The Mindset Shift You MUST Make When Planning for 2024

I recently came across a YouTube video of a man building a working replica of a Tesla Cybertruck out of wood. 

It took him 100 days and $15,000, and the result is absolutely stunning…but what fascinated me wasn’t the car itself but the process of putting it together.

Piece by piece, everything slid perfectly into place. 

There was no winging it, no trial and error, no chaos. Just a clear plan and a step-by-step process to measure, cut, and assemble each element of the car so they all worked in harmony. 

This guy thought it all through ahead of time and knew exactly how the pieces were going to go together.

Ideally, this is what you want your business to be like. 

You want to start with a vision, then break that vision down into its various parts and create each one intentionally, according to your design.

That takes a certain type of mindset, and most agents do NOT operate that way. 

Every day, I see agents just winging it—doing whatever they feel like at the moment, making decisions based on impulse, chasing transactions, and slapping on bandaids instead of solving problems.

They might set goals and make plans, but where do those things end up? In a drawer somewhere, abandoned in favor of the false promise of instant gratification.

For the most part, it’s a mess.

If car makers operated the way real estate agents do, those cars wouldn’t go far, last long, or be very safe to drive.

Some agents are better at the mess than others. One of my clients is relatively new to real estate, not yet 30 years old, and already doing $100M in sales. From the outside, she seems wildly successful…

But under the hood, she’s working 80 hours a week, has no life, and is on the fast track to burnout. Her “success” is not sustainable or scalable.

Every agent needs to understand this: you are physically limited by time and energy. If working harder is your primary growth strategy, you will hit the ceiling fast.

The only way around that ceiling is to start treating your business like a BUSINESS, not a job.

A business is an entity that exists apart from you. It can operate without you, scale beyond you, and even outlive you.

How do you create that? The same way that guy built his wooden Tesla: with thoughtful planning and a precise, step-by-step process. If he wanted to, he could hire workers and build 1,000 more wooden Teslas exactly the way he built the first one. 

Can you say the same about your business?

Even if you’re happy as a solo agent and have no plans to scale beyond your own capacity…

What if you could do the same volume of business in less time, with less stress?

Or what if you could double your results without working any harder?

That’s the power of treating your business like a business.

It forces you to create that clear plan and step-by-step process, as if you were going to build a team that could replicate and scale up your work.

Whether you actually build that team or not, you learn to streamline and systematize how you do things. You cut waste, avoid mistakes, improve consistency, and stay focused on what matters.

As you plan for next year, keep this guy and his wooden Tesla in mind.

He didn’t just set the goal of building a Tesla Cybertruck and then put it in a drawer and keep doing the same things he did before. He did not bounce around from one thing to another. He did not sit around worrying and hoping for solutions to appear. 

He made a plan. He looked at each element of the car and considered how they would all fit together in advance. Then he executed the plan, not all at once, but step by step, in a logical order.

And in the end, every piece became part of a cohesive whole, exactly as he envisioned.

You can do the same thing for your business—when you start treating it like a business, not just a job.