Creating a Powerful Personal Brand (Victoria Coster interview)

Welcome back to Real Estate Business Builders. This is going to be a fun conversation. We were chatting before I hit record here. Victoria Koster has 13 years experience with a few very high end real estate brands. So I would say a real estate marketing expert guru. I don't know how you'd say it.

Guru sounds great.

It's awesome. Proclaimed I've been a guru forever. And the conversations today, especially in the kind of market that we're in, is how do you set yourself apart in a sea of agents? There's no shortage of agents. 100% commoditized market for the most part. And how do you succeed? How do you create a brand for yourself? So that's the conversation we're going to have today. Victoria, give us a couple minutes on your background. I know you've got a couple powerhouse brands that you've worked with and recently you've launched on your own and you've got an exciting venture that we'll talk about later. But tell us a little bit about yourself and then we'll get into, you know, maybe breaking down this sort of you do you brands approach that you have.

Sure. So when you say 13 years, Lars, it sounds longer than it feels like it's been, but I started my real estate marketing career at one Sotheby's International Realty, which is a South Florida franchise. I moved on to a boutique brokerage for a little bit and then I found myself at Compass in August 2015. So I was the second employee on the ground when we launched the Florida market with four agents, one we workspace and a prayer. And then eight years later, I believe the Florida region is up to about 3,000 plus agents now. And I left Compass incredible terms having grown an incredible team, overseeing as the senior director of marketing the Southeast. So I oversaw the Florida marketing teams as well as Greater Atlanta. Up to about 40 people on my team towards the end and give or take as people move forward in their careers. But it was the highlight of my career to be able to build that team and now I'm just really obsessed. Now that I've taken a step back from the brokerage perspective of real estate marketing is getting really inspired by agents and agent branding. Just giving agents the tools they need to unlock their personal stories and create a really an authentic real estate personal brand that they're incredibly proud of. That resonates with their clients. That feels exactly how it feels when they're in their element with their clients, defending their deals, securing their homes, getting their listings, showing them property. So that's sort of where I'm going in this next chapter of mine is stepping away from the brokerage side and really working with individual agents, brokerage agnostic, to help all of them tell their stories in an authentic manner.

Awesome. So before we get into maybe some of the tactics and tools and systems and whatnot, why is this so important? Even transcends even real estate? But why is being able to tell your story and communicate that in a way that lands with your target market? Talk a little bit about maybe the 10,000 foot view. Why does this approach to business for real estate agents matter so much?

Because all marketing is storytelling. And so if you are able to own your story and unlock that and tell it in its most authentic manner, that is what over time helps grow your business. Because you're developing trust with your clients and, or your prospective clients by telling your story in a very consistent way. And when you develop trust with people, they want to invest with you, they want to work with you, because they feel connected to you. And every single marketer talks about story from the very beginning. And every human makes decisions based on emotions, not based on logic. And the only way to connect with humans is on an emotional level. We don't make decisions based on rationality, although we like to think we do. We make those decisions based on emotion, even when the investment is as big as a home might be.

Awesome. So let's break down some of the frameworks and I'll kind of give you a little bit of room to freestyle here. So as you look at, with your background and experience coming from the trenches and now, now being able to look and sort of like decide how you want to impact the industry, given your skill set, guide us into, like, what we need to consider as we're, you know, maybe we're, we don't have a brand per se. We're not focused on storytelling. So, so kind of lay out the frameworks that you would use with somebody to help them kind of go along this, this journey to, you know, creating a brand in our vertical.

Sure. So I think the first place I want agents to start thinking about is basically start listening, which sounds simple, perhaps is not easy. What I mean by that is there's an unexpected place that your brand is hiding and it is staring you right in the face. As a realtor, you are your brand. You don't have to overthink your brand. You do not have to fit into a box that someone has told you is a real estate marketing brand. The way that you sound on the phone with a client or in Person with a client is your brand. And I think sometimes what I've seen in the past is that agents get very focused on a logo because it's something that you could touch and feel. And suddenly that agent is like, my logo needs to be perfect or my brand is ruined. Your logo is not your brand. Spoiler alert. Your brand is everything else. And Jeff Bezos says it perfectly. Your brand is what other people say about you when you are not in the room. And what other people say about you when you're not in the room is not, oh, you know what? I was going to work with that agent, but I didn't like their logo. That is literally never something a client is going to say about their real estate experience, but it's tangible and you're able to hold on to it. So I think sometimes agents get fixated with it. So I think the first thing you need to do is start listening. Do you have a certain way that you sign off your. On your phone calls or your emails? And I'll go into a little storytelling here and give a shout out to my agent, Ivan Hovis Goburn of the Chapel real estate team Encompass Raleigh, which is where my husband and I are going to relocate. When I first got connected to Ivan via his principal, Johnny Chappell, Johnny said to me via email, he said, this is Ivan. He's one of my best. Ivan never met a stranger. I had never heard that phrase in my life, but I knew what it meant, right? It was suddenly Ivan and I were already friends and we hadn't met yet. And when Ivan sent his first direct communication back to me, he ended it with, I'm excited and I'm grateful. And every time somebody asks Ivan how he's doing, you know, how are you? Everybody says, good, I'm okay. Whatever Ivan says, I'm grateful. And that's his thing. Ivan is a grateful person and it comes across in everything he does. And that is his common thread that pulls his clients with. With him on the journey that they're taking with him. So that. That's like a little thing. And I think sometimes agents don't put enough weight behind those soft skills and those really special moments that feel natural to you as an agent, but that a client really, like, really sticks with. I cannot get over the fact that Ivan says, I'm grateful. I'm still talking about it. And we're, we're under contract now for our first home, thanks to him. But those are the places that I want you as agents to pay attention to. And if that Means recording yourself so you can actually hear what you sound like, you know, with the right permissions on the other side. Do that, because I think sometimes we don't hear how we sound in the real world. And all you have to do is give yourself permission to listen for that and then leverage that and you'll be unstoppable.

Awesome. So maybe continue with this thread. Was there anything else that was obvious in your. In this example, this real life example, you know, on the phone? What were some examples of other things that Ivan did?

So, you know, he was immediately calling us brother and sister and calling my son Dean, his nephew, Right? So Ivan paid attention to these little details. When he met my husband Kevin and I over a phone call, he remembered that my husband was about to run his first marathon in Miami, which Kevin, my husband, did in late January. And the day of the marathon, in the afternoon, he reached out to me and said, hey, sis, how did our. How did brother do on his marathon? And I said, ivan, he made his goal time of 3 hours and 44 minutes. And he was like, that's amazing. Please tell him congratulations. I'm sure he's exhausted. I'll shout him out tomorrow. So it's those little things, right? Like, it's not only I'm going to tell you everything you need to know about real estate, but I'm going to care about you as a human being. And, you know, he's sending us pictures of, you know, while we were in the waiting period of seeing if our offer was going to get accepted. I'm burning Palo Santo at home to send good juju into the universe. And then Ivan is saying, get out of my head. I'm burning sage over here in Raleigh. So he's making that connection. And when he finally called us to tell us the offer was accepted, he wanted to make sure we were all on speaker. And he said, is the little man in the room? My son will be two next March. We were all in the room. He's on speaker. My kid's about to go take a bath. And Ivan puts it like this. He says, dean, I want you to know that your future brother is going to be born in North Carolina. By the way, I'm not pregnant. This is just Ivan knowing that I want to have another child and I want to do that in my new home. And that's the way he told us that our offer got accepted. He didn't say, oh, your contract has been executed. He said, your family is going to grow and your dreams are going to be made real. In this home that we just got.

For you, that chokes me up and almost makes me cry. And I'm not a woman.

Like, I have kids.

I live in Charlotte. It's close to Raleigh. That is amazing. That is amazing. All right, so start listening. That's sort of the first point here. What's the second thing you would have us pay attention to or do?

Stop overthinking. Overthinking. Your brand is going to kill your business. And if energy is finite, you are better served as an agent, spending all of that energy on your clients. Don't lizard a brain on what your logo looks like or what your tagline is. What I have seen agents do time and time again, Lars, over the last 13 years is like, crowdsource their logo, right? Like your designer, whether they're an in house, God bless those graphic designers in house at brokerages or somebody on Fiverr. They make you a logo or two logos or three. And then you start asking your mom, your partner, your client, your ex client, your boyfriend, your sister, your daughter. You start asking everybody for an opinion. You know, who has the best opinion about what your brand should look and feel like you do. So why do you think that getting a bunch of different opinions about what your brand should look like is going to give you any sense of clarity? It's not. You know what feels right. And if you give the right information to the designer upfront and set them up for success, let them do their jobs and bring back the solution to your real estate brand. I think sometimes because it's something you can hold on to, like I mentioned that the logo is tangible. You want to just, like, be like, it's not right. But I don't know why. And I feel like because agents don't have enough time to spend giving information to a designer, sometimes those designers are designing in the dark because you haven't told them, hey, you know, I love an Hermes bag, and I've always worn Hermes, or I've always worn Chanel, or I drive a Lexus or I drive a Tesla. That's it. You might not think it's important as an agent to tell your designer that, but those are clues and little hints and Easter eggs that that designer can put together to get a better understanding of who you are. So that when they come to the table with your logo and you've given them good information at the beginning, you can be really proud of what they've come up with at the end. But if you tell a designer, make me a logo, and you give them no Other context, that's like a client coming to you and saying, hey, Lars, I need a place to live. Is that enough information for you to do your job? You're going to be like, okay, do you want an apartment or a condo or do you want a townhouse or a home? And you're going to be like, I don't know. You tell me. You can't. But you're not. You're not as a realtor being set up for success if that's the kind of information you're getting as a client. So put yourself on the other side of that equation. If a designer is like, okay, I have a bunch of questions and you're not answering them, you're not going to get what you're proud of and what works for you, because you need to do a little bit of homework for them, for them to be able to do their job right for you. And I've seen that every single brokerage, every single agent, doesn't matter what type of production, if you're new to the business, if you're a veteran in the business, I have seen every agent shoot themselves in the foot over the L word.

So let's talk about this a little bit. So this is not as much challenging you. I have just done it a different way. So talk about, like, the look and the feel of the brand.

Yep.

You know, I was. I was with a small boutique brokerage, then I was with ReMax, which arguably they love their brand, but it couldn't be like, it's a big ugly balloon. And then I was that. I own my own ReMax, then I was independent, then I was Keller Williams, then, now exp. But I don't. I don't produce. Haven't produced in a while. Yeah, but talk to me about from the agent perspective, when, you know, you're helping agents sort of build their own brands through story and through imagery and look and feel and all of that. Talk about that part a little bit. Like, how much does a logo matter, you know, in your experience? Or how much should they, or shouldn't they leverage their brokerage? You know, I'm at a brokerage now where it is about the agent and their brand and you get to your brand on our platform. But talk about a little bit.

Oh, it's such a loaded question, Lars. How much does a logo matter? Individually, not much. As part of a bigger branding ecosystem, it's important because it's part of what your look and feel out into the world is and becomes over time. But I don't think you're ever going to, as I mentioned, a client's ever going to look at your logo versus someone else's and be like, I'm going to work with that realtor. That client's going to make a decision based on, how did you pitch me, how did I feel in the room with you, over the phone with you? It's not a deal breaker. I think why it's important is because it's a differentiation point that is visual, because you can't put that type of soft skill into something understandable until you need a foot in the door and you need to be able to get into the room. A logo is something that can represent you outside of actually being in a room with a client or a prospective client. I think a personal logo is more important than a brokerage only because if it's done right, more indicative of that agent's personality or that team's personality. And I'll talk a little bit about how it worked at Compass. Any time that we came up with a logo that an agent really loved, that agent wanted it locked up with the brokerage logo. I want my logo and a line and I want Compass next to it. And we always said, don't do that because you don't want the two icons to be fighting each other. You want your logo to have breathing room and you want Compass's logo to have breathing room. Otherwise the client doesn't know what's more important. And what's more important is a personal experience they're getting from their agent, regardless of what brokerage they are with. So we would always put the agent's logo at the top. And then Compass's logo for compliance purposes was at the footer of whatever we were talking about, ad, email, et cetera, et cetera, whatever we were looking at. So we wanted each of them to have their own moment in the sun. And we always put more preference on the agent's logo versus the brokerage's logo, because that's what matters. And it sounds like that's what's happening at EXP as well.

Yeah. Awesome. All right, cool. So start listening. Stop over overthinking. What's a third point that you'd have us sort of focus on?

Stay focused. Do not fall victim to Shiny Object syndrome. I think there's so many places that I've seen a very, very good at their job publisher reach out to an agent and say, I have a remnant rate in XYZ magazine, only $400 for a full page. You need to give me an ad. Two Days ago, do you want it? And then that sweet agent who wants to spend money but doesn't know where to spend it, it's like, yeah, that sounds great. And then they're making the marketing team race to make an ad for a publication that like, it's just going to be another thing that someone flips through. It doesn't reach, it doesn't help you reach your goals. You're stressing yourself out about something that's not important. And then the marketing team or graphic designer is also stressing out to put something together really quickly. I think the less you do like that shotgun approach, the more time you'll have to get really, really consistent and thoughtful and about where your brand makes sense. If you can't fill out a one sentence thing that tells you, if I take this opportunity, it's going to help me reach this goal by achieving this result. And if you cannot answer those questions for yourself, don't do it. Just don't. You can say no. It's okay to say no. And I think sometimes agents are like, I have this money and I want to spend it, so I'm just going to throw it out there and hope for the best. That's not particularly strategic. And when strategy guides the way your business grows and I think as an agent, what more could you want than that, Right?

Yeah. So as it relates to, you know, start listening, stop overthinking, stay, stay focused. Yeah, Talk to an agent for a bit. You know, kind of weaving all those together. You know, how do you, and it could be sort of a lead in to what I know you're building. You know, how, how would you work with an agent or how would you guide an agent to kind of go from like, they don't have any of this tied together to now. They just present themselves completely differently in the marketing. Is it email? Is it logo? Is it look, is it video? Is it like kind of give us a picture of it?

Yeah. So I'm thinking specifically about Riley Smith, who's an agent here in Coconut Grove because I was just on the phone with him before you and I started speaking. Lars and I did this with Riley when he joined Compass. He had originally been at his previous brokerage for I think 17, if not 20 years. And that was the only brokerage Riley was at when he joined Compass. We did a full fledged rebrand with him. And what I told Riley from the beginning was I'm going to get, for lack of a better word, kind of creepy with how much I'm paying attention to what you do and say. And how you say it, because it's important, and I'll tell you why in a few weeks. And Riley was like, I don't know what you're talking about, but it sounds great. So what I would do is I would go to meetings with Riley and with one of my marketing advisors who now works with Riley, and he would just get to talking, and he would talk about his business or his clients, and I would take what I call verbatim notes, which is literally, Riley said exactly this, Riley said exactly that. In testimonials, clients describe Riley as exactly this. And that's what I mean about listening. You don't need to change the way you sound. The way you sound is great. You just need to put that into something you can use. So what I do is I get really, really deep and big brother on listening to what this, what. I did this with Riley, what he sounded like. And then I said, if we could make this into a tone of voice, how would I describe that tone of voice? And then we came up with taglines from there. So that by the time we got to the taglines, which, you know, at the end of the day, what are you talking about? 3 to 5 words for a tagline. Those were so thoughtfully presented to him because we had done our homework, and he was just telling me this. One of the taglines we came up with for Riley was, he's a Coconut Grove native, born and raised. And one of the taglines we came up with for him was Grove is in the Heart, which is now on a beautifully branded freebie electric vehicle, which I see at least five times a day because I also live in Coconut Grove. But it was a sense of it's been everything to Riley. Coconut Grove isn't just where he does his business. He lives here. He's raising his family here. He grew up here. He went to school down the street from me. So when we finally got to Grove is in the Heart, you could see that he lit up because he felt seen, because suddenly somebody had said something that he always felt, but that hadn't been put into words. And he just told me over the phone, he said, I'm going to transition that tagline from actual brand awareness, where it's been now, to start a community foundation for Coconut Grove. And that's what Grove is in the Heart is going to now transition into becoming, which is, you know, kind of a dream to be able to serve the greater good in that fashion. So that's a little bit of a labyrinthine way of Telling you what my process is. I want to go an inch wide and a mile deep. Lars. Because there's no point in going a mile wide, an inch deep. That's not going to penetrate and it's not going to resonate with your prospective clients.

Yeah. And there are so many agents that the only way to succeed is going super deep. Do you see this approach? Like, so for that example, sort of a geographic focus, price point, stage of life, like how, how, how many different iterations? And I imagine it's all of them. But talk through that a little bit.

I think that approach is, it's a very one to one type of touch point. Right. Like you would need someone who is literally following you around and. Or paying attention to everything you do for a couple of weeks. So it doesn't necessarily scale the way that I would like it to, because I would love nothing more than to be able to have that type of exercise. So what I've thought about instead is if there are agents who would benefit from that type of work, how can I provide that so that an agent can go through this journey with me with the time that they have? Right. Like, nobody's out here trying to ask an agent to spend eight hours a week on marketing, 40 hours a week on marketing. That's not realistic and that's not where you're best served. So that kind of brings me to this course that I'm working on called you do you build your authentic real estate brand in eight weeks? And it's going to be eight modules where what I'm asking agents to do is going to slot into whatever your day looks like. If you're in the car a couple, like 30 minutes at a time, you'll be able to do some of these exercises from where you are. I'm not asking you to sit in front of a computer and take time away from your business. So I've been really thoughtful about what those exercises are, how short and thoughtful they can be and, or how you can already leverage what you're doing to hear what you sound like, to be able to distill that, to be able to put together a framework for what your tone of voice is so that ultimately you can hand that over to somebody else. Because we all know in an ideal world, agents aren't actually doing their marketing from an implementation standpoint. You'll be able to hand off an entire sort of playbook about this is what I sound like, feel like, look like, take this and run with it so that I can go get more listings so that I can go close more deals. That's the goal of what we're working through.

Awesome. And what's the, what's the best way for someone to get in touch with you?

So if you're interested in what we're talking about, the best way to get in touch with me is to go to you do you brands.com and to sign up for my mailing list, I am going to be putting together and launching a free masterclass on March 16 that if you're interested in and you're listening to this in real time, you'll be able to leverage. Otherwise, those communications will give you more information on what I'm talking about here. And if you're interested in the course, you'll get more information about how to sign up and your different options investment there.

Awesome. And I would say to anyone listening in terms of timing, you know, that's such a even less business for even more agents, right? So the ability to really just make it clear who you are, what you stand for, to do it in a way that just amplifies everything that is, is part of you is, is awesome. So I appreciate you coming on and putting yourself and going out on a limb and giving this, you know, this gift that You've developed over 13 years to our industry. I think it's going to be awesome. So I highly encourage everyone to check it out. You do you brands.com and we will see you soon.

Victoria, thanks for having me.