Steve Kantor

I will share the history of Billion Dollar Agent, Best Agent Business and Lifebushido.

How did we get here? Let me give you a short history leading up to Billion Dollar Agent Manifesto.

I grew up in San Diego, went to Harvard for college and graduated in three years. I came to Washington, DC, bought an Apple II plus computer and learned how to program. In my first job out of college, I did economic consulting for Clients such as the CIA, World Bank, IMF and the State Department. I only had one job out of college before starting my own business.

I got a masters from John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Global Theory and History. After graduation, I backpacked around the world for a year and visited over 50 countries. When I returned, I started a software company named Gnossos Software.

Gnossos Software was a database CRM software product company. I like databases. I grew Gnossos Software to a few million in revenue and sold the company in 2004.

I took a year off in 2005 and came up with 100 business ideas. In 2006, I started a few of them under the name Lifebushido. Lifebushido is focused on building a global network of people, working part-time from home, with flexible hours, using their unique talents. We have business, creative and social entrepreneurial ventures. We are global and 100 percent virtual. We have more than 100 staff members who all work part-time and refer to themselves as Ishidos. Our fantastic team provides part-time, virtual assistant and calling services to small business entrepreneurs with $100,000 to $10M in revenue per year.

Best Agent Business is the primary revenue and funding source for Lifebushido ventures. Best Agent Business provides services to top real estate agents. Our target market is agents above $100,000 in GCI.

In 2006, when I started Best Agent Business, I realized that out of 1,000,000 real estate agents, probably only a few hundred had sold over $1B in real estate in their career. We started to track down those people. I reached out and interviewed over 70 top agents and coaches and we published Billion Dollar Agent – Lessons Learned.

Billion Dollar Agent was well-received by top agents and we continued to do research, and fund the research, with revenue from Best Agent Business. In short, Best Agent Business tests the business model theories from Billion Dollar Agent. It all works together smoothly.

In the five years since publishing Billion Dollar Agent - Lessons Learned, we have conducted interviews with over 1,000 agents, completed over $1,000,000 worth of customer-driven research, built our Billion Dollar Agent Team to over 100 part-time assistants and callers from over 5,000 job applicants and worked with over 100 top agents as clients of Best Agent Business.

We have over 1,000 pages of solid systems that we use to run Database Management, Lead Management, Marketing, Listing Management, Closing Management, Accounting, Calling, Agent Management, Agent Recruiting and Life Management teams.

As Best Agent Business has grown, I have had over 1,000 30-minute phone call sessions with top agents doing over $100,000 in GCI. Detailed notes have been made during every single call. These notes have been fed back into our knowledge base and systems. We map out the patterns we see across different segments of the industry.

Given the real estate crash in recent years, we delayed the next edition of Billion Dollar Agent because it would have been distorted by the crash, surge in REO and short sale business.

For Billion Dollar Agent Manifesto, we decided to focus on agents doing more than $1,000,000 in GCI per year. We estimate this number to be less than 1,000 across the country or one in 1,000 agents. Since $1M in GCI is roughly $40 million in sales volume, someone doing those numbers for 20 to 30 years will get to one billion in closed sales volume for their career.

Billion Dollar Agent is like Switzerland. We are independent.

• We are not biased by a geographic area

• We are not biased by doing business at low or high price points

• We are not biased by a REO or short sale focus

• We are not biased by association with one franchise

• We are not biased by association with one coach

• We are not biased by association with one database or one buyer web lead system

Anything is possible…

-Steve