Chasing Joy: My Happy Agent Story

In this very first episode, we’re getting personal!

I’m taking you behind the scenes of my journey, from selling my first McMansion fresh out of college to discovering that working for someone else's version of success was no longer serving me. Along the way, I found joy in unexpected places—think improv classes, pottery studios, and yoga mats—and learned how to start creating a life on my terms.

This episode is packed with real talk about the ups and downs of finding alignment in your real estate career, why joy is the secret weapon no one talks about, and how real estate can be the ultimate playground for crafting your dream life.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:34

Welcome to the inaugural episode of Happy Agent Co, the podcast. I am so excited that you are here. I thought what we would do to kick off this first episode is to talk about the origin story. Everyone loves an origin story. Mostly it's for superheroes. Admittedly, I am not a superhero. I like to think I'm fairly good at real estate, but I will let you be the judge of that over the course of our time together. So how did we get here? How did I get here? What I am going to get into is the story of how being a joy chaser is the key to having a life in a business that you love. It is so crucial as a real estate agent, not only for your longevity in this business, to enjoy the business. If you think back to the beginning of your career, think about how much excitement, how much happiness, how much zest for life you had. It is all about bringing back that feeling because that feeling is magnetic and it's also really good for you. Like you probably really, really love feeling that way. So to kick the story off, we're going to flash back to the early 2000s, 2004 to be precise. I was a senior at the University of Maryland and I had one goal. My goal was to make six figures. I wanted to make bank because I thought that money was the ultimate goal and it was going to give me so much freedom. Now, I really only had two choices in terms of career path getting out of the University of Maryland. Shout out to the Terps. I could sell drugs. And I'm not talking illegal ones. We're talking legal pharmaceuticals. I had a job offer from Eli Lilly, or I could sell homes. I had a job offer from Pulte Homes selling McMansions in the DC area. Now you can probably guess which path I took. I decided to take the job with Pulte Homes and started selling McMansions at the ripe age of 21 years old. I will tell you, I... literally had no business selling million dollar plus homes as a 21 year old. I will say Pulte did an incredible job with their training program. Shout out because I don't think I'd be where I am today without their mortgage training, their construction training, all of their incredible training. I will say that I did achieve my goal. However, I started making bank, which is incredible. At 22, I bought my first home. It was a townhouse in the suburbs of Virginia. And I also leased a really baller vehicle, which I bet you guys can guess what it was back then. BMW, right? It's a little X3 when those first came out. It was so cute. I thought it was hot shit, just driving around, making my money, driving my fancy car. But there is a secret lurking inside. I was shocked. Absolutely miserable. From the outside looking in, I had success. I was doing great. But real talk, I was not happy. I was living a suburban soccer mom's dream life. I would walk to the Whole Foods. I would see moms pushing baby strollers. I was absolutely miserable. And I realized money is great, but it doesn't make you happy. So that led me on my quest to be a happy person, which took me to hobbies, right? Like we have to do fun things. I couldn't control that I had to go to this job because I needed to make money to support my life, but I could control my hobbies. So I started with improv comedy. I don't know if anyone has tried this, but improv It is pretty scary at first because you literally have no idea what you're doing. You go on stage and then you just do stuff. I will say it's very helpful for professional reasons, to be honest. But improv was something that was very, very fun. And I was so happy when I was on stage playing with my friends, making jokes, being silly, being funny. And that brought a lot of happiness to my life. I also picked up pottery. Throwing pottery was so therapeutic and it was also really fun to be creative and to get your hands in the clay, make something beautiful or functional. Actually, that's really like my secret love language is making functional things, obsessed with mugs and pulling handles. If you know, you know. And I also started doing yoga. And yoga was so good for my mental health. It really helped me with my mind and body and soul connection. I'm going to ask you a question. And this isn't a trick. It's not a riddle. I mean, it might be a little bit of a riddle. What do improv, pottery, and yoga have in common? I can see that you're stumped. They all require you to be absolutely present in the present moment. So improv. you cannot be somewhere else in your mind. Like you have to be there on that stage or it's just not going to make any sense. You're not going to be a good scene partner, which isn't cool. You have to be a good scene partner. Yes and, right? Pottery, they have a saying, your day ends up in the clay. And that is totally accurate. If your mind is somewhere else, if you're angry about something, you're anxious about something, your clay is not going to turn into anything worthwhile. And with yoga, I think it's a given that you have to be in the present moment when you're doing yoga. And so what this taught me was that joy lives in the present moment. You cannot have joy in your life if you're focusing on the past, if you're focusing on the future. You have to live in the moment. And that is where happiness and joy resides. So I had my hobbies on lock. Still had my job, but I was still miserable about where I was living. And In real estate, we all know it is location, location, location. And I hated my location. It was, again, soccer mom dream life, and that was not my vibe. So I bought a condo in one of the coolest up-and-coming neighborhoods in D.C. in 2007. It's the U Street neighborhood. I was close to all of the cool bars. I was close to a Whole Foods. Obviously, there's a trend here. I really like being near Whole Foods. And... That location and living in that condo brought me so much happiness. I was close to all of the things I loved. I was with people that I could relate to. And there was this vibrancy about the city that was just so soul-filling for me. I really felt like I was home. It felt so good. So I had my hobbies. I had my location on lock. And I was feeling pretty good. I was making money. My commute wasn't the best because I was going way out into the burbs of Virginia. But I felt like, okay, this is cool. This is sustainable. I'm pretty happy. Then for those of you following along at home, 2008 hit. And I think most of us understand what happened in 2008. And that was when the Great Recession hit. Nobody gets a mortgage anymore. Prices decline. It was... a total and utter shit show. But being the eternal optimist, I was like, okay, what am I going to do? I was sitting at a model home selling zero homes per year, and I was commission-based only, so zero homes with two mortgages and an expensive lease payment was not going to work for me. So I looked around, and I realized I actually didn't hate real estate. I really just didn't like sitting in a model home being stuck. So I became a real estate agent. I got my license in D.C., Maryland, and Virginia, and I started selling real estate to the millennials of Washington, D.C. Now, they were of first-time homebuyer age. We had some really great tax incentives. Pricing had come down. Affordability was back. And I was able to sell 15 homes my first year. which was shocking. I remember my first broker asking me, I don't understand how you're doing this. And I told her, it's the internet. So I had a website that I had designed myself. I'd been designing websites since I was 14. So graphic design and web design and internet marketing was a huge piece of my creativity and how I was pouring into my business, which I absolutely loved. Like online lead generation was so fun. I also loved creating good client experiences, like going above and beyond for them and making sure that they had the best experience possible. And what I ultimately loved the most was that I was able to own my own success. I was able to work and see success. What I was reaping from all of that hard work is like if I worked hard, I got rewarded for that hard work. And for the first time, I had true joy in my job. I truly, truly, truly loved, loved being a real estate agent. And to be honest, I was living the dream. I had free time. I think I was working maybe 20 to 30 hours a week. I had money, so I was able to pay my bills, and I had enough money to have fun, pursue my hobbies, travel. And I was joyful in my life and business. I was seriously, truly, so incredibly happy. But you can probably already see where this is headed. Success begets success. And all entrepreneurs, not just real estate agents, if they are successful, they reach a point where they have to leverage, they have to scale. They can either plateau, which again, if that's what you want for your business is you just want to sustain, no shame in that game. But at that point in my career, I wanted to grow. I saw an opportunity and I wanted to keep going. I realized I could either keep working on the current pace I was going and burn out, which was not an option, or And at this point, and this is 2011, teams were not a really popular, prolific thing like they are now. So it was either start a brokerage or start referring out my excess business. And when I thought about it, I thought through, okay, what do I really enjoy about the real estate business? I love creating experiences. I love technology. I love systems. I love marketing and lead generation. And I absolutely love operations. And what I realized was that opening a real estate brokerage allowed me to do what I loved, which was run a business. I love running a business. Everything about it. I love wearing all the hats. I love... being in control of my destiny. I just love being an entrepreneur. So in 2011, I opened City Chic Real Estate, servicing the entire metropolitan DC area. The really funny part is on the same day that I opened my brokerage, my now husband proposed to me that same day because he said it was the only way that I'd be distracted enough to not know what he was planning. And 100% that's accurate. He actually surprised me, which was really amazing. So it's a really special day. It is March 4th, 2011. I will remember it forever. But here's the thing about opening a company. And I think anyone who's done this knows. It took so much hard work to get launched. There were so many nights. I was working till three in the morning. I was working seven days a week. And I was also in production. So it was like, Broker by day, real estate agent by night and weekend. But I really loved it. I was having a really good time. And I was good at it. We were growing. I was able to bring agents on, train them. They were getting productive. And we were on this really incredible upward trajectory. And then I got pregnant. So we were growing in more ways than one. And in 2015, I had my daughter Lexi. Now for those moms out there who have been pregnant and had kids, it is probably one of the hardest things to do as a real estate agent. It was such a difficult transition because I was really, really, really struggling financially. with being a type A overachiever who pretty much had no limits on time or energy. And for the first time, I had this little human who needed so much of me, so much of my energy. They had no control over my schedule. It was just a total lack of control. And I was so overwhelmed. I definitely, looking back, realized I had postpartum depression and I It was just one of the darkest times of my life, I will be honest. It was like I had so much of my identity wrapped up in my career of being this badass real estate bitch. And it was like I couldn't wear both of the hats anymore. I couldn't be a broker and I couldn't be selling$15 million a year. It just, I had to choose. Something had to give. So that's when I entered into a coaching program. And they asked me, where do you want to be in five years? And I really, really took that question to heart because I have always been a joy chaser. I have always chased happiness. Happiness is like one of my guiding principles. And joy and happiness look so different with kids. It does not look like my life on U Street, going into bars, restaurants, and hanging out with my friends. And that really got me thinking city life versus my childhood, which was growing up in the mountains of New Hampshire. And what I realized was in five years, I really wanted to be living in my hometown in New Hampshire by the time that Lexi started kindergarten. I wanted my kids to have that same experience growing up that I did. Looking back, My hometown in New Hampshire, it's really like joy in a town for me. It's big enough that you have amenities, but it's small enough that everyone knows each other and you feel safe and you are able to experience the four seasons and have the beauty of nature. And that was so important. And just like me being miserable in the suburbs of D.C., place is so important. As a real estate agent, like we sell that to our clients. And so when you're not happy in your place that you're living, that spills over into a lot of aspects of your life. And such a good example or nice reminder of how real estate can impact people's lives beyond just you're living in a nice house. But that sense of location, that sense of place, that sense of community is so, so important. So with that goal. of wanting to be in New Hampshire in five years. I got to work building a brokerage that I could run remotely. This was in 2016 and this was Before COVID, this was pre-virtual brokerage. So there was no EXP. There's no real. There's no cloud brokerages. So I really had no example of how to do this. And I was really creating my own playbook. This was also right around the time that they were creating Zoom meetings. So it seems like it was not that long ago, but it was kind of like the Stone Ages in terms of virtual work.

UNKNOWN: 18:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 18:10

But I was so, so, so motivated to chase my happiness and to chase my joy. So I really just started building all of our systems, all of our technology, all of our processes, our culture. It was all based around the fact that I wanted to be able to run this brokerage remotely. And I don't know about you, but when something feels so incredibly aligned, when something feels like, you know deep in your heart it is 100% what you're supposed to be doing, that makes things a lot easier. And this was one of those decisions. I just knew it was the right thing to do. I knew it was like the thing that was so important for me to do. I wanted to move my family to New Hampshire, but I still wanted to be able to run my company. So I'm trucking along, building this brokerage. I'm going to be able to run remotely. And we experience as a family an unexpected loss. We lost my father-in-law, Andy. And Andy was this very charismatic guy. He spoke like 20 languages. He was just a really cool, worldly dude. But he was also an entrepreneur. And he was one of those entrepreneurs who just never quite made it, never quite got it to click. And he is a cautionary tale of an entrepreneur who worked himself to death. He died of a heart attack in his sleep from stress. And what my husband and I realized was that life is so short. Life is so precious. And why are we putting off things that are going to make our life better? Why are we not making the moves that we really feel like we should be making? So we decided we're not postponing joy anymore. And that's like one of my favorite sayings now is don't postpone joy. Just chase it. So we made one of our hugest leaps towards joy, and we listed our house in D.C., and this was like four years before we– of the five-year plan. So we didn't even reach five years. It was like one year after we set this intention. We're doing it. So we listed our house in D.C., and we made the big move to New Hampshire. And while we were making that move, it was– I think around the time that we ratified a contract on our house, I found out I was pregnant with our son. There's something about like moves and pregnancy with me. It like always happens. I'm always pregnant or having a baby when we're moving. And I remember announcing it to my team and having people find out that we were doing this. And the things that were said to me were pretty discouraging and pretty shocking. You're crazy. You're throwing it all away. This will never work. You're going to miss DC. You'll be moving back in two years. And when you chase joy, it makes people uncomfortable because joy is so incredibly personal. It's not something that's externally validated a lot of the times. And you can't always expect people to understand. But making decisions about your happiness is That's your business. Like it has nothing to do with anybody else. And if you're making it out of alignment with what you feel and your heart and your gut and just your whole being is the right thing to do, I do not think that you can go wrong. Even if it seems risky, even if it seems like you're throwing it all away to people, I really don't feel like you can go wrong. So let's fast forward to 2024, present day. We're almost closing out the year. Holy moly. It's almost done. Present day, Chasing Joy has totally paid off for me. I still have a real estate brokerage that I am still running remotely from New Hampshire and is still doing really well. I have three really happy and healthy kids who are living in my dream town. My husband and I built our dream house. It's like our forever home. We put so much time and energy and money into that. But it's so great to be able to be living in New my vision board. And it is all because I took a chance on real estate. And I have really great news for you. You are uniquely positioned to craft your dream life just by being in real estate. And not only craft your dream life, but your dream career. There are so many ways to do real estate and so many ways to build a career that you love. And That is why I launched Happy Agent Co. in 2023. I realized that the zeitgeist of real estate isn't about happiness. It's not about fulfillment. It's not about joy. It's about hustling. It's about grinding. It's about making those calls. It's about power hour. It's aren't about what makes you happy. And yes, I think you do have to do a lot of things in your business, but they can still be aligned with your happiness. So I, through Happy Agent Co., coach real estate agents on how to have a happy business that supports them living their dream lives. And yes, that includes making money. Like we aren't just going to be sitting having spa days all the time. Although that sounds incredible. So sign me up. If we have a brokerage that's doing that, I'm in. But just like joy isn't a one-size-fits-all, neither is real estate. And that is amazing. But so many agents need help thinking outside of the box because they're surrounded by people who are just doing the same thing, because they're surrounded by people or agents or maybe even their broker who are just like, what are we going to do this year? Are we selling more this year? What are we doing this year? More and more and more. Yeah. I like to use my experience as an agent and as running a real estate team in a brokerage to help agents figure out what that joy puzzle looks like for them. What does that ideal work-life balance look for them? Where do you want to be in five years? Where do you want to be in 20 years? What does your dream life and career look like? So while I hope we have the opportunity to work together, if you want to get a head start in I have a workbook that walks you through the three steps of building a happy business. It is completely free, free 99. If it's free, it's for me. And I'm going to walk you through the three steps. They seem simple, but they actually are pretty thought provoking. The first is you need to follow the joy. And the first exercise you'll go through is really unpacking your life and your business, all of the tasks that you do, all of the people you deal with. the client types that you have, the lead generation that you do. All of the things that you're doing, you're going to then rank from one to 10 on how much you enjoy them. And if it's a seven or above, those are your joy tasks. Those are the things you really love. Those are the things that really fill you up. If it's below a seven, you got to evaluate. Should you delegate? Should you stop doing it altogether? Which is totally an option, by the way. Um, It's a really, really great exercise to see what you're doing. And it just unpacks everything. It's an abbreviated version of what we do in the Happy Agent Retreat Day. So just wholeheartedly believe in it. It's so great to just take the intentional time to unpack your life and your business. So that's step one, follow the joy. Step two is you need to have a five-year vision. You need to have something that you're looking forward to. Whether that's I want to have a team of three people and I want to be doing a little bit less production and I want to really focus on lead generation and being the rainmaker. It might be I'm heading into my retirement years. I kind of want to coast a little bit. How can I maximize my time and energy for maximum income? It could be that you want to make a move. Maybe you want to go remote like I did. There's a lot of ways that you can grow your real estate career. And so that's having that five-year vision is so crucial. And then the last step is you got to put in the work. So you're making your plan on how you're going to implement changes in your business or restructure your business to support your vision. I'll include in the show notes a link to download the Happy Agent Workbook, which is going to lead you through these three steps. And again, it is completely free. Help yourself. What I know for sure is that hustling and grinding is not the only way to have success in real estate. In my experience, agents who survive the longest in this industry are the happiest ones. And I think that that just goes to show that happy agents don't just survive, they thrive.