Power up Your Real Estate Mindset: Strategies for Growth with Nicole Christopherson

00:00:14 - Mike Mills

Everybody. How are we doing today? So all my Realtors out there, have you ever wondered how to transform market challenges into career triumphs? It's all about your daily mindset. It really comes down to the difference between seeing opportunity in every situation or instead noticing all the looming obstacles. And today's guest will help guide you on how to maintain a winning mentality and how it can make all the difference in the world on your eventual success or inevitable failure. So welcome to Mike Mills Mortgage and Finance, your guide to real estate success one episode at a time. I'm your host, Mike Mills, a mortgage banker with 13 years of experience in the heart of Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex and also home to the American League champs Texas Rangers. And in the spirit of those resilient Rangers, today we are diving deep into the Work hard, never quit mindset. But before we get into today's emotional recalibration, remember, if you find value in these conversations, hit that subscribe button on your podcast platform or go check me out on Mike Mills Mortgage and Finance on YouTube for more exclusive content. Subscribing ensures that you stay updated on insights that can help continue to elevate your real estate business. So my guest today is Nicole Christopherson, an industry leader who's turned her real estate passion into a nationwide movement. She founded NMC Realty Group in Southern California, expanded it to Austin, Texas and has recently launched the Work Hard Smile Large community. Nicole, how are we doing today?

00:01:44 - Nicole Christopherson

Excellent. Thank you so much for having me, Mike.

00:01:47 - Mike Mills

Yes. So how's life treating you there in Austin, Texas?

00:01:52 - Nicole Christopherson

It's great. We're finally getting some rain right now, but my family and I are coming up on full three years here and we are super happy we made the yes we are. We get to go back and visit California often because we still both conduct fair amount of business there and all our family is there. But we have the best of both worlds. We get to stop in and get out and we've got our awesome, chill, relaxed, active lifestyle in Austin, Texas now.

00:02:20 - Mike Mills

So you get the happy, friendly Texans along with the coast. We can go back out to California and live the beach lifestyle from time to time too.

00:02:28 - Nicole Christopherson

Beach lifestyle? Sit in some.

00:02:31 - Mike Mills

Yeah. Well, there's no shortage of traffic here in Dallas Fort Worth either and I'm sure in Austin these days, especially going through down there by the university. What's that little there's like a split where you go around or you go down that little section, right?

00:02:44 - Nicole Christopherson

Yeah, yes, I was down there. That's what I was saying. I got stuck in the rain earlier this week when we were talking before and that's exactly where I was. I was in bumper to bumper traffic by the university because I was going to listen to a couple of female founders speak at the university and I haven't been in traffic like that since I moved here. So I was testing pretty gnarly.

00:03:03 - Mike Mills

Certainly get pretty gnarly down there. All right, well, I want to kick us off by I want you to share the inspiration behind that mantra, the Work Hard, Smile Large kind of how it shaped your journey in the real estate world and then what you've done with it since.

00:03:19 - Nicole Christopherson

Absolutely. Work Hard, Smile Large was a dream or a manifestation that I kind of had right as I was starting my real estate brokerage. I went from being a sales associate to a brokerage associate to saying, hey, it's time for me to start my own brokerage. I think this is the next thing.

00:03:38 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:03:39 - Nicole Christopherson

And that was around 2013 years in.

00:03:46 - Mike Mills

The business at that point.

00:03:49 - Nicole Christopherson

And I'd worked for all the awesome boutique brokerages in Newport Beach, California. They're all still really great friends of mine. And it just was one of those things. Our third party aggregates were coming about like zillow and stuff, and things were starting to change. And I just said, hey, I think I'm going to try this. I was doing things a little bit more different with my marketing and stuff, and so I woke up one day and I was trying to have my family understand why I work so hard. And my husband was starting his business and I was working seven days a week and he was watching our first baby at home on the weekend. So I was doing open houses and we're really good partnership, so we've carried each other through different times. And my real estate was really helping us while they were getting off the ground. And I just said, you know what, babe? I work this hard so we can smile large. Like, I wasn't not having fun on the time I wasn't working. And we just started saying it on everything. Tagging everything. That was about when hashtags started coming about.

00:04:45 - Mike Mills

You had your own personal family hashtag inside.

00:04:47 - Nicole Christopherson

Exactly, yeah. And so it's just our friends and our family and everybody knew that was just my mindset. I work hard so I can smile large. I do a lot. It may be intimidating to other people, but it doesn't stop me. Like, I know I'm going to take care of my fitness every day. I know I'm going to see my friends on the weekend or host people or entertain, and we've done that consistently forever. So that's where it started and then it started bleeding into my business. I started using a lot in my business as people were seeing I had started my brokerage. Now let me go circle back. I was also pregnant at this time and opened my brokerage two months before I had my second daughter.

00:05:22 - Mike Mills

Okay, wow. That's really whenever that large is a.

00:05:27 - Nicole Christopherson

Big part of the energy and mission and purpose that I had to establish myself as an independent broker owner. So that was really fun. And now it's just carried us through. Our kids use it. I say it to them every day before they leave my site for school or anything. I say, work hard. They say, smile large. My husband and I use it all the time, and it's just who we are. So when we relocated and I expanded NMC realty group to Austin, Texas, and my kids were making new friends and we were trying to build a new community, I was like, hey, this is the time. Let's put it out there. Our new community needs to know who we are and work hard. Smile large is us. That's a way for us to let them know who we are. They're going to see us moving and shaking and running all around and going different places, inviting them in. We have an open door policy at our house. Anybody can come over, eat dinner with us anytime or anything like that. And so we really just manifested that and building our community here. And my daughter was a big part of the branding and launch of work Hard, Smile arch. It was about bringing the different ages and the different generations and the different genders of dads, moms, and kids together so we could get to know them and so the kids could get to know each other, teach them how to network with one another and collaborate like we do as adults. Give them that tool now, early on.

00:06:47 - Mike Mills

So what prompted the switch or the move from California to Texas?

00:06:52 - Nicole Christopherson

It was mainly my husband's business. He's in healthcare tech, and we've been together since they were ground floor breaking into insurance. And he and his partners had talked about their growth because they're nationwide. It's a nationwide tech platform for group health insurance. And we were in the middle of the pandemic, and it know, health insurance and health and all that's really big. And so they knew they were expanding. And it was just natural that somebody out of the partners came to the central time zone as a middle point and a growth spot. And tech is growing in Austin, and so there's a little bit of a brotherhood is what we call it business brotherhood. Um, but it was just matt threw his hands up instantaneously. He's like, we're going this is our family's adventure. We're going to.

00:07:38 - Mike Mills

The great thing about your job as a broker and a realtor is that you can sell real estate. Granted, you have to develop a community, and referrals in real estate are incredibly important, obviously, because that's the lifeblood of a lot of what you do. And when you just drop yourself into a brand new market, that can be a challenge. Because as an agent, if you don't have that sphere around you immediately when you come in, you've got an uphill climb, especially compared to other agents in a really hot market like Austin. So what was that move for you? Like, coming from having a sphere in California, I'm sure that you worked with on a regular basis to being dropped into a brand new place. And what did you see, like, were the big differences between California and Texas?

00:08:20 - Nicole Christopherson

And that mean there's a couple questions there, but I think when I came to Austin, I wasn't sure how I was going to break into the market, and I was really focused on the client, the transactional side of it, and I was like, I have transactions. I still owned my brokerage. I was operating my brokerage in Southern California while we had moved here. I didn't close it down. I didn't transition. I didn't do anything. I had my team support boots on the ground there. So I was like, I was involved at my board. I was on a lot of the committees at the Newport Beach Association of Realtors, and I'm like, you know what? I need to find my professional peers, the people that I connect with and that I can collaborate with here, and then I'll know where I want to hang my license, and I'll know who I want to be affiliated with, and I'll kind of know. So I was taking my time when I had first gotten here, and I did a bunch of deals non represented, helping some of our relocation clients here, because legalities in California help me with all of that here.

00:09:17 - Mike Mills

Well, it was a good time. I guess a lot of people were moving back and forth, too, right? So you had a big influx of people moving to Texas, and we had.

00:09:23 - Nicole Christopherson

Managers and people that my husband's company was relocating out here. So I was able to help all of them and kept focus on what was important, which was our little circle of people who were relocating. But I just kept hearing a person's name come up, and she was a huge guiding light, an angel to me, meeting the network of people that I now collaborate with almost every single day. I mean, I have the best influence of professionals around me in all the areas of Austin, Metro, and even Dallas and Fort Worth as well, that I get to work with now. And that's where I really focused. Who do I want to be around? Who do I want to interact with every day? And that really guided my growth here in Austin. I got pulled up. I feel like I got pulled up by the angels wings. I got pulled on leadership panels. It was really was, you know, my production had just started because a lot of it was done off market, off record. So it was really I choose to surround myself with, and that I'm very much like, really helped me launch NMC Realty group here.

00:10:23 - Mike Mills

Well, truly, when you put yourself out there in that regard, and you surround yourself and dive into meeting as many people as you possibly can, those opportunities tend to create.

00:10:31 - Nicole Christopherson

I had contractors telling me I need to meet her. Lenders, contractors, we were just meeting people through what we were having to go through here. Anybody I met was like, have you met this person or you need to meet this person, you're just like and that's it was amazing.

00:10:49 - Mike Mills

So coming down here into Austin, I'm sure you had to bring in some new agents because you're expanding your brokerage. And obviously it sounded like you did bring a community with you to some extent, which is pretty cool because your husband's work and how that you kind of had a little built in sphere to some extent when you got here, but you also had to hire new agents. So when you brought in new people, especially with this mindset that you had and in some degree, I mean, obviously you came in and the market was still doing pretty well, but we've obviously seen that change over. But how did your organization go about helping new agents come into the business and put their expectations on what it was going to be like to be an agent in that area and then versus the reality of what it actually is.

00:11:30 - Nicole Christopherson

And then how did two years ago is when that really started happening for me. And I'm like, I've always put a lot of effort into my business. And so I have two decades of experience and procedures and process and I've gone through the market, the trend in the market and cycles in the market before. So originally when I started, I was being pulled up on the leadership panels to talk about what it was like to own a brokerage and operate a brokerage and now be at a global digital brokerage that's agent owned. So they pulled me up to really talk about that and the difference and the collaboration that was taking place. But at EXP, we have a mentor program. So with my program, I'm a certified mentor. So a lot of what was happening is I was attracting agents that were newer agents or that were on other teams and they were hearing how I talked about running or managing my team and how I operated my team and how collaborative we were. And so I naturally was attracting mentees who were newer agents who had done three or less deals. And that's really how my team started growing. I hired somebody to help me with my family as I really started pouring into growing NMC realty group here and was being pulled a lot of different places for these speaking events. And she eventually became my assistant. So you just saw her a little bit before.

00:12:49 - Mike Mills

She's worked for the family first and now the business.

00:12:51 - Nicole Christopherson

She's my right hand and she's born and raised in Texas. And so some of her friends have come to me and joined because of her friendship with them. So it's really been a blessing to be at my brokerage and to be affiliated with EXP and brokered by EXP. I'm still NMC Realty Group, but being brokered by a global digital brokerage is mean. I have so many opportunities to mentor, to be pulled up into leadership, and to gain resources from others and collaborate on what and how things are done or how they're doing it and what's working.

00:13:28 - Mike Mills

I'm a little curious too, because you mentioned this a second ago, and I always hear people that have had success and really all walks of life mention this often, and I'm a big proponent of it as well. But when you have to maintain a certain mentality, especially in a down market, right now, things are slower. I mean, there's no pretending that it's not it's not what it was. It's not terrible, but it's also not great. So there can be a little bit of downtroddenness or whatever you want to call it, agents that get upset.

00:13:57 - Nicole Christopherson

Everything takes more work.

00:13:58 - Mike Mills

That's right, it takes and guess what?

00:14:00 - Nicole Christopherson

It's always taken more work. In my 21 years of doing real estate, there's only been maybe two years that it wasn't a lot of work or three years that it wasn't a lot of work.

00:14:10 - Mike Mills

Yes. Takes effort. Yes.

00:14:13 - Nicole Christopherson

It's a project, it's a transaction, it's a relationship.

00:14:15 - Mike Mills

And where I was going with that.

00:14:16 - Nicole Christopherson

A little bit is patience.

00:14:20 - Mike Mills

Well, you had brought up part of your regimen and part of your day is very focused on your fitness, on taking care of your body and your mind. And I think people lose track of that often when we feel like, well, I got to work, work, work. I got to go out and hustle and bustle all day long. But if you don't work on yourself and take care of yourself, then the rest of it doesn't bleed over very well. So can you speak to a little bit about why that's so important? Especially in that work hard smile, large mindset, where you got to take care of?

00:14:47 - Nicole Christopherson

Absolutely. My family calls me a machine, and I know when I feel my best and whether it means I had a ton of success at work or anything like that. I know when I feel my best throughout my day and when I end my day. And so I try to recreate my best day every day. And that's, for me, that's what I know. I check in with myself and check that. So that means waking everybody's is going to be different. So let me just make that disclaimer right now. Mine is going to one size fits all. I used to wake up at 04:00 A.m. In California, be at Spin by five, be home by 630 from the gym, wake my kids up. I don't do that anymore because that doesn't work. So my routine has changed, but I make sure I wake up and have quiet time. I really try not to get on my device in the morning until my kids or whatever have been seen off. I make sure we eat healthy, whatever that means, vitamins, home cooked food, healthy fruits and vegetables. But I get exercise almost every day and my form of exercise changes, but that needs to be done before I start my workday. The minute I pick up my device or I get on my computer, my workout is nonexistent.

00:15:55 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:15:55 - Nicole Christopherson

And what happens when you I tried many times. I'm not going to work out at the end of the day. It's not going to happen in the middle of the day. I want to be ready. And part of me doing it in the morning for all the professionals that are listening is you don't know where your day is going to take you.

00:16:09 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:16:09 - Nicole Christopherson

I don't go through my day in sweats anymore. And if I am in my workout clothes, it's very rare. I will embrace that. That's fine. But I get ready every day. Not to the nines, to how I feel comfortable so that something calls upon me or I have an opportunity to meet somebody or go somewhere or do something or be on camera with somebody and learn and grow. I'm ready. And then it sets up my tone for how I operate my business every day and how I run my daily routine. So that's like the physical whatever. But then I also have a daily, weekly, monthly routine of what I check through every morning. I check my email, I check my calendar, I check the MLS, I check our marketing calendar. I read the couple of news things. And that gets shorter and shorter every single day until I revamp it and build it up. But it should take less than an hour. Now I'm hitting all my cues and I'm starting my day with a clear mind and a prioritized list of what I need to do and who I need to call. And I'm ready and I'm way more efficient. The days I scramble and don't hit that I'm scrambling all day.

00:17:09 - Mike Mills

Well, I've had a couple of conversations with different people about this. And what I've found as a general theme is that you don't appreciate the physical exertion and the mental clarity that you get from it until you don't do it or you do it for a long period of time and then you fall off the bike, which everybody does. Nobody's perfect. We're all going to work out.

00:17:33 - Nicole Christopherson

There's weeks that you're tired or your body tells you you don't need it, and then you do something else. You read a book instead. You find another form of peace and calmness for yourself because it's really a mental reset. Exercising gives you those endorphins. Reading gives you a sense of calmness or maybe some insight into a topic that you're reading. But I absolutely shift it when I need to. But yeah, you're right. You're absolutely right. You don't know until you don't do it and you miss it.

00:17:57 - Mike Mills

Yes. Well and then you realize how much it impacts your day, because I know personally, like, if I have a couple of days in a row where I don't do something in the morning, I think the morning is really key. And what you hit on about, if you try to push that stuff to the end of the day, it never happens because life happens and it gets in the way.

00:18:13 - Nicole Christopherson

You're not focused on you. You're not breathing right. There's a little bit more tension in it, and your exercises can change. Some days I don't have an hour or 45 minutes, and that 20 minutes I make worth. It like, I'm doing intervals for 20 minutes, and I don't beat myself up because I only worked out for 20 minutes, whereas five years ago, I would have beat myself up over it. But now I'm like, no, it's consistency. It's lifestyle. I don't even look at my routine like a routine. It's my lifestyle. It affords me the ability to be able to get up and go anywhere, to travel wherever I want to go. I'm going to keep it consistent. And that's why we're super mobile now, more mobile than we ever were before.

00:18:47 - Mike Mills

Well, and you stay healthy in your right mind for your family as well, because if you're in a good state, then that passes down to everybody in the household. And even if it's a 30 minutes.

00:18:56 - Nicole Christopherson

Walk, they hate it a lot of times.

00:18:59 - Mike Mills

Well, it's got its drawbacks, too, for sure. But even if it's a 30 minutes walk, listening to a book or returning voicemails or phone calls, anything just to get your body in motion, especially earlier in the day, is always a benefit.

00:19:11 - Nicole Christopherson

And that's what I wanted to say. It could be anything. Some days it's a walk for me, some days it's a run. Some days it's spin. Some days it's the tonal. Some days it's gardening. Gardening. I'm a cook, and I have my own produce garden, and I do all of it on my own. But that's a workout. So I don't say I have to go for a run on the day I'm going to go and like, it's one or the other.

00:19:29 - Mike Mills

A lot of the um so you recently expanded to Austin, but you do have some intent or desire to kind of push your brokerage or your team a little bit further outside the expanses of California.

00:19:42 - Nicole Christopherson

I'm always open to speaking to agents that are other brokerages that want to join my organization. Because the cool thing about what I am a part of now is, yes, I have my team at NMC, realty group. But I am part of this organization that collaborates all day long. So I don't have a ton. Of team members like I would have liked to in Austin because all of these top producers that I'm friends with, we meet and we mastermind once or twice a week and we do stuff. So when I say, Come join EXP realty and join me and let me sponsor you coming over. It's like, come let me open my playbook and let me open all my organization's playbooks and let's make this happen because it's so powerful. I mean, being a broker owner for ten years on your own, serving the community on the board and on committees and stuff, and really having to go out, you don't have that same sense of collaboration on how procedures process things like that. And so this has just been monumental. It's the new wave of how real estate should be done. So if it's not happening for other people, give me a call because it's pretty amazing.

00:20:47 - Mike Mills

Yes, you're always open to accept. Well, and especially these days, look, when things are slower, everybody's looking to try to change something up and they're looking for new ways to do it. And if you can offer something to a new agent or a prospective realtor that's trying to change or get their.

00:21:01 - Nicole Christopherson

Career restarted, sharing our playbook, sharing what's worked, sharing our experiences, sharing current happenings. Yeah, absolutely.

00:21:09 - Mike Mills

So through all this too, you also launched a podcast. And so I want to talk a little bit about that. So right now it seems like your podcast is really geared more towards mindset and hard work, to Work Hard, Smile.

00:21:22 - Nicole Christopherson

Large, health, well being, entrepreneurship, giving back.

00:21:27 - Mike Mills

So what prompted you to start that? And what are some of the things that you feel like you've learned from those conversations with people that you've had since you started?

00:21:34 - Nicole Christopherson

So, starting the podcast was really something that I talked about for a few years and I didn't know when the podcast was going to manifest itself because I thought it was going to be a real estate podcast. But going through being an independent broker owner to transitioning, I was like, real estate podcast is a lot to break into. And when we started Work Hard, Smile Large, and we started doing local community events and then it started growing. I did a vision mapping event last January, which is something I did with my real estate team and in real estate, and I did it for Work Hard, Smile Large, and it went global.

00:22:09 - Mike Mills

Wow.

00:22:10 - Nicole Christopherson

So, yes, I did a virtual vision mapping workshop last January. We're going to do another one this January.

00:22:18 - Mike Mills

How would you describe if someone's like, what's vision mapping? What would you tell them?

00:22:21 - Nicole Christopherson

So vision mapping is taking your goals, it's not a business plan. Take your goals for the year and put them into these individual buckets, whether it be family, health, finance, relationships, giving back, travel, and you map specific actions and specific things you want to accomplish in those and even perhaps a couple of line items of how you're going to get to those things. And then on the other side, you create a very personalized collage style board. So you visualize that, you see your smile, you see those meals, you see those locations or whatever your goals are for yourself. If you want to read 20 books, go print out all those little book covers of those books and put them on there so you see them, right? And you just map it. And we are going to host another one this next January for World. Work hard, small arts. But when that hit and my goal was to have 100 people on it and we had over 300 in three different countries, I was like, now's the time. I want Work Hard Small Arch to connect people from all over the world. And it started. This is our 6th month, will be the 20 eigth of October. And so it's really uniting my communities, right? Like, I can host local events, but the podcast is global. Anybody can access it, anybody can get to I just said I had to do it. I said April 1 was my date. I didn't hit April 1. So it ended up being April 20 eigth. And I'm so happy I did it because every time I record a podcast and every time I get to meet with another guest or every time somebody submits a guest form, I'm like, yes. Now, my friends, my family, our Work Hard Smile Arts Community get to hear what they're doing. I don't have to tell them they can jump on and listen and see us hype it up on Instagram and stuff. And then those people become part of our Work Hard Smile arts community. And my family, I keep in touch with them.

00:24:10 - Mike Mills

Yeah, because you have an intimate conversation with them and you share a lot of ideas and it very much is a personal thing and you don't I mean, I've experienced that doing this. You meet all kinds of people from all walks of life. And the great thing is you learn a little bit from everybody and you find out what they're all about and apply it to your own life to some extent and the things that you find valuable.

00:24:30 - Nicole Christopherson

Agreed? No, I totally agree. And it's just the beginning. We're really excited for 2024. So starting the podcast happened when it was supposed to happen. And it's been easy. It's been so easy and so fun.

00:24:44 - Mike Mills

Well, the thing that you mentioned earlier about the vision mapping, and I think this goes to the whole mindset piece of I always explain it to people. It's like, I'm sure everybody's familiar with that book The Secret, right? And how this whole manifestation thing and when you say that to people, sometimes they're like, okay, here we go. The woo is about to kick in. But what gets lost sometimes in that is that when you see things and they're in front of you on a regular basis, opportunities present themselves that you otherwise would miss if you weren't aware that that opportunity could exist, right? So the best example is always and I use people's, like when you buy a new. Car. So if you go out, you buy a white truck, right? And that's your car that you just purchased last week. Well, now all of a sudden, you look out on the road and there's 8 billion white trucks and you're like, where did all these white trucks come from? Before I bought mine, I never saw these. Well, you didn't see them because the possibility of it existing wasn't open in your world. And so it's not really woo. If you don't present those opportunities in front of yourself and make sure you focus on them on a daily basis, then when the opportunity arises to take a step in that direction, you'll often miss it because you're not thinking about what the end goal is ultimately going to be.

00:25:55 - Nicole Christopherson

The other thing is you'll also surpass your expectations of yourself. So you'll add to it. You may not hit everything, but you will definitely add to it, which is the other really powerful experience throughout the year. You're like, oh, there's no way I'm going to read 20 books. And somehow you read more than 20 books and you're like changing that number on it. Because I always remind people, go back to your vision map, like add to it, check it off, cross it off, put a star, highlight it. But one really special thing that I do when I am leading the workshop and I have guest speakers come and speak on different topics, which is really cool. We always have nice guest speakers come and guide a certain topic. I have everybody write a magic letter, okay? Anybody that's participating, we give a supplies list. We get everybody prepped beforehand on what to have with them. But everybody writes a letter to themselves, okay? And imagines a year later having accomplished what they put on their vision map and they write that letter to themselves and they self address it, send it to me or hand it to me. We have one in person location we'll be at, but everybody else can send it to me. And I will hold it for a year and I will pay the postage and I will send it back to you and you will get it in a year and you will not remember you wrote that letter.

00:27:05 - Mike Mills

Oh, no.

00:27:06 - Nicole Christopherson

For almost eight years.

00:27:08 - Mike Mills

Yeah.

00:27:08 - Nicole Christopherson

I never recognize it when I get it. Somebody else has to send it to me.

00:27:11 - Mike Mills

Yes.

00:27:12 - Nicole Christopherson

And every single time it brings me to tears of joy. Because A, I believed in myself and B, how I spoke to myself a year prior and what I was able to accomplish with and for myself. It's the best way to end the year and start a new year.

00:27:28 - Mike Mills

Yeah, it's funny. You write something else like that down, you're like, oh, I'll never forget this. This will be exact. And then you open it a year later. Who is this human? And who wrote this? Was it me? I don't remember doing this? Yeah. That's crazy. I think that's great. I mean, especially because when you get something like that, twelve months later, it does two things for you. It reinforces the goals that you set. And if you accomplish those goals and if you didn't, then it also takes a little bit of a self evaluation to go back and go, okay, what did I do? Or maybe your goal changed. Maybe you thought you wanted something that happens too.

00:28:02 - Nicole Christopherson

And that's very powerful. It's growth nonetheless. Right? You're going to have to join us in January.

00:28:07 - Mike Mills

Yeah. You're moving in the right direction one way or another. Well, this is where I get a little I lose people sometimes, but I really think in my life experiences that we all, every single day, every hour, every minute, you are headed down a road, right? You're headed down a trajectory. And every decision that you make, whether it be good, bad, or indifferent, is going to push you further in a direction. And the only way that you can control that to a certain extent is by your brain. And if your brain says, okay, this happened to me, but it's going to be okay, and that's the best way I can put it, it's all going to be okay. I'm going to work through it. This is a challenge, we're going to get past it. You're going to push yourself. I always tell people there's two versions of you that are out there. There's way more than that, but two versions. There's the one living under the bridge that's miserable, can't feed themselves and horrible. And then there's one that's ruling the planet, right? And those two versions of you exist out there. And it's just a matter of which one are you headed more towards. You're not going to get to be the ruler of the planet, but are you headed in that direction? Are you moving in that direction? And I think every decision that you make pushes you in one direction or the other. So if that's the case, then why not push yourself towards the direction of, hey, it's all going to be okay. This is just another challenge I got to work through.

00:29:21 - Nicole Christopherson

You have to do the work. You have to believe in yourself, and these other people are going to support you. There might even be intimidators, they might intimidate you or to try and distract you or things like that. But ultimately you have the power to get yourself wherever you want to go.

00:29:35 - Mike Mills

So yes, a big part of your development over the years has been your ability to mentor up and coming agents or new people in small business. Because whether you're running an air conditioning company or you're running a real estate brokerage, entrepreneurship, it's all the same tenants. Right. There's not a lot of differences involved. There new agents coming into the business, especially in this challenging market right now. What are you mentoring them towards? To keep whether it's their mindset in the right place or certain practices on their daily routines. What's the message that you're trying to convey right now when transactions are a little harder to come by these days?

00:30:15 - Nicole Christopherson

That they have to stay consistent because the market is not reliable or consistent right now for them. And so they have to establish themselves and market themselves authentically. So I've actually just been doing this with a couple of my mentees and my team recently. We do business planning, but really business planning is just like sketching for our vision mapping, but it's more transactional and stuff. But they need to know what they need to do every day to get to what their end goal is at the end of the year. So if you want to do eight or eleven or whatever transactions next year, this is what your GCI is going to be based on the median home price. And we kind of break it down, but it goes once we get that number because that's really intimidating for new agents. Oh my gosh, I have to call two people a day. And I'm like, you can call anybody and say Happy birthday and be like, did you see my post on my page? I'm putting more real estate stuff out there. I mean, just drop. I'm trying to help them make everything authentic to who they are, right? Then we do a whole K Putnam marketing brand archetype thing. And so I'm really helping them identify who they are and how they want to present themselves as a realtor so they don't have impostor syndrome, right? That's where I really start with my new mentees, and we build that out and then we do an accountability call every Friday. Did you hit it? Did you not hit it? Why? Why not? Was it easy? Or you want to do more? Great. Do more next week. But we set it up to where they don't feel like if they're dog people and they're at the park, in the gym, and that's part of who going to be as a realtor. Build your real estate community around that be authentic to you. I think that's the one thing that held me back as a realtor in my early careers. I was like, oh my gosh, all these people are so much older and oh my gosh, and I was so intimidated. And then once I was like, I know what I'm doing. Why am I afraid of that? Who am I? I'm going to market to who I am, and I'm going to be myself. And that's really when I established myself.

00:32:03 - Mike Mills

I would say, well, there's an idea behind building your career around your life and not building your life around your career, right. Because you can do it that way. There's been plenty of examples where especially in our business, really and truly, because it's such a network based business where you have to meet people and get to know, and you can't just walk around going, you want to buy a house? You want to buy house, you want to buy house.

00:32:24 - Nicole Christopherson

Well, and you could be called at all different hours of the day and pulled so much, you know what I mean?

00:32:29 - Mike Mills

Well, and you want to make sure that your activities are the things that you're passionate about. And I tell agents that I work with often, too. It's like, look, if you're heavily involved in your church, for example, there's a lot of people that they spend a lot of time sundays, Wednesdays, they're individual Bible study groups where they're into their church hardcore. Well, use that as an opportunity to build your real estate business around it. Because when people see that you have passion for something that you care deeply about, and then you go, oh, by the way, I also help people buy and sell homes. Well, they're going to go, wow, if you're this passionate about this thing, then that's surely going to carry over to the thing that you feed your family with, right?

00:33:08 - Nicole Christopherson

But I even say you don't have to pitch yourself as a realtor when you're in those different communities. You can share what you're doing and show them, hey, I did this, I tried this new, what do you think about this? And get their feedback that you don't ever have to sell anybody on it. But you need to have them know that you have to be aware, right. They have to be aware, but you could ask for their advice on stuff or anything. There's all different ways to connect with people without pitching them. And I think that's where new agents kind of freeze up. They feel like they have to put on that blazer yes. And have that nice pen, and it's like, no, you really don't.

00:33:41 - Mike Mills

No, you just be yourself. And business tends to work its way out. So you spoke earlier a little bit about we've talked a lot about goals and setting those and creating systems around those goals. But I want you to talk a little bit about the importance of because everybody has goals, right? We all have I want to do this many transactions. I want to do this much time with my family, whatever the goal based is, because everybody's definition, success is a little different. But having goals is one thing, but building processes around getting to those goals is really what it boils down to. So can you speak a little bit.

00:34:15 - Nicole Christopherson

About that, the process? Are we talking business?

00:34:20 - Mike Mills

Yeah, you can speak specifically about real estate if you want to, but what I'm saying is, like I said, I want to close, whatever, 50 transactions this year. Okay, well, that's great, and it's great to have that out there, but if you don't break it down to its small steps like you were talking about, okay, well, how many contacts does that look like per day? How much time does that in building a plan around that, then the goals are irrelevant.

00:34:40 - Nicole Christopherson

Yeah, exactly. So on the real estate side, I would say that monthly, I'm breaking it down by where are we marketing, what are we doing? And we're breaking it down, and we're doing a social media calendar, and we're knowing what we're doing. We're staggering it. We're looking at what's working once or twice a month. We're not like pouring into it every single day.

00:35:03 - Mike Mills

Right?

00:35:03 - Nicole Christopherson

We're giving it time to see what works. We're staying consistent. We're seeing what our engagement is and stuff like that. So that's one thing that's really helpful with clients. I have a weird instinct. We use our CRM, and I definitely use my CRM, and I get in and I see who I need to get in touch with. And I have birthdays in my calendar. So one of the consistent things of contact management for me and Procedures and Process for prospecting. I have everybody's birthday, most everybody's anniversary. If I ever saw it on something or anything, it immediately goes in my calendar. Close of escrow anniversaries for my clients for the last 21 years. Those are in there. Those are opportunities for me to reach out and talk to them. I missed one client this year, and he was like, you forgot to call me on my home anniversary.

00:35:48 - Mike Mills

He's like, hey, what's up?

00:35:49 - Nicole Christopherson

Oh, my goodness. They look forward to it. So those are like authentic, real fun things. I'm not a geek. I really don't go in and build out email drip campaigns and things like that. It's just not who I am. I'm not patient enough. We started using another program this year called Flow Desk, which is like an email campaign kind of thing. So I've gotten better at it, but I keep things small and I make it very manageable. When I start doing email, I'm going to call them campaigns, things that are automated, but I need them to be authentic and from me. So we start small. So that's another part of our procedures. We start small, very manageable. And then we use that for a little bit. And then I have these ideas, and my assistant and I talk and I'm like, wow, we should add that to it. Oh, my gosh, that question came up. So I don't try to do everything all at once either. I always break things down and test it and make sure it works. But we use a CRM. I send a monthly newsletter. I don't try and get all crazy intellectual on it or anything. It's really just to keep a relationship with my clients in our database.

00:36:57 - Mike Mills

Yeah, just to contact on a semi regular basis to stay in front.

00:37:00 - Nicole Christopherson

So monthly, I get that they get birthdays every year and stuff with work hard, smile large. I'm going to shift over to procedures and process for that because we were doing a lot of small little micro community events and so we had a little procedure that went through with that, where we would work the calendar backwards four weeks. We'd set up what the text was that we were going to want to put on the event. We'd create the headers and we would start there, and everything would just be replicated on how many touches we wanted to hit on them up until that event hit and what message we wanted to send with regards to that. I'm lucky I have a social media manager. So she's really diligent on the marketing from a social media standpoint and helping support us. But on the back end I work from dropbox Google Drive. We always have everything pre drafted, pretexted, and I start small and build on that. So after 20 years, I just had to send out I mean, I have to find a house in Orange County right now, shifting back to NMC, keep it exciting today. I have to find a house in Crona del Mar with a view before the end of this year. So I went back to my old school ways, and I'm like, God, we keep getting these letters prospecting for selling our house. I'm like, It cannot come off like that, right? So I put together custom stuff based on all my experience over these 20 years of how am I going to reach these particular homeowners or these particular agents that work in that area, and if a phone call is not working and how am I going to get to this level of clientele. And so I've just sat and showed my team. These are all the letters I've written over the last 20 years. This is what I'm getting as a homeowner right now that I don't really appreciate. It's very unprofessional, so I'm going to do it this way. And so they sat and helped me. How I found the house, the style that it was, how researched back how long ago did it sell? Pulled title to see who the homeowner is? Do they have a mailing address and a permanent address? Are they all at the same? And we put it all together and packaged up all nice, and I'm kind of going back to my old school ways, but I start very small and build it out and then elaborate on it from there. So if that helps you with my procedures and process a little bit. I mean, everybody calling me right now trying to figure out what my listing presentation is, and I'm like, Well, I'll open it up. I'll sit on zoom with you guys and share it with you.

00:39:15 - Mike Mills

Sure.

00:39:16 - Nicole Christopherson

It's not a secret. I'll show you all. We up our stuff, like any of our marketing materials that I have or presentations that I've created, I try to update them every six months. Some stuff changes.

00:39:31 - Mike Mills

People with an entrepreneurial mindset often lose sight of the fact that we all have big goals and big dreams. We're trying to get to. But what you just said about, look, you got to break it down into chunks, right? You got to break it down into small things. And like you also said, you can't do everything. So find the one thing that you want to do and you want to do well and break that thing down into the smallest piece as possible. Because then the challenge doesn't seem quite so daunting, right? It's the whole how do you eat a whale one bite at a time. And being able to do that and being able to grow your business that way in small steps. Once you master if it's the I'm sending out a particular way to send out letters to listings, potential listings. Okay? Once I've gotten that, now I can offload that to an assistant or somebody else because the process I've developed is as rock solid as it could be. It always can use improvement, and I lead by example.

00:40:22 - Nicole Christopherson

I really like my team and the people, the professionals that want to know what I'm doing. I really like for them to shadow me. I don't have any secrets. Come watch me do it. See how it's done. It does take a little bit of work, but come watch me do it. Takes a lot of work. It's a teacher in me. I was a teacher a long time ago.

00:40:41 - Mike Mills

Yeah, no, there's not a little work. It's a lot of work into that. I mean, those require a lot of time and effort. Now, you've brought up social media a few times and obviously with the community that you've launched and having a presence on social media, but what have you found in dealing with the real estate side, but then also your Work Hard small arts community? How has social media played a role in growing that and developing that, and do you think it brings a lot of value to your business overall?

00:41:12 - Nicole Christopherson

I definitely think social media is a value add to any business because your reach is so great and it's just up to you how present you want to be on it and what your brand is or what your goal is with your social media. We just put together some statistics and things like that from the Work Hard Smile Art Social media. And it really humbled me. I was really happy with what we were able to do with the podcast in the last six months because we're looking to gain sponsorship for the podcast next year so we could do more for the youth and for the events that we're trying to do for our community. And social media is a tricky beast. Like, you don't live or die by it. You need to set out your goal, and that's been really helpful for brand identity, for Work Hard Smile large and sharing about stuff. I really wish our social media had more growth, but our reach is huge. That's what the consumers don't see. We're reaching tens of thousands of people every month. They might not be following the page. So that's the interesting part about social media, and I want people that are watching this to hear that, don't beat yourself up.

00:42:16 - Mike Mills

Likes don't determine the success.

00:42:17 - Nicole Christopherson

Yeah, no, it doesn't. Even though my kids like to tell me that they're like, you don't have 500,000 followers, mom.

00:42:26 - Mike Mills

What's wrong with you? Yeah.

00:42:29 - Nicole Christopherson

But NMC, it's crucial for me. I'm in two markets. I'm growing my organization nationwide. I have clients moving all over the country. I mean, they're moving from California to Tennessee, from Florida to, like, everybody's moving all you know, me being on social media and my group being on social media and showing our area knowledge and what we're doing and how we're doing it different. I think everybody markets themselves different.

00:42:54 - Mike Mills

Sure.

00:42:55 - Nicole Christopherson

In real estate, no harm, no foul to any realtors, I want to do everything that a realtor wouldn't do.

00:43:02 - Mike Mills

Right. The opposite. Well, because you want to stand out. You're trying to stand out.

00:43:06 - Nicole Christopherson

I just want to do it a little bit different. Like, that just feels natural to me. And so, NMC, Realty group social media has been really crucial for me, expanding to Austin and also growing my nationwide network.

00:43:20 - Mike Mills

Well, I think agents lose the concept of social media being more about third party validation sometimes than it is about virality. Whether or not you have 2 million followers or one of your posts goes viral, that's really not the importance part, especially when it comes to running a business. Right.

00:43:37 - Nicole Christopherson

If you want to be everybody else.

00:43:38 - Mike Mills

Is doing yeah, if you want to do an influencer or something like that, fine. But that's not running a business. Whereas running a business, especially in real estate, is when someone says, hey, you should call so and so if you want to buy or sell your home. Well, what's the first thing that 90%.

00:43:52 - Nicole Christopherson

Of people are going to go look at the magazine that you've created about how you do business and who you are. And the first thing is going to be whatever pops up when they Google you or when they go to their social media account and search you.

00:44:03 - Mike Mills

Do you try to be on every platform, or do you try to specialize and focus on one particular platform more?

00:44:08 - Nicole Christopherson

So, I am on all platforms. I am most active on Instagram, probably because of my age demographic, and that's just normal. Facebook? No. Somebody fraudulently hacked into my account a few years ago, and so I lost a bunch of stuff, and I just haven't wanted to regain it because my demographic, my sphere of influence, majority of my clients are on Instagram. I am on Twitter. Of course. I'm on LinkedIn. I mean, LinkedIn is a great professional platform.

00:44:42 - Mike Mills

It's a good networking place, especially for what you're trying to do with podcasts. You meet all kinds of interesting people that way. But I think what I've found in talking with different people is that Instagram for sure is a big player, for realtors. But it is true what you said. There's a generational thing that occurs.

00:44:57 - Nicole Christopherson

Oh, and now I'm on TikTok.

00:44:58 - Mike Mills

Oh, yes.

00:44:59 - Nicole Christopherson

Well, I was going to now my kids are telling me, like, oh, you need to tag it this, and oh my gosh, your stuff came up on my thing, mom. I'm like, oh, great, I don't even go on the TikTok page. I just take whatever is on our YouTube shorts and put it back on there, over there.

00:45:14 - Mike Mills

I think this is getting better these days. But this is taboo quote. But how old are you? Oh, you don't want to say.

00:45:21 - Nicole Christopherson

Everybody thinks I'm 29.

00:45:22 - Mike Mills

Okay, right.

00:45:23 - Nicole Christopherson

Tell my kids. No, I'm 42 years old. I have no shame in my age right now. I'm 42 years young, actually.

00:45:29 - Mike Mills

I'm 45, or will be tomorrow. And so what I found is that our generation, we kind of started with Facebook, because, I mean, I say that you could go back to like, MySpace and those kind of things, but nobody even knows what that is.

00:45:43 - Nicole Christopherson

I was never on MySpace and Facebook, I really only started using because of business and maybe connect with some people, because I noticed people were connecting from college and high school because this is where I could really see it. I'm 42, and we did not email our friends when we were in college. I didn't have any of my friends emails in college. That's the weird part, to connect with people from these parts of your life. When we didn't use technology that way.

00:46:07 - Mike Mills

There was very little to no email. Maybe you emailed a professor from time to time because they required it.

00:46:12 - Nicole Christopherson

Facebook was that yes, it was a way to connect.

00:46:15 - Mike Mills

Yeah, well, and then it kind of transitioned. So I have a couple of younger sisters at about tenure, and Instagram became after Facebook, it kind of waned off. If you were old and boring, you were on Facebook, but if you were new and hip and cool, you were on Instagram, and Instagram kind of really took off. And it's still because they remodel and remarket themselves, rebrand themselves a little bit on what they intend to be. But in talking with younger generations, especially now with TikTok and really Snapchat has really taken off a lot, which I.

00:46:44 - Nicole Christopherson

Don'T fully how much can you mean? We got to really break this down for your listeners and for each other, because how many different platforms can you manage?

00:46:52 - Mike Mills

You can't.

00:46:53 - Nicole Christopherson

You really the ones that are easiest for you to manage. Like, you can't be on everything, or you're hiring other people, and it's just even I don't know, it's too difficult.

00:47:01 - Mike Mills

Well, and the big bulk of buyers right now are really and truly millennials. And people lose sight of the fact that millennials and gen z are even surpassing baby boomers in the size of the population next round of homeowners. But I was talking with a Gen Z specialist not too long ago, and we were talking about just kind of how she surfs the Internet, like, how do you go about looking for things? And so I asked specifically, I was like, all know, she flew around a lot. I was like, when you go to a particular like, how do you look up a place to go know? And she's like, Well, I go to TikTok and I'm like, you go to TikTok to find a restaurant? She's like, yeah, I'm going to go look for the hottest places in know, Phoenix or whatever and type that in. And I'm like, what about like yelp? And she's what's? I don't know. What do you mean yelp I was like, okay. Man, I am old and outdated here, but the habits of consumers and the habits of people change as the generations change. And so you don't need to be everywhere, but you do need to focus on a place. And whoever your target customer, your target person is, where do they exist and find that out and then dive into that medium. Would you agree?

00:48:07 - Nicole Christopherson

I agree. And that's where the bulk of my contacts and my sphere of influence and my past clients and my peers and affiliates are is on Instagram. I can't connect with all of them on Snapchat, and nor am I trying to build my business off of Snapchat. I could have a presence there. But the bulk of my contacts, I have to focus on where those platforms are. And really, truly, I probably should be using Twitter a little bit more for work hard, smile large, and have I get on there a lot and look.

00:48:36 - Mike Mills

At things called X Now, by the way. It's called X now, by the way.

00:48:40 - Nicole Christopherson

I know it's called X Now, but I can't get over it.

00:48:43 - Mike Mills

Yes, I know. I call it Twitter all the time, too. No, it has its place, for sure. It's one of those things that I don't know. It's just a different medium. I use it for news more than anything else. But you can make a lot of connections within an industry, and especially for your podcast. I think there's a lot there that you can kind of network with. But speaking about your podcast again, if somebody were to tune in and say, okay, why should I listen to this? What am I going to get from it? What would you tell them about the podcast and what the goal is of it and why they should tune in and listen?

00:49:17 - Nicole Christopherson

Well, I really think there's a lot of stories about people's journeys and what's gotten them to where they're at and what they want their legacy to be and their purpose. I think people understanding that everybody's routines and mantras and journeys are very different, but everybody's looking for the same legacy or the same goal in the. End. And that to me is pretty powerful because I feel like we're all working towards something or trying really hard at things and want better futures for ourselves or for our communities or for our businesses or whatever. But I think it really teaches a lot of our listeners about overcoming adversity. I don't think any of this came easy for any of us.

00:49:57 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:49:57 - Nicole Christopherson

Everybody has a journey and everybody has a story and a why. And I think listening to that and hearing other people's really lets you know that you're not alone. We've all had a challenging road at some point, or a tough start or a hiccup or a speed bump here and there. And it's what you choose to do with it. Like we talked about earlier, I have a friend that's a musician and she didn't make it until she was in her 30s. That's frowned upon. Oh, that's way too old. You know what I mean? Musicians start younger, stuff like that. So like age differences, global.

00:50:28 - Mike Mills

There you go. We got somebody from the UK reaching out there.

00:50:34 - Nicole Christopherson

I think the takeaway from the podcast is really just those authentic stories about the journey and really being able to connect with it. And you'll have takeaways from health and wellness tips. We had a breath work coach on. I use breath work every day.

00:50:49 - Mike Mills

Have you read that?

00:50:50 - Nicole Christopherson

Meditate and breathe. I reset with my breath. It's like a free vitamin that you can use every single day and you can do a lot in your day and your breath can get shorter and you can feel more and more anxious and stuff like that. And you can turn to different means to soothe that or you can just take the free drug that's right in front of you. So these fun guests that come on and they're really fun and teach us all these little tips and tricks and remind us.

00:51:15 - Mike Mills

Have you read the book Breathe or Breath I think is what it's called. The author's last name is Nestor. It's a great book and it talks about obviously it's all about breathing, but how even our facial structures changed over the years because so many people are mouth breathers. And your jawline, because foods are soft and they used to be much harder.

00:51:33 - Nicole Christopherson

Well, and you're so tense all the time because you're not breathing and calming your muscles down.

00:51:38 - Mike Mills

Yeah, and it's hard, but it makes a world of difference on sleep. Talk about mindset. I mean, just being clear headed all the time and having that extra energy that you get from breathing properly, which we just don't really appreciate and fully understand as coming from a mouth breather myself, it's very difficult thing, especially if you've been doing it one way. But it's something that I literally think about every single day because it's such a challenge.

00:52:03 - Nicole Christopherson

Here's a tip for the listeners and for you. It started for me because I used to drive a lot. I mean, I'm a real estate broker. I drove all over the place all the time. I was in my car a lot. My Acupuncturist was like, you need to start breathing. Like, you have got to do this for yourself, for this baby that's inside you. She's like, every stoplight you're at when you hit a red light, just listen to yourself. Breathe in your nose, out your mouth while you're at that red light. And so it would really remind me in times of, like, when I was worrying. So it kind of just started in my car, and now it's just transitioned to just different times where I'm like, my mind starts getting too busy or I start feeling a little bit stressed or whatever, and I'm like, just stop and breathe.

00:52:38 - Mike Mills

Just a reset. You just got to get your head back in the right place. When people listen in to your podcast and they hear those stories from other people and what challenges that they had to overcome to get to where they were or what challenges that they're still because there's another thing that everybody well, you've accomplished. No, it never ends. There's always a new challenge that you have to overcome. There's always a new obstacle in your way that you've got to get past. And this idea that you just get it figured out one day. I joke about people say, well, when I retire, I'm going to go lay on the beach. And I'm like, okay, cool. And then what? You're just going to lay on the beach every single day? No, you've got to have something that fires you up and gets you out of bed every single day to want to accomplish. And the thing is, going back to what we were talking out about, seeing things in front of you and it being there. I was in a weird place for a long time where I thought people that would have the inspirational stories, I'll roll my eyes, like, okay, great. But the thing is that when you put that kind of information in front of your brain on a regular basis, it puts you in the right place to go, okay, I can do this. There's no reason for me to because we all have that self talk. We're like, oh, you suck. You're not good at this thing, or, Why are you even doing this? We all go through that. And when you hear other people say, hey, look, I went through it too, and this is how I overcame it, it keeps you headed in that direction.

00:53:51 - Nicole Christopherson

And it's my guests are vulnerable. They talk about things that they've gone through, challenges that they had in their lives and how they've overcome it. And they give they give so much to our listeners on my podcast, and it's really powerful.

00:54:07 - Mike Mills

It can definitely put you in a good spot. And you need that kind of motivation on a regular basis, a weekly basis, a daily basis, whatever it is. I post on TikTok, but I'm not on there frequently for business or whatever, but I have a saved section on my TikTok that's nothing but motivational stuff that every morning when I get up, and I always listen to the first five or six clips that I have rolling through. It's all kinds of different people, but it's just in a place where when you wake up, you just want to put your head in the right place to go forward. And if you don't have a method or a technique or some kind of process that you do to get there, then we all fall into our old habits and you stay back in the place that you didn't want to be in the first place, right?

00:54:49 - Nicole Christopherson

Something you shouldn't do that throws you off track from whatever that routine needs to be. Mine is I cannot get on my email and I cannot get on my calendar. I know that I can't do it.

00:55:00 - Mike Mills

You fall into the rabbit hole and never call back.

00:55:02 - Nicole Christopherson

Multiple alarms when I need to get everybody up and do my stuff in the morning. And so then I just turn the alarm off on my phone so I don't open the screen and look at other stuff.

00:55:10 - Mike Mills

Well, we're almost at an hour, and so I want to be respectful of your time here, but before we go, I just want you to kind of leave us with where you see taking your community in the next five years, kind of what the path you're headed down to. And then what you would tell anybody that either wants to get involved or what you would say to, like, hey, if you want to have as happy and healthy life as you can, make sure you're doing these things. What would you say to that?

00:55:38 - Nicole Christopherson

Hey, I've been in my career now for 21 years, and I've expanded and I'm going to continue to grow. I really want to grow my organization so I can continue to mentor more. I really am at that point where I want to share my knowledge and I am sharing my knowledge. So open to speaking to anybody in the real estate industry or thinking about getting into the real estate industry. So that's definitely my next step for NMC and for Work Hard, Smile Large, we are going to be growing the podcast next year. We are doing another worldwide vision mapping event and we're going to have some pretty amazing guests on in 2024. We're going to be featuring positivity, couples, people that are making it happen together. So that's going to be really fun. But work hard. Smile large is a movement. My family is always on the move, and we will be taking Work Hard, Smile Large on the road with us on our journey. I'm preaching world school to my kids right now. My husband's traveling quite a bit. I take the podcast on the road with me back to California. So stay tuned. It's going to go. It's got wheels and wings.

00:56:52 - Mike Mills

Got the nationwide tour, coming to a town near you, right?

00:56:56 - Nicole Christopherson

Absolutely.

00:56:57 - Mike Mills

That's awesome.

00:56:57 - Nicole Christopherson

And anybody, if you're interested in being a guest on the Work Hard small arts podcast, DM us on social media or visit the website, be awesome.

00:57:04 - Mike Mills

Well, Nicole, I really appreciate your time. I know you are a busy, busy lady. You've got a lot of balls that you're juggling in the air. And so it's hard to carve out an hour of your day to do something like this. I can't thank you enough for coming in and chatting with us a little bit and we'll be tracking where all this goes. I've watched a couple of episodes of podcasts. I think it's great. I think anybody that really needs a little bit of a boost on their mindset right now, if they're struggling through it, I think it's a great place to start. Because when you get your head in the right place, your business tends to follow. And you just got to keep on that path and not get down on yourself, because we're all going to have downtimes and go through tough spots. But it's how you yourself back up that matters, right?

00:57:44 - Nicole Christopherson

Yes.

00:57:45 - Mike Mills

All right, well, I appreciate it. Thanks for everybody that stuck around. And this will be out on Spotify and Apple tomorrow, so if you want to check it out or listen again, then please do. And we will be back next week where we are talking with a real estate CPA. So we go from mindset to taxes because we got to get ready for 2024. And you've got to set up your business structure in a place where you can make sure that you maximize your expenses, especially in a time where maybe revenue isn't as big as it was the year before.

00:58:14 - Nicole Christopherson

And don't forget to breathe.

00:58:16 - Mike Mills

Yes. And don't forget to breathe. All right, thanks, everybody, and we'll see you next week.