Life by Design — What It Looks Like When the Plan Actually Works

MJ Sauer, Associate Broker and KW New Orleans original, on building a life by design through real estate investing, why she finally took one meeting she’d been saying no to for years — and what it looks like when a decade of disciplined goal-setting actually pays off.

Most agents talk about real estate as the path to wealth. MJ Sauer is one of the rare ones who mapped the route, set a finish line, and crossed it on schedule — at 53, with her mortgages paid off and her time finally her own. Her story isn’t a motivational anecdote. It’s a blueprint for what this business can actually become.

At a recent KW New Orleans office gathering, Sauer took the front of the room to share what she’s built — and what comes next. After years as co-broker alongside Clayton, she’s stepping into what she calls her “enjoyment phase”: still in the office, still part of the team, still invested in the culture she helped create. The occasion also brought a major introduction: Nichole Donald, former team leader at KW West Bank, joining as Coach and Co-Broker. And woven throughout the morning was a practical, urgent conversation about business planning, leverage, and using AI to stop losing agents to the homework gap.

Three separate but connected threads ran through the morning: a leadership evolution, a business planning push, and a new face stepping into a coaching role designed to close the gap between agents who have plans and agents who don’t.

In 2013, MJ Sauer and her husband sat down and built a number. Not a vague aspiration — a specific financial target that would let them live the way they wanted to live, with no one else’s schedule attached to it. They bought over 60 properties across their investing career, put the ones they were keeping on 10-year notes, and ran toward a 2023 payoff date like a finish line they could actually see.

She reached it at 53. The properties are paid off. The income is passive. And the thing that strikes her most — still — is how many people in this business never make that kind of move. “It blows my mind how many people are in real estate and don’t buy real estate,” she told the room. The accumulation phase, in her framing, is not just about earning — it’s about building the asset base that eventually sets you free from needing to earn.

The discipline required wasn’t glamorous. High mortgages on short notes means less cash flow in the short run. But the math, worked backward from a specific goal, made it the only logical choice. That “work backward from your goal” logic is exactly what Lauren Doussan was teaching agents in the business planning session that opened the same morning — how much GCI do you need, how many transactions does that require, what does that mean you need to do this week?

MJ Sauer had been in real estate since 1999. She ran her own boutique brokerage for 14 years. She had a clear life by design and goals that were on track. Every broker who called got the same answer: no.

The call from Jeffrey Doussan was different — not because of what he said, but because of what was changing around her. She had been watching Compass expand out of Chicago and understood what it signaled about where the industry was going: toward platforms with scale, technology, and training that small independents simply couldn’t match. She had paid over $10,000 for a website that largely just displayed the MLS. The boutique model, she concluded, wasn’t going to be sustainable.

She joined KW New Orleans just before COVID. The timing looked bad. It turned out to be a gift — the disruption cleared her calendar and gave her time to go deep on Keller Williams training, Gary Keller’s books, and the models and systems she hadn’t had space to absorb while chasing day-to-day operations at her own shop. The reset she didn’t plan for accelerated the trajectory she had.

Nichole Donald grew up in New Orleans in the truest sense — her father served as president of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club during Katrina, leading the organization’s return to the city in 2006. She was decorating coconuts as a kid. Roots run deep.

She spent nearly her entire real estate career at KW West Bank — 16-plus years — with one brief early detour to a boutique brokerage that lasted six months before she sat in on a class at NOMAR, looked around at who was in the room, and made her decision. She’s served as productivity coach, team leader, and director on the NOMAR board. She knows the models.

Her mandate at KW New Orleans is focused: help agents who aren’t yet capping get there. Her framework is built around three P’s — predictable, productive, and profitable. Every initiative, every conversation, every accountability check runs through that filter. And she was clear with the room from the start: she’s not the rah-rah type. She’ll celebrate wins, but she’ll hold people to what they said they were going to do.

The morning opened with a practical, slightly uncomfortable exercise: Lauren Doussan and Jeffrey Doussan walking the room through a baseline worksheet — GCI, transaction count, social media metrics, all of it on paper — and asking agents to work backward from the life they actually want to the activity required to get there.

The point wasn’t to constrain anyone. Jeffrey Doussan put it this way: getting clear on the numbers creates freedom later, not less of it. The clarity is what lets you say yes to things — and know which things to say yes to. An upcoming ALC Plus session is designed to take agents’ completed plans and run them through AI tools to generate specific daily, weekly, and monthly action benchmarks, shortcutting the multi-week follow-up cycle that coaching typically requires.

The AI application being demonstrated isn’t theoretical. Jeffrey Doussan fed a transcript of Gary Vaynerchuk’s remarks at Keller Williams Family Reunion into Claude, prompted it to generate a social media action plan for a new KW New Orleans agent without nine transactions in the prior 12 months, and shared the output with the room. The session is designed to let agents get deep into ideation and action planning before they ever sit down one-on-one with a coach — making that time sharper and faster.

The thread connecting every conversation in the room — business planning, AI tools, MJ’s investing arc, Nichole’s three P’s — is the same one: you cannot water a plant with a year’s worth of water in a single day and expect it to grow. The agents at the top of the room all have a plan, work it consistently, and don’t stop when a season is slow.

Lauren Doussan referenced a concept from author Jurgen Appelo’s writing on entrepreneurial time: adding just three focused hours on a Saturday morning translates to roughly 20 additional productive workdays per year. The math is less interesting than what it implies — that the gap between good producers and great ones is rarely talent. It’s time allocation and the willingness to protect the hours that only you can fill.

About this series. KW New Orleans hosts regular conversations with the leaders shaping our city — developers, architects, investors, and operators building the New Orleans of tomorrow. These are the conversations that happen in the rooms most people don’t get invited into.