In this week’s episode I visit South Dakota and talk with an extremely talented and hard working broker named Nick Gustafson, a principal at Bender Commercial Real Estate in Sioux Falls. Nick  is a ten year veteran commercial real estate broker.  Nick started taking real estate classes in his final year at Augustana College and started his brokerage career upon graduation.  Applying the phone skills he acquired at his college sales job with Gateway Computer, Nick made thousands of cold calls in his first year in the business, quickly becoming a leading tenant rep broker, honing his deal making skills on small to mid-sized office leases.

Nick actively expanded his client base with repeat business and aggressive prospecting. Tenant representation deals led to listings and listings led to an increasing number of commercial building sales.  Nick spends the majority of his time working on investment and commercial real estate sales transactions over $500,000.

We have a lot in common in that we’re both from small markets and started our careers at about the same time. I quickly realized that Nick is driven and focused. While his success, and any of our successes, have a lot of layers and reasons his starts and finishes with one thing… hard work. Enjoy!

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Here’s What You’ll Discover

• How Nick honed his skills making thousands of cold-calls early on his career
• The pros and cons of working in a small market
• Nick leveraged an internship into a career
• Nick reads two hours a day of non-fiction business content
• How to avoid the feast-or-famine effect

Mentions & Resources

• The Art of the Deal – by Donald Trump
• Zero to One – by Peter Thiel
• Zeckendorf: The Autobiography of William Zeckendorf (legendary NYC developer)
• Twitter #CRE

Advice & Quotes

• “Feel the fear” and embrace it
• Track your deals, listings, pendings and check in on them daily
• It’s all about managing expectations
• “Do a good job” – when you have assignments… over perform regardless of the size
• “Have a long term perspective combined with persistency”
• “Know that you’re not going to make money starting out… be prepared”

 Connect with Nick Gustafson, CCIM

  – Check out Nick’s full bio here

  – Call Nick at 605-201-2809