When Karen Briscoe would be speaking, coaching, and training with people, she found over and over again that they invariably felt they didn’t have enough time, particularly when it came to investing in their personal and business development. This led her to develop her 5 Minute Success principles. Karen is an entrepreneur, author, speaker, and host of the successful 5 Minute Success podcast. Today, she joins Chris Larsen on the show to share some of these principles and some personal philosophy Karen has been applying to her own life.

Listen To The Podcast Here:

5 Minute Success With Karen Briscoe

On this show, I’m excited to have Karen Briscoe. Karen is a mother, wife, top producing realtor, as well as an author and Creator of the transformative 5 Minute Success concept. She’s also the Principal Owner of HBC with Keller Williams, which has been recognized by the Wall Street Journal as one of the 250 Top Realtor teams in the United States. Karen, welcome to the show.

Chris, I’m delighted to be here because who doesn’t love to go Next Level? We’re doing a pod swap. You’ve got to guest on the 5 Minute Success podcast. It’s time to turn the mic.

I love the concept and I’m not going to steal your thunder. I’ll let you talk more about that, but I’d love for the audience to know a little bit about your journey and how you ended up, where I introduced you in the intro.

I started out in the dirt in the early ’80s out of college. I worked for Trammell Crow in Dallas, where the company bought land, put in streets, utilities and sold lots to home builders and met my husband there. We had our two children and then his career brought us to the Washington DC Metro region inside the Beltway on the Virginia side McLean, which is where the home of Langley is. I’m sure if you’ve seen any spy movie, you know where Langley is and where Amazon HQ2 is in this area. We are impacted by the DC Metro region, but we also have a vibrant economy on the side of the river as well.

I mostly stayed home with our children for the first dozen years of their life and when I wanted to reenter the workforce, I wanted to go back into commercial real estate. I went to work for the Staubach Company, had the Nextel Account and we managed the sales engineering warehouse offices around the United States. What I found was what you’ve seen in one sales engineering warehouse office. You’ve seen them all because it’s pretty cookie-cutter, the attorneys do all the negotiating and it was during the tech bust. When markets are correcting and then there are dispositions going on, there’s no money, Staubach lost the account, I would have to go for Nextel. That didn’t seem interesting and somebody said, “Why don’t you try residential real estate?”

You and I alluded to this, but the commercial people think that they’ve got all the hard skills, negotiation, market knowledge, strategy. Those people on the residential side, all they’re doing is dealing with emotions and relationships. How hard is that? Those are the soft skills. What I found is I’m strong on both sides, and that was success rapidly. I would say technically rookie of the year. As what often happens when people achieve a high level of success fast, you get the attention of people. At the time, Sue Huckaby was number ten in the nation on the residential rankings.

I happened to know her from church and she asked me if I would join her team and then that led to me becoming her partner in ’06. Sadly, she passed away in ’08. It happened to be the same month that the financial markets crashed and the real estate market then crashed thereafter. I took over this huge business that shifted on me. I’m a resourceful person. I was in Texas during the savings and loan crisis in the ’80s. I had some muscle memory about that and also the recession of the early ’90s and what happened after 9/11 and the tech bust. I’ve been through five recessions and market corrections.

I pivoted quickly and moved the company to Keller Williams, and brought on Lizzy Conroy as my business partner. We set about rebuilding the company and over the next years started hitting the top rankings again and people start to notice. Particularly when you go through the level of the situation I had with a partner dying and market crashing, that led to a lot of speaking, coaching and training, which led to me having a lot of people say I should write a book. I wanted to write a book that would be different than other real estate books because there are already a lot of real estate books.

I read a lot of them and I haven’t even come close to all of them.

I was like, “What is unique?” That would be a unique value proposition. What I found over and over again, when I would be speaking, coaching and training with people is they invariably felt they didn’t have enough time, particularly when it came to investing in their personal and business development. I said, “Do you have five minutes a day?” Everybody did. That stuck and it’s proven to be true that it works for a lot of reasons. One, it’s Parkinson’s Law. Parkinson’s Law states that limiting or restricting time makes you more efficient and effective. It’s not time per se. Many people say they don’t have enough time.

There’s a quote from Lao Tzu who said, “Time is a created thing. To say, ‘I don’t have time,’ it’s like saying, ‘I don’t want to.’” What we’re trying to do is we’re trying to break that down and eliminate that blockage. I found the 5 Minute Success principles apply for many reasons, but probably one of the main ones is that people are more likely to remember it and apply it. It’s the principle of the daily reader concept in motivational and spiritual-religious literature because the most books, most training, it’s a tsunami. It’s almost too much information. People don’t remember it and then they can’t apply it when they need it, which is the point.

They return on the shelf and say, “I’ll get to it when I have time.” 

They never have time or they started and they don’t know where to stop and this is bite-size nuggets. It’s effective. That’s how the 5 Minute Success came about through my journey.

How many podcasts have you done?

The 5 Minute Success podcast came out of the fact that my book on its first birthday, I said, “I wanted a podcast.” Ideas often generate other ideas. That’s not unusual. I was being asked to be a guest on other people’s podcasts such as yours. What I found is these principles universally applied that I felt that I could bring guests on and hone in on the 5 Minute Success principles that way. We’re at over 250 episodes. Many outstanding guests like, Hal Elrod, Gretchen Rubin, Gay Hendricks and lots of outstanding real estate people, Jay Papasan and Chris Larsen.

Thank you. I would encourage everybody to check out Karen’s podcast. I listened through several of them that’s why I invited Karen to come on. Some amazing people, amazing nuggets including those from Karen herself. I’m excited to have you share some more here. A lot of people know me from Next-Level Income. They know the commercial side but they don’t know my affinity towards commercial real estate, multifamily. I started as a realtor when I was in college. I had a real estate license for a couple of years and then moved into the medical device field.

I learned the same thing you did, which was applying those systems makes a big difference, Karen, but it doesn’t take a lot of time if you’re working on the right things if you’re working on your business. I had one of my regional managers early on and this was in pharma, medical advice say, “If you read two studies a week, you can outperform 98% of the reps out there.” For people that haven’t listened to your podcast yet, the 5 Minutes Success, what are some of the things that you talk about focusing on as you get started? 

The key fundamentals, the book is written as I said, as a daily reader so every day it’s different. I did that intentionally because many sales and entrepreneurial people, they’re shiny object squirrel, they’re off of the next day. I wanted to have enough unique information coming out of that they wouldn’t get bored. The principles are core and the first one is commit to getting leads. That’s business development, prospecting, lead generation. In any sales they’re entrepreneurs, but any profession, if you think about dentists they lead generate, they call those patients.

It was my birthday and I got a text from my dentist. I was like, “That’s innovative. I like that.” 

They recognize that client or patient retention is huge. Everybody does this. They just don’t call it necessarily that, but it is the key aspect. For example, the commercial side, the leads could be investors or the leads could be deals. Everybody’s doing some lead generation. That is until you have a lead though you don’t have anything to do. Once you have a lead, then the next key component is consult to sell. Some people call this conversion. I prefer the consultative approach because I feel like oftentimes if somebody feels like they’re being converted, they may have buyer’s remorse later or something will happen. If you’re consulting and you’re taking them through the transactional process to help them a service-oriented, then that will end up with a better result. The ultimate result for the business is a transaction. Money comes out on the other end and everybody has to do that. If you don’t monetize it, then you’re nonprofit. Do you realize nonprofits have to make money too? We’re all in the same business. If you think about it deeply enough. The next component is connected, build, and grow.

What often happens particularly with sales entrepreneurs is they’re always off of their next deal and/or they’ll do a deal and then they’ll wake up and realize they don’t have any business coming in. They get a crazy busy lead generating, and then they stop lead generating and they get to work their deal. There are principles to create scale leverage systems, to create a more sustainable enterprise. We saw this happen with COVID-19, how many businesses did not have a plan if no money was coming in for 30, 60 days? To create longevity, you need a plan. You need to work on the plan.

Many people referred to the E-Myth Mastery concept of, “This is working on the business, working in the business as a transactional aspect of a technician.” It’s surrounded or encompassed by The Success Principles of success, thinking activities and vision, which is the mindset motivation component to be successful. Long-term is key first to have the thinking, which is affirmations and business planning but also to have the vision of where you want to go. Doing the actions to make those happen, many people think all they have to do is say their affirmations and have a vision board. It takes action to make things happen.

Take massive actions. 

Massive action moves things faster than anything because at least you’ll know quickly whether it’s worthy or not. All of that comes together and that creates a sweet spot of success. These core key principles are throughout the book and obviously throughout the podcast as well.

What you said you see it from multiple experts and people. I love how you’ve put it down in bite-sized pieces. My wife, for instance, she’s an architect, she’s a professional. You’re a professional. You’re reading to this and you’re like, “I’m not in sales. I’m not a realtor and a sales rep that’s going out there. I don’t need to generate leads.” What would you say to that person, Karen?

They are generating leads. They’re probably having a lot of referrals, but at some point, that would dry up if you stop doing the things that caused the business to come and flow. The lead generating is the doing good work that spreads the news and that brings in more work. At some point, there will be a reckoning because you stopped doing that. I’ve seen it happen over and over again. I had one agent that was successful at open houses and he decided to take off the season to go hunting. Then he woke up months later and said, “I have no business.” I’m like, “You stopped the flow.” Oftentimes, people want to start a new form of business development and you can do that, but often that takes longer because it’s like the rocket ship. If you think about it, where the energy that is required to get a rocket ship in the air, it has to get over gravity, is way more at a higher level than keeping it in orbit. Your wife is in orbit.

She escaped velocity. 

She has and that is a powerful place to be. Although I have seen situations where people start to relax, they don’t realize that some of the things they were doing or what was causing the energy to continue and they relax. All of a sudden they wake up someday and they go, “What happened? Where did it all go?” They stop.

We’re into the COVID-19 crisis. Hopefully, we’re coming out of it as we go through this. What have you been doing personally during this period working on your business? We can go into the changes we’ve seen in the real estate market, but I’d love to hear about what you’ve personally been doing during this period. 

Back to the muscle memory, the one thing I’ve discovered is that when there’s a market shift, a correction, the first thing is to stop the flow out. Make the corrections necessary, which is a lot of instances should have been done. When your money’s flowing and deals are flowing, it’s easy to say, “Keep that on the credit card.” That was first, I made some adjustments, corrections also to the employee, went to some more contract labor for the transactional aspect of it rather than an employee based. Those changes stop some of the flow out. In terms of the lead generation business development, we all double-timed from not so much like, I’m calling you to stop you buy or sell a house, but more of a client care and service call.

We also started doing video series because we found that we had a lot of people that were wondering what’s going on in real estate? What’s happening in the market? They wanted a good resource. What we found is our business is up this 2020, over 2019. 2019, our team sold $91 million, average. We sold about 100 houses a year, every sales price to $100,000. We’re at a high-income area or cost of living area. Now, we’re already over $50 million sold. It’s sold and under contract. What attributes to that? I like to think we’re good at what we do. I believe that we’re responsive to the market in a timely manner.

The other key thing about at least our market area, Homeland Security considers it to be a central service. We were not shut down. We did have stay at home orders but we, as a business, we could still show houses and close deals. The first most important thing was the recreation at the courthouses still because I feel like I was instrumental in that. I have a friend of mine who’s a title attorney who is also a Virginia Delegate. I woke up one morning and go, “If they close the courthouses, we will all be shut down. All these people are going to be homeless.” He went immediately to the Virginia Supreme Court and declared central service courthouses. We’re fortunate and we’re blessed and at the same time, I could speak for a lot of the United States because I’m in a lot of masterminds with top agents all around. What we’re finding is that home has become even more important to people in the sense that it’s not just sheltered place and save it home but it’s also where many people are working, playing, or homeschooling. They want more physical distance.

We’re seeing a shifting from what we had been seeing a movement towards the city center and walkability and density. We’re seeing the opposite towards Suburbia. I believe it’s a trend that’s going to benefit the residential real estate agent. If you look at economies when the housing is strong, other aspects of the economy are strong too. We have employment. I’m not saying we’re out of the woods yet, but I’m anticipating or optimistic that we’re going to see that housing is going to be one of those areas that people are going to focus on. It will be beneficial to the overall economy because again, as people buy and sell houses, that creates a lot of jobs in demand in other areas.

In my book, I talk about the cycles, like you mentioned and a lot of the money and the banking is real estate driven with all the real estate collateral, which drives the stock market, drives economies. It’s a huge component and you can go back to 1800s. Karen, you talked about this is the fifth downturn you’ve seen. I saw my first when my parents got laid off in the early ‘90s during the savings and loan crisis. You were in Texas, you’re acutely aware of that. I saw three after that so far, what have you learned from those? Also, we were talking about this before the show, there was a female achieving success during those downturns in commercial and residential, what can you share with the audience? I’d love to hear some advice for those out there that may be looking at my show and saying, “You’ve got a lot of men on here and not a lot of women.”

We’ve got that in common.

A natural driver, this internal fire in the belly. I’m going to keep going Energizer Bunny until I keep going. The other thing is that I recognize early on that this was a business. What happens frequently, particularly on the residential side women enter the real estate profession as a side hustle from their family, which I did too. I get that.

That’s an interesting perspective. I never thought of it that way, like a side hustle from the family from being a mom. 

It is good for that. My business partner started out that way. I have a number of women that have started that way. This is the difference is when they recognize that it’s a business and back to the E-Myth Mastery, they go from the technician of being the deal maker to recognizing they have to work on the business and create systems and scale. I saw that early on and I implemented those in place. As I’ve risen in the rankings of top-level producers, as you mentioned that it flip flops. There’s a majority of women, real estate agents on the residential side and yet you get to the upper echelons, the top 20% and it’s the other way around. I’ve talked to many top producers. I hear it over and over again, the men go into it from the ground running, creating a building a business. What often happens with women are several things. One, I feel like they take it personally, the rejection, and I do too. Believe me, in the beginning, I had to put up my bulletproof fast. I look at guys, look you all have to ask women out on dates. You get a lot of experience in overcoming rejection.

I got rejected a lot, Karen, is that what you’re saying? 

There you go. It reminds me of that movie You’ve Got Mail was Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan and he’s going, “You’ve got to go to the mattresses.” It’s not personal, it’s business. Men for some reason come out that way and women look at it the other way. They think it’s personal and they don’t look at it as business and then they take it personally. By taking it personally, then it holds them back. I’m sure you’ve heard Sheryl Sandberg and the whole idea of Lean In. Its true women don’t lean in. They don’t make the big ask. They don’t ask to sit at the table, but oftentimes there are many successful women out there, myself included, but the ones that do, they lean in, they make the ask. They consider it as a business. They treat it like a business. They have feelings, but they recognize that it’s not personal and they don’t make it about them. They make it about the business and how they can help that be successful.

Like you said, if you take a little bit of time and you put that first to working on the business, systematizing focus on lead generation and the sequential growth afterward, then at some point you don’t even have to work in the business. You can have more freedom. That’s what I loved about your TEDx Talk, I believe it’s Flip Time/Love Life. I listened to that. It resonated with me when we were talking before the show. I’d love for everybody to go and listen to Karen on TEDx. If maybe you could share a little bit about the philosophy of that and how you have applied in your own life?

What happened with me is that I achieved a high-level success of a marriage of over three decades with the love of my life and two successful adult children. I looked around and I go, “There’s still something more.” I was like what many people would say, “You’ve already arrived at the peak.” What I found is that I also kept saying, “I didn’t have enough time to do the creative work, the contribution work, the thing that would give more meaning.” This is what led me to write the book. What I realized was the only one that was stopping me from doing it was me, because if I wanted to do it, I would do it.

There’s a quote by Lao Tzu that’s 2,500 years ago. That says, “Time is a created thing. To say, ‘I don’t have time.’ It’s like saying, ‘I don’t want to.’” I had to look at why I was saying that, why I was stopping myself and what I discovered along the way is that what I was doing and what many people do as I was working my way up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs pyramid the self-actualization. In the time of COVID, the base of the pyramid is your physical needs. You’re needing toilet paper. We all went back to the basics we all do need our toilet paper. The safety and security needs. We all needed to know that we were going to be okay. The esteem needs, relationship needs, then self-actualization.

Many people, myself included, work their way up the pyramid, and only once they have the lower level needs satisfied, do they work on self-actualization. Several things can happen. You can run out of time. It’s a health, career, and life event where you don’t get to self-actualization. Many people wait until the kids are out of school, they’re retired, in school, or whatever it is they’re waiting for something to happen. What I realized was also people were trying to fit self-actualization into their life, like a time management block or work-life balance initiative. The challenge of work-life balance is it’s got this teeter-totter philosophy was like, “You give to your work, but then your life suffers and then if you give to your life, your work suffers.” First of all, it’s all life. I was like, “What if you flipped the pyramid? What if it’s not time management? What if it is focus and energy management?” If you put self-actualization first by flipping time and you create the life you love, while you’re living the life you love right now, but you’re creating the life of your dreams, what I find is the people who do that, they are more authentic with themselves.

Because they’re more authentic with themselves, they have higher self-esteem, they have better relationships. They’re more productive because they’re living in tune with themselves. That leads to personal needs. People say, “How does this work?” I’m like, “I took the time to write my book.” Some would say, “You took away from your business.” It’s doubled my business. The energy that comes from living that life that I love is more impactful than the idea that I could work harder and smarter. It became that impetus if you will. The paradigm shift is what caused that to happen. It wasn’t the other way around. It didn’t become self-actualized and then it happened. I had to pursue it and then it came to me.

You mentioned losing your business partner. I lost my best friend, my training partner in college. It made me think, “Am I doing what I’m meant to be doing?” I say I’m lucky a lot of times because I went through some of these challenges. I lost my father too when I was young but it makes you think. What I went through was I thought, “Is this what I’m meant to be doing?” It took me like you a long time to work up at that point. I realized one day, like, “You can have it all. You can do it all.” It doesn’t have to be the chicken or the egg. That’s what we try to talk about at the Next-Level Income is you can find your passion, you can work on that. You can be an amazing mother or father or business person, and do all those things. That’s why I’d love to have you on the show, Karen. I’m going to ask you the last question we always ask all our guests, and then I’ll let you share where everybody can find all your resources. We always ask our guests, if you could go back and give your 25-year-old self one piece of advice, what would it be?

It’s going to have two parts, but one piece is to the proverb of, “When was the best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago. The next best time is now.” It’s the same with real estate. What is the best time to buy real estate? Twenty years ago. The next best time is now. I would encourage that. The similar is invest yourself. Warren Buffett said, “Your greatest asset, your greatest investment is in yourself.” I have found that to be true. Many people think that coaching, personal development and business development is expensive, but I’m like, “I have the ability to create value and wealth more than any other asset I own.” I would encourage my 25-year-old self to recognize that and to invest in myself.

That’s a perfect advice. I was listening to a podcast with a successful tech and entrepreneur, and they said, “If I know if I lost everything, if I could be dropped in a country where I speak the language and had the proper business structure, I could have a business in 5 to 10 years, I’d be tremendously wealthy again.” If you invest in yourself and you go through that, it can have all that. Karen, I’ve loved having you on the show. For our audience that wants to listen to your podcast, get your books and/or learn more about you, please go and check out her TED Talk as well. What’s the best way to find you, Karen?

It’s easy because it’s 5 Minute Success. That’s the podcast where you find podcasts everywhere. The website, social media and the books, Real Estate Success in 5 Minutes a Day, Commit To Get Leads: 66 Day Challenge as well as Flip Time/Love Life: A Heroine’s Journey. It’s a story told about the character, Haley who goes on this journey and learns to flip time to love life. All of those are at Amazon or wherever you get books.

Thank you so much, Karen. I highly encourage the audience to check all of Karen’s material out. Also, you can get my book free at NextLevelIncome.com/book. Karen, I wish you the best. Thank you so much for your time. 

Here’s to your success, Chris.

Thank you.

Important Links:

• HBC

• 5 Minute Success – Podcast

• Keller Williams

• E-Myth Mastery

• The Success Principles

• Lean In

• 5 Minute Success

• Real Estate Success in 5 Minutes a Day

• Commit To Get Leads: 66 Day Challenge 

• Flip Time/Love Life: A Heroine’s Journey

• NextLevelIncome.com/book

Tagged: 5 Minute Success, self-actualization, work-life balance, success principles, business development, personal development, Group 2