Today we’d like to introduce you to Eric Baker.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Eric. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
When I was four years old, my Dad left and my Mom was given the task of raising my brother and I by herself. She was a stay at home Mom at the time, so she didn’t have a job or any income. The time that followed was very difficult. The first Christmas we had, there were no presents under the tree, and I remember my brother coming down the hallway crying asking Mom why Santa forgot us that year. Almost everything we had was given to us from donations through friends, churches, and non-profits. Shortly after, for six months or so, our house was for sale while my Mom was looking for work. During this time, had the home sold for any reason, we would have had nowhere to go. As a child, feeling the instability of home and the constant questioning of whether or not we would have a place to stay that night built in a very strong desire for having a sense of permanence and a sense of place, which ended up having an impact on my life I never imagined. By the grace of God, the home never sold and my Mom ended up getting a job teaching kindergarten during the day, but it didn’t pay enough to support the family long term. After looking at so many jobs that were nights and weekends, she decided to go back to school so she could get a teaching degree because being a teacher was the only job that would keep her on the same schedule as her boys.
So for the following 3.5 years, she taught kindergarten during the day, then drove from Marietta to the University of West Georgia in Carrollton for night classes; a 120-mile round trip journey. During this time, my grandparents would watch us until she returned home. Finally in 1999, my Mom graduated with a double major and Master’s Degree, and three days later she took the first teaching job that was available at Sequoyah High School in Cherokee County. Even though she had stable employment, money was always tight and it wasn’t uncommon to say a prayer that we had enough gas to get us to school and back when we were nearing the end of the month. Throughout all of it, in the corner of our kitchen, there was always a box we would put extra cans of food in and my Mom affectionately called it the “Poor People Box” – being an adult now, and realizing we WERE the poor people in most people’s eyes, it was my Mom’s way of teaching us that no matter how bad you think things are, there are always people out there who are less fortunate than us, and a reminder of how grateful and blessed we are for what we DO have, however little that may be. And that is one of the single greatest lessons we were ever taught.
Ever since I was a child, I always loved homes and architecture. I would get lost in designing homes. Most kids were playing Nintendo, and I was busy designing houses. It was my escape and my chance to design and imagine stable homes, something that always felt at risk when I was young. Little did I know that would eventually lead to a career in Real Estate. My senior year in High School, I was held back by one class and had to take summer classes to finish and get my diploma, but it meant I never did walk at my own High School graduation. After that, feeling like a failure, I decided to take a year off of school before going to college because I just wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. In that year, I developed crippling anxiety that drove me to become agoraphobic – the fear of leaving one’s own home – and it prevented me from doing anything. Against all desire to do so, I decided to sign up for college and get a job at Home Depot anyways, because I knew that the world I was looking at hadn’t changed, the only thing that had changed was the way I was looking at the world. I was forcing myself out of my comfort zone, even though it would give me panic attacks and cause me to throw up in parking lots, I knew that it wouldn’t always be like that. So I charged on, and ended up going to Kennesaw State University for Marketing, joined a Fraternity, and had a solid job as a Personal Banker at SunTrust Bank.
While I was at SunTrust, I had a client who was in Real Estate put the idea of a career in Real Estate in my head. Shortly after I began studying to get my Georgia Real Estate License. After a few years, I began struggling in school because I needed my job to pay for my schooling, but my job was taking away from my schooling and my schooling was taking away from my job. Then in 2013, I was fired from SunTrust and two weeks later, I was Academically Suspended from KSU, which is a nice way of saying don’t come back. At this point, I didn’t have any options. I had no degrees, no job references, and I was living back at home searching for part-time jobs and struggling to pay for my small car payment. Doing anything I could for money. I finally secured a job, but it didn’t start for two months. Then the morning of the first day at my new job, I come out to the driveway to see that my car had been repossessed overnight. After a fight on the phone with my Dad, he told me that if I had a better work ethic, it would have never happened to me in the first place and hung up on me. My Mom ended up having to open a credit card to pay for the repossession fees and car payments so we could get my car back so I could go to work. Finally at the end of 2013, after failing my Georgia Real Estate exam three times, I passed and started working for Keller Williams First Atlanta.
Although I was very optimistic about my new career, I only made $2,000 all year long in 2014 and was ready to quit by Christmas. I truly didn’t want to do anything else other than real estate, but I was failing so badly, I started looking at other jobs. However, I had no college degree and no real job references, so my job opportunities were very limited, at best. I decided that if Real Estate was truly what I wanted to do, then I was going to do anything and everything I could to make it work. So for the next six months, I went to my brokerage at 8am, made 300-400 phone calls a day, changed clothes in the office bathroom, drove to Buckhead and valeted cars at different bars and nightclubs until 2-3am in the morning, drove back home to Marietta, and went right back to the office at 8am the next morning to start all over again. It was unbelievably difficult, but by the end of 2015 I closed $6.5 million in sales volume and had started my team Eric Baker & Associates. Since then I have closed over $30 million in real estate sales, serve on the Board of Directors for Keller Williams First Atlanta, serve on the Board of Directors for MUST Ministries, a member of the Atlanta Board of Realtors Top Producers Club, help run the Atlanta Home’s & Lifestyles Magazine Designer Showcase Homes as a Day Captain, and am a Real Estate Business Productivity Coach helping other agents launch their careers in the industry.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Absolutely not. Since I was four years old the road to where I am has been, at times, almost non-existent, but mostly loose gravel covered in potholes. The financial obstacles, like it is for many people, were incredibly difficult. It’s difficult to manage money when there is no money to manage. That in turn makes for a host of mental obstacles, things like anxiety, the feeling of being trapped, depression, and most commonly, the feeling of being a failure. To believe that things will get better, when there are no signs to indicate such, takes a level of optimism that is almost unattainable, but inherently necessary. A major challenge for me was dealing with the agoraphobia. How was I ever going to become anything when I was scared to leave my house? The process was slow, but every day I would walk the end of my driveway, pick a landmark, walk to it, pick another landmark from there, (a tree, mailbox, driveway), go home, then go back out the next day and walk to the landmark I picked the day before. Slowly but surely, I began walking farther and farther and realized one of the greatest lessons in my life; if I can make it to this point, then I can take two more steps and make it there. No matter how small of a distance it may be, progress is progress. That is ultimately been how I built my life and my business. I discovered in the process that our “comfort zone” isn’t a physical place, but rather a mentality of what we find comfortable, and we have the control to change the definition of what that is and take it with us wherever we go.
Now I fly all over the world by myself, speak and teach to crowds of people, and do things I never thought would be possible. But I am able to do these things because there were thousands of very small and minute steps that proceeded where I am now. To overcome, what seems to be a mountain range of obstacles, we must do the smallest steps to begin and find victory and success even in the very smallest of accomplishment. If we constantly check where we are vs where we want to be, it breeds a feeling of failure and stagnation. However, if we can master being celebratory in the small victories, and feel proud of those things, then that will begin to develop the staunch optimism that is required to overcome mountain ranges of obstacles and challenges. I learned that the same world that produced some of my most difficult days is the same world that has produced some of my happiest days, so if I am beginning to view everything with anxiety and depression, I remind myself that the happy world I have been a part of is still out there and it is up to me to find it again. My mood isn’t powerful enough to change the world I live in, it is only powerful enough to change the lenses I look at my world through, and I have control what lenses those are.
Alright – so let’s talk business. What else should we know about you and your career so far?
I am in residential real estate sales, specializing in the entire central and northwestern Atlanta Market. I believe what sets me apart is why I am in the business, and that I am so heavily relationship and education-based. I know that buying and selling a home can be extremely stressful and anxiety-provoking, but through patience, transparency, integrity, and highly educating my own clients, I can help make the process fun, fulfilling, and enjoyable. It’s so special to me to do what I do because I know what it’s like to feel the permanence of home at risk, so having the ability to help find other people their own sense of place and permanence is so rewarding. Even though most people won’t know what that feels like, I do, and that’s a major part of why I am in this business.
I am most proud of the fact that we are 96% referral based. I don’t do any outside advertising or marketing, I just rely on my clients to connect me with their friends, family, and coworkers who are looking to buy and sell. That is so notable to me because it means that not only did my clients enjoy their experience, but they trusted me enough to share it with the people they are close to. It is the feeling of trust and reliance on integrity that keeps growing my business year after year, and it is why I want to continue to do what I’m doing for as long as I can. For me, it is anything but “just another transaction” – it is truly helping people who need assistance in a frequently major way.
What is “success” or “successful” for you?
I define success as the unwillingness to fall victim to our own circumstances. Every human being comes with some level of circumstances or baggage, which are almost always out of our direct control. But far too many of us allow ourselves to be victimized by those circumstances, regardless of what they are. It is in that victimization mindset that we lose the edge and motivation to get out from underneath them. Now of course this takes a tremendous amount of work, but everyone has a choice to stop being victimized by things we can not control in our past or present. And it starts with making more intentional decisions and less statements. We mess this part up frequently, because the only difference between a statement and a decision, is action. Too many of us make a “decision” that is never backed up with any action, which means it was ultimately just a hollow statement. So to me, I define success as the intentional act of defiance and specific decision making that allows us to get out from underneath the weight of our own circumstances in order to create a life we personally feel is truly worth living.
For me personally, I feel success in the numbers of individuals who I have been able to help, either through my career in real estate and/or through my position at MUST Ministries. In real estate, seeing my clients happy with the completion of their real estate goals gives me tremendous joy and motivation to keep going. And within MUST Ministries, having the ability to help families and individuals who are less fortunate, people who’s circumstances closely mirror the circumstances of my childhood, and people who in many cases can’t help themselves is one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. It gives me an immense feeling of success because I have been in positions similar to the ones of the people we help. Through either channel, if there is anyone person who can be impacted by the work I do, then that makes every difficult time and roadblock worth going through because it gives justification to why I am here and why I do what I do.
Contact Info:
- Address: 200 Glenridge Point Parkway, Suite 100, Atlanta, GA 30342
- Phone: 404-719-1414
- Email: EricBaker@kw.com
- Instagram: @the_eric_baker
- Facebook: https://www.Facebook.com/EricBakerSells/
Image Credit:
Bobby Brunelle, Elisabeth Sherwin, Michelle Mejia-Jones
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