The Faithful Agent Series Ep 1: How to be a Faithful Agent

In business, we often don’t stop to take the time to ask ourselves how can we be faithful? And, even more often we don’t sit quietly and seek the answer.

 “One who is faithful in a very little is faithful in much and one who is dishonest in very little is also dishonest in much. If then you have not been faithful in the unrighteous wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful in that which is another's, who will give you that which is your own?” (Luke 16:10-12) 

Today begins our seven week Faithful Agent Series, we’re excited to bring you a new episode each Thursday. This series will lead up to our in-person Faithful Agent Conference where like-minded believers will receive high-level business training from leaders who encourage high-level faith and faithfulness. 

What you’ll learn throughout the series; 

- How a Faithful Agent can be Generous Before They’re Successful 
- Lead Generation for the Faithful 
- How do Faithful Agents Think About Their Schedule? 
- Goal Setting for Faithful Agents 
- How to Balance People & Profit Faithfully 
- How to Stay Faithful when the World Just Doesn’t Get It? 

Connect with Garrett on social! Instagram

Learn how Garrett is gathering Christian agents all around the globe to be in business together with the 2:10 Collective at eXp - 210collective.com

Come to the Faithful Agent Conference - faithfulagent.com/conference

Help us fund the continued work of The Faithful Agent by sending us your Hampton Roads and Richmond, VA buyer and seller referrals! https://faithfulagent.com/referral

Join our Facebook community to meet other agents who share your work and your faith! facebook.com/groups/thefaithfulagent

Want to join a local Faithful Agent group to meet believers in your area? Check out faithfulagent.com/local-groups

Transcript

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Are you a Christian in real estate wanting to grow your business and your faith that this series is for you? Here's the truth. Being a business owner and being a Christian can feel lonely. We're here to bring you into community with other like minded business professionals who desire to grow their business and their faith also, to create a faithful aged family through short teaching episodes around important topics for believers in the business world, prepared to be encouraged, challenged and inspired to serve God and serve people and a community that knows you and loves you. Are you ready to be surrounded by the people who think like you love like you and serve like you then join us as we navigate being a faithful Christian in the real estate world together. Hey, everybody, welcome back to another episode of serving not selling, we're super excited about beginning our seven week faithful agent series. So let me explain a little bit about what this is. Tyler and I are gonna go for the next seven weeks is going to launch just once a week on Thursdays specifically talking to Christians in the real estate space about issues that we struggle with. Tyler and I many of you know are launching a faithful agent conference for Christians in the real estate space coming in March. Super excited about that go to faithful agent.com. If you want to learn more in this episode, and the next six episodes are going to be specifically geared towards believers in the real estate space, it absolutely will bring value to you. If you don't consider yourself a Christian. We want to serve everyone. But we wanted to come out with a specific series just for the Christian agent in real estate. So we are excited to dig into this. This episode today is just an intro episode to give you a taste of what these next few weeks are going to look like. And in some of our episodes, we will be joined by our good buddy Cody person or who runs a very good real estate business and a very good team out in the western side of Virginia. He's a great guy you'll enjoy when we get to have him on the show as well. We want to introduce this series to you and hope that it will be a blessing to many of you and an encouragement to many of you. And if it is share it with your friends. That's our intent here. So Tyler, man, we're diving in doing something a little bit different. I'm excited about man how you feel it? Yeah, I'm really looking forward to it. I mean, to all of the faithful listeners that have been here for however many episodes we've done now, get and I would pray and hope that it'd be evident that we are lovers of the Lord and desire to honor him and all that we do. And this podcast is just a part of that. But we really felt like it was important to take a couple months to devote some time to being really intentional about having conversations directed straight to Christians in the real estate space. And as you mentioned, it applies to anybody even if you don't find yourself a believer hopefully pulls on your heart but and seeing how faithful the Lord has been to each of us in our lives and in meeting our family's lives together. And in our vocations. We felt like this was an appropriate time as we lead up to march in our faithful agent conference, when we're all together to just really kind of dive into some of the important topics and what it looks like to be, you know, a Christian professional. And our hope is that the Lord's honored above all in this, but in that that he would use us as vehicles to encourage each of you that are listening, what we're trying to do here, and this is why this is just a series not a new podcast is we love the serving, not selling concept, we're not gonna get rid of that this has been a great series, a great podcast for many people, and we're grateful for that. But what we're trying to see is, is there a need in the market? Do people want more of these kinds of conversations geared towards Christian real estate agents. So we would greatly appreciate you audience if you know someone who is a faithful agent, that you would share this with them, ask them to download it, that's one of the best ways that we can tell if it's making a bigger impact. Ask them to download the episode, subscribe to the show, especially over these next few weeks. So that we can see that there is an audience out there for this. If there is we will absolutely do more of this, right. And we will continue to serve in this arena as best as we can. But we need to make sure and know that is there an audience out there for this. So we would greatly bless us if you would ask your friends to take a listen download it, feel free to shoot me an email Garrett at business by relationships.com. And say this is awesome. There's a Facebook group that you can join, just go in and look up facebook.com backslash groups backslash, the faithful agent. And you'll hear that in the outro of these episodes as well. But we would love to connect with you all to know that this is something that means something to you, the audience, that's why we're here to help make that known to us, it would be greatly appreciated. So here's what this is going to look like. And then we're going to dive into a little bit of the topic today, which is what is a faithful age and this will be a shorter episode just an intro to the series. But today we're going to talk about what is the faithful agent. Each episode is going to begin with a scripture and that's going to be the crux of our conversation in our topic. Then we're going to talk about what is how is a faithful agent generous before they've even made it. That's week two, week three is how does a faithful agent lead generate? Week four How does a faithful agent think about their schedule? Week? Five? How does the faithful agent set goals? Week? Six? How does the faithful agent balance people and profit? We actually just recorded that one ahead of time, and it was a phenomenally good conversation. So you're definitely gonna want to listen to that one. And finally, week seven, how does the faithful agent stay faithful when the world around them just doesn't get it? And we're going to dive into those, and hope that we can serve you all as we talked about some of these topics. So T man and audience don't worry, we're still going to do bad jokes. Christian jokes. So why don't we do that first, and then you can read what you've got for the scripture of the day. I mean, we can't lose our real identity. I mean, that jokes. That's why people listen in the first place. So it can't just completely let that go. The audience listens, like for the first two and a half minutes, and they shut it off. No opinion. They just want our jokes. That's right. But I love these. I love these little punny jokes, and especially this Christian one here. What do you call a sleepwalking nun? Roman Catholic? Yeah, that's hilarious. Why is Adam considered the fastest person in the Bible? He came in first in the human race. That's it. That's it. And then finally, I don't know why I'm going to read this one too. Why Samson considered the best comedian in the Bible. He brought the house down. It looks like you knew that one. So the guy had read that. I liked it. I gotta admit this to this is real sad. But um, so I'm at the chiropractor this morning. He comes in, and he's getting ready to work for me. He's like, Hey, Gary, by the way, gotten the bad Christmas jokes for me. And I'm like, I don't know. He's like, Oh, so I'm like, wait, I do have one. And I told it to but he was like, it's good. Like, my chiropractor now was asking me for bad jokes. For the boy, boy. Oh, that's right. Making making big moves here. Uh, hey, you got to be known as somebody you know, not all of us can be known as the bad joke guy. But you know, you've got something so at least I have an identity. I know. That's right. All right, buddy. Let's jump in. Yeah, we got we're gonna start in Luke chapter 16, verses 10 through 12. One who's faithful and a very little is also faithful and much, and one who is dishonest and very little is also dishonest and much, if then you have not been faithful in the unrighteous wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches. And if you have not been faithful, and that which is another's, who will give you that which is your own. Amen. I just want to jump in as we as we talked about this together. And you know, really what brought you and I together with the Lord sewed together a decade and a half ago and has still brought us together intimately to this day is is this when that's why I'm excited for this series, audience G and I's relationship we didn't know at the time, but would be cultivated and centered around our faith. I was 14 The first time I met Garrett and very naive and he knew the Lord and was pursuing him from an early age and made an impact on me before I even realized it. And the Lord was faithful to bring us back together. But as we've you know, learned what it looks like to live life together as families, as brothers in Christ as our families are knit together. And as we grow in business with one another and truly aim to honor and grow the kingdom side by side, this is the essence of it all pursuing the Lord pursuing him locking arms to say, what does it look like to be faithful to what the Lord has called us to? And that's a really hard question. You know, it's easy to talk conceptually about what it looks like and see what Scripture calls us into. But you guys have heard us talk so many times about what it means to have accountability partners to be in relationship with other believers to be yoked as Scripture calls us to. And Garrett and I have just been so passionate about this for a long time, that that's what I mean, we started a long time ago that we were going to have a conference to try to bring Christians in the real estate space together. Now, we didn't know what that looked like. And we don't know, we still are figuring out what its gonna look like to bring people together. But we trust in God's sovereignty, and we trust in His provision, and we are actively just trying to be faithful to what he is calling us to, and to create space to where his name can be lifted on high and to where a community of believers can come together to encourage each other. And ultimately, so that the Lord and His Kingdom would grow just as were called in the Great Commission to go forth and multiply into religious submit to His will. And so that is the as much as you've heard G and I go back and forth and banter and have a ton of fun and talk about high level business stuff and what we have learned day to day in the real estate space. This is at the heart of it all and that is what it means to be a faithful agent. We're going to talk more about that but to me, it stops and it starts with willful submit Shin to honoring the Lord over pursuing anything else. And we just want to create space for that. And so we're happy you guys are here, we're excited to talk more about it over the next couple of months. Live events changed lives. That's why on March 2, and third, we are gathering the Christian real estate community across the country, for our first ever faithful agent conference. Let's face it, it's easy to get caught up in the world and distracted from our mission as servants of Jesus. And it's hard to find a community of true Christ centered business owners that can both expand your faith and help you grow your business. So if you desire to build a network of believers and receive world class business training, that join us for two days of in depth discussions about being a Christian in the real estate business, we want to deepen your faith, strengthen your business and connect you to lifelong friends for fellowship, and encouragement, just go to faithful agent.com to learn more. And now let's get back to the rest of the conversation. I think at the heart of all these discussions is the reminder for myself too, very much so is taking or more often stopping to take the time to say what does it look like to be faithful in? Whatever you're doing? What does it look like to be faithful to the Lord right now in this buyer consultation? Right? What does it look like right now to be faithful in my lead generation, or faithful and managing my expenses for my business? Or, of course, faithful with my family time, or my schedule? That's our hope is that we can just become people that ask that question more often. And then quietly, seek that answer from Scripture through through accountability, like you talked about T through prayer, and ultimately, through submission of ourselves. And that's really hard for me, and made it really hard because I'm bent towards just moving quickly on things. And that doesn't lend itself to being still and faithful. And a lot of and I don't know that I've been unfaithful, but I'm certainly not being faithful to sit and listen, and seek what the Lord might have for me. Right. So, yeah, I think this is so important. You know, the truth is audience I was burdened by this thought and idea to when I just started looking around to say, Where are the Christians in this business, and you got the Christian real estate network, shout out to Justin Smith, love Justin. He's the CEO of that. And there's a couple 1000 agents that are part of that, but they don't, they don't necessarily do training and things like that. And so we've talked to him a bunch, I have an awesome dude, love him go join that network. But but but there's no like conferences that are meant for agents, I looked around and said, Why don't Christians have high level business training and high level training on growing their faith? Right, it's like Christians have accepted that we should just sit down and shut up and let the world teach us how to run a business. And then the church is going to teach you how to have faith. And scripture is full of examples. And parables of, of the workplace, and what's involved in that, right, and it can become so easily ignored. And so I've just become excited as, as Tyler has, like you said, we're just doing this fade, man, we movie on this audience, we don't really know what we're doing. We're just getting people together, who are believers and saying, let's grow our business and our faith that we've got some great speakers, and it's gonna just be an awesome time to gather with other Christians in the real estate space and learn together. But that's the burden of our hearts is, why is there not any high level business training from people who also encourage high level faith and faithfulness? Right? That's, we were gonna fail at that miserably. Right? Man, just saying that I'm like, There's no way we can live up to that, but by the Lord's grace. And so we hope that this can just be a part of the encouragement for you all. So yeah, what does it look like to be a faithful nation? I think the faithful agent is the one that seeks to know, Lord, how do you want me to move in this particular area and my life with work? And all the conversations that we're going to be having? is understanding Lord, how do you want me to act in this particular situation? I've become so convinced, as I as I see, my personality is I'm like, I honestly and not in a private way. I don't think but like, I feel like I could do most things at least decent. Right? You know, within reason. But like most things, I feel like I could figure out pretty decently but, but asking the question, but Lord, where do you really want me to move? Where do you really want me to spend my time? How do you really want me to serve people? What does that really look like? Right? He didn't call me to do everything. He uniquely gifted me and you and all of our audience in certain ways and what does it look like to be faithful? It doesn't look like copycatting everybody. It looks like seeking out how the Lord made us and how he wants to use us with the understanding, like you said, Tyler that our mission is to go out and make disciples. So what does that look like practically and that's hard. So that's what it means to be a faithful agent is to seek those So he's not to have the answers but to seek those things. What do you think? You know, we'll wrap this episode up here in a sec. But what do you think? Yeah, and I want to I think that the last kind of point of that, that's really good brother. But the is that to disclaimer, as we've said, all along, through serving, not selling, and then all of our conversations, we don't have this all figured out. But I think in, you know, in God's grace in providing us the humility to recognize that we don't have it all figured out, is I think, the Genesis and the motivation in what has brought this together, right. So we realize that we don't have it figured out, the Lord's been kind to each of us to humble us, and also provide in the same way. So we are aiming really to be faithful and just creating a space to encourage and say that, that's all right, and to foster relationship and community where people can come together, and be real with that, and ultimately fall back on the truth of God's word fall back on the community that God has created in His Church. And so these podcasts and these discussions are not going to give answers, they're not going to be black and white, those scripture is black and white about a lot of things. Most things, there is a lot of freedom in our ability to Rome, within the kingdom that God has established within his boundaries, so that his character can be beautifully revealed in dialogue between his creation. So that is, what excites me as we unpack a lot of these topics is that there's not we're not going to give you the right answer, because we're, we're all gonna give you the right answer, because we're going to point you back to scripture. But we're not going to give you this template of this is what you have to do, because, as ji said, we were all so uniquely created. And as the Lord created, just because I'm not going to say repeat the Scripture, well, I should have this memorized. But just because you're a foot and not a hand doesn't mean that you don't contribute to the body, right, each bar, each person and member of the body is uniquely skilled to come together to serve the rest of it. So I'm not going to do things the same way that je does, because the Lord has knit me together uniquely from him. Now we encourage one another. And we God's character is revealed so much in our relationship, obviously, personally, but we don't even have we're we're still figuring out what it looks like. How are his characters revealed in a business type relationship, because we our minds think so differently in a lot of ways and praise God for that. And so where the value we've seen is that in just relationships like this, like you and I have, and that the Lord has provided and other spheres, and how faithful he's been to bring believers together to encourage one another, that has motivated us, it has built us up, it gives us joy in an industry where there can be some frustrating times and in a broken world that leads to frustrating times. We want to create space where people can be encouraged come together and get poured into how many times do you think do we think about as believers or or leaders where we're always pouring out? And we're always giving, in the answer to the question of how are you getting filled up? Or how are you getting poured into Zonta? I mean, outside of the Lord, it's in our community. I mean, it's in your marriages, it's in your most intimate relationships, but why not commit to growing a community around you and immersing yourself in a community that is equally yoked and, you know, we pray that the Lord would provide that and create that space here. And that in doing so, each of you that are listening would be encouraged to step out and to embrace it. That's good, man. Yeah, I mean, I, I just think imagine, you know, a place where you can be encouraged, sanctified, and grow your business all at once. You know, like, that gets me excited, because quite honestly, audience, I looked for that, and I didn't find it. And that's why tea and I felt compelled to do it. Because this is just something that I desire. And I think many other people do, as I've talked to others. And so again, you know, we for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, right? We certainly am. And that we're going to be going on this journey with you all and many of you all will have insights that we don't have. And you know, that's why we want the community as Tyler said, we're not the only voices that matter here by any means. But we want to be the ones and if it's the Lord's will to be the catalyst to start this. So join us audience join us at the faithful agent conference. Certainly join us on that Facebook group. Please tell your other faithful agent friends about this. Again, we want to know who's out there how we can serve them, and we can only do it with your help. So share this with other faithful agents. We are excited to go on this faithful agent series journey with you we've never done anything like this a series like this, but we are trusting that the Lord is going to do with it what he wants to do. And if that means our show total The text than the show totally tax. Right? But no matter what he will be glorified, because that's who he is. And he's good. So we love you, audience. We are grateful for you Tyler, why don't you read that scripture? One more time, brother as you take us out? That's right, good word. Luke chapter 16, verses 10 through 12. One who is faithful and a very little is also faithful and much and one who is dishonest and a very little is also dishonest and much if then you have not been faithful in the unrighteous wealth, who will entrust you the true riches. And if you have not been faithful in that, which is another's, who will give you who will give you that which is your own. So may we all be faithful with everything the Lord has blessed us with, and lean in and step out into the light and be bold, excited to go on this journey with you guys. Amen. Go out and be faithful friends. See you next week. Thanks for listening to our faithful agent series on the Serbian selling podcast. And don't forget to share the show with other Christians in real estate and review the show on your favorite podcast app so more people hear the good news. We want to grow the Christian real estate community deeper and stronger. So every time you share the show, you are offering your faithful agent friends a place to grow their business and be welcomed by their brothers and sisters in Christ. To learn more about our faithful agent conference, go to faithful agent.com and to join our Facebook community go to facebook.com backslash groups backslash the faithful agent. We'd love to connect with you there and stay tuned for the next episode of our faithful agent series on serving not selling