The Journey From School Teacher to 120 Million Sold in 4 years

Where I Come From

In 2012 I was an assistant golf pro at a shitty public course making $10 an hour fighting like hell for a $2 an hour raise.  I had married the love of my life and Obama with his first time home buyer credit helped us buy a $60,000 condo.  My wife was an assistant manager at Abercrombie which was almost as shitty as my job except she had benefits and a 30k salary (I got laid off and filed unemployment every winter).  My wife’s parents were school teachers and so I thought I could get 9-18 in after work every day and have all summer to play golf so why not do that?  I went back to school and earned a degree in Special Education. It was probably the first time in my life I set a goal and put my mind to accomplishing it and graduated with a 3.92 GPA which is a bit higher than the 1.6 I had in high school.  I fell in love with the kids & it was surprisingly a fun job.

The Big Move

In 2015 we hired the man, the myth, the legend Blake Ginther to sell our cheap-ass condo and moved to DC (it actually expired and we rented it for a year then rehired him to sell it…to this day I still haven’t been fired and rehired…what the hell was I thinking🤣, love you brother).  We had decided to make a move because we had lived our whole lives in our bubble in NC and weren’t ready to settle down just yet.  I was locked in on Wilmington, Charleston, Savannah, or any warm-weather place with water.  Lindsay got a job offer in Fairfax VA as a store manager.  We went to DC to visit and 2 weeks later we rented an apartment sight unseen (this wouldn’t be the last time we do that).  A 2 bedroom 2 baths squeezed into 700 sq ft “30 minutes from DC”.  That would be at 2 am, any other time it was 2 hours coming and going.  I taught in DC that summer but wasn’t able to get a job there and was hired on at Piney Branch about 20 legit minutes from our apartment.  It was an awesome school I had so much fun and met so many great people.

Teacher Teacher

The next year I landed a teaching job in DC & we moved 30 minutes east to Arlington just outside DC (a legit 15 minutes from DC).  We rented a townhome for 2k a month and when my wife’s mother came to visit we took her thereafter we had signed the lease and there were some dudes on our corner drinking 40’s and smoking dope…she cried hysterically and asked if we were joking🤣. I wanted to teach in DC because of their progressive pay scale and student loan forgiveness, who knew a school teacher would be so money motivated. The first couple months was the honeymoon phase, everything was all good and I was making $60,000 a year, I thought I had made it until I went to pay my now ridiculous monthly expenses that I couldn’t afford because of the insane cost of living.  Then things started going sour at the school I was at.  They had ridiculous expectations, I felt like the administration gave ZERO f’s about the kids and me not going with the flow and saying hey this is wrong some of these kids need different environments so they can learn resulted in the principal and I not getting along, to say the least.  It turned to a dark time in my life.  I was drinking after work every day to numb whatever hell I just went thru, we had no money and my relationship with my wife was suffering.

I Needed A Lifeline

In January 2016 I reached out to the guy that failed to sell our condo and finally did for advice.  I told him I wanted to sell a few homes a year so I could make an extra 20k-30k a year because Lindsay and I were thinking about having kids and we had no money and I was a teacher.  He said cool get licensed and go talk to KW in Arlington.  I took the classes and the only one that knew was my wife, I didn’t tell anyone until I got licensed in February 2016.  I was so excited and ready to make that extra 20k to live the dream!

Getting Out Of A Dark Place

March 2016 to May 2016 I went to the office every day after work and completed the Ignite program on my own and remember waiting on my phone to ring for someone wanting to buy a house (still waiting).  I had a spreadsheet of the people I knew in DC (less than 50 and mostly school teachers that I didn’t want to tell I had another job).  I had another spreadsheet of FSBOS because that’s what the book said to do.  I followed the Ignite model, all 12 steps, and no business yet.  About then I met Gabe, he had a team, a really successful guy drove a BMW X5 all the super impressive Realtor stuff.  He gave me a copy of Millionaire Real Estate Agent and I read “Think A Million” on the bus to a field trip toward the end of the year, Mayish timeframe.  I decided then that I was going to bust my ass over the summer and do whatever it took not to go back to teaching in August.

The Journey Begins

That summer I got to the office at 7 am and started calling on MOJO at 8.  I was terrible but I did it all day, I basically cold-called all of DC.  On the weekends I would doorknock and host open houses.  Ironically enough a buddy from my golf league bought a 700k house in Capitol Hill. He would sell it 3 years later for 100k more and not use me, a tough lesson to go into every listing appointment ready to sign the contract and don’t take the relationship for granted. So I sell one house that summer and sign up for BOLD.  My man Paul Teller the house seller changed my life forever.  The week before starting I had sold 1 house and just walked in and told my principal that I quit.  Now that I was all in I played all out.  In the end, he challenged me to put a deposit on a trip to Scotland for my family and double my goal from 100k to 200k and then double it again to 400k, at the time I couldn’t believe it.  I was doing a BOLD 100 every week (100 contacts in a day), one day I did 200 contacts because Gabe told me I was soft and 100 was too easy for me.  I grinded like hell and in 4 months sold about 7 million in real estate thru pure hustle.  I had a buyer that I door knocked that was renting and purchased a 1.1m house, a lady I door knocked signed the listing on the spot and got under contract within a week on a 600k row home, cold-called a guy that signed with me same day and his neighbor was his best friend and an agent but he liked my hustle…any of these could be due to luck and yet the more you shoot, the more you score and all I did was take shots unapologetically to get the result I desired.  I was rolling, had replaced my teaching salary and people were taking notice that I was different, I had a special talent.  My only real talent as my buddy Danny Frye so eloquently put it as only he can “I knew you would be successful because you have no shame”.  He was right when it came down to it I didn’t care if someone got upset because I called them at 8 am or knocked on their door, I was determined and on a mission to succeed.

22 Million Rookie Year

Everything was going so well in December 2018 I decided to leave the team I was on and go out on my own.  I actually was going to join another team with higher splits.  After BOLD I convinced MAPS to let me sign up for a Mastery Coach and on about our 5th coaching call I had told Joe I was moving teams.  We went through the pros and cons of staying on the team I was on or going to another and then he asked me “Kiger do you want to build a business or go get a pay raise”…It was a challenge I couldn’t back down from I was going to build a business so I went solo just before Christmas.  Here I was I had sold about 12 houses and had an admin, tools, systems, mentor to being a single agent with a dialer, and a MAPS coach.  I didn’t sell a home in January and was HURTING.  I went to Family Reunion and Dianna Kokoszka said: “it’s about compound interest, you have to put the work in everyday overtime to get the result”.  Then I hear Gary Keller tell us we can be anywhere we want to be in 5 years, most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year and underestimate what they can accomplish in 5.  I came back home in February and got back to work.  I had a couple close in February a few close in March and then that compound interest thing hit in April.  6-8 months of smiling and dialing all day long, door knocking, 3-4 open houses every weekend, 80 hour work weeks finally came to fruition.  8 closings for $108,000 in GCI.  I had never dreamed of having that kind of money.  I took my wife and parents on a dream vacation to Scotland and played golf with my pops and paid for it all.  We shed tears of joy walking up the 18th fairway at The Old Course.  I finally realized the person I was becoming and what I was doing wasn’t all about the money, it was about the memories that money can help create and I had big plans to create some amazing experiences.

Coming up next Is the ups and downs of growth, hiring & firing, and what someone that has been poor their whole life does with a little change in their pocket…