How Damon Gettier Implemented the Systems to Double His Transactions in a Year

Hey, everyone, this is Lars Hedinborg here. And I wanted to bring on Damon Gutierre, a client of mine. We've been working together for some time, seven, eight months or so now. And I admire so many things about Damon. He probably wouldn't say it exactly in those words. You'll get to know him here in a second. But he has done before. I met Damon did amazing things in his business. He went from heavy REO business and on the flip of a dime, shifted over as the REO market sort of dried up a little bit, shifted over to general brokerage sales and was selling over 200 homes when I met Damon. And we've done some really, really good work together. He was like. And he is a freight train. He goes and he goes. And I admire that most about him. And we were able to put some systems and tracking tools in place and plug some holes in the buyer lead funnel, or the buyer sales funnel, the seller sales funnel. Cut out some expenses that weren't producing for them and done some really, really good things in the business. So, Damon, thanks as always. Kind of giving up time to talk with me, but maybe tell everyone here today you know where you were when we started working together. Damon was interesting because when he came on, he kind of just made me an offer. Let me just buy your stuff. Like, I just want your forms. I'll just pay you ten grand for your forms. And we made a little bit more formal consulting agreement than that. But, David, just tell everyone sort of where you were when we met, what you saw in me as someone to help you kind of build out systems and sort of scale your business on the right foundation, and then kind of give us an overview of what we've been working on.

Okay. When I met Lars, when I met you, I was probably the most successful, disorganized person who sold 200 homes in spite of themselves you've ever met. I've done very well doing REOs. I went from 100% REO to 100% resale real estate in one year with no downturn whatsoever. Actually sold more homes resale real estate than did reo and just totally switched modes. Did 180 in one year. Saw your video, actually. You were doing an interview with Frank on vyral Marketing, and I saw your stinking your return on investment form, your tracker, and I was like, man, he knows what he makes off of radio. I have no clue what I make off radio. I know I get phone calls, but I don't know what I make. So like you said after the phone call or after the video, I called you up and I didn't want to hear about your coaching. I didn't want to hear about any of that. I. I was just like, look, I'll pay you $10,000, you give me the forms. And you're like, let's talk. Let's see what we can do. And so, I mean, we did the coaching agreement and the coaching agreement. While it might be a little bit more than the 10,000 for the forms, I've gotten a whole lot more than the forums for that. We went down in November and talked to you and went through all of our expenses and everything and what we were paying. We cut out things that weren't working. We added things like viral marketing that we didn't have. We changed that whole scenario completely. We finally put buyers into account, buyer agents into accountability. Because before then, we. I don't even know if I can say this, but we were like lead whores. I mean, we wanted every lead out there. When we saw something that got more leads, I wanted it, I bought it. We were getting 700 to 1,000 leads a month, and we had seven buyer's agents. And our buyer's agents were just cherry picking up. And so one of the big things you told us to do is get rid of the leads, get your leads down to where agents actually work them. And so, as you know, we chopped lead sources, we chopped pay per click, we chopped everything we could to get our leads down to a manageable or semi manageable position. Hired more buyer's agents. We're up to 10 buyer's agents now. January, we sold 20% of the homes in our market. And I'm talking about a market with 10, 86 real estate agents. We sold 20. We did it with eight agents. Now we've been hiring, recruiting. We're up to 18 real estate agents. We have four listing agents now we have 10 buyers agents. We got a couple agents in outlying markets that are doing dual roles. We've opened up another office and another MLS because our radio traffic gets us business there. It's just been an eye opening, awakening thing to see what your business really is and to start gravitating selling houses into a business. Because I think most people sell houses because they think it's cool. They think it's neat to show houses. And that's really not what it's about. It's a business. It needs to be run like a business. I don't think most real estate agents get that.

So, Damon, what makes Lars Coaching different than maybe Any other training or coaching program you've experienced in your years of selling real estate.

It's real and it's practical. It's hands on. It's actual business. Most people want to regurgitate what they heard from someone else. They want to tell you you need to make 40 calls, you need to call 40 people, you need to send handwritten notes. That's been around since real estate was invented 150 years ago. But that's not what real estate is today. Real estate today is high tech. Lars understands that. He's one of the few coaches, I think, that actually understands that we're living in a digital world and we have to pay attention to that. But it's also hard numbers. I mean, it's accountability. You've got to hold your agents accountable to systems and to you and to themselves.

And the cool thing is, and I'll kind of chime in there, pick up on that, there's actually two levels of accountability. So Damon touched on it. Where most real estate agents come into the business. I mean, the people that are attracted to me and what I do, they're true entrepreneurs. So they're really, really good at doing, getting into it, but then they're on to the next thing. So it's. We call it chasing squirrels or being distracted by shiny objects. And that's the one level of accountability. It's like, dude, you don't need. I've used this one thing for my whole career. I could run my business on flashcards if I needed to stop looking for the replacement for this. Or what am I going to do when this thing, when something else new comes out? Because then you're constantly never picking up the momentum. You're never really dialing in systems. Then the next level of accountability is obviously for your staff and your agents and for everyone to understand that when you generate a lead, there's a real buyer, even though it's an Internet lead, there's a real buyer on the other.

Side of the computer.

And don't burn the leads, don't cherry pick the leads thinking that they're not good. Work every lead as if it was a closing and that'll drive your conversions up. I think one thing, I mean, Damon, you were cursing me at the time, but when I had you go through your expenses and tie them to closings, you were able to cut out quite a bit of expense, especially a couple radio stations that weren't performing. You found, I think, one or two that were really good and then one or two that were pretty bad. Tell everyone about that experience and how eye opening it was to kind of go through your expenses and track it down to closings.

Well, the amazing thing is we've always done a good job of knowing where the lead came from. And that's about as far as it went. I actually thought I was pretty good because I could tell my talent on the radio. I could tell them exactly how many leads they brought in. And for whatever reason, there was a disconnect from there to how many dollars I made from that lead. And when we sat down, because we were in four radio stations at the time and I was spending probably right at 10,000amonth on four stations. And when we sat down and looked at the return on investment and broke each station down, like you said, I had one station that I was on that I had zero ROI. I had another one that I was less than 1% ROI. And then I had one, my country station that I was at 5.3 ROI. And then my easy listening, I was at a 2.1 ROI. And so when it came down to just dollars and cents, we cut two stations immediately. We already used to spending the money. So we rolled that over to the country that was giving us the 5.3 ROI. We doubled down on that. And now we're seeing almost a 7 to 1 ROI. So it's one thing to have numbers, it's another thing to analyze numbers. And you know, with Lars and his stupid little spreadsheet, that annoyed me. It was very easy to analyze the numbers because you just. It was plug and play. And that's, that's the form that when I saw it, I wanted it so bad. But it's not just that. Mars. I'll touch on it. When we sat down and we were going through where I was spending money, you asked me about Vulcan 7. And I don't know if you remember, but I said, yeah, my ISA is killing on Vulcan 7. And you said, give me the password. And you went there and she hadn't logged on in a month. She hadn't even logged on to Vulcan 7 in a month. And here's something I'm paying $250 for. And that goes back to the accountability. I mean, Lars held me accountable to myself so that I could hold my people accountable to me. And it was, that was not a fun conversation for my ISA because she told me she was doing a good job. And so that's the kind of thing that when you have somebody that got your back and that's helping to watch you, it does help you be more.

Accountable what would you say are that couple of things that you're working on right now? Damon, let me ask you this. What are your goals here next year? Where do you want to be one year from now?

Well, my goal this year, as Lars very well knows, is super aggressive. We did over 200. Just over 200 deals last year, which, when I was 100% REO, we did 122. We did a 180 at the very end of the year and went from 122reo deals to just over 200 deals. Didn't miss a lick. My goal this year is 400 sales. Lars says that's extremely aggressive. He has me down for like 330, 340. But if I set a goal, I'm gonna hit it. So my goal this year is 400 sales. And then this is our growing year. This is gonna be our painful year. Cause we're expanding very quickly, which means I'm gonna spend more time training, whatnot. But we're gonna do 400 deals this year, and next year, 2015, we'll do 1,000 deals.

So what is. What is Lars working with you on right now? What are your two biggest challenges to hitting that that Lars is helping you with?

Well, the biggest thing Lars helps him with. And just to be blatantly honest, Lars doesn't hunt. Okay. But if Lars hunted, he'd have the nicest gun in the world because he shoots my squirrels like it's his job. I mean, every time I hear about this new system that's just going to be the greatest in the world, I'll call him or I'll text him, I'll email him. I. I'll be about, what do you think about this? And he's like, squirrel, quit getting distracted. And that's always been my weak link, I guess, is I see a shiny new object that somebody's talking about, and I want to go do that, because that's got to be easier than the basics. It's got to be more successful than the basics. And so that's probably as dumb as it sounds. That's probably one of the number one things. But the other thing is getting my agents into a rhythm and into a system. Lars has his seller system so ironed out. Everybody concentrates on buyers, and you hear about buyer leads and buyer leads, and everybody wants to buy more buyer leads. What most agents don't realize is that buyer leads all come from listings. If you don't have the listings, you're not going to have the buyer leads. When I Met with Lars, and this is embarrassing, but when I met with Lars, he asked us what our how much business we got from sphere of influence and past clients. And out of 200 sales, I can't remember Lars, it was either six or seven sales. Lars is like 30% at a sphere and past clients, which is why we hired Hiral. But we were at like 4, which is what, 2%? It's embarrassing. Sign calls, our sign calls. We sold eight houses from sign call. I think Lars sells 70 something from signed calls. We had no tracking or accountable for that. That's what we put into place. We're still tracking that. We're getting harder on it on our agents because most agents, most independent agents, if they get two or three signed calls a month, they're going to sell a house from that because they're going to get those two or three calls and they're going to dog them to death because they're not getting any more leads. We at these large teams have gotten so adept and so good at getting leads that we have to train our people, both our seller agents and our buyer agents, to actually work those leads in a competent manner to turn them. And that's the biggest challenge that we have. And I think that's the biggest thing that Lars and I work on is making sure that we train our people and hold them accountable to those leads. Because we're paying thousands and thousands of dollars every month to get the phone to ring or to get the email to come in. But those leads have to be handled like it's the last one you're ever going to get. And that's the major accountability sessions that I think that we're working on.

Lars, do you have any questions? We got about two minutes left for Damon here.

No, I mean, one thing I'll add too. I mean, Damon, and I say this with love, he is like a bull in a china shop. There's one part of what I think we've worked a little bit on too as well. And when I first got into real estate, not only did I have sales experience, but I also, it took me several years to learn how to approach people and teach why accountability is important and do it in a way where they understand it and how it's going to benefit them. So that's another sort of angle that we work on as well. You know, what does Damon need to bring to his team? And the bull in the china shop is great and it's going to serve you well. You will get to your thousand goal, but to get there and to enlist.

The help of others.

We work on that as well. But Damon, I can't say enough good things about you just kicking ass, taking names. And I have no doubt that you're going to get to not only a thousand transactions, but you're going to have. You're going to know your numbers. You should see my new tracker. You're going to love it. I've got this amazing tracker that will track every bit of your business. But yeah, you're going to get there. You're going to know your numbers, you're going to be profitable. Then every person you talk to on any of the Facebook groups you associate yourself with. So that's the thing that all these, all these agents are out there saying, this is working, that's working. But unless you see their bank account and you see their P and L, you know, you don't know anything about anything that they're talking about. So. I just have so much respect for you, Damon, and just appreciate you letting me into your life.

I appreciate it, Lars. And just so you know, Lars, I haven't had a chance to tell you, moving out of this office. We just today inked a deal on one two and a half times bigger. $500 less a month than I own it. There you go.

Put that credit card away.

Throw it out there.

How should someone get ahold of you, Lars?

You can check me out on the web. Larisheadenborg.com I've got inner circle sort of online training. I've got the consulting that we're talking about here and I've also got B school, real estate, business school. So I've got that coming out as well. So Definitely check out Larsheadenborg.com Great.

Damon, thanks a lot for your kind comments today and being on the interview.

No problem. Thank you.

Thanks. All.