Win at Work Without Losing at Life

By Justin Stoddart

There’s a definition of success in real estate that most of us have absorbed without ever consciously choosing it: do more deals, build a bigger team, make more money, move up the rankings, and then do it all again next year.

There’s nothing wrong with growth. But my conversation with my good friend Garrett Maroon challenged an assumption worth examining: Does winning at work have to require losing somewhere else?

Garrett has built an exceptional real estate business, almost entirely through referrals. What I admire most, though, is that he’s deliberately built that business around his faith and family rather than expecting those priorities to fit around his work.

Define Success on Your Own Terms

In 2021, Garrett was figuring out how to double his business. He found a path to doubling sales and profit, but he couldn’t see how to accomplish it without increasing his workweek from roughly 40 hours to 60.

That led him to a better question: Five years from now, would he be more proud of doubling his profit while seeing his kids less, or maintaining a successful business while creating substantially more time with his family?

As Garrett told me, “I wanted to define success on my own terms.”

Eventually, that definition became very specific: a profit target, a weekly date night with his wife and every seventh week off with his kids. Those priorities became a filter for business decisions. If an opportunity helped financially but violated the other parts of his definition of success, he could say no.

That’s a powerful distinction. If your personal priorities are merely what happens after work, work has an incredible ability to consume whatever you give it.

Focus Makes You More Valuable

Garrett has also built his career by questioning assumptions. Early on, he was told he couldn’t sell 50 homes in a year entirely by referral. He tested the assumption and sold exactly 50. Later, he was told he needed a large team to get out of full-time production. Instead, he accomplished it with one agent and one administrator.

Part of what made that possible was focus. Garrett decided early that referrals were his lane and spent years mastering them instead of trying every available method of generating business.

For real estate professionals, there’s an important economic principle underneath that decision. Specialists are harder to commoditize. A consumer who finds you through a generic search can easily conduct another search. A consumer who hears from a trusted friend, “Call Garrett. He’ll take care of you,” begins the relationship from an entirely different position.

Garrett described it as becoming an asset rather than a commodity. That becomes increasingly valuable in a world where technology makes basic information and services easier to compare.

Build the Life First

One statement from Garrett summarized the entire conversation for me:

“I would rather live a quiet and faithful life than be the guy that everybody talks about and my family can’t stand me.”

Awards disappear. Rankings change. Somebody eventually breaks your production record. But the people closest to you experience the consequences of how you build your business every day.

So my challenge is simple: define your scoreboard. Decide what winning actually means before accepting the industry’s definition. Get specific about the income you want to create, the clients you want to serve and the relationships you refuse to sacrifice along the way.

Then build your business accordingly.

You absolutely can win at work without losing at life. But first, you have to decide what winning means.

At ProInsight, we help professionals build a referral engine for their business. Apply here to see if becoming a Homeowner Concierge™ Select Professional is available in your area.