We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Michael Lester a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Michael, appreciate you joining us today. One deeply underappreciated facet of being a service provider is the kind of crazy stuff that happens from time to time. It could be anything from a disgruntled client attacking an employee or waking up to find out a celebrity gave you a shoutout on TikTok – the sudden, unexpected hits (both positive and negative) make the profession both exhilarating and exhausting. Can you share one of your craziest stories?
Coming from a waiter position where every tip depended on my ability to make rent and pay my bills, my first thought upon getting my real estate license was, “Larger tips that just take longer.” So, all I wanted to do is make more commission checks—and this reflected on how I composed myself in my fake-it-’til-you-make-it attitude. Let’s be honest, every real estate agent is faking it when they first get licensed…you have no idea what you’re doing at this point.
While working 8 AM – 4 PM at the restaurant and 5 PM – til in real estate, all I couldn’t think about was:
A) I need to make more money, &
B) I need to get far away from the restaurant industry. (I had gotten a $5 on a $120 bill and it was the last straw!)
However, during the hustle that very first year, I had a very rude awakening. One of my very good, old friends had reached out to me after seeing the Facebook message I sent him, and he wanted to meet for a buyer consultation with his wife. So, I remember meeting them at the restaurant where I was working and paying for their lunch after hearing their story about struggling with finances. They had 3 kids, one of which had special needs, and they lived in a tiny trailer in a trailer park that not only felt like it was going to fall down every time you walked from from to back, but also poured water inside from a large hole in the roof every time it rained. They said the owner of the trailer would not repair the hole no matter how many times they asked, and even got to the point where they were going to have their parents buy the piece of garbage from the owner (for way more money than it was worth) so they could fix it themselves.
Being a good friend, of course, I jumped into action. I got him and his wife both pre-approved with a local lender who dealt with lower credit scores and higher debt since their credit wasn’t great, and got them approved for a $100,000 property — It’s hilarious every time I think about this story because I’ve done deals worth millions of dollars and this one means the most to me. After digging into the MLS and sending them what was available, I found them a double-wide manufactured home in Pearl River on one acre of land that they loved. It was priced at $110,000, but we were able to negotiate down to $99,000 with the seller paying all the closing costs. The listing agent tried to send another counter, but it’s the highest my clients could go—AND I explained their situation to both the listing agent and seller who were together on speaker phone. Luckily for my people, the seller was older and decided to have a heart—and the offer was accepted. Step 1—Done. Next we hit the inspections and the place was flawless. We accepted it in its current condition and told the sweet couple we were in the home stretch! Now it was just up to the lender to close the loan…
And just like that—not quite. Remember that local lender? Well he calls me and tells me he can’t close the loan because the property was labeled a “manufactured home.” Why they didn’t look up the home before we had gone through the process of inspections or even submitted an offer still baffles me to think about to this day. Since we were already through our inspection period, I had to call my clients and tell them the bad news. Heartbroken is an understatement — I had just shown them the light only to throw a reverse UNO card. They were in tears. They had given a $1,000 deposit that they couldn’t afford (yes they would get it back but they didn’t need the money back, they needed a new home), and now were right back where they started.
It was at this moment my entire mentality about everything changed. I didn’t give a damn about my commission I was owed. My empathy overpowered all of those “I need more money” thoughts. I didn’t care about anything besides getting this desperate family into this manufactured house to better their lives—to better their future. I refused to let myself allow this to happen. I made calls. I drove to lenders offices hours away that I heard did loans on manufactured homes when they didn’t answer the phone. After a month of extensions and postponing the listing agent with pity party stories, I finally found a lender willing to take on the loan after looking at all the facts.
It took 2 more months after that for them to close the loan. The level of stress I endured on a daily basis between the listing agent threatening to not have the extensions signed and trying to comfort my buyer clients with positivity was grueling. But, we finally—after 4 months, 3 and half of which were absolute torture—got the clear-to-close. I will never forget the image implanted in my mind of the final walk-through: The grandmother was there, the kids were there, and their new puppy was there the day before closing. The 3 kids were chasing each other around the living room playing with the puppy, all while the grandmother and my clients were in tears hugging each other. I swear I will never forget this moment as long as I live. Nothing else mattered in this moment but this family. I changed their life against all odds and gave them an amazing house with an acre of land for their children to grow up on.
I broke down in tears myself that day. From that day forward, I vowed to not ever make it about the commission check, but about helping people better their lives—help them achieve what they didn’t think was possible. I gave up portions of my commission on another deal here, and paid for inspections for another deal there. I paid to have a septic tank pumped in Slidell and also fully stocked a family’s pantry after closing since they used almost all their savings for their closing costs. I fully contribute this Shift in my mindset to what allowed me to go from selling 8 homes in my first year to 36 my second year. Word got around that I was in it to actually help people, and word spread quickly. My clients were telling everyone about me.
There was a time where I was selling a client’s home in Metairie and also helping them buy their new home in Destrehan. Both closings were on the same day at the same title company, and even though I told them they needed to have their U-haul packed the day before, drive it to the closings, and then drive it to their new home to unload, they completely dropped the ball and didn’t move anything for the final walk-through. The buyer’s of their home were threatening to hold $10,000 in escrow, which my clients needed to close on their new home.
So I took some deep breaths, and had a solution—I took it upon myself to get to U-haul at 8 AM the day of closing, rent a large U-haul truck, bring it their house, and help them pack up every item they had in enough time for the buyers to come see their house before the Act of Sale. I drove that truck to the closing, and after successfully closing on both houses, I drove that truck all the way to Destrehan (45 minutes away) and helped them unload it all; fortunately they had 2 friends in Destrehan that also came to help unload. I ordered pizza delivered to their new home and didn’t even eat any of it once we were finished. I got back to drop the U-haul truck off at 10 PM that evening and got home at 10:30 PM—mentally and physically exhausted.
Was I happy that I saved a $15,000+ pay day? Of course. But, I didn’t do it for that reason—I knew these people needed the help. They wrote an amazing, lengthy review on all my sites and I got 3 more deals from their friends (one of which was a guy who helped us unload the truck!) when they heard how I went above and beyond to help them. They had a housewarming party where they told everyone the story of how lucky they were to have a realtor that cared so much to go through the trouble of everything I pulled together in just an hour. That 1 act of kindness turned into over $30,000 in commissions.
You must learn to come from contribution, and that lesson has propelled me into the successful person I am today.
Michael, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
Being from New Orleans, I know the lay of the land and what people in this area truly strive for: comfort. I went to Archbishop Rummel High School and then on to LSU where I graduated in 2010 with a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology. It was at LSU where I dug into business relations, learned how and why they reflect on people emotionally, and how to overcome obstacles when it comes to combining the two. Once I began my career in Real Estate, I realized the importance of understanding how his clients feel emotionally when it comes to buying or selling a home, and I believe Keller Williams Realty exemplifies that same belief. I take pride in being an agent you feel comfortable using for future endeavors, and I take pride in being an agent you can trust.
My journey into the industry? It’s quite a story! I was 28 years old, and though I had graduated from Louisiana State University, I had been waiting tables at 2 different restaurants (one for lunch and one fine dining in the evenings) while performing music locally and touring with a band around the country. Not only was I equally helping write the music for the band, I also acted as the band’s manager, booking agent, artist, marketing director, and monetary negotiator for live performances. I had set my life up to make sure I wasn’t tied down by any specific responsibility, so if a door were to ever open in another location, it wouldn’t be difficult to drop everything and leave it all behind. I would work my tail off for months so I had enough money to cover my rent and a couple hundred dollars to go out on the road…where I would always go broke and have to do it all over again once we returned from whatever tour I was on. Days on days of eating dollar menu food/Waffle House and drinking myself into a coma was my life.
On one particular summer tour, I had just made enough to pay my rent and barely had $100 to my name before we had to tour to California and back (the summer is usually the worst months for making money as a waiter in a New Orleans restaurant). Now, we usually would ask the crowd if anyone would have a floor we could sleep on so we could avoid the cost of a hotel/motel; and also the cheaper ones were always filthy! So not only was I way malnourished, my body was also bent, stiff and sore from sleeping on floors almost every night. I would eat garbage food for breakfast and dinner, skipping lunch in order to conserve my funds.
I’ll never forget the night I decided I needed a change. In Tempe, AZ, we found a guy who was willing to put us up for the evening…and when we got there at 2 AM after our show, it ended up being a halfway house. I was drunk, exhausted, and felt sick after the show so I didn’t pay attention to where we even were. At 3 AM, the guy who allowed us to stay with him woke up screaming in pain. My bandmates and I woke up and didn’t know what to do. We made the decision to quietly get up and bail out of the situation— we would just drive through the early morning to our next destination and sleep in the truck until our load in at the next venue. I was so sick I could barely function on that ride to the next state, and I couldn’t sleep. I knew we had a long ways to go still to get to LA, and then we still had to travel all the way back to New Orleans. After suffering through the rest of the tour, I decided the very day we got back that I needed a change. No more touring. No more late night performances. Plus, I had no time to recover since I was flat broke, so I jumped into a mental Shift at the restaurant to make enough money to feed myself. My very last table of my shift tipped me $5 on a $120 bill, and that was the final straw. No more $5 tips.
I told my bandmates I needed to step away for a bit, and of course it all fell apart because I was the one doing everything. I still needed a creative outlet, so on the evenings I was off work I would sit down with a joint, a bottle of whiskey, and just write and record music on my own—mentally searching desperately for that open door…then it happened.
One of my best friends had been working at Keller Williams for a couple years and one day when I was in the room writing, he called me. I usually don’t answer the phone during my creative process, but something told me to answer this one. We shot the breeze for a minute and I told him mentally and physically where I was in my life…and he told me that I would be great in Real Estate—and that classes were coming up the next month on the Northshore. I knew he was supporting his family selling homes, and he did the math for me and knew it would help me financially to go through the process of getting my real estate license,
“Selling 1 home per month could make you $60k. Imagine selling 3 homes per month,” he said.
So I prepared myself mentally for the next month. I borrowed $500 from my mom for the classes and registered. Once classes started, I quit my nighttime restaurant job, and just worked every day for lunch until 4; then would immediately drive to class on the Northshore from 5-8 PM. I’ll never forget desperately trying to say awake on that drive back across the causeway every evening during that time. One day, there was a guest speaker who taught our class named Dawn. At the time my hair was long, and I had packed a flat bill cap, tank top, baggy shorts, and flip flops to comfortably be sitting in class that evening. She began to tell us about her life and how she ended up successful, and it was very inspiring. I remember listening to her and imagining myself being able to accomplish even half the things she had up to this point. Then, she looks right at me in my eyes, points at me, and tells everyone else in the class:
“You CAN NOT look like this. You must always be presentable–you never know who you’re going to meet.”
Then she told us a story about a developer who was about to begin construction of a new neighborhood subdivision. It was supposed to be a casual meeting with her and her husband about representing them for every property in the subdivision. As they were getting ready, her husband walked out dressed in a t-shirt, shorts, and flip flops and she was in a business suit. She looked at him and told him to go change immediately. They argued for a moment since it was supposed to just be a casual meet up, until she eventually won the argument and her husband put on a suit. When they walked into the restaurant, the table had 5 people sitting there, all dressed in their best. They told Dawn and her husband that telling them it was a casual meeting was a test to see if they always came prepared. They passed the test, and got the business.
I remember going home and having a meltdown…I need to delete my social media, I need to cut my hair, I need to throw all my clothes away, I need to change my phone number…I smoked an entire pack of cigarettes that evening and cried. It was a breakthrough that I didn’t see coming. I knew in that moment that if I truly wanted my life to change and I truly wanted this new career path to work, that I needed to change everything—and I did just that (I actually just went through my posts and photos and cleaned them up on social media after my fiance calmed me down, so I didn’t delete the whole thing).
The classes lasted 3 months until I completed the hours and passed everything I needed to in preparation for the exam. Then after studying like a crazy person, I knocked out the exam (which was easier said then done), and I was officially a real estate agent in October of 2017. I met with the team leader at Keller Williams at the time and set everything up to begin on January 1st of 2018. In October I took Career Development classes Keller Williams offered while saving up enough money to pay for my first year of MLS/GSREIN dues. I learned about my Sphere of Influence, and how to use that as your immediate base of operations. I learned about the power of follow up and how that is where you money is; and a ton more. When January 1 hit, I had everything set up online to make it look like I was a working, fully functional realtor.
Then, in February, BOLD came to town. For those that don’t know, BOLD is real estate boot camp offered by Keller Williams that gets you mentally prepared to do all the hard things you don’t want to do in order to set yourself apart from other agents in the industry. They teach you how to generate your own leads, and how to mentally change your outlook so you can confidently speak to people and inevitably infiltrate the industry. You have to make 100 NEW contacts a week that you have a real estate conversation with. If you fail to do this 3 times, you’re out the course. They taught me about my schedule, how to handle objections, how to plan vacations, and how to always seek leverage in situations you can’t control. By this time, I was continuing to float through each day without any sort of schedule or calendar to keep everything in line. I was missing dates, appointments, birthdays—you name it! Taking both the Career Development courses and BOLD within a few months (and also knowing what I had to fall back on if I failed) fueled me to be successful. I did everything (and then some) to get my name out there, and then everything began to snowball. I won Keller William’s “Rookie of the Year Award” for my first year in production and never looked back. Every year I have been topping my production end over end, and I was able to get myself into a financially comfortable position for the first time in my life at the end of 2019 where I sold 36 homes. You have the ability to change your life—and change yourself. It takes discipline, drive, and the ability to want to change for the better.
Now in year 6, I am still running full throttle as the CEO/Owner of MDL Homes & Luxury within Keller Williams and I have accepted a position as a Growth Coach in 2023. I teach all new agents how to get through a transaction: the correct contracts and documents to use in any situation, the correct way to price their client’s homes, how to judge if a home is overpriced for a buyer client, and the best way to market their homes for their clients. I have started a mind-shift movement with my new program titled “Myndset” that I believe will be responsible with helping people of all facets and careers (not just real estate agents) to break through their ceiling of achievement and accomplish things they never thought they could. I want anyone who feels stuck in a position or situation where they feel trapped–that there is a way out; and “Myndset” is a platform to help guide them there. Later this year, I am releasing a new documentary video series titled “NOLA Cribz” where I will be interviewing New Orleans’ Musicians, Actors, Artists, Entrepreneurs, and Athletes and providing exclusive access to show their private, luxuriously beautiful homes in all their glory.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
Being in the music industry as a band’s manager, booking agent, artist, marketing director, and monetary negotiator for live performances, I learned how to advertise and market to the best of my ability. I took everything I learned and funneled my real estate career through those same avenues of social media on a whole new scale–and it caught on. Once I had helped my first 10 clients close on their homes, they shared reviews for my business on google and facebook that showed anyone googling me that I was the real deal, and I knew what I was doing. Not only that, I will go the extra mile to help a client through if I have to. If they searched my name or my business, all my social media pages were up to date with content and articles. Having a strong social media and internet presence is paramount in an agent when everyone wants to look at reviews before they purchase–and that includes what real estate agent they are going to use. Just in my office alone there are over 300 agents, and there are countless competing companies out there. Showing how I am reliable and how I’m different from the lot is the key to getting someone to use your services over another agent.
Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?
There are so many books! You can NEVER stop learning in this industry–and really in life. I crave learning so I’m always reading a new book. Here are a few that I believe truly helped me break through my own toxic or negative thoughts as well as guide me through some tricky times over the last 6 years:
1. The Millionaire Real Estate Agent – Gary Keller
2. Sell It Like Serhant – Ryan Serhant
3. Big Money Energy – Ryan Serhant
4. Thinking Fast and Slow – Danile Kahnerman
5. Hustle – Patrick Vlaskovits
6. Success Momentum – Indominus Publishing
7. Discipline is Destiny – Ryan Holiday
8. The Snowball – Alice Schroeder
9. Way of the Wolf – Jordan Belfort
10. SHIFT – Gary Keller
11. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck – Mark Manson
12. The Sell – Fredrik Eklund
13. Ninja Selling – Larry Kendall
14. Can’t Hurt Me – David Goggins
15. The 5AM Club – Robin Sharma
16. Unfu*k Yourself – Gary John Bishop
17. Never Split the Difference – Chris Voss
18. BE. – Jessica Zweig
Contact Info:
- Website: www.mdl-homes.com
- Instagram: @mdlhomesnola
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/buyandsellwithmdl/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mdl-homes/
- Twitter: @mdl_homes
- Youtube: @YourMyndset and @MDL_Homes
Image Credits
Rachel Madelyn