Establishing a Virtual Cadence with Your Team

What's up, everyone? This is Lars Hedinborg, founder of Real Estate B School, and this is the Business Freedom Podcast. You know, this is unprecedented times in one respect in terms of the trigger of what's going on in the market. But it's not new. Like, this is just going to be a market shift, a slowdown, a standoff with buyers and sellers. And so the one thing we need to figure out how to do, and this is for real estate team leaders. If you're leading one person or 20 people on your team, you need to get really clear what the virtual cadence is going to be for your team. So establishing that virtual cadence, and what I mean by cadence is, you know, you have folks that are maybe before any of this lockdown happened, you didn't really have a tight cadence cadence as it was. So for some of you, this is an opportunity to tighten things up. Because the reality of what's getting ready to happen is that if your team doesn't, you know, if they don't remain the calm in the storm and they put their head down and they get to work, administrative folks and sales folks, they're going to have to go back to the career they had before real estate, especially with your sales team and especially administrators. If your business contracts and you can't retain all of your administrative staff, it's just not going to be good. You're going to have to have that triage. Like, I can't afford this person. I can't afford. And we don't want you to get there with your salespeople. They have to line up in your virtual cadence so that they can absolutely crush the shift that we're going to see here in the coming 3, 6, 12, 18, 24 months. So let's talk about virtual cadence and how to lead your home, lead your team virtually so from your home. First of all, it's schedules. This is the time where it is easy. With the kids home, it's easy to fall out of a schedule. If your sales team falls out of a schedule with new business development, they will lose this game. They will be out of the business. If you allow yourself to get out of a cadence with new business development, you will lose this game. Just because we are in a weird time where we need to stay in our homes and who knows if we can show homes or if closings are going to happen, it doesn't mean you let off the throttle on new business development. So when it comes to schedules, you need to know that you're all committing to a cadence. There still is a daily huddle. If there wasn't a daily huddle, you start a daily huddle. Hey everyone, we're going to jump on at 7:45. We're going to jump on a zoom and we're going to, you know, go around and go through commitments and, you know, take turns running those huddles, those daily huddles. I recommend 7:45 to 8:00'. Clock. 8:00 is when new business development starts. We do a 50:10 cadence for 3, 4, 5, 6 hours. However many hours you need to set, the number of appointments you need to hold, a number of virtual consultations. We'll talk about that here in a minute. I would bring way more energy to those virtual meetings, those huddles, than you do even in person huddles. You start with positive focus. Every meeting starts with positive focus. What's the one thing that you crushed or you're grateful for that happened in the last 24 hours? So if you're doing these daily huddles, everyone starts in positive focus. The big three for the day. What are the three things you are going to crush today? Everyone goes around those. Any obstacles or challenges that you're having that I can help you solve and what we'd like, what can I help you with? That's the cadence I would run every day with your team. I would even go as far to say, you know, from 8 to 12. That's when our new business development hours are. That's five days a week, 20 hours. You're committing to a 5010 cadence only if you want to stay in real estate. And I really do believe that it's that severe. If you want to stay in real estate, you need to have that sort of discipline, especially now. You should have had it already if you don't. This is the perfect opportunity to step in and establish the cadence. Don't let your agents just get out of the business because you weren't strong enough as a leader to step on up and establish that cadence. So I was saying I would go as far as to say at noon we're going to do another 15 minute huddle to talk about what went well, what didn't go well, what consultations did you set? Right? So bookend that part of the morning and if you don't have consultations and you're in sales, you're going to get right back on the phone. Maybe you have some client servicing work to do, but 1 to 5 is going to be the same thing you did from eight to 12. So your new business development cadence could go from three hours or maybe even less than that if you didn't have a cadence to eight hours a day. And that's the intensity that you need to have with your team. The intentionality and not mince words around just that one area. Virtual team meetings once a week. Get together, lighten things up. We've got an agenda for that. Every meeting starts in positive focus, where the client wins in the week. How do we serve someone in the community through our Compassion program. Any prayer requests, any praise, things that have happened in the last week. We do hollers where we give awards for someone showing exemplary behavior on the team, helping another team member or a client. We do some cool things in our team meetings. You've got to keep that cadence going. Personal development. We still do personal development once a week. It's just virtual. So we're watching a video, we're doing an exercise, we're reading an article, we're talking about it. That doesn't stop. If anything, your people need personal development time more than ever right now. What else? Virtual consultations. I touched on this a little bit on the last one of the most recent podcast episodes. You need to make sure your team knows how to handle virtual consultations. So you need to set up the process right now of being able to hold an actual buyer consultation and an actual seller consultation completely virtually and get signed paperwork. And it's not. We have it set up where we can just send a buyer or seller to a landing page. There's a video, there are a questionnaire that they need to fill out to make sure they watch the video and then specific information we need from them to make sure that we know what their needs versus wants are and that they're ready to do business with us once we come back in and we have a face to face over zoom. So we've got all that built out. We have Docusign or whatever the other one is, dot loop for signatures and all of that is already up and running and online. So if you haven't worked on that and you've got those people that are following you, you need to put that system into place right away. What else in terms of virtual? Higher level of communication with your team. Higher level of communication. Let them know the best ways to get in touch with you. Voxer is a walkie talkie app. V O X E R. It's probably the best way let your team know that you need to time block so they can't just interrupt you whenever they want with Voxer, but it's probably the best real time tool that we know of. I would get your whole team on a voxer channel. You can give them sort of words of inspiration during the day. You can put a quote out there. Funny gifs you can put up there. You need to tighten up the culture of your team. It should have been tight anyway. For some of you, this is just an excuse to do it again. And this, this goes for if you manage one administrator and you as the main salesperson or one administrator and a couple salespeople. Some of you. I'm hearing you because you've told me this. You're either a member of real estate B school or in a strategy session. You said, well, I'm thinking that I just focus on me. I've only got two agents. They're only a year in the business. I'm going to buckle down and protect what I have and I'm not going to focus on them. I think it's a major miss. I think one other thing you could do virtually is when 8 o' clock hits, you guys leave zoom up on the screen so you have accountability that you're actually doing that thing. New business development. Those folks that you promised a year ago to join your team and you're going to show them how to do this business, they need you to lead them through this. And it could be just shoulder to shoulder. This is, you know, we talk about I do it, we do it, they do it. Maybe you were at the point where they were doing it and now you need to step back in and we do it this. If you were already with other salespeople and it was a we do it, I think it would be irresponsible to just go to I do it and forget your team. I think there's a way you can grow and scale through what's going on right now. You know, I got into real estate at the worst time. Looking back, it was the best time. We went from 15,000 agents to 5,000 agents in Charlotte over three to four year period. And I started my team the first year I hired an agent. We did 58 sides. We did 248 sides three years later. And so in terms of being ready for this, I think it's game on. There's going to be so much fear in if you're an agent, you have a license, there's going to be really good agents that you can, you can pick up in these uncertain times and you can show them the way. Show them the way. And if you're going to abandon what you built or thought of building something, I think it's a monumental miss and I think the opportunity is better than ever in what's coming down the road. Once we get through the dust of, like, being able to leave our homes, I can't pretend to understand that part of it. I do know what's coming and it's just going to be an economic something, shift, slow down. You know, a lot of people are getting hurt economically, financially from what's going on. So there will be an impact here. And that's all I've got. You know, just think of how you can redefine your business because it has to go virtual. And how could you do it even better than you were doing it before? That's my challenge for you. If you're at the point in your business growth journey where you have others that are relying on you to help them through this and you really don't know how to help them, you have a lot on the line. Maybe you're a small team at 500,000 GCI or a big team at 5 million GCI. The only thing I can offer you is a conversation about where you're at, how can we protect what you have, pivot quickly and then profit from what's going on. The three P's that is what I'm teaching right now to our members. And I know that if we do this thing the right way, we're going to look back in 12 to 24 months and. And we're going to have taken advantage. Not in a bad way, but we will have taken advantage of what's going on right now and we won't be victims of it. And if that's you, go to realestatebeeschool.com. there's an orange button there that says apply. Now we just need a few bits of information and we'll jump on a phone call to talk about. Really? Yeah. How we can just kind of meet you where you are and get you going in the right direction. And if the conversation about real estate B school makes sense, we'll definitely have it. And yeah, we'll talk to you soon. I love you. I may have never met you and I love you for standing in there and being the calm in the storm, being the wartime general that we were designed to be. And I respect you as well. So we'll talk soon.