Episode 380 - Jorge Guerra - Broker/Owner - Real Estate Sales Force

00:00:00 - Jorge Guerra

You can easily get caught up with all these things that are going on. But if you look at my office and you look at the top performers and the way that they work, it's, it's not that difficult. It's simple. But they're consistent, you know, and they're focused on, on what their genre is. So, so for me, you know what? It's my job as a broker to interpret the technology out there, to, to vet it, and to bring it into in my company whenever I feel or deem that it moves the needle.

00:00:32 - Bill Risser

You're listening to the real estate sessions, and I'm your host, Bill Risser. With nearly 25 years in the real estate business, I love to interview industry leaders, up and comers, and really anyone with a story to tell. It's the stories that led my guests to a career in the real estate world that drives me into my 9th year and nearly 400 episodes of the podcast. And now, I hope you enjoy the next journey. Hi, everybody. Welcome to episode 380 of the Real Estate Sessions podcast. As always, thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you so much for telling a friend. Today I'm staying in my new home state. Is that really my new home state, Florida? And we're going to go down to South Florida. We're going to go to Coral Gables, and we're talking to George Gara. George Gara is the owner broker of Real Estate Sales Force, a company he started in 2005, I think at the age of 26, so opened his own brokerage. It's very successful in that at Coral Gables and all around that South Florida area. It's going to be really fun to talk to George, very passionate about what he does. So let's get this thing started. George, welcome to the podcast.

00:01:36 - Jorge Guerra

Bill, thank you very much for the invitation to the real estate sessions. I'm looking forward to sharing and connecting with everything that you need today.

00:01:43 - Bill Risser

Yeah, it's going to be a lot of fun. I had the chance to chat with you for a little bit at the one coast re bar camp, and so I was intrigued by some of the things you were talking about and teaching and saying. So you're a natural for the show. So thanks for doing this.

00:01:58 - Jorge Guerra

Pleasure is mine.

00:01:59 - Bill Risser

Well, let's start. I like to start at the beginning. Some people say I spend an inordinate amount of time getting the background of my guests. But if you listen to most podcasts, George, you know this, that you listen to a podcast and it's like, oh, give me that 32nd background of you. And then we go right into the marketing or the good stuff? The great stuff about how you do business. And we'll get there. We're going to take it slow, though. So the first thing I want to find out is I know you live in Coral Gables, beautiful part of the Miami area, and your brokerage is located kind of throughout South Florida. Now, real estate salesforce, I'm going to just assume you're a native of the area, am I right?

00:02:35 - Jorge Guerra

I was born and raised here.

00:02:37 - Bill Risser

All right. And does that mean. Now, please don't disappoint me here. This means you're behind the dolphins. Marlins, Heat, panthers. Those are all your teams, right? Of course.

00:02:47 - Jorge Guerra

Listen, homegrown over here, watching them as a young kid growing up and seeing a lot of these franchises literally start right in front of you, you have no choice. You're sort of indoctrinated into that fan club. Not to mention all of them have won some sort of world championship in one way, shape, or form.

00:03:05 - Bill Risser

Surprisingly, that cuts deep, because I grew up in San Diego, George. Never had one, never had a championship ever. And I'm way older than you, so that's great. The Marlins get two of them, you get LeBron in the. Even. The Panthers have won the Stanley cup. You're right. And the Dolphins, undefeated.

00:03:24 - Jorge Guerra

Whatever. And don't forget the elephant in the room right now. Enter Miami with Messi.

00:03:31 - Bill Risser

Oh, that's. Saw, I had that commercial on the Super bowl yesterday. Did you catch it?

00:03:36 - Jorge Guerra

Yeah. Of.

00:03:39 - Bill Risser

You know, you and I had a chat about your family background at the bar camp, and your parents immigrated from Cuba in very different ways. Do you mind sharing that story?

00:03:49 - Jorge Guerra

No, absolutely not. So you know what? My father's side of the family, they came over here pretty much because of, obviously, political issues. And one of them, first and foremost, was my dad's brother. Got arrested as a double agent. He was working for the CIA and the Castro regime, and he got arrested, got sentenced for 15 years in prison, and my family was separated. Obviously, my grandmother, his mother, didn't want to leave him in Cuba in prison and come to the US. My father came from Cuba to Spain, stayed in a monastery there for six months, and then came over to South Florida to live with his aunt until his father joined him when he was 17 years old. So left at 15, got reunited with his father back at 17.

00:04:39 - Bill Risser

Wow.

00:04:39 - Jorge Guerra

My father, construction guy, hard labor. And I want to say my grandmother came a couple of years later, and I want to say, when my dad's brother's tenure came over, finished in prison, he got on a raft, went to Mexico. Hitchhiked all the way to Miami, and we've been a happy family ever since.

00:04:57 - Bill Risser

Wow. And I think I remember you saying your mom was more traditional. It was like, just got on a plane and just flew over to the states. Is it pretty simple?

00:05:07 - Jorge Guerra

On my mother's know, I don't share this very often, but my great great grandmother was part of the mafia over there. They were running numbers. Yeah, numbers, as crazy as that sounds back then. And my great grandmother was that my grandmother was married to a prosecutor. And to make a long story short, as soon as the Castro regime hit in there, they had an opportunity to leave, and they all boarded a plane, left all their possessions. I remember my mother was telling me that her only memory was that they took away her coloring books and her colors, and she was devastated before she got on that plane. And they came to here, south Florida. And like most people from Cuba, both my mother and my father and their families came here with nothing.

00:05:51 - Bill Risser

Do you have your brothers and sisters?

00:05:53 - Jorge Guerra

I do. I have a brother and a sister that are both younger than me. Okay. They're six years younger than me. They both happen to be doctors, believe it or not.

00:06:03 - Bill Risser

Wow. That's great. So I imagine there was a very powerful push from your parents for you to be successful and your siblings to be successful in this country.

00:06:13 - Jorge Guerra

Well, you know what? Not only was it a major push as I grew up, before my parents took any luxuries, schooling was first and foremost on their agenda. So they sacrificed everything they could. I would say not the best schools, but the best schools that they can afford at the time. And education was a priority. I remember growing up as a kid, my parents goals are very simple. We want to work hard, labor so you guys don't have to work as hard as we do. And they instilled in us, you're going to be an attorney or a doctor, pick one. And that's sort of the way we sort of grew up. But more importantly, Bill, I think the pressure for me more than anything was seeing my parents come in as a young couple. My parents got pregnant with me when they were 18 years old. Seeing that go to work early, come home late, sleep all weekend because they were exhausted. And then I had the opportunity to speak the language, go to some of the best schools out here. So for me, Bill, I felt an immense amount of pressure to not only succeed, but to take it to that next level. They went so far with what they did, coming to a country without speaking the language, and I had all the opportunities in my right mind I couldn't say I'm going to slack, fool around. I need to level this up. I need to represent. And that's sort of, I think, the fuel or the mindset that they gave both me, my brother and my sister. We're lucky to be here. We need to take advantage. And life is that.

00:07:41 - Bill Risser

I'm sure they're very proud of all of you. So that's awesome. So South Florida, I've had the opportunity because I live in St. Petersburg now. I've been here seven years. I've had the chance to get down there a few times. Give me the biggest misconception about growing up in South Florida. What's the one thing, when you hear it, you go, come on, guys.

00:08:01 - Jorge Guerra

You know what? That's a great question because the misconceptions are mostly real. For the most part. I would love to say that there isn't. I think the biggest misconception for me is crime. You don't see it as often as it's portrayed. The Miami fast life, the drug dealing and the shootings aren't as prevalent as people might think. We are a police city, law abiding, multiculture melting pot that has changed every single decade to not look like the decade before how it was. It's been incredible, the growth and what we've seen here, to be honest with you.

00:08:46 - Bill Risser

No, I think it. Talk about a melting pot. You said, though, use those. Every. It's almost like you can find every nationality in south Florida.

00:08:55 - Jorge Guerra

You know what, Bill? I'll give you a funny story. My oldest son is in high school, and I went to the first parent teacher meeting in high school, and the coach came out, the PE coach came out with a Miami dolphin jacket on, and nobody cheered him. And he said, hey, where are you all from? And you would see the hands raised. Chicago, La, New York, Brazil, Venezuela, Russia, Argentina. And it was like the United nations in that high school, to be honest with, felt, you know, out of place. And I was born, and, and I'm going to go even farther to say that if you go dine at a restaurant and if you listen to the conversations around you, you'll see that the people aren't, there's nobody born and raised here anymore. Everyone has come from some other.

00:09:45 - Bill Risser

Let's get, let's get back. You're in high school. You're right down there. What community did you grow up in?

00:09:50 - Jorge Guerra

So I jumped around. I was born in Hayalia. I moved to Dural. I moved to the southwest. I lived in the beach in South beach for a while before I was even 15. And then I started driving at 15 years old in core gables.

00:10:07 - Bill Risser

Okay, so let's say you're 1617 years old. I heard what your parents said. Doctor, attorney, were you choosing one of those for your career at that age, or was it something else?

00:10:20 - Jorge Guerra

Absolutely. And I wanted to go into the medical field and believe it or not, dentistry was where I thought it was going to be a little bit easier than being a doctor. And I figured I can slide in there. And I actually went to college and I went into premed and I said, at that point, I'm going to go full steam ahead. I'm going to become a doctor. And then real estate sort of knocked on my door, surprisingly.

00:10:41 - Bill Risser

Let's talk about that then, because obviously real estate for everybody. It was your first career out of school, right? That's rare. You know that you have a lot of agents. I'll bet you it's not very popular. Let me say it one more time. I'll say like this. I'm sure you know you have over 500 agents in your brokerage, not many of them. This is their first gig.

00:11:02 - Jorge Guerra

No, as a matter of fact, historically, real estate is the biggest secondary profession that most people take. I was very lucky when I was in college, and I never share this story, so you're probably going to be the first one to get it.

00:11:17 - Jorge Guerra

But I was in college and I was in pre med, and the only way to succeed there was to study from eight in the morning till midnight and go to classes in between. And it was the first year, it was rough. And you know what? During that time, I became single, bill. And living here in south Florida, studying from eight to midnight, being single in your early 20s, early teens, with all your friends calling you, hey, I'm in the beach, I'm partying here. I have a table with this. And what are you doing? And I remember at the end of that semester, I was heartbroken, to be honest with you, Bill. And I told my father, hey, dad, I'm taking a semester off. I want to have some fun and get out there. And my father had a heart attack and he said, listen, there's no way you're going to live off my dime and go out, know, while you should be in college.

00:12:07 - Jorge Guerra

And he told me, if you decide to take a semester off, you need to get a job. And if you don't have a job, you're going to work construction with me. And sure enough, I took that semester off and I told myself, fine, I'll work construction. You're up early before the crack of dawn, and you're home by 03:00 for sure you're exhausted, but the nights are yours and the weekends are yours.

00:12:27 - Jorge Guerra

And I want to say, the first week in construction, I found in the middle of the development site, bill, I found the sales office. Okay. Inside the sales office, there was air conditioning, there was a water jug, and there was a cute girl working in the front desk. So as you can imagine, construction and sales aren't allowed to mix. We have to go to the Porta potties outside. And you might not know me very well, but I'm not designed for a Porta potty. So I would charm my way into the sales office with coffee, or somehow I would find my way in there. And I got caught by the owner of the development inside the sales office with my construction boots on. And he told me to, in a very nice way, to get out. And on the way out, I asked him right back, hey, how can I get a job in here? And he looked at me and he said, you know what? I'm looking for an assistant.

00:13:21 - Jorge Guerra

Why don't you come tomorrow with a shirt and tie, and we'll see how you do? And sure enough, next day, shirt and tie. And by the end of that week, I remember meeting with the owner and him asking me, the ladies inside said, you were great. You want to work this summer here? And my response to him was, yeah, but I think I can sell. I've heard these ladies and I've seen what they've been doing this week give me an opportunity to sell by being a very smart boss. He said, you know what? Instead of having two salespeople, let me have three for sure. And by the end of that semester, I ended up being the number one salesperson in his company.

00:13:59 - Jorge Guerra

And when I departed from him and I said, hey, thank you very much for the opportunity. I'm going back to school. He said, wait a second. I have these other opportunities, and you're my best salesman. I can offer you this much money if you decide to stay. And when I looked at the amount and I looked at what doctors were making at that time, I figured, you know what? They were pretty close.

00:14:18 - Jorge Guerra

And I told my father, hey, I have this opportunity, and I like sales. And in a very not so nice way, he gave me his blessing to go ahead and just do it. And I've been selling real estate ever since. So I think that I started that around 20 years old. By the time I was 26, I opened up real estate salesforce.

00:14:37 - Bill Risser

And that's look, you're the second person I've interviewed this month who started their own operation in their mid twenty s. I can't even imagine how tough that was. I'm going to guess you were hiring a bunch of people that were older than you. They came in and looked at you and said, what? You're going to help me with my business and talk about that a little bit?

00:14:59 - Jorge Guerra

So you know what? Quite the opposite. When I opened up my company, I looked around at the space that I was in, and I felt that it was riddled with opportunity and it was for me for the taking. So, Bill, let me paint to you my picture. I'm 26 years old. The real estate market has just collapsed, okay? The Internet has boomed right in front of us, and the average broker is 64 years old and the average agent is 57 years old. And the Internet has just exploded. Markets crashed. So for me, I was a tech native. I was the first generation to go to school with a laptop. So for me, seeing it go online and seeing that start, for me, I said, you know what? There's huge opportunity. And when I would talk to my competitors, they were looking at left field. They didn't spot this, they didn't see it, they weren't paying that much attention to it. And I felt that, you know what? If I were going to stay in the business and grow, I was going to leverage some of these new technologies and I was fluent in it. And I love to share this story with you, Bill. I used to farm core gable, so I would knock on people's doors like old school, and people would tell me, george, I love your attitude, I love your energy, but Sally Jesse Raphael has been selling in my neighborhood for 30, 40 years. I'm going to go with her. She sold my parents, she sold me, and she's probably going to sell my kids. And it wasn't until the Internet boomed that I was able to sort of change my value proposition and say, hey, listen, I know you've been working with Sally Jesse Raphael for the last 30 to 40 years, but check this out. The Internet has boomed. 90% of all home buyers are going online. As a matter of fact, the first showing happens online. And we now have viewers from all over the world looking. Sally's super nice, but let me share with you a couple things that I do differently to target that audience that really resonated with the consumer compared to the old school tactics. It was a little hybrid of old school and new school techniques that we were sort of inventing as we went. We saw an opportunity for greater exposure. We're going to add it to our presentation at the speed of now and go out there and hit our audience. So for me, when I looked at the space, I didn't want to hire anybody older. Quite the contrary. I've learned in my industry that the older I get, the younger I have to hire. Because tech and business moves at such a fast speed that I lose it the older I get. So for me, during that time, I was young, I was creative. I had a wife that was pregnant with my first born. I had a house with a mortgage that I couldn't afford. I couldn't have had more fire in me. Build to succeed and make stuff up and see what stuck and move my needle forward.

00:17:46 - Bill Risser

Wow, George, you can still hear the passion in your voice right now. The one thing you haven't lost in your older years, you're old, you're a kid.

00:17:54 - Jorge Guerra

But passion, paying my tuition in every single which way. But more importantly, seeing what real estate can give back, not only from a business perspective, yeah, making money is great and dandy, but from an agent growth perspective, from a family perspective, finding what they're looking for from an investment perspective, helping people build their portfolios. Are you kidding me? And they pay me for this?

00:18:22 - Bill Risser

You talk about being an early adopter of social. Did a little research, digging around online before we chat. And 5000 subscribers at the Resf YouTube channel. Over 4000 videos. Dude, I don't think I've ever seen that before. And that's from an independent brokerage.

00:18:38 - Jorge Guerra

Yeah. So check this out. When the market crashed and I told you that I was riddled with opportunities, I made a decision. And my decision was very simple. I wanted to be a listing brokerage. If you list you last. And I asked myself simple, basic common sense questions. If I'm going to build a listing agency and focus on listings, then my value proposition needs to be centered around that. And I didn't want to discriminate on price because I know that a lot of people that I sold very small units to 20 years ago are now multimillionaires. So for me I wanted to sort of set a standard and say, hey, if you list with me this is what you should be expecting. And I thought it was very simple. We're going to go into all of our properties and we're going to shoot pictures with the wide angle pictures. We're going to shoot high dynamic range photography. And then as technology was evolving, the cameras became smaller and smaller. And now would you shoot pictures? You can also shoot video. So we said, you know what, not only are we going to shoot pictures while we're there, but we want to create a video that allows the consumer to feel like they're walking the property from their iPhone, their iPad or their computer. And we're going to use that wide angle camera. So we get from wall to wall, from scene to floor, we're going to shoot 60 frames a second so we can slow things down and speed them up without losing any quality, and we're not going to cut. So once we open that door, that camera is going to flow. We have it on a glide cam, so it's very smooth. But we want to make you feel like you're walking the house. We want you to come out of that video saying, hey, I like it. Or, you know what? Thank you for saving me the time. I don't want to even see it. So whichever way you go, we want you to have that experience. And what happens when we started doing that consistently was that we would get something from the owners that we never got at the beginning, which was, wow, we're impressed with how you're launching our property. And that was really our focus. And what we learned, bill, from videotaping all of our properties till today, is, number one, my showing time gets cut by 90%, which is powerful, powerful. Number two, in my market, bill, 20% of my market is coming from another country. Another 10% is coming from another state. So video for them sort of is a godsend. Number four, this is a reputation business. You can start your reputation with five iPhone pictures and a high five, or you can really spend money on the quality that you produce, not only to showcase to your audience, but those that you work for to really cement them to be an ambassador of you moving forward for me was a gimme. And you know what? Unfortunately, it's hard work. But guess what? We are in the most competitive market in the history of the world right now. Hard work is a given, in my opinion. So for me, if I was going to build a brokerage, I knew that I couldn't take any shortcuts. I needed to really focus on what was important to building the agent and to the consumer, and I built that into my company. So we have a staff now that goes out and does this for us Monday through Friday.

00:21:58 - Bill Risser

I would imagine you've heard multiple times, maybe more times than you can ever recall. Wow, I saw what you did for my friend. Can we talk?

00:22:09 - Jorge Guerra

Listen, that's a given. I get more along the lines of, hey, I live in that building. I saw your listing unit number four. I'm thinking about selling mine. Will you do the same to mine that you did there?

00:22:24 - Bill Risser

Yes. George, you're on the track. I'm pretty sure I have this right. I'm not super detailed on the association world, but you're on the track. Somewhere in the next few years, you're going to be president of Florida Realtors, am I right? You're on that track.

00:22:38 - Jorge Guerra

If I don't die or go to jail. That's the plan.

00:22:41 - Bill Risser

Okay, so let's talk about you've embraced volunteering in the industry at the local, state, national level, nar international. You've done some things as well. Talk. Why is that so important for you?

00:22:53 - Jorge Guerra

You know what? It goes back to my dad. My dad was a contractor here in South Florida during a time where Hispanics weren't able to get permits or be able to build freely. There was a lot of racism and discrimination here. So what happened down here is all the hispanic builders and subcontractors got together and they created an association called the Latin Builders association.

00:23:14 - Jorge Guerra

And they pooled money, they lobbied together, they funded their own candidates, and they put themselves in a position to create legislation and build their industry. So for me, being involved, I saw the power of it. And I also saw the power coming from a country or watching my parents come from a country that lost all their rights. What happens when you don't get involved? So for me, when I got involved in my industry, the decisions that were made by my peers directly affected me and my business. And whether I felt that they were on the right track or were they on the wrong track, I felt that me being at the helm or me being involved with the years of experience that I had and being an independent broker and an agent, that I had a good sense of what was necessary for the overall industry.

00:24:06 - Jorge Guerra

And I started from a local level as president of YPN in South Florida, I'm in Miami. And from there I moved directly up to the residential president for Miami association of Realtors. And from there I became the chairman of Miami. And for me it was just being able to connect with them, being able to sort of understand technology and a lot of it know, really growing up in the industry know, being able to understand different facets of it.

00:24:35 - Jorge Guerra

My involvement in Miami obviously gave me some great exposure to Florida and Nar. With Nar, I was lucky enough in I'm not sure what year, but Elizabeth Menenhall had a chair called the emerging business and technology chair, and she didn't want to assign it. So they had a national vote to see who would win that chair. And I was a young tech guy, and I said, you know what? Let me throw my name on that hat. And I won a national election for a national spot. So that was my know. Everybody in my board was saying, how did you get know who do you know? I didn't know anybody, but I knew technology and my peers knew it, and they voted me in a couple years later, after I was chairman of Miami. Luckily, Miami gave me a position where, man, I was able to travel the world. And I was lucky enough to go to Spain.

00:25:28 - Jorge Guerra

And Spain loved that there was an American that spoke Spanish that can talk about american real estate that was successful. So I was able to again, go to Spain and really get involved in that international side of real estate. And what they really wanted to know was how we do it in know how awesome our system is. And so for me, it was very easy to go over there, speak Spanish, and share not only how we do it, but the techniques that we're using and where our industry is heading.

00:25:54 - Jorge Guerra

And for me, that gave me that international look, that when Charlie Oppler, President Charlie Oppler, came looking for his NAR global liaison, I was lucky enough, right after Covid, to be given that post. And the cool thing about that, Bill was that, unfortunately, it was during COVID So I got to zoom around the world and meet people from different continents and different areas.

00:26:17 - Jorge Guerra

And I'll share with you one common denominator from everywhere. Number one, how important home became after Covid. Regardless of where you were, home became now re standard as your sanctuary, your work, play and live environment. Number two was how international Florida was. They spoke about our governor. Whether you're pro or against know he was highlighted nationally. They spoke about the freedoms that we were experiencing here in Florida. They spoke about the safety we had here in Florida. And my favorite was that they felt that there was great opportunity here in Florida. So a lot of that was, for me, very exciting to go everywhere. And a lot of the good compliments came right back to our state.

00:27:04 - Bill Risser

Yeah, a couple more questions and I'll get you going. I know I've got a very busy guy.

00:27:09 - Jorge Guerra

My next appointment's at four, so take your time. Make sure you get the good questions out of there.

00:27:13 - Bill Risser

You mentioned the pandemic. Coming out of the pandemic and into this, it was something nobody predicted. But then by June or July, it was like, oh, things are happening, things are different. On top of that now, as we go a little further down, the lawsuits pop up. I do want to bring it up. And I know you have to be careful when you talk about that kind of stuff. And then AI explodes and there's all this stuff going on. So all these things you, as the owner broker of resf real estate salesforce, how do you set your agents up for success when there's so much stuff going on? How do you keep the focus?

00:27:52 - Jorge Guerra

You know what? Great, great question. And I keep on with my rhetoric of forget about the shiny new objects and get back to work. And you know what, real estate, I love to say it is the oldest profession, contrary to what other people think it is. You need to take out a room first and we got it for you. So with that being said, RNGC has been around for a long time. It's not rocket science. You need to get your business sense on, your common sense on this is a face to face, nose to nose value giving business. And you can easily get caught up with all these things that are going on. But if you look at my office and you look at the top performers and the way that they work, it's not that difficult. It's simple, but they're consistent and they're focused on what their genre is. For me, you know what, it's my job as a broker to interpret the technology out there, to vet it and to bring it into my company. Whenever I feel or deem that it moves the needle when it comes to the lawsuits, I need to remind my agents that I'm on the tip of that spear. I am talking with all the attorneys in there and I'm not worried. So they shouldn't be worried. They should be going back to business. When it comes to AI, I think it's an evolution of our business and it's where our business is heading. So I'm embracing it. It's innovations within the products that we have already, and I'm looking for innovations and products that are coming in. Anything that can make us better. I'm into it now. I remind everybody that the core of our business is relationships. It's being able to go out there and strike a chord with an audience, meet with an audience. More importantly, provide consistent value to your audience. And there is no piece of technology besides humans right now that can deliver it in a way that really impacts the consumer. And the day that technology, it's on par with our ability to prospect. And we're going to have to shift it because everyone's going to be doing the same thing. So there's always going to be that human element that knows to knows face to face prospecting and marketing and creating that consistency that moves the needle. So you know what? I try to be an interpreter of that tech. I tend to be a reassurer of our industry and the good that it does and the importance that it causes within our stuff. And when it comes to technology, bring it on. There's one thing constant, it's change. And we're going to find a way to use it for good.

00:30:28 - Bill Risser

I like the way you, I haven't heard you once talk about transactions and income and units. You're helping families. That's what you're doing.

00:30:38 - Jorge Guerra

Well, listen, that comes. I think if you look at the money, you don't go very far. You need to look at which part of this industry moves you and let it take you.

00:30:46 - Bill Risser

Yeah, that's awesome. George, what if this 26 year old dude walks in your, or woman walks into your office and says, I heard your story. How can I do that? How can I be the next George Gara?

00:31:01 - Jorge Guerra

I say, good luck. Find another industry. I'm just kidding. You know what? I'm going to tell you this. George Gara, where you see him here today, he's been beaten up, he's been bloodied, he's been dragged through the street. But you know what? He never gave up. He always kept it positive. He always believed in the people around him. He always believed know doing the right thing. And I kept that consistent. Don't get me wrong, I didn't fool myself and just think that I believe this is going to work. I put my nose to the ground. I really invested my free time and my off time in really sharpening my tools and making my industry better. I'm constantly grading myself and pushing myself to improve. And as long as you keep that, you're going to be fine. So don't give up. Understand that until you feel that you can't go any lower, you have to be there. Nothing I ever got came easy. It wasn't one, two, three or magic. It was a lot of suffering, a lot of mistakes, a lot of financial tuitions to get me to where I'm at today. But I never gave up. And I think that's the trick. And I never gave up because it was my passion, because I felt it in my heart and I believed in it.

00:32:10 - Bill Risser

Yeah. George, final question. It's the same one I've asked every guest. You're guest number 381st of all. I apologize for taking so long to get to you.

00:32:20 - Jorge Guerra

No worries.

00:32:22 - Bill Risser

What one piece of advice would you give a new agent? Just getting started. So it's brand new agent. They're new to the business.

00:32:31 - Jorge Guerra

That's a great question because there's so much I'd want to tell them. When I talk to new agents, I always tell them this. My business is a marathon. It's not a sprint. It requires a diet and an exercise. And the diet is marketing, the exercise is prospecting. And very much like working out. If you work out every day and you eat right every day, you're going to build your muscles and you're going to get big and strong. This business requires consistency. For my newer agents, I always say do the hard stuff first, so get all the stuff you don't want to do out of the way. And probably my best advice if I were to go and just give one advice, is that inside your heart, inside your soul, you have a business sense. You have common business sense and a lot of times products and people say things that just don't make sense. But we fall for it just because we don't have any other ideas or we're looking for something else. And if it doesn't make sense, it probably doesn't work. If it's hard work, it probably does work. So focus on working hard.

00:33:38 - Bill Risser

George, this has been awesome. I can't thank you enough. If somebody wants to reach out to you, what's the best way for them to do that?

00:33:46 - Jorge Guerra

Definitely do not send me an email. Email is my first form of communication. Listen, Bill, my best form of communication is text message is my best me. If you google me, you can definitely find most of my social media outlets out there. So if you direct message me as well on social media, I tend to be very responsive. And if you call me, huge chance that I pick up the phone.

00:34:09 - Bill Risser

All right, cool. George, this has been great. Like I said, I can't thank you enough. And it was wonderful to get a chance to visit with you because I've known about you a long time because of how active you are in the community in Florida. And so this is wonderful to get a chance to kind of get this episode. And thank you so much for all your time.

00:34:29 - Jorge Guerra

Thank you, Bill.

00:34:30 - Bill Risser

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