Blog / Time Management
The Fast Track to Success, with Nick Dunn and George Findikakis
Great success comes when you believe in yourself and find your own groove.
When agents reach the point in their careers where they have the confidence to run their business in way that works for them, even if it not the way that works for others, they often find success. Two agents who have definitely found their own groove and are reaping the rewards are Nick Dunn from McGrath, formerly from Byron Bay First National, and George Findikakis from EView Real Estate Partners in Melbourne’s outer south eastern suburbs.
Nick's Story
Nick Dunn grew up in Sydney and spent most of his working life using his hands. He worked as a landscaper in Sydney, building walls and tilling the soil in some of the most beautiful homes in the eastern suburbs, then became a tiler before moving into real estate in Bryon Bay, just over four years ago.
For the first eight months, at 39 years of age, he worked as a lead generator which was arduous and difficult. Nick recalls, “I had to eat like quite a few large pieces of humble pie because Michael Rogers was training me at the time and he was 22 and he was just like a machine on the phone, and here I am, 39, you know, bumbling. So it was quite hard to swallow.” But the support and training he received from other staff in the office was phenomenal, so he kept ploughing forward.
It took a while to have the confidence though to find his own groove, but his boss, Chris Hanley always reminded him to be himself. Nick says, “He’d say, ‘We employed you because we like Nick Dunn and we want you to develop real estate dialogue but we don’t want Nick Dunn to change’.”
So now Nick finds himself with 10-15 vendors at one time with listings from $400,000 hamlets to $6M to $7M estates. He says, “In Byron, you don’t want to be just known as the person that works the top end. Higher end property takes longer to sell. It’s very important that the service you offer to the $6M client and the $500,000 client is exactly the same. It’s just as important a decision to the person selling a $500,000 property as it is to the person selling a multi-million dollar property.”
With listings, he’ll mix it up depending on who is sitting in front of him. He says, “I’ll try and have a look at the character that’s sitting in front of me and work out in my mind very quickly whether this is the sort of person who is going to want to go through a structured listing presentation or whether they just want more of a relaxed version.” “I give them a sense that I’m going to work extremely hard for them. I’m going to do everything I can for them in order to get them the best result that they’re after; that they’re not going to be having to ring me - I’ll be ringing them. If my vendor’s ringing me that just means that I haven’t been ringing them, and that never happens with me.”
In real estate, Nick believes, “It is so important to be yourself, to study and educate yourself and never stop doing that, because real estate just evolves all the time - and to realise and understand that we’re in the service industry. That’s what we do. What we sell is houses. And if you don’t understand your buyer and your seller you’ll never be good at this job.”
George's Story
George Findikakis was another late starter to real estate. For over twenty years he worked in the hospitality industry, busting his boiler, working long hours, seven days a week. He learned everything he needed to know about customer service and running his own business. A conversation with his brother, and a burning desire to spend more time with his family, led him to make a career change in his forties.
He started with his mobile phone and his list of 300 contacts. George recalls, “I sent out an SMS and I got a call straight away; it was one of my previous managers who used to work for me who said, ‘George, I’m actually thinking of selling my house’. So, we went and saw it and we listed the house the next day.”
Within a week he created an EBU. He says, “There’s so much you can do with this industry and there’s only so much you can do on your own. At the end of the day, you know, working with a team, is so much easier. I got into this business for lifestyle. I didn’t want to do sevendays- a-week, six o’clock in the morning until ten at night. With a team, we can share the load and then it’s like clockwork.” So now George does about 12 to 15 appraisals a month and business is going from strength to strength. But family and the right work/life balance are incredibly important to George. The right groove for George is the right balance between real estate and spending time with his family.
He says, for him, “Family time is non-negotiable. So, whatever I do in the future is not going to interfere with my family life. I enjoy taking my kids to school in the morning, every morning. I enjoy being at home when they come home from school; picking them up from school and doing all the social activities that we do on weekends, and sports and whatnot, because they’re at that age now where, you know, they need their parents to be there. For eight years when they were first born, when I was in takeaway food, I didn’t see my kids.”
For the future, George knows that he doesn’t want to go back into his own business. He has found his groove. He says, “I don’t want to have my own agency. I feel working with an EBU is my agency.” Everyone’s dreams are different. Getting your groove on helps you to realise them.
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