With Josh Mana, Sales Agent, McGrath Central Coast
Josh Mana is certainly a man who is prepared to take a risk. He’s taken on the Gold Coast and written big numbers in a highly competitive patch in Newcastle. But that wasn’t enough. Wanting a bigger canvas to work with and to align himself with some of the best in the business, in the last year, at 36 years of age, with a beautiful wife Carrie and two toddlers, Josh has moved to the NSW Central Coast and joined McGrath, working alongside Mat Steinwede in the Terrigal office.
He first heard of Mat when he listened to The Mat Steinwede Real Estate System CDs many years ago. He says, “I sat down and listened to it and the way he went about business really resonated with me. I said to Carrie, ‘This guy does business the way I do it’. It's more about connection, it's more about feeling, and it's a bloody lot of hard work, but the process is what I understood.” After meeting with Jaimie and Darren he says he, “had a good feeling on the way they do things and what their projection is for the next 10 years - I understood the ethos that those guys have got, and what I was looking for is that they're all in.”
So Josh made the move and for the last few months, with all his breadth of experience, he’s been back at zero, working a brand new area, where every face is new. He says, “I had a goal of getting a listing within my first month and I was lucky enough that I did that. That started the ball rolling. I feel like I'm still obviously in that building stage.” He knows he has to do the hard yards to win business and continued loyalty. He says, “The good thing for me is Mat and his team - they're massive. They're doing huge numbers and they're doing great, but I knew that there was an opportunity there. I've been able to just literally come in and just hit the phones, start my marketing the same way that I was doing it in Newcastle, and literally doing everything that I was doing in Newcastle and then some."
Josh is working on building a really, really solid database and credibility. His end game is to be seen as a trusted advisor. He says, “What I want to do is have as many people who own a property or business or live in Terrigal as possible, and have them know that I'm the person that knows what's going on in Terrigal. What I'm chasing is to make sure that if there's anything real estate that they need, doesn't matter whether it's property management or sales, I'm the conduit to be able to get that information for them.”
Wearing out the leather in his highly polished shoes, Josh has spent time doing lots of research and being seen, getting out there to know the community of Terrigal. He explains, "I’m attending absolutely every single open home and property that we've got listed, and every auction that every other agent does, too. I'm sure the other agents have seen me four or five times at each of their auctions. It's just about being present. I've met people out door knocking that are looking to sell, that I'm doing appraisals and listings for. I've held buyers with other properties that are now looking to sell as well. Those traditional conduits are the ones where I'm finding these people everywhere, which is why I'm very mindful that I've got to keep that going."
He wants to get to a stage where he can walk down the street and people know who Josh Mana is, and they say, ‘Hi Josh, how are you?’.
Success doesn’t just happen – it’s a result of a lot of grit and effort. Josh (and his wife) are really putting in the hard yards – but he knows he has to if he wants to be successful. Once the children are in bed, it’s game on. He says, “I've got fairly high standards from a data entry point of view. I'm doing a six week campaign at the moment where we're putting letters in envelopes, 500 each night, and then I'm out there at 5:30 in the morning letterbox dropping these guys. Those things that I don't want to take up my time during the day, we're just getting done at night."
Josh has short and long term goals. In the long term he says, “I saw Brian Whiteman speak two years ago at AREC, and I literally said to my wife, ‘Why can he write $1.3m and not me?’. My goal is to write that $1.3m, so we'll just see how we go with that.”
In the short term, he wants to build a team. He says, “I've just got to build a team. What I'm really lucky with, and I've seen it already, is just the guys here at McGrath Central Coast. If I've got an issue with anything, I can just go to any number of people. I can literally go, ‘I've got an issue with this, who's the best person to talk to?’. Is it a business thing? Let's talk to Jaimie. Is it a listing thing? Let's talk to Mat. Is it something else? I can talk to Darren. When it comes to the stage, and I'm hoping that it'll happen very, very soon because I work better with a team, I think every agent does if they build the right team, I want to be building a team very, very quickly. I need to do that to be able to do volume. That's one of the reasons why I joined the guys because it's a great synergy with the way that I do business and the way that they do business. It's literally just learning what that brand on the coast has to offer for my clients, and just bringing that into my listing presentation."
At the rate Josh is going, it’s not going to take him too long to achieve that long-term goal.