I grew up around real estate the way other kids grow up around the family restaurant or the family farm. My parents had both been in the business for something like thirty years by the time I was old enough to understand what they actually did all day. Open houses, contracts, closings, the phone ringing at dinner. That was just normal for me.
And for a long time, I told myself I wanted nothing to do with it.
I don't know if it was rebellion or just my need to prove I could build something of my own, but I made a quiet deal with myself: I wouldn't touch real estate until I actually saw the money in it. Until then, it was my parents' world, not mine.
So I went to college instead. I enrolled at Biola University without any real clarity on what I wanted to do once I walked across that stage. I wasn't chasing a title or a career path so much as I was chasing the next right thing in front of me. And the next right thing turned out to be a marketing honors cohort I felt strangely pulled toward.
That pull changed everything.
In that cohort, I met a professor who saw something in me before I saw it in myself. I am forever grateful for him. He pushed me hard. Under his direction, we tackled three or four major projects a semester, ninety to a hundred and twenty pages each, typed with single spacing, built from real customer interviews, real research, real stories pulled out of actual businesses instead of textbook case studies. He wasn't teaching us marketing theory. He was teaching us discipline.
By my senior year, I was sitting in his B2B sales class. After one of my presentations, he pulled me aside and said something I still carry with me: "Grant, I could really see sales in your future."
That sentence cracked something open in me. I remember going home that night and having what I can only describe as a real moment with God. I asked for clarity, for direction, for some sign of what I was actually supposed to do with my life. And what I felt back wasn't vague. It felt like a calling. Sales, somehow, was it.
I graduated in May of 2023. Not long after, I sat down for a couple of interviews with the leadership team at my brokerage. What hooked me wasn't a big promise of easy money. It was the opposite, honestly. They told me straight out that recruiting would be one of the hardest things I'd ever do. But they also told me it would make me a better salesperson than almost any other path could, and that the skills I'd build doing it would follow me for the rest of my career.
I later learned that one of the partners had gone directly to my mom before I even knew the opportunity existed. He told her, "I know you have a son graduating college soon. Why doesn't he come interview to be a recruiter with me?" That's how this whole thing started. Not a job posting. Not a resume blasted into the void. A man who believed in relationships enough to start with my mom.
I was so sold on the idea of building a sales career in recruiting that I gave myself exactly one week off after graduation. Then I showed up for my first day.
My desk was set up with my boss sitting directly behind me, another recruiter to my right, and my monitor facing straight toward my boss's desk. Every call I made, every meeting I booked, was visible and audible to the person evaluating me. I had never worked in sales before in my life, and I was terrified.
It showed in my numbers. I brought on exactly one recruit in my first month. And then, for the four months after that, I brought on zero production. Nothing. Five months into what I'd been told would be the hardest job of my career, I was living proof of just how hard they meant it.
What kept me from quitting was Kobe Bryant.
I kept coming back to the story of how bad Kobe was when he first started playing basketball. He was unremarkable, even ordinary, and he became the best in the world anyway, purely because he refused to stop sharpening his craft. I adopted that same mentality. I told myself that if I kept showing up, kept practicing, kept pushing, I would eventually become the version of myself this job demanded.
So I set appointments. Every single day, without fail. And most of them fell apart, recruits who showed up unmotivated, or didn't show up at all. It felt like running full speed into a wall, over and over, hoping the wall would give before I did.
Eventually, it did.
Chapter One continues in the full book.