By Susan Doran
We’re all aware that life is more wild and woolly in the Canadian Great White North than in the rest of the country.
If you’ve ever wondered how this difference in local character manifests itself in your real estate brethren living way up there along the Alaskan highway, meet 31-year-old Trevor Bolin, a hall-of-famer who was Re/Max of Western Canada’s No. 1 sales rep for British Columbia last year.
Trevor Bolin (Photos by See & Believe Photography)
Bolin lives in Fort St. John (population 20,000), a 16-hour drive north of Vancouver and six hours south of the border for the Northwest Territories. His family goes back five generations, a rarity in the community, when the norm sees oil, gas, mining and forestry workers coming and going on a regular basis.
“My great-grandfather came here to bootleg… and the family’s never left,” he says.
With partners Rich and Doug Petersen, Bolin owns three Re/Max offices in the area (Action Realty; Action Chetwynd Realty and Dawson Creek Reality – the former was Re/Max’s top small market office in western Canada last year).
He has his fingers in a lot of other real-estate-related pies as well, including a property management company. He’s a city councillor. He has self-published a motivational rags-to-riches book. And he heads up Bolin & Co. International, offering intensive coaching, seminars and publications to those who are keen to get ahead.
Especially if you’re from a big city and are used to the machinations of corporate image making and media training, you’d expect Bolin to be pretty slick. Instead, he’s a “ground up kind of guy,” as he puts it.
Take for instance how he handled the following situation. He received some local media attention thanks to his hard-hitting marketing tactics, which have his face plastered all over town on everything from billboards, arena boards and bus benches to flyers, magazines, buyers’ guides, postcards, television ads and even ads on the screen at the local theatre. I asked him to email some of the local newspaper articles his marketing campaign has helped generate. I waited days. The federal budget was drafted and rejected sooner. Just as I was beginning to feel like I was dealing with the bureaucracy of a third-world country, the articles came through.
Bolin apologized profusely, explaining that his office Internet had been down (“the joys of the north,” he says) and that he had spent four hours over the weekend personally searching for what I wanted.
“It tells me I should be more organized,” he laughed.
I was floored. Not only had he gone to a great deal of trouble, he was guileless – not something you see every day, at least in Toronto where I live.
In tandem with his pervasive, ‘gorilla’ marketing tactics and his genius for generating brand-name recognition (with his name and face as the brand) it’s a winning combination.
He’s a nice guy, but a nice guy with a $250,000 yearly budget for marketing. To ensure that he’s the only sales rep with his face on the local bus benches, he bought the bus bench advertising company.
Now, with his book Take Charge and Change Your Life Today just released (available at Chapters and on Bolin’s website) he’s planning on entering all Canadian sales reps who buy the book into a contest. The prize is a free training session and Bolin will fly to the winner’s home turf to give it.
Be forewarned that his coaching is not for everyone, Bolin says. “It’s extremely intense and is for people who are absolutely serious” about boosting their business, he says.
Life was not always thus for him. After he left a job as an airline ticket handler 11 years ago to become, at 20, the youngest sales rep in the local board (he claims he initially went into real estate solely because he wanted to be able to put a big picture of himself on his vehicle), he found himself $130,000 in debt.
“Debt collectors were calling up to seven or eight times a day,” he says. With the help of his broker he realized that what he needed was training. “It’s key,” he says.
“I went to Realtor boot camp,” Bolin says. Among his trainers were Terry Paranych, Brian Tracy and Jim Rohn.
When he returned to sales a few months later he had “put all the pieces together.” Subsequent years saw his income multiplying like the Jolie-Pitt family, with his various commercial acquisitions and start-ups made along the way.
“Some people are in the business five or 10 years. They know what they want but not how to get there,” he says. “I just needed some guidance. I think at the end of the day that’s what everyone needs.”
He finds it’s best to combine systems – repeat and referral business; direct marketing and blasting the area with flyers.
“One system is great. You’ll make $100,000 a year. But what if you want to make $500,000 or more? Don’t go to coaches who say they can double your income or help you earn $100,000 per year. Think big.”
His key advice for new or struggling sales reps:
* Get training/mentorship.
* Have a life plan.
* Know what you do well and stick with it.
* Advertise everywhere. Work at getting brand-name recognition.
* Manage your time.
* Take regular vacations so you don’t burn out.
“Sales is 85 per cent mindset and 15 per cent tools,” Bolin says. “People think it’s the other way around. You need to have the right mindset and know where you want to be … knowing is half the work. Then you must figure out how to put it in play.”
To enter the contest to get training from Bolin or to purchase his book, visit www.bolininternational.com.
