I got my real estate license and thought failure was a personal problem.
Before real estate I owned about twenty businesses at once. A cell phone store. A dry cleaner. A laundromat. Several of them failed, and for a long time I thought that was about me - that I wasn't working hard enough, wasn't disciplined enough, wasn't hungry enough.
What I eventually figured out is that you can't out-hustle a broken system. The businesses that survived were the ones where I stopped trying to do everything at once and committed to one thing, built a process, and measured what worked.
Real estate taught me the same lesson. When I focused on systems, on process, on environment, that's when production changed. Not overnight. But consistently.
85% of agents don't produce in their first year. That number usually gets used to make new agents feel stupid. It shouldn't. The people inside that statistic aren't lazy and they aren't dumb. Most of them are working harder than the agents closing thirty deals a year. They're just working alone.
The Newbie is the newsletter I wish someone had handed me. What this business actually costs. What actually produces. What nobody covers in pre-license class. No theory, just tools you can use Monday morning.
And the name is the whole idea: everyone is a newbie at something. Brand new agent, seasoned pro, broker, mentor. We're all figuring something out.
I'm Dustin Olverson. Branch Owner and Team Leader at eXp Realty-Richmond, and founder of One Dream Realty Group, which I started in April 2021. I'm a certified mentor in the eXp Mentor Program, and I work the Virginia market as an agent and a developer.
Before any of that I spent 25 years in the Army. I grew up in New York City a few blocks from the World Trade Center, I was on active duty on 9/11, and I deployed to Iraq as a sergeant on a convoy security team. That's where I learned most of what I know about process, accountability, and getting a group of people through something hard together.