6 Steps To 7 Figures Review: An Essential Book For Every Real Estate Agent

In this article

Getting your real estate license doesn’t automatically make you a good real estate agent. Building a real estate business takes grit and dedication to doing the same things over and over again. Author Pat Hiban understands this. After all, he holds the coveted “Billion-Dollar Agent” title and has spent over 20 years creating a game plan for success. Lucky for you, he lets you cheat decades of learning with 6 Steps to 7 Figures, a step-by-step guide to building real wealth through real estate sales.

Here’s a breakdown of some of the core concepts in the book.

Set Goals and Affirmations

What are you trying to achieve, and how will you get there? By goal setting and surrounding yourself with people who can hold you accountable. Most agents are willing to lower their goals halfway through the year because it’s hard or they’ve allowed their schedule to control them.  

Hiban himself, after watching the markets tank and missing his goal of being a millionaire, says, “you can be successful in meeting your goals only if you focus your actions on what you yourself can control.”  

What do you control? Your activities, your time, your effort.  

Track

How will you know if you’re succeeding? By keeping tabs on the metrics that indicate your success. Don’t know what they are? 6 Steps to 7 Figures gives you the playbook of the right things to track. Using Hiban’s system, you’ll inform business decisions by knowing where your leads are coming from, how to measure your own net worth and hold your expenses accountable. Overall, you should probably know how much money you made this month. It’s kind of important.

Find Mentors and Masterminds

Where can I find advice from people who have done it before me? Start by engaging in conversations that build a community around you. Pat’s business was built on “copying his way to success,” and it has saved him time and money for decades. When the market shifted, and Hiban realized that foreclosures would need to be a part of his sales portfolio, he engaged a mentor’s wisdom to be proactive and “went from zero banks and zero foreclosure listings to thirty-two different banks that give me business”. A willingness to learn—that’s where growth happens. Are there areas in your life or your business that you need to improve? Do it.

Act

Do you know what you earn per hour? Every time the phone rings, that’s the figure to remember. Hiban built one of the country’s largest real estate sales businesses by knowing what activities were dollar-productive and not getting distracted by the noise. In 6 Steps to 7 Figures, he laments about the agents who “squander leads because they felt those leads weren’t good enough .”Every lead is an opportunity for a conversation, which is the backbone of growing your sales. Have you connected with your old leads recently? Now’s the time.

Build On It

Are you leveraging your small successes to build bigger ones? Follow Hiban’s lead when he uses a 15-year-old foreclosure sale to open the door to grow the number one REO team in Maryland. Or when he realizes that his time is best spent on activities that bring in money and learns to delegate. Big businesses are tough to sustain with a team of one. If you truly want a seven-figure income or net worth, don’t be afraid to bring leverage into your world. Do you still believe you’re the only one your clients will trust? Unfortunately, you’re not.

Invest

Does the business you’re building support the goals that you set for yourself? Understanding the flow of income in a sales business is critical to sustained growth and success. As Hiban is building his active and passive income streams, he reminds us not to make long-term financial decisions based on temporary income. Have you ever increased your expenses in the good months, assuming they’ll last? Maybe you shouldn’t.

Conclusion

Let me tell you what this book is not. It’s not a novel filled with beautiful prose and flowery imagery.  

It is a guidebook to the best practices for success in real estate sales and encourages you to think about your business differently. Pat Hiban reminds us to work smart and use the power of modeling others to shortcut the time it takes for you to be a successful real estate agent.  

As a bonus, we get the wisdom of Pat, ten years later, reflecting on how his business and life have grown since the book’s initial release. 6 Steps to 7 Figures is full of practical tips, entertaining stories of successes and failures, and the kind of humor that can only come from someone who embraces change and curiosity at every step.

Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.