Well, it's great to be back here in the UK, and great to see so many familiar faces. I left my avatar at home, so I'm going to do this freestyling. I enjoyed coming in. Scott and Ben were talking, and the thing that came to mind – I decided I would talk a little bit about two words: freedom and hope. Financial freedom is something you're going to see a lot of people over the next couple of days that are financially free. And what does financial freedom mean? It means that you work because you want to, not because you have to. When I was 35, I got my real estate license in the United States, and I figured out I was sold this bill of goods that I had a real estate business. Whether you work as an employed estate agent or self-employed, I think most people are sold the same bill of goods. Is that fair? You're kind of sold this idea, but the reality is you don't actually own a business. You have a business that owns you, which means if you're not out there listing and selling real estate, you're fundamentally out of business – which is not the definition of financial freedom. I had some mentors. My dad had been a successful business person. When I was born, we lived in a single wide manufactured home. We pulled our house in Canada to another province. I grew up till I was about six or seven years old, then we moved to a little tear-down house. Do you guys have lead based paint disclosures here? I can tell you firsthand that lead based paint tastes quite good. I've eaten my share. But we went on from there to ending up having the largest home in the lower mainland of British Columbia, or the second largest, around 1978-79. He sold his business to Kellogg's and we were in the oil and gas business after that, and we proceeded to lose everything. So we went from rags to riches to rags again. There were some good things that came out of that: I got to see the contrast. Nothing's revealed without contrast, which is a really powerful thing if you can spend time seeing contrast. You can actually be more innovative. I made a determination that I was going to start a business, but I wasn't going to sell it. That's why I'm still fundamentally involved in EXP each and every day, not because I have to be. I hit the financial freedom piece a long time ago, but I work because I want to give back, help the next generation. Going back to when I was 35, I recognized very quickly that I didn't actually own a business, and that this whole thing was really kind of a bamboozle of sorts. I was just there to help the broker owner pay his bills. I quickly figured out through the internet – I was a good internet marketer – how to build teams. The first thing you do in the United States is go from agent to running a team to running a brokerage, and they call it being a broker owner. The interesting thing is that most broker owners are worse off as a broker owner than they were as an agent, which is kind of a conundrum. As Leo was talking about, 2008-2009 was a tough time in real estate. At that point, I'd actually grown a small real estate brokerage. I was a boutique broker owner and I was literally broker in 2009 than I was as an individual agent. I often recommend that agents not become team leaders or broker owners because you could make more money as an individual agent, but you still didn't have the financial freedom piece. And I think that's why people become broker owners. Anyway, 2009 happened, and similar to what Leo was saying, sometimes you say something and it is generative. My generative statement was: we need to build a defensible business model that's not dependent on bricks and mortar. I was saying that to shut down one of the agents who wanted to get our offices back. But after I heard it come out of my mouth and back into my ears, I thought that's a pretty good idea. And that was what became EXP. It's done quite well. We're now in 29 countries. Congratulations on a thousand agents – that is huge. You guys are just coming into momentum, which is pretty incredible. The idea of financial freedom is the idea that you can build something that's not dependent on you showing up every day. That's part of the reason why you own a business, so that you don't have to show up every day and there's still something coming in. EXP finally has the underpinnings of a business that you can own that actually gives you hope. That's the reason why we do these events, why we all come together. This is probably one of the bigger real estate events taking place where agents are showing up, spending money and time, investing because you have hope in your business because there's potential for financial freedom. I always think about this idea: if you're with EXP, you're also a hope dealer. You're not just dealing in real estate and listings and instructions and all the things you do. You're actually helping the next generation of agents have an opportunity that didn't exist in the marketplace. There are other opportunities, but this one is unique. It was designed by real estate agents, myself included as an agent. From there, you're able to deal this hope out to the next agent who is looking for a way off the hamster wheel. Real estate is very much a hamster wheel. If you're not out there getting more instructions, if you're not out there doing the work, you are fundamentally out of business. This is one of the first models that's existed in organized real estate where you can actually build something beyond just your personal efforts without going through the brain damage of setting up a business. There was a lot of brain damage probably for Adam here locally to set this up, but you guys now have this amazing platform to build off of. I'm super proud to be in business with each and every one of you. One of the things, we changed our name last week: EXP World Holdings is now Agent Inc., AGNT Inc. is the parent company. The reason why we renamed the company is because we're very agent centric. Olivia Curley on the legal team a couple years ago found a symbol that NASDAQ had, which was this one, and we reserved it. Now we're starting to branch out a little bit, we've got more opportunities showing up in our ecosystem, but we want to make sure we're always focused on fundamentally the agent. With the name change, it allows us to continue to keep our north star in place, which is really about you, about the next agent that joins. If you look at the decisions we make on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly basis, every one of our decisions is fundamentally designed as: does this help the next agent get off the hamster wheel? That's what gets me up every day, that's what makes me excited about everything going on in this industry, about our international expansion. Each one of you has opportunities to be an international sponsor for agents from other countries, sponsoring in the UK, as well as finding agents here in the UK and sponsoring overseas. We've got this really cool platform called our international sponsorship program. If you know somebody in Australia, pair up with an agent in Australia, you guys can co-sponsor agents anywhere in the world. It's always been with this idea of how do we make this better for agents. I didn't have a lot of stuff that I want to talk about today other than you guys are at the right place, the right time. There are a number of people who are already financially free because of EXP. You have the opportunity to take advantage of the EXP model at whatever level you want. Some people this is just a great place to be in community with other entrepreneurial agents. For others, it is their platform to create true financial freedom for them and their legacy. Every decision is the right decision for you. There's no right or wrong decision. The fact is you have in your hands the ability to deal out hope, to help the next agent, and to make this industry better for everyone. So with that, thank you for having me, and super excited about the rest of the conference. Thanks everyone.
