Thinking Big, Acting Big, and Making a Lot of Money in a Successful Real Estate Business – With Shon Kokoszka

Shon Kokoszka is the founder and CEO of ICON Coaching, working with real estate professionals to improve their production, profit, and their lifestyle. He came from a very humble background and got into real estate sales when he was 20-years-old. While he had some success in his first two years, he was not on the fast track to success. However, he thought he knew how to do it all and was not open to other people’s ideas or learning new things, and he had limited thinking. He says he was “uncoachable” during this timeframe.
Then all of that changed.

Shon attended a conference and he heard someone on the panel say they said they had $100,000 commission day. It blew his mind that this was even possible. He realized immediately that he wanted to get some coaching, get some accountability, and open himself to new ideas and new approaches.
Before this, his limited thinking was keeping him from growing. He had set a goal to make $1,500 a month when he got into real estate sales, which at that time, seemed like a good income. But from that moment he could sense a shift within him and all of a sudden, he became coachable. After that, the fire was lit and the next year he made over six figures.
Here’s the deal: If your goal is to make $1,500 a month, you will do what it takes to make $1500 a month. If your goal is to make $15,000 a month, you’ll do what it takes to get there.

He manipulated his $1,500 a month mindset into over $100,000 a month in commissions as a buyer’s agent, and as a result, was picked up by some of speaking companies. Then organizations like the National Association of Realtors, Gary Keller, Remax, Century 21, Coldwell Banker, etc. started taking notice of the production levels, and wondered if he could train their agents to have this level of success.
Shon spent several years learning from the best of the best, Gary Keller. He came on as a consultant, essentially a coach, for Keller Williams and built a training program “Bold”. He moved on to corporate as the VP of Growth and helped them grow the company and was then promoted to President of a company with the mission of taking the success models they were implementing within real estate to other companies and industries outside of real estate. He brought the training program to many Fortune 500 companies, learned about their structure, their compensation models, how they operated. But he wasn’t fulfilled by this position, so he resigned and launched ICON Coaching. It took off immediately and he hasn’t looked back since. Shon is having the time of his life adding value and getting fulfillment from watching other people’s trajectories and income improve day after day.
Now his purpose is to work with people and add so much value to them their trajectory increases, their profitability increases, and ultimately their income grows to allow them to spend more time with their loved ones, to take the vacations that they deserve, and to live a fulfilling life. That’s what’s behind ICON coaching. Now he is in his “happy place”. He gets to add value to people.
Shon has learned a lot of valuable lessons that helps him coach others to great success now, through a lot of ups and downs in his career, some great successes and some heavy losses. Here are some of his best tips.
Key Takeaways
The undisciplined pursuit of ‘more’ will bring you to your knees.
~ Shon Kokoszka

How do you get “more” in a disciplined way? Shon shares the following tips for success:
1. Have a purpose behind everything that you are doing. This will keep you grounded and moving forward to the right goals.
2. To really grow your business, build a team so that you don’t have to be there for the business to function. The faster you can pass on different elements of running the business to other people, the faster you can grow and scale. Move from the I do it → we do it → THEY do it.
3. Sometimes failure is the greatest learning opportunity.
4. Take responsibility for everything in your life.
Structuring and moving from I do it → We Do It → THEY do it
If you want to really have success and growth in your business, you have to put things in place to allow the business to grow.
1. Identify the key people you need on your team – a listing agent and a lead buyer, for example. Create the models for your business, like lead generation model, budget model, et.
2. Then build systems around these different elements so that it’s done the same way and anyone can do them. (Systems do not fail, people do.)
3. Get the technology you need to make things happen. What do you use for a CRM or digital marketing?
4. Finally, you want to hire the right people, train them fully, then give them the incentive to stay, through good compensation and buy-in (equity).

When you’re at the lowest of lows, you have the greatest opportunity for growth
Shon found himself in a pretty desperate situation after the bubble burst in 2008 and he lost everything. His properties, his home, his boat, everything except his family. He was at the lowest place, a very dark place, even to the point of contemplating suicide, when he had somewhat of an epiphany. He decided what he wanted to do was help other people grow and develop by learning from the best and then transferring that knowledge to individuals like him to keep them out of a desperate financial position. So he followed routes that would help him improve himself and help others as well. This led to some amazing opportunities for him.
Take responsibility for everything in your life
Have a good attitude and you will reap the benefits. Where your attention goes, energy flows. And since energy attracts like energy, if you’re complaining all the time, you just get more things to complain about. Shon made a mental shift to take responsibility for all the good and the bad that was happening to him. Instead of having a victim attitude when things didn’t go his way, he started turning things around and trying to learn from and adjust from anything negative in his life. He credits much of his current success to his attitude shift.
When your ego gets out of control gang, the world will figure out a way to humble you, I promise you that. ~ Shon Kokoszka
These are some of the key areas that Shon teaches others who want to achieve great success. You can follow him for more inspiration at: (insert where to follow him).