the way. And it's no longer an obstacle, right? It's just a big question mark. I just have to figure out how to answer that question. And then there's this amazing path ahead of me that used to be in the way and now it just is the way.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Um, and that's been helpful. Like Netflix, right? Like Netflix for me when I was on Bravo was, and then selling sunset came out and, you know, how did that make you feel when all these big real estate shows were on Netflix and you weren't on there yet? Plus and minus, like it was still streaming. I don't know, but there's a new generation of people who watch TV now.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
And so, and their numbers are wild. Like Like Netflix is the largest global distribution network on planet earth. Forget media. Like Netflix can put one thing out and 270 million people are alerted. Like you can't, you know, it just doesn't, it's wild to think about. And so, you know, I was doing Bravo and there's all these new things happening and real estate shows everywhere and ours was great.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I'm like, oh, there's this thing that's kind of like in the way from me being successful, what I'm doing right now. So I can either hunker down and just tell myself what we're doing is the best, I'm gonna stay doing this thing or maybe what stands in the way becomes the way. You know what? Start own company.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Million Dollar Listing has been awesome, but it doesn't make sense for me now that I have my own company. So let's sunset. Oh, we did that in 2021 and it went off air in 2022. Wow. We did our spinoff shows, all that. Now I'm going to go pitch streamers with a new idea. Really? Yeah. Was it challenging at first? It was challenging because the market's so saturated, even for me.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
It's just saturated, man. There's so much stuff. And you also have to make the determination. You could have a great YouTube show and more people could watch it. You don't have to do. You don't have to wait six months to a year for it to come out. Exactly. So I created a format called House of Serhant. So you've seen our clubhouse in Soho. So we have clubhouses everywhere instead of offices.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
They're fun, they're content houses. There's no desks, okay. So we called it House of Serhant and it was about kind of the building of a company in New York. And then we started pitching it to HBO, Peacock, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Netflix, something else, I can't remember. And went through and it was, I mean, it was interesting. It obviously worked.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
And so we went with Netflix because they're just great partners and have the biggest network.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
It was one full year of producing, pre-production, casting, pitching, all that stuff. Before you started filming. Oh, yeah, man. One year. And then a whole year of filming, 2023. So much work. It's so much work. You have a 90% chance that no one watches it. It may not work. Especially on streaming. Oh my gosh. Because when I did, I did a show that people didn't watch called Sell It Like Serhant.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
People watched it, just not as many as like million dollar listing. So Sell It Like Serhant was a passion project of mine. But even though it wasn't like a ratings juggernaut, it spawned the book, it spawned the education business, it spawned a speaking tour, all these things that still exist today and are huge parts of our business, but it was cable.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
And so no matter what, for like 12 weeks, Sell It Like Sirhan is in your TV guide, it's there, there are commercials for three months, no matter what. And then it reruns and everything. Streaming, you get 48 hours for the algorithm to decide Do viewers agree with this content or are we going to drop it?
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
And they will drop it fast because the minute you click on something that everybody else has said meh to, you might then go to Hulu. You might look at your phone. So how do you keep people from looking at their phone, right? You have to give them hooks and cliffhangers. It's no longer arcs and storylines. It's hooks and cliffhangers, hooks and cliffhangers.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I think you can have a lot of income streams. You can do a lot of different things, but it's very difficult to have multi-level passions. You can have a career, a couple jobs, a couple hobbies, but everyone always has their passion. Maybe your passion is really your kids. Maybe it's really your spouse. Maybe it's really that sport.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
It's bite-sized content in long form media. And so- So yeah, so there was a year of filming with Netflix and then the show came out in June and worked, thank God.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Oh, I mean, my life changed like overnight. Really? Yes. Yeah. Like I, before Netflix, I used to tell people like, you know, I had my life, then Million Dollar Listing happened. Like that was always in all these talks and podcasts, I'd say, yeah, and then Million Dollar Listing happened. And then things changed, right?
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I was able to, you know, not just that people recognize me, but they would know me as the real estate guy. And that was helpful for business. I sell real estate, you know, I don't sell toasters. And so it would also help me open doors. You know, we always say like opportunity knocks on both sides. And so you gotta go knock and then the door would open. And now I say until Netflix happened.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
It's just, it has been wild. Like I've never seen, between like follower and subscriber growth, it was like 1.3 million like that month. And just organic.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Yeah, Instagram, TikTok, everywhere. Just all grew. Just all, yeah, just because the whole world was just told about a new world. Wow. And so it's translated into every language. It's insane. There are people outside my office right now. I mean, they're all day long, all night. It's insane.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Yeah, they come to the building, they wait for me, they take photos with me, they wait outside my house. They're everywhere. So far, I mean, knock on wood, but so far everyone's been super nice and just very, very excited. It's been wild for business. Wow. For recruitment. Yeah, man.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Yeah, completely.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
You are only as good as your last deal. That's what I tell salespeople. You're only as good as your 1099 and you're only as good as your last deal. I don't care what you're working on right now. You're only as good as the last deal you did. So if I did a TV show, that's amazing. It was great. What did you do with it? How did you make it work for you?
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Because you're only as good as that show that used to be on the air. Five, seven years ago. Yeah, so you have to be constantly moving and constantly iterating and it's also exhausting. But for me, it's also fun to like think about new things. And on the new show, I'm an executive producer. I have a significant amount of control compared to Million Dollar Listing where I was just talent.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Even on season one, you were an executive producer? I was a producer on season one, but they can't do the show without me. It's about me. Right, right, right. So you're creative control. Season two, we just started filming season two. We got picked up for season two. We just started and it's so far. I'm sorry you announced that.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
And so I'm an executive producer now and every day I show up, I'm like, hey, EP Energy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is what we're gonna do, okay? But we get to have, like Netflix allows us to have fun, like cable TV, you turn on ESPN, you know what you're gonna get.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
You don't know if it's gonna be SportsCenter or something else, you know what it's gonna look like, and they'll be talking about sports. Netflix, you turn it on and you actually are looking for something you haven't seen before. Maybe you have like an itch because you like true crime. Or documentaries.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
And I think you've got to figure out what are your multi-level businesses that align with that singular passion. And so that was a realization for me before I started all the companies. Yeah. because I felt like you did.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
But you're not gonna watch something you've seen before. That's actually one of the problems is like, I kind of saw that movie already. They need new content. Different people. So how do you scratch that itch of newness? So Netflix is super open to like, if anyone's watched Owning Manhattan, it is not a normal reality TV show.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
It is like a docu-series taking place in a workplace with real estate as kind of the skeleton with a narrator. Like I narrate the show as a real estate show with a voiceover. So cool. And there's, you know, a lot of the reviews when they came out were like, this is awesome. Because I didn't know that I wanted to watch this. And so you asked me about feedback, like I-
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
We did Million Dollar Listing for 10 years, two Emmy nominations. I did four spinoff shows. Crazy, man. Right? So much work. I'd never been in Vogue. I'd never been in Time Magazine. The level of, I think, awareness that Netflix brought to our business It is a content to community to commerce engine. And then it just fuels everything else. And for our agents, they're excited about it.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
It's actually been more beneficial for our company outside of Manhattan. Really? Because in Manhattan, it's like a given. Everyone knows you guys. And no one cares.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
North Carolina, South Carolina. So that they can have a piece of what we're working on is really, really, really exciting. The owner's there, the buyer's there, the seller's there. We have a wait list for agents to join our company in every single state, right? And in 45 countries at this point. So it's just bandwidth. It's just like bandwidth and quality because it would kill us. We would die.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
But hopefully it was simple. We'll be able to do it much easier. Simpler.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I felt like, okay, I'm doing this, I'm doing this, I'm speaking here, I'm selling real estate, then I'm on this TV show, and then I'm doing, and then I'm over here, and what am I doing? And I was passionate about the work until I took a step back and realized, okay, wait, am I really passionate about the work? Am I passionate about the results?
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Hand model acting. Yes, yes.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
So I come from a big family, right? So there's three sisters, two brothers. And I think- You're the youngest? Second youngest. I think I spent a long time trying to figure out what my thing was. And I think most people do. I don't know, what should I do? You know, there's optionality now. It's not the way it used to be.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
We're so thankful that it's not 1950 anymore, but at the same time, 1950 was simpler. Like you had your options.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
You know what you're gonna do, you know, for the most part. Today there's just mass optionality and it's scary. You know, it's like going to a restaurant with a 50 page menu. Like I came for steak, but now I don't know. I don't know, what should I do? Should I do this? Oh, you have a Mediterranean menu, what do I do? Oh, should I travel? I don't know.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
And so I tried every single sport, you know, I took every class. I was as well-rounded as you could imagine because I just didn't know. And I wasn't great at anything. Like there wasn't one thing I was like great at, even acting. I think I was good. It was good. I mean, you had good hands, you know. I had good hands. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was good, but it wasn't great.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
And if I'm passionate about sales as an unlock for people, human potential in the 20s and 30s and the future to control your own income, to control your own life, then I gotta be also passionate about retention and I have to be passionate about finding my tree branches.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
And I think that I like subconsciously told myself, one day I'm gonna figure out what my thing is. And once I do, Everybody better watch the out because I am going to go so hard. I don't know what it's gonna be. I might be a garbage man. I might be an artist. I might be a poet. I don't know. I don't know. But once I figure it out, I spent my whole life trying to figure out what I want.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I didn't have a job. I mean, I didn't have any money. So I was like, I guess this is just hard. And so once it clicked and I just started doing it, it's like I'm, I'm gonna do this every day. It's just volume for me. I'm not gonna take this personally. I tried acting, acting is personal. You get rejected to your face because of your face. So I am going to just go hard all day, every day.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I'm not gonna be the most connected. I'm not gonna be the best looking, but something no one can take away from me is how hard I'm gonna work. I'm gonna wake up earlier and go to bed later. And I don't care what anyone else says. modern day gurus about how the grind is dead, doesn't matter. That's great when you have money. When you're rich, you can talk all day long about work-life balance.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
When you are trying to figure out how you're gonna pay rent and pay your groceries, your work-life balance, you have to just grind. And you gotta take it one day at a time and know you're working harder today than you did yesterday. And that hard work, What ends up happening is you work so hard, you make luck easy to find. And so then lucky things start to happen.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
You get that first big deal that pays your rent for a year. And I remember depositing that check for like 24 grand. It's a crazy feeling, right? Yeah, at the Chase Bank in Tribeca. And then I was like, great, what's the next one? And then you do that next big one. I get two years ahead, four years ahead. Yeah, and then you go to the open casting call for Million Dollar List in New York.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
And then that happens. I'm like, all right, I'm gonna keep working even harder because the harder I work, I make luck even easier to find me. And then you just start building and building and building. And it's that, that never letting go thing. Like, you know, I said sell it like Serhant is a TV show we did for Bravo in 2016, 17. The, that was my,
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I wanna say 30th, it might've been more, pitch to Bravo. And I think they agreed to it because they were sick of me. I think they were like, guys, if we don't at least give Ryan one thing, he's gonna pitch us on the next real estate doctor, the next apprentice, but for real estate show. And I had all of them. I pitched all of them. They didn't accept any of them, rightly so.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I will just never give up. And I will come to you until you buy or you die.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
So if I'm the oak tree and I get to have all these rings, then I need to have tree branches, which are people who, if they were physically not gonna attach to me, it would be fine. Like so great that they could be a part of my tree. And I had done the opposite. I was trying to find people that were like so different from me.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I'd say the one prediction that I made that has not come true is I thought we would see more home absorption this year than we saw in 2023. I was pretty convinced, like most of the market. More people buying up homes? Correct. Like investors? 2023, so just the United States, not globally. 2023 saw the fewest home sales in 30 years. Just about 4 million.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Is that because interest rates were so high? Interest rates were too high. So 90% of people who have mortgages in the United States have them under 5%. So when rates went to 8%, no one was refining. No one would sell. I can't afford to sell. Buyers all said, what am I supposed to do? My monthly cost now just shot through the roof. It was so abrupt and so sudden.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
for good reason, I think, that the housing market just basically came to a standstill. And across the country, you had no inventory or short. I mean, what pundits will say is we're short about 4 million homes. I think we're actually short something like 6 million homes. And so what do you do, right? And so I assumed that coming into 2024, what goes down must go up, what goes up must go down.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
So we can't have a worse year. Turns out, looks like 2024 is gonna see even fewer home sales than last year because it took the Fed nine months to start adjusting rates instead of three to six months, right? A lot of people were calling for Fed cuts in Q1 and then it was Q2, then it came in September. but the market had already baked in the cuts.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
So mortgage rates haven't truly, truly seen any like major effect, but they are at like 20 month lows right now, which is nice when you say it that way, but they're still at 10 year highs. It is just a mindset shift. You know, we need mortgage rates to get down healthily into the fives, which will enable people to buy down points into the fours. If you can get a loan,
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
with a four handle in front of it, then the market will start being far more liquid and will move because you got to give incentive to people who are in these damn homes to move. And you've got to give incentive to developers at these rates to create more housing inventory. Like it's just too expensive to build.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
And so all of that has kind of created this stagnation effect in 2024, where I think last year we had 4.1 million homes sold in the United States. This year will probably be sub four. Wow. Which means that in 2025, could it get less? Sure, but I think there are so many economic indicators right now that are pointing towards even lower rates, right?
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Greater economic stability, totally non-dependent on who wins the election. If you look the last nine of the 11 presidential elections we've had, the housing market has actually increased. absorption has increased and pricing has increased nine of the last 11 times, which is like 1982. The only two times it hasn't, 2008 Lehman Brothers and 2020, right, COVID.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
People who could take me to here and take me to there because that's what everyone had always told me, right? Like, don't hire your identical twin, go hire someone who's gonna take you to the next level. And then it was like mixing, you know, it's like apples and oranges. It's like, you're both fruit, But I don't know if I'm in the mood for an orange right now.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
So it's been like these huge, huge, huge moments. I think that what we'll see in 2025 is you're gonna see rapid absorption of current stock. You're gonna see greater listing inventory than we've seen in the last three years. You're gonna see even more Gen Z purchasers purchasing with baby boomer dollars. Really?
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
of all the Gen Z right now in the United States is outpacing millennials in home buying. Why is that? Because 75% of the deals that Gen Z is doing are financed by their parents because the greatest money-making generation we've ever seen are still the baby boomers. And they're also the greatest saving generation because they came out of parents from the depression. Like my dad, His dad had polio.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
No one knows what polio is anymore, right? You have to Google it and it's in black and white. Right, right, right. So like that, he, that guy, my dad, My dad would save, he would do nothing for $5. It is insane to me. He paid me a penny a stick growing up to pick up sticks. And I understand why. And I'm sure I will have those tendencies with my own daughter. I'm like, hey, save up wifi bandwidth.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
What if the Wi-Fi goes down? And she's gonna be like, dad, it's in my brain now. There's no Wi-Fi anymore. It's just high five.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Because the alternative is you pay your kid's rent or your kid lives with you. So you know what? I'm making an investment. You go pay the caring costs is what most parents are doing. You cover the common charges, the HOA fees, the real estate taxes. It's gonna be my apartment. I'm gonna own it and we'll see what happens. And there is, that's happening everywhere. Really?
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I think that what we'll see in 2025 is... Really? And I realized in that moment that I'd spent the last 20 years waking up every day to feel important instead of waking up every day to feel happy. People are no longer afraid of being failures. They're afraid of being embarrassed. Yes. So they won't try because they care about failing.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
It's gift tax. Interesting. So you've got to go. So the parent, you can go buy a house, you know, and... Your kid can use it. That's really what it is.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I don't really wanna peel and like the stringy, like I want an apple, right? It's like, it just doesn't work. So it was finding the passion for me and then being really, really, really focused on retention and creating those branches that allow the oak tree to grow. Otherwise I'm just losing my mind.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I've got a brown jacket on. I've got like a tan shirt. I've got closed-toe shoes. I'm all about those baby boomers. Like, let's go find little Sally.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
We're expanding so quickly. In other states. Yeah, two ways companies can grow, okay? You grow through growth, right? Or you grow through cost cutting. So in 2022 and 23, especially in tech, you saw a lot of companies improving their numbers because they were just cutting the bottom line and they were firing everybody, reducing costs everywhere. Hey, no offices, no problem, no overhead.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
And then their numbers look great, right? You're just trying to improve margins or you expand fast. I crossed my entire 2023 revenue, I crossed in like June 5th or something this year. Because we're also just growing so quickly and all the work we did last year pays out this year. And in sales, it's not like e-commerce where I'm two quarters ahead.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Yeah, but we're also, the work we put in right now, we're not gonna see results from those salespeople doing deals and all that stuff happening until next year. So we're always like a year ahead. So what we're experiencing right now in our numbers and our sales is to the benefit of all the work that we actually did when we were hunkering down at this time last year.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
And this time last year was brutal. We were like... are there, what are we gonna do? Like rates are high. The market is really, really tough. People are being let go left and right. We have to go to war. We gotta put our brave heart face paint on, right? And they cannot take our freedom. It's just like we are going out to battle.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
And we've got to operate with a startup mindset no matter how big we are every single day. And that's got to be a part of our purpose to the beginning of our convo.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I'm super biased. I think real estate is one of the safer investments you can make as long as it's not short term. I don't like giving people short term real estate advice unless it's fix and flip. There's tons of fix and flips you can do. There's a lot in Florida. Unfortunately, it is what it is. Anytime there is natural disasters, you see investors come down.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Are they providing immediate liquidity? for maybe a lot of people who didn't have home insurance, 100%. So you can look at it from both sides of the coin, right? You don't do any fix and flip yourself as an investor, right? No, because we're mostly in like, you know, we're in luxury markets. Do you do any investing in real estate yourself? We have real estate investments.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I invest in companies mostly. So real estate adjacent companies, tech companies, consumer product companies.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Yeah, not really. You know what? Because it's all I do all day long. It's literally all I do. I feel like if I was doing something else, like most of my clients do, owning real estate ends up becoming fun for me. I buy and sell real estate for clients all day, every day. It's kind of the last thing I want to do is let's go do more real estate personally.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
That's where I get excited in education and media and the TV shows and people and different types of companies. Like I'm an investor in Blank Street Coffee. Why? Because it's a coffee company and that's awesome. And they have cool tech and they can open up stores faster than Starbucks. And it's like, That's crazy. You know, like we do weird things that way that enable my brain to start.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I feel like there's a part of my brain that gets to work at that. You know, when I think about companies like that, they're like, oh, we're here, we're here, we're here. It's like the kid in the back of the room, you know, he gets to raise his hand. He's like, oh, I know that one. It's important to light all the fires.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I mean, for the last two years, it's just been about blood in the water. It's using interest rate pressure on existing portfolios to help bail people out and get market rate discounts. So you can buy things at 20, 30, 40, 50% off because somebody has a 3% note that is ballooning to 7.5% by November 1st. And that's where you see a lot of resets.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
We do a lot of office to residential conversion right now, especially in a lot of our urban markets. It's like a whole building, office building converted into apartments. Yeah, being sold. Something that used to have a markup of let's say $700 million sells today for a hundred million bucks because the basis on residential is short-term, right? Especially if you're gonna create condos out of it.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
It's one time and then the condo developer has to pay income tax. That's how the government looks at it. There's a lot of unique opportunities out there, but there's always opportunities. Everything's a potential opportunity. It just depends on where you want to be, what your capital requirements are, what your debt structure is going to be like.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
There's a lot of people buying up real estate at what I think are – terrible multiples right now with awful cap rates, but they have a much, much, much longer term view and they want to own market share. And so that's interesting to me, you know, to go out and you can actually overbid against institutional players who are trying to underbid because they have certain hurdles they have to hit.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
And you can now just go grab that market share and you get to say you have a thousand units in 2030. And at the rate at which rents are increasing, at the rate at which even inflation at 3% is increasing, By 2030, you'll be good as long as you can protect cash flows. And that's where people get hurt.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I have a billionaire right now. That's so funny.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
The 2030 agenda where it's like you'll own nothing. You'll be happy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone wants to be like Elon Musk. That's all. But I do have a billionaire right now who's like I want to own – less things. I'm like, great, how can I help you? Let me sell that for you. Yeah, just all my, so my house is in, where are they? Montana, Texas, New York, and Florida.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I just want to sell everything. Like, should you consult your wife before? Are you currently drinking? Are you currently under the influence of anything? You know? No, we just decided to sell. So we put everything on the market. Really? Yeah, it's like $270 million worth of personal property and just houses and pied-a-terres and things. We're like, yeah, I don't care anymore.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Let's just sell it all. Okay, great. And we will. And we'll sell it. Why do you think that is for that building?
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Yeah, he can afford it.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Yeah. You can stay at cool hotels. But here's what's going to happen. Everyone's going to go through that phase. And in a couple of years, everyone's going to say, meh, I want to just keep my clothes in one spot. So at the same time, I have that guy selling off just under $300 million worth of personal property because he wants to own no things.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I then have another billionaire who is, I don't know where he's based. I think Puerto Rico, via Florida, who's now saying, I no longer want to have a hotel room in LA and in New York City. So just give me the two best properties, all in plus closing costs. I don't want to spend more than $18 million. So just go figure that out for me. And so we're doing that right now, like today, actually. Wow.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
So the way, I guess if I want to, I like alliteration. So like that passion has a core, okay? So your passion is podcasting versus courses, let's say. So that passion for me is sales. It just is what it is. Like I wish it was coding. I wish it was chemistry. Like it could have been anything else, but it is sales. So my passion is sales. And then how do I build a company using the other P's?
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
What a... This podcast has covered a lot, by the way. It's great.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I'd say there's two types of billionaires. There's earned wealth and then there's inherited. And there's inherited wealth. Inherited wealth is far more afraid of it than the earned. Losing it or afraid of having it? Both.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Every trust fund kid I've worked with, anyone who's stepped into a significant amount of money, they know inherently that it's not theirs and that they didn't earn it. And there's a fear of the money. It's wild. You would think that someone who's broke, poor, like myself in 2008, can't afford groceries. I was also scared of money, but I knew if I had it, I would not be scared.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I would use it and I would figure it out and it's gonna be a tool.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
you know there's no one's crying tears for billionaires but there is that inherited wealth kind of dilemma which is then you know that's the malcolm mcdowell bell curve the person who earns it takes the family up the person who inherits it takes the family down every time the earned billionaires and billionaire class okay um their number one asset isn't their money it's their time
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
down to we negotiate nine-figure deals just by text or by signal. A lot of them use signal. Really? Yeah, that app signal. Just texting? Just texting. They don't have time.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
So you got to be careful. It's all in writing. It's all there, right? But they don't have time. They'll get on a phone to do a gut check, but for the most part, this is the price, it's just a fact.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
They also do other things like, and I've talked about this before, but the majority of the billionaires I know, when we go to dinner, let's say, You don't go to bad restaurants, you go to good ones. And what's the point of looking at a menu at a good or great restaurant? Tell the waiter, if you have any allergies, tell us to bring your best, surprise me.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
It's a far better use of my time for the hour, hour and a half we have here at dinner for you and I to talk than for me to sit here and say, what's the halibut like? It tastes like in halibut, man. Like, what's the question? What is that? It's a waste of their energy.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
So like now I've been in the situation where I'll pick up the menu and looking at it and I'll just see them looking at me and I'm like,
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Yeah, yeah. Hey, yeah, exactly. You should bring me, bring me whatever. Is the duck alive? No, it's not alive. Okay, great. Perfect.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Where are we eating right now?
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
they think about things at a hundred X. Like it's not 10 X anymore. It's not two X, it's not three X, it's a hundred X. How is everybody your partner? What's that collaboration? You know, what can I build to scale a hundred times? And that's had a huge influence. One, how I manage my time, right? But also that's had a huge influence on me building
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
a business was, okay, how do I build a business that I can scale to 100? Whatever that means. Why go small? Why take a small swing? Why not just take a big swing? My life was fine as a real estate agent. I'm gonna start my own company. I'll start four. And then I did all these TV shows. Let's do a bigger one.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
And let's get to a valuation as an enterprise where we really swing for that $10 billion multiple. Why not? Why not? And I don't know how I'm going to do it right now, but I'm getting there. And we will figure it out because I will be as consistent as possible until you buy or die. You won't let go. And that is like, they are relentless in their capacity and their consistency.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
And they're risk-taking. They're far bigger risk-takers than I am, that's for sure. It's scary to risk money. It's a lot, man. But life is a gamble.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
You got to start with purpose. So what's your purpose? And then it's people, product, profit. And that is the math. And like that is the unlock. And I was going from, okay, I'm passionate about everything. Let's just make money. Let's just work. And I want to go build this. And then I need the right people to help me build it. And so then I was – I had no –
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I think it's a couple of things. It was the thing I woke up with on my 40th birthday, which was you're no longer waking up to be important anymore. You're now waking up to be happy. And what does that mean? Maybe it means to be important. Maybe it doesn't. But you have to ask yourself that question every day. Two, I think my 70-year-old self is telling me to remember, right?
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
You're never going to remember your tasks. You will only remember your adventures, right? And as much time as I spend on email and in meetings and commuting, like I'm never gonna sit there when I'm 70 and remember that email. Like it's just, no matter how much importance there is today, it will mean nothing to me in 30 years. but I will remember the adventures, right? I will remember the stories.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
And I think the third thing he would say is there is nothing without being present. Like there is just that opportunity to be present, especially, you know, as Xena, my daughter's like five and you know, I spent all my time at work And how do you balance that? You have family, you have obligations, you have responsibility. Where do you find the synergy? Where do you make a difference?
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
And where can you be as present as possible? And just look other humans in the eye and make sure, and I kind of like this, make sure that I don't spend my entire life just being a human doing, but being a human being. Yeah.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Oh, you know, just be my friend. See me on the street, say hi. And we do a lot. If you're looking to buy, rent, sell, or develop real estate, you can find us at serhant.com. If you want some fun entertainment, you can go watch the first season of Owning Manhattan, which is now on Netflix. You can follow us on any of our socials, Ryan Serhant or Serhant.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
If you're in real estate or in sales or part of an enterprise sales team, you can go to sellit.com. I think it's the best next-gen sales training for salespeople and sales teams. And other than that, man, just live a life worth living. That's good, man. Yeah.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
core passion I didn't really know exactly what we were building but I knew I had to go find people for it and then that can last like a year and then it just breaks you or people start splintering you start getting people who are quitting or leaving you and you've got to find that real kind of like cultural
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Well, number one is take care of the work. The work takes care of you. Number two is you are the people you keep. Like spend a lot of your time with other people. Make sure you're with the people you want to be like, right? And then number three would just have to be like living a life that's actually fun, right? Just be fun. Yeah. Otherwise, it's just not worth it.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
kind of statement, I guess, if you will, where everyone understands, oh, we're all here for the same purpose. And because we're all here from the same purpose, we're all the right people aligned on that right purpose. And then all the right people together, we can build whatever product we want. Because we can now go into, for me, real estate brokerage, sales training, enterprise, right?
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
My final question is what's your definition of greatness? My definition of greatness is not self-reflective. I would ask everybody else. I only think I'm great if everybody else kind of affirms the greatness. So I think it would have to be attached to the public affirmation, because I don't think anyone's great in a bubble or a vacuum.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I think great is a definition that's attached to a lot of other really good things and okay things and bad things and terrible things. And so I look at greatness through the eyes of every single person I've ever interacted with or come in touch with or ever followed or subscribed to me. And that's a weird answer, but I'm going to leave it at that. There you go. My bad, Brian.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Appreciate you, brother.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
We can do media, we can do TV shows, we can do whatever we want. And then that all leads down to profits, right?
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I think you have to make mistakes and give yourself a lot of room to make those mistakes. I think people are no longer afraid of being failures. They're afraid of being embarrassed. So they won't try because they care about failing. They then don't try because they don't want other people to know it didn't work out. And so,
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
As a good example, we started Serhant in 2020, in the depths of COVID in New York City.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
They then don't try because they don't want other people to know it didn't work out.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Everybody said, don't do it. So I said, I'm going to go start my own real estate firm, but I have an idea. I have an idea of how things are gonna be bought and sold in the future. I'm not gonna be able to do it by myself. It's gonna take me a second. I'm gonna start a sales training platform called sellit.com.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
And then we're gonna have studios, which does real estate media, because it's just what we do and it's what we know. And there's going to be an undercurrent of tech enablement, okay, underneath everything. And I think it's gonna be one thing. And so what I started with was an app called Spaces.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
that was basically studios in your pocket so that I could go to 10,000 real estate agents around the world and say, you get to go make your own property tours now, really easy. It'll edit itself. It'll cue itself. It'll capture itself. One click, you're done. You don't have to spend the $1,500 that it's gonna cost you to do a mini, all that stuff. I was the only one who used it. Wow.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I spent all this money and I listened because it was me saying, I know what you need. So that didn't work. Why didn't people need it? Because they didn't want it. So instead of me saying, hey, I know what you need, what I should have said is, what do you want? But it's tricky because if I ask most people what they want, they don't know what they want until you show it to them.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
So then I made a virtual world because then I was like, you know what, screw it. People will make property tours however they want. How do I scale virtual culture? You know, if we have a company of a thousand people, a hundred thousand people, and we don't have brick and mortar offices, it's not like they're in warehouses. All of our people either work at home or they're in their cars, right?
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
They're in other people's properties. How do I scale culture that? How do I align us back to the passion and the purpose? Like, how do I do that through webinars? Like, what do I do? You know what? I'm going to build a virtual world. It's going to be called Serhant Universe. And we're all just going to operate in there. Everyone's got multiple screens now.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
The majority of our salespeople, you know, coming out of high school, they're all on screens all day long. They got Fortnite on pause at home while they're at school. Like everyone's there. They all have avatars. And I got really excited about the idea of, because I'd never seen a salesperson in a wheelchair. I'd never seen a salesperson who was a military amputee, right?
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
And so we do a lot with vets. And I was like- That could be amazing because now you don't have, it doesn't matter what you look like, how you walk, if you can walk, you can now be in sales just like anybody else, anyone who's able-bodied, and we're gonna do it in this virtual world. And I'm the only one who uses it. Unbelievable. And I spent all this money. I was like, God, guys, come on.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
It's this whole thing. And everyone's like, dude, the last thing I'm gonna do is look at another screen. And that's really what it came down to. So I made both of those mistakes. Wow. How much time did that take? It was a year a piece. How much money? A lot. You know, Spaces was a couple hundred grand. Universe... was way more. And it's shut down now. No, it's still there.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Just no one uses it because there's no utility. And so when you asked me initially, before I started rambling, how do you determine what product to build? The answer for me is I don't. What product does the customer need? And they don't know. And they don't know.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
And so the answers from all of our customers basically brought us to, I guess you call it a software that we just put out called Simple, that I started beta testing in January. But I had taken the people that helped me build Spaces and the people who helped me build Universe, and I was like, guys, I have another idea. And they were like, oh, dude, if you're gonna pay us, whatever, man.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Yeah, we'll do it. You know what, this whole company is just, Ryan, just make it up. And so I was like, no, no, no, let's figure out, how do we make a screenless company? how do we be screenless? How do we be buttonless? Like the answer is always to add more screens or add more buttons. And I'd seen all these other companies and they were like, oh, AI now.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
And we're gonna, here's a chat bot and this, that. And then it's just annoying and no one wants to do it. And the response from all of our customers was, we don't want to do more things. We actually wanna do less things. We don't wanna download more apps and games and programs. Exactly. And then I had this light bulb moment of, ah, so maybe it isn't about, hmm,
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
having an underlying element of tech enablement. Maybe it's about empowerment using machine learning and everything else we have at our fingertips now. And so we created Simple, which replaces work. It does work for salespeople. It's a niche, right? It's in the sales world. So for real estate agents in the United States for now, it does the work for them. It's like Instacart, but for work.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Our audition was in 2010. The show came out in 2012.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
So all the administrative work gets to go away and it replaces boring work. That's nice. Everybody uses it. That's exciting. Like everybody, like the usage rate, it's like 97%. So instead of just Ryan, then it's 97%. okay, so now we'll go hard into simple and people, you know, purpose, people, product now, right? Now you've figured out the product that works.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
You have to stumble, you have to make mistakes, you have to have good people around you who are also willing to tell you no. Like it's part of our interview process too. I get, I'm very, very focused on trying to find people who aren't, mean, but who are not afraid to say no.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Because you surround yourself with yes people because you pay their bills and you will go bankrupt because they will yes you to their next job. And you got to surround yourself with people that are so passionate that they are willing to make you angry. and make you upset. And I definitely have those people now. Wow, really?
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Yeah, it's not as much, it's not as comfortable as it used to be, but the business is so much better for it because I am not always right. In fact, most of the times I'm wrong, but I really wanna understand how we get to the why. And so- I've been able to scale now by surrounding myself with leaders who are 100% comfortable with saying no to themselves, to other people, to me.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
We just count the nos till we get to the yes. And it makes for a massive business. Wow.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
So I went to the cardiologist yesterday. I know that's not your question, but it's funny you asked me that because I did go to the cardiologist yesterday. I mean, it's all connected. Got an EKG, did it. I turned 40 this summer. It was just like, just want to make sure I'm good. And the guy was like, you're good. I'm like, you sure? Are you sure? Why did you ask? Why did you ask? Are you sure?
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
I do that annual Ezra scan, so the annual body MRI, because I've known too many people now in their early 40s who are like, my back hurts. And then they have cancer and die. And I have too much going on to die. So I will do a preventative medicine plan instead of a reactive medicine plan. Yeah, smart. The same reason like I work out and I eat well, it's not for me today.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Actually it is the opposite for me today. The last thing I wanna do is wake up at 4.30 and go work out. That is awful. I do it so that Ryan at 70 can look back and say, Dude, thanks, man, because if you hadn't, imagine where I would be today, right? So I'm always thinking about future me because I've worked for that person.
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
So I got an annual Ezra scan and it came back with like, hey, plaque in arteries, you know, because I'm 40 now. And so I went to the doctor and they came back and there was like the calcium score was 53 of 400. So on the low side, but not zero. So then I go to a cardiologist and they're like, yeah, you're fine. It's fine. You're fine. I'm like, do I need an ultrasound?
The School of Greatness
Ryan Serhant Reveals The MINDSET Behind His Billion Dollar Empire
Do you have to open my chest? I have a lot of responsibilities right now. My heart's gotta be okay. And they're like, you're gonna be okay. Wow. How do you feel emotionally? Emotionally, I think I don't take nearly enough time to do self checks.