Ryan Serhant is a costar on Bravo’s hit show Million Dollar Listing New York and the author of the national bestseller, Sell It Like Serhant. Ryan made just $9,000 his first year in the business. Twelve years later, he averages a billion dollars in sales every year, making him one of the most successful real estate brokers in the world. His social media platforms get a combined average of 3 million+ eyeballs. He is the CEO and founder of SERHANT., his eponymous real estate company, which launched in 2020 and is the most followed real estate brand in the world. He lives in New York City with his wife, Emilia, and their daughter, Zena.
John Shegerian: This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet, and your privacy. It is the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company in the United States, and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit ERIdirect.com.
John: Welcome to another edition of the Impact Podcast. This is a very special edition of the Impact Podcast. I am John Shegerian. We have got Ryan Serhant with us from Million Dollar Listing, from Big Money Energy, and Sell It Like Serhant. He is a superstar in the real estate industry. He is a superstar in the media. Welcome to the Impact Podcast, Ryan.
Ryan Serhant: Thank you so much for having me. I love your energy. It is like you have read my book or something.
John: Well, you think? Do you think I read your book? I do not know. There is so much good stuff in here I made so many markings I actually confuse myself. But, I mean, these are great books. I am just going to say it from the top of the show, first of all, I am a native New Yorker so I am the CEO of your fan club. I have loved you since the first season and I love what you are doing now in business and I love your books. For any entrepreneur out there or who wants to be an entrepreneur, these are the books to read for anyone who wants to be in sales. And by the way, we are all in sales because we are always trying to sell something, whether it is our self or a product that you have, these are the books to read. I am going to tell you right now, I am fifty-eight years old and I learned a shit ton from these books. So, Ryan, you have got it right. We are going to talk about that today.
Ryan: You look younger than me.
John: Well, I do not think so. First of all, there is no way this good-looking guy here should have ever been a hand model. Come on now. I mean, I do not even know how that even remotely happened. That is like the funniest thing ever.
Ryan: Yes. I needed to make money, man, and so in order to make money, I had to do whatever it took. If I had to use my hands then I would have to use my hands.
John: But how does a guy who is better looking than Ryan Reynolds is a hand model and not a movie star? It is ridiculous.
Ryan: I challenge that statement.
John: I do not know about that, but well, Ryan, before we get talking about both books, of course, we are here today to talk about Big Money Energy which I love, BME which you also say means Big Magnetic Energy, which we are going to talk about as well, talk a little bit about the back story, where you were in 2008 and your backstory, how you really got to where you are today. I just love our business. For our readers, our viewers, our listeners who have not seen you yet, to learn more about you through your own eyes and words.
Ryan: So I was born in Texas, I grew up outside Boston. My parents made me play every single sport known to man and take every single class ever because they wanted me to be well-rounded and try everything. I was terrible in every sport and I was okay at school, I was not great. The one thing that I actually like doing was theater, acting. I had a love for that and made little movies with my brother, I forced him to do everything. My mom was my main camera person. We had fun like that. Then I went to college, I was going to go to college for theater but my parents would not let me so went to a liberal arts school and majored in English and Theater. Then when I graduated I had money saved up from construction jobs every summer, my grandfather had died and left a few thousand dollars to each of the grandkids, and so I basically said, “Okay, I got enough money to live in New York without having to get a job for maybe a year or two.” That is what I am going to do because I would rather regret the things I did than the things I never tried and I do not want to be fifty years old saying, “Man, I wish I could have tried the acting thing because that was always my passion,” and here I am as an actuary or something, right? Just to appease my parents, I did take the LSAT to go to law school. I took it twice. I bombed it both times and I really did try, I really did study. It was just really, really, really hard.
John: Right.
Ryan: So I went to New York, tried to become an actor, got onto a soap opera pretty quickly. They killed me off, also quickly. I hand-modeled and that paid me the most actually. I held phones for AT&T. I held Nespresso capsules. I held phones. I was a stand-in for athletes’ hands. It was a very strange time in my life and then I basically just ran out of money, and it was, go home, move home, which at that point had become Colorado, refigure out life, and then I guess get another job or figure out a way to stay in New York. And so that is what I did. I had a friend who said, “Do not become a bartender or waiter or get a temp job. Get your real estate license,” and this was like this spring and summer of 2008.
John: Okay.
Ryan: He said, “Get your real estate license. It is the greatest thing in the world. People buy apartments over the internet without even seeing them,” and so I said, “Okay, I guess I can make my own hours that way.” So I got my license and my first day was the day Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in 2008. The benefit to me was that I did not really have a lifestyle to uphold. I was living little check to little check anyway, so it is not like I had money invested, life was just sort of, you know, I live in a 300-square foot box in Koreatown so I just thought real estate was really, really, really, really, really hard, but I became addicted it because you know what is harder? Trying to be an actor in New York City. Do you know what the worst rejection is? When people reject you to your face because of your face. With real estate, people say they would not take apartments or they just would not call me back but it was because of the apartments, I do not think it was because of my eyebrows.
John: Right. So it is less personal.
Ryan: I am okay with it. Yes, less personal. I think that is hard for a lot of people, but for me, it was way better than what I had been dealing with and so I just stuck with it and I fell in love with it. I fell in love with the idea that I could make an income as a percentage of a sale price that has nothing to do with me by connecting people and talking to them while they are making a decision that they were otherwise probably going to make anyway.
John: Right.
Ryan: That is a job? I will do that job all day long, and most people then say, “Oh, but there is no salary, there are no benefits, there are no guarantees,” like, fuck salaries, I have never had a salary or benefit, no one has ever guaranteed me anything, right? I made a hundred and fifty dollars a photo with my hands. Those are my big money days. I just became obsessed with the business and then it grew from there. So that is kind of the back story if you will.
John: That is awesome. We are going to go into the first book later, but we are here today to talk about your new book, Big Money Energy. I want to go into anecdotes from both books but today it is Big Money Energy. For our listeners who want to buy it, obviously, you can go to bigmoneyenergy.com or from Ryan’s website, ryanserhant, S-E-R-H-A-N-T, .com. Of course, this book is available at amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and other great book stores. Also, I have to just say, at the top of the show, when we are off the air, Ryan made me aware that he is closing a deal while we are doing the show. So not only can he do the Impact Podcast but he is closing a deal. So this is like a Million Dollar Listing Impact version of Ryan closing a deal, so watch him multitask while he answers my questions. Ryan, after this National Best Selling Book that you wrote, Sell It Like Serhant, which is a great book, I read it through twice, why Big Money Energy, why post-2020, maybe one of the craziest, if not the craziest year in human history, coming out of this tragic pandemic that we have all gone through, why Big Money Energy, why now?
Ryan: Sell It Like Serhant was a book that took me nearly ten years to write. It was everything that I knew about how to sell. It was all my tips, all my tricks, all my strategies. It was really my sales bible and I had a lot of it written for a long time for my team, my team members, teaching them how to sell everything that I knew. I really flushed it out and made it a book that was applicable to not just real estate but to all sales and how to build a sales career, and then that book spawned the spin-off show on Bravo and an online sales course, the Sell It Like Serhant sales course has been huge with people all over the world learning how to sell with us and learning our tactics and strategies and increasing their lifestyles which has just been awesome. And then the pandemic hits, and we are quarantined, and I am talking to all of our course members and I am talking to a bunch of random people too, people I do not know doing Instagram lives and just getting emails from people all day long, and a lot of people were being fired or furloughed or just scared. What I heard the most is people were connecting their self-worth to their income. I remember what that was like when I first started doing real estate. I did not get into real estate because I like crown moldings. I got into real estate because I need to pay rent and I did not want to have a lockdown job that would not allow me to do anything else, and real estate, I was told anyway, was you make your own hours. You do not have to go to an office, you could do whatever you want, just sell things or rent things and get paid, and I thought that sounds pretty great. But I remember too, at that time, I had no confidence as an agent. I was barely even confident in my own skin as a person. I had low self-esteem. It is super tough being in New York City. I lived in the worst apartment ever. I ate the same food all day long. I was totally embarrassed about not being able to make it and I did not want to go home. So I carried that desperation on my sleeve, no matter how hard I tried not to. As I was talking to everyone during quarantine, I felt like a lot of people kind of were starting to feel the same way, and a lot of people were saying, “Listen, Ryan, even now, Sell It Like Serhant gave us all the tools of the trade, you gave me my toolkit but my stomach is in knots and I do not know how to use the tools. My throat chokes up. My palms are sweaty. I turned bright red. No one is going to believe me and I have got impostor syndrome,” like all the self-doubt. So Big Money Energy is that unique set of qualities that every super successful person has that allows them to become the person they have always wanted to become.
John: So this is the toolkit? This is the mindset?
Ryan: Yes, the toolkit and mindset. That is exactly right. That is what I told the publisher word-for-word. You cannot just get a toolkit full of a bunch of tools and then go build a house, right? You need to learn how to build the house and then you got to have the confidence in yourself to go put up that house.
John: Right. I love it. Well, I loved in the first book, now that we are going to be– Obviously, science is going to win. This vaccine is happening. We are going to get beyond this, and even though it is wonderful you and I are doing this Zoom interview today and we are all living on Zoom right now, but eventually, we are going to move out of that, again.
Ryan: Yes.
John: And what I love, just back to your secret number three, and I always tell this to our salespeople, “Get your face out of Facebook and go into somebody’s face.” Serhant secret number three, “Never underestimate the power of face-to-face meetings, sometimes emails and texts are not enough to get a deal closed.” Talk about that first big deal that you closed, that landmark story with the Chinese guy.
Ryan: Oh, in Big Money Energy?
John: Yes.
Ryan: Yes, there was that light bulb moment for me, my whole life, honestly, I remember my entire life by deal, like, if you could say, “Ryan, what happened in 2009?” I would say, “Oh, man, I do not know.” If you are like, “When did you meet June Shen?” I would be, like, “Oh, March 15th, 2009.”
John: Right, right.
Ryan: Your life, you remember it because all these deals are so traumatic. I was basically just doing rentals, small tiny sales, like three hundred and sixty thousand, three hundred and ninety thousand, like six hundred, seven hundred or eight hundred thousand on Long Island City, Queens. I was posting open listings of beautiful apartments because that is what my training was, that is what I was told to do. A woman from China named June Shen reached out and said that she was looking to make an investment for her daughter. It turns out she is looking to make an investment and buy a property for her daughter who was not even born yet because that daughter would eventually go to NYU, as they do.
John: Everybody has a plan.
Ryan: Everyone has a plan. She was real and she worked in energy, like oil and gas, and she was coming to New York by herself, pregnant, and was going to come to find an apartment and she needed to work with someone. I had these cool listings that were not mine and she wanted me to show her around. It was like a total lay-up, but I had never even had a lay-up before, I have never even done a sale over I think eight hundred thousand dollars before, and her budget was two and a half million dollars. So I freaked out at first but instead of telling her, “Oh, I do not really do sales like that. I have never done them before,” I said, “Absolutely, a hundred percent. Let me know when you are there. I will send a car for you,” anything I had learned from the movies. I have never done this before and I had a light bulb moment, man, where it is like, you know what, I could do this, I can do this job. I could become a power broker, I do not even know what that means but I can become a real estate broker. I see all these super successful brokers who are just dominating all day long, why not me, right? Why not me? That kind of became my inner mantra, “No matter what, why not me?”
John: That is such a good mantra.
Ryan: And so, I decided, you know what, I am going to clean up. I went and got a suit at Macy’s. I cleaned up my apartment. I rented a car on my credit card, it was terrifying, and I went and I did all my research. I studied everything because I knew I can start acting like I have been doing this for ten years so that when she gets off her plane from China she is with somebody who knows what he is doing, but how the hell am I going to get ten years of experience in a week? What is ten years of experience? Ten years of experience is just information. It is just knowledge. I have been around the block. So I do not have deal experience, but what I can do, because this is what I did as an actor for all those years, I can memorize information. So I figured out what apartments I was going to show her and I walked that tour every day, all day, for that entire week before she got there. I memorized everything, every fact about every building, the amount of apartments that were in each one, the sizes, the developers, the architects, and if there were celebrities. I went into every coffee shop, met everybody, memorized the menus just in the off chance that she gets hungry or need a drink, I could walk in with her, in my mind this is what I am thinking, and go up and say, “Hey, Bob,” and Bob would know me because I introduce myself every day for seven days and get her a matcha latte with this, that, and the other, and really, really hook her up because this is what I do, right?
John: The lifestyle.
Ryan: Winning confidence.
John: Right.
Ryan: And she showed up, she slept most of the time because she was jet-lagged and pregnant, and she bought an apartment for just over two million dollars and we did that deal like three a.m. at St. Regis and she asked me to bring her McDonald’s, and I will never forget–
John: You talked about standing in the lobby just in utter amazement with everything that was going on at St. Regis, which is–
Ryan: Yes, it was insane. And so, yes, dude, it is totally crazy. So I did that deal and that is when I realized, this is something that I can do. That was my first big commission check, it was twenty-five thousand dollars, and it blew my mind and I realized, you know what, there are more of these people. I can do a lot more of these deals and I am going to keep doing them, over and over and over and over again.
John: That was it. We have got, today, for our listeners and viewers out there, of course, you know, but if you do not, Ryan Serhant, the founder and CEO of Serhant, Big Money Energy is his new book. He is the star of Million Dollar Listing New York. I am a native New Yorker. I have been his fan since the first season. He is just amazing. You can also find Ryan and his colleagues at ryanserhant.com. Ryan, I love how honest you are in the book in all your anecdotes and also all the props you give, all the great people around you including your mom, your dad, your stepdad, your brothers, and your sisters. I love that you say, as a young boy, that they used to call you crying Ryan and you just said, “I am not going to be crying Ryan, I am Ryan the lion.
Ryan: Yes.
John: And is that something that you play that over still when you said, just when you are telling the June Shen story, I keep thinking, “I am not crying Ryan, I am Ryan the lion.”
Ryan: Yes, I do not think about that that often anymore. No one calls me crying Ryan, unless my employees, the people that work here, do behind my back. I think they call me a lot of things.
John: But, I mean, like, you play it back that that is where you came from and you even give credit to that in your books, that that is still part of you, that stuff still stays part of your DNA, you do not have a chip on your shoulder, you have a boulder on your shoulder it always seems like.
Ryan: Yes, I think, Million Dollar Listing cast me in 2010. I went to an open casting call with three thousand agents and it was really, really tough. In November, they said, “Hey, we are casting four of you, Ryan you are one of them, congratulations, but just FYI, only three of you are making the final show. Okay. And it was me, Fredrik Eklund, Michael Lorber, and then another person who did not make it. I was not Howard Lorber’s son, and I was not Fredrik Eklund who had been in the business for ten years, right? I was renting apartments. I did one sale to one Chinese lady and I had one building at that point which is kind of my claim to fame. I took that one deal and I just freaking milked it, talked about it left, right, and center. That also taught me something about how to market yourself, but there was a lot of push back to me being on Million Dollar Listing the first season. There are a lot of people who said I should not have been cast in the first place. There are a lot of people who said I was not a real broker, I am not from New York. People were super mean. People are very mean in this city. You need to be very, very tough and I will never, ever, ever forget all of that. So it pushed me to work even harder to not get cut on the first season and it pushed me to be the absolute best broker possible because up until very recently, people still said, “Now, he is just this reality TV guy, he is not a real broker, he does not do this, does not do that.” Well, I was a couple of minutes late to our podcast, just FYI, because I was just posting on Instagram that I just sold the second most expensive house in the history of the United States for just under a hundred and forty million dollars.
John: Right today? Right now?
Ryan: Yes, like twenty minutes ago.
John: Unbelievable.
Ryan: So that is the deal that I am working on. Just making sure it is all clean, it is good, the buyer is happy, all that.
John: Say that again, how big was that sale? A hundred and forty million?
Ryan: Yes, the asking was just under a hundred and forty million.
John: Well, you are going to have to come back on Impact again, because the next time you want to do a big deal, I mean dude, this will be a–
Ryan: You are the reason.
John: Yes. Well, I want to be part of something. For our listeners out there, that story of– I do not want to go into that story necessarily today, but it is one of my favorite stories in your book when they came to film you, do the test run, whatever it is called, the screen test for a Million Dollar Listing, how the day ended early and how you figured out how to get out of the day and make it seem like– You used actually a girl who had basically dumped you in a very sweet but nice way, you used your lie to literally blow off the cast when you were out of stuff to do with them right after your boxing lesson, and after one of your tours, one of the great stories in your books, another great anecdote, but for those who want to read it, it is in Big Money Energy. You got to read his book, bigmoneyenergy.com, amazon.com, Barnes & Noble. Of course, you could get it on his website ryanserhant.com. He just closed a hundred and forty million dollar deal. Did we need to say more about why you need to buy this book? Come on, right? I mean, honestly, this show could be over now, but there is so much to go into. Going back, we talked about this is the toolkit, this is the mindset. As you said, 2020 brought external anxiety and external pressures that nobody was really equipped to deal with, and now that we are into 2021 and getting back off the canvas and getting on with it is really what you cover in here. Talk a little bit about what you mean in Big Money Energy with, “Be the future you, now.” “Be the future you, now,” what do you mean by that?
Ryan: Yes. So a lot of people tell me they are like, “Okay, so what did you do? How did you start working with luxury clients? How did you pick yourself up and start running around? Did you just fake it until you make it?” A lot of people talk about that, right? Fake it until you make it. Tell everyone you are great and you will just be great. There is some truth to that. I believe in the power of positive energy. I believe in vision boards. I have got a whiteboard in my office right here that has got all our goals and I better hit them, but I do not believe in being disingenuous. I do not believe in not being authentic to yourself. I do not think you should ever lie. I believe that you have the power to be the absolute biggest and best version of yourself whenever you are ready, maybe you are ready today, maybe you are not. I believed after I did that deal that I was ready today, and I did not want to wait ten years. I wanted to start being the best real estate broker in the United States tomorrow, was I going to have the resume to prove it? Absolutely not. Was I going to have the experience to be able to talk about fifteen hundred deals and this that and the other? No way. But could I start carrying myself in such a way where I would humbly be able to walk into rooms as somebody who knew exactly what he was doing? Big Money Energy is all about knowing what you want and going and getting it. It is Big Magnetic Energy. It is the ability to control your energy so you can control your life, so you can attract success to you and not sit and wait for the opportunity because that is what I noticed the most successful people in the room were doing and I wanted that. I wanted that, and the first way you get there is you have to have a plan. So we are talking about you, we are talking about mindset. We are talking about your life. So what is your plan for your life? Write it down. Who are you going to be in the future? For me, right now, I think about Ryan 2030 all day long because ten years ago was like yesterday to me, it goes by so fast. In my Ryan 2030, I think about who that guy is going to be and how I can make that guy’s life awesome. So for you, and anyone listening, you do not have to go out ten years or nine years, you can go out two years, okay? You can go out twenty-four months. Write down who that person is. What do they look like? What do they weigh? If that matters to you. Who are they with? Do they have more kids? Are they on vacation? Are you in a new job? A new car? Get real material, write it all down. Who are you in two years? That is now your goal. That is the future you, that person. You do not have all those things today, but you can start being her or him right now. Start carrying yourself with those shoulders right now, and I am telling you, if you do that and you believe it more than anyone else, you will become that person, but better. There is something to be said– Remind me where you are based?
John: We are in California, in Fresno, California, but I have an office in New York and we have facilities across America.
Ryan: Okay. Tom Brady just won his seventh Super Bowl, right?
John: Right.
Ryan: And there is something that people in the defense when they play against him always say, like, “Is he the best athlete?” “No way. But man, oh man, that guy believes so, so solidly that he is the absolute best. That he causes everyone else to have doubt in their own abilities so they do not play as well.” We literally just watch that happen on TV. Where like the greatest quarterback, physically, athletically, what he can do, Mahomes, was so intimidated by Brady in the Super Bowl that he did not play is good because Brady believed in himself so much more. It is amazing how real that becomes. So if you believe in yourself, everybody else will.
John: Ryan, I love that, but also you make it so clear in your books your preparation level, as you just said about the June Shen meeting, but just even in your daily practice, your discipline is amazing. Brady’s discipline is unmatched, Gisele and the kids moved out of the house twelve days prior to the Super Bowl. She herself is a superstar near billionaire model. They moved out of the house so he can watch film for twelve days without any interruption. You happened to have a routine. You are up at 4:30.
Ryan: Yes.
John: You intermittent fast, twelve to six is how you eat?
Ryan: Yes.
John: You watch what you eat, you exercise every day. Talk a little bit about discipline equaling freedom, discipline equaling success and that is part of getting your mindset right, getting your body right, getting your whole persona and look and lifestyle right to win. Talk a little bit about how you do it and how you coach others to do it as well, especially here in Big Money Energy.
Ryan: Yes. Discipline reminds me a lot of my parents and my dad disciplining us. I make a lot of choices and I stick to them. Professionals make decisions based on their commitments, amateurs make decisions based on their feelings, how they feel that day. I make choices that in turn become commitments and I do not waiver off of them because I am an adult. I am a professional. Why would I make a choice and make a commitment and then not do it? All I am doing is showing that I am not a professional, I am not an adult. So if you want to be a kid, go be a kid. Those choices help really, really set me free because it also gives me something to lock into. My routine becomes my rock. That is it. It is my routine. It is how I do it, and it allows me to add in flexibility if and when I need to, but it keeps me busy so that at the end of the day, man, and I just started this company four months ago, my own real estate firm after I was at another brokerage for twelve years, I want to be too busy to fail. I do not even want to think about failure and think about overhead and think about all those things that will just get into my head. I want to be so busy and have so much going on that I just did not have time to fail, even if we get close to it, like I will miss it.
John: Let us talk about those three M’s that you talked about in this book, magnetism, mindset, and motivation. First one is you say, “Shed your work PTSD,” what does that mean? That is interesting and I know it is in the book, talk about to our listeners what that means.
Ryan: So that means we all carry baggage, okay? You cannot be free, you cannot start working on the future you unless you remove excess baggage. A lot of us carry our past into our present, so that is one thing that you have to learn on removing, and one of the ways you can do that is with effective time management and there are different ways that you can let go. I understand grief, okay, I understand there is a lot of things that will be with you forever and they are part of your makeup and that is totally fine, but a lot of us have work PTSD with a past boss or employee or something happen at work and it just affects all of your work going forward. You have to leave all of that stuff at the door because it is absolutely meaningless, and I go into how to do that all the time.
John: Good. Talk about killing problems that pollute and give that for the anecdote on the blanket, the forty million dollar blanket anecdote.
Ryan: Yes. I was selling a house, a beach house, a forty-million-dollar beach house in the Hamptons two years ago, and it was completely crazy and the deal was coming as forty million dollars for the house, completely furnished, and then at the last minute, the seller added in a rider that said they wanted five things to stay, the pizza oven and a bunch of stuff and a blanket. So instead of going to the client and saying, “Hey, what about this?” you control the situation, which is what I did. I controlled the situation and I went back to the sellers and I said, “Hey. If I bring this to my client, there is no deal. You make up your mind.” They got angry. They yelled. They screamed. I said, “You make me bring this to my client, I do not care how cheap this stuff is, you told us you would sell it for forty million dollars fully furnished and now you are not.” So they removed everything but the blanket. So the blanket became this disease, became this problem. And so that entire chapter is really all about how to effectively communicate, especially with really successful people, so how to communicate like a boss. The way you do that is to think about a high-end doctor. If you got problems, they are not coming in just ripping through all your problems, no, they think about their words, they think about what they say to you, they space things out and they tell you what you need to hear because you do not always need to hear everything, and the reason you go to the doctors is because they are the expert, right? They are the expert. They will tell me what I need to know, and I behave the same way and people with big money energy behave the same way. If I had gone to my client and said, “Hey, just so you know, they are keeping this blanket. It is a hundred bucks. I am buying you a new one.” It would have been down to principle because when you are dealing with billionaires, it is always about principle. So he would have said, “No,” he would have said, “No problem, keep the blanket and I will keep my forty million, no problem.” And so I held firm, I held the line, I put the deal on the line. It was very risky. I could have just lied to him and said, “Hey, everything is good,” but it just would not have sat right with me, and the sellers acquiesced and they sold the place and they gave us their stupid blanket, and the buyer never knew and we still move forward, because that is what I care about, it is getting deals done.
John: The other thing you talked about magnetism, mindset, and motivation, and just saying yes even if you do not feel ready. First of all, you already gave the June Shen story that talks to that, you gave the Million Dollar Listing story that talks to just saying yes, even if you do not feel ready right away, also, you give a story about being in Mexico or somewhere like that with your sister getting sunburned, being in a movie theater, and getting an email, and just like things changing but then working everything with confidence. Let us go back to what you just said. You started a company. You left the brokerage house, which was very comfy for twelve years.
Ryan: Super comfy.
John: Super comfy. You could have stayed there forever and a day. You could have stayed there and never have to leave those comforts that you had, business comforts, your routine. Why start your own firm during a pandemic when everyone said, “Oh my God, New York, everyone is vacating, they are going to Miami, they are going to Dallas, they are going to the Hamptons and never coming back to the city. The city is never going to be the same, ever, ever, never, ever,” and you did something counterintuitive as the ultimate entrepreneur and you started your own real estate firm. Explain that saying, yes, even if maybe the world did not understand that kind of thinking.
Ryan: Why do mountain climbers climb mountains? Because they are there, right? I built a large sales team. We were the number one selling sales team in New York for three years in a row. What was I going to do? Do it again? Do it again? Do it again? No, sometimes you need to shake the shit up and do try new things. The next best step for me was starting my own place and that is what we did, in New York, in the middle of a pandemic when New York was completely shut down and a million people moved out.
John: Got it. Is this way overblown that New York is never going to be the same? What is your thought process on real estate now in New York and other great places that you are selling real estate, you are going to become as– you are still so young and have decades in front of you, what is going to happen post-pandemic and how has your firm been doing the first four months? I know it is still top of the first inning here, but what is your outlook now on everything?
Ryan: I would tell you and then I am going to have to let you go because I am in the middle of a lot of things blowing up in front of me and I am actually a real estate broker full-time.
John: Okay. The outlook is great, man. It is rosy, it is bright, things are awesome. Things were not great last year, but it cannot rain all the time so it is exciting to be in the position where we are in right now and it is the future, man, it is crazy, the things we could do, the information we can transfer, the stuff that is just at our fingertips, it is the most exciting it has ever been and it will continue to be the most exciting ever, and that is what excites me about the future. We can sell things anywhere, we can do whatever we want to be successful if you want to be, and if you do not want to be, no problem, you do whatever you want, stay on, move out, go to the beach, sit in the hut, sleep there, eat fish, you can do whatever you want and I think that is awesome. Freedom of choice is what keeps me going and I love it.
John: I appreciate all your time today. I know you are closing one of the biggest transactions ever in your career and in American US History. You go back to closing that. For our listeners out there, he is Ryan Serhant, you can find him at ryanserhant, S-E-R-H-A-N-T, .com. Of course, watch him on Million Dollar Listing. He has got a new podcast. He has a new television show called Selling It Like Serhant. This is the toolkit, buy it if you want to be a great entrepreneur or salesperson, this is a toolkit and this is Big Money Energy, BME. This is the mindset, get them both, be like Ryan Serhant.
Ryan: Thanks, man.
John: Ryan the lion, we love you. You are always welcome back here. Hope to meet you one day in person. Go close that deal, man.
Ryan: All right. See you.
John: Take care.
John: This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by Engage. Engage is a digital booking engine revolutionizing the talent booking industry. With hundreds of athletes, entrepreneurs, speakers, and business leaders, Engage is the go-to spot for booking talent for your next event. For more information, please visit letusengage.com.