How Kerby and Cristina Sold 549 Homes in a Single Year- Part 1

Hey, welcome back to the Business Freedom Podcast. This episode is going to be awesome. I dig into a business that I helped back in. I believe it was 2014 when Kirby Screwrat and his bride Christina came into my world and I was blessed to be able to work with them for a few years earlier on in their journey. The punchline of this is that they closed 549 homes last year. And it's just an awesome story. He got into the business on his own to begin with. Christina joined him and he spends about five hours a week now in his business. And Christina, his wife, is running that business for about 40 hours a week. Just an amazing story. And he lays out his journey in terms of how he was able to do the ascension. You know, we all want to sort of grow these businesses, but he breaks it down and we really break it down in a way where no matter where you are in your journey, there is profound wisdom that is spewed by Kirby in these sessions. So it's going to be two parts because it was a longer session. The only thing I ask is because this is a members only session that I'm bringing you into. This was at our virtual intensive workshop. I want to ask you for a favor. I want you to share this episode on social media and I want you to leave us a five star review. That is all I ask of you for getting an inside look into our world. And I promise you it'll be worth it. So much love and respect. Stay tuned. Kirby, I want you to start off and give like the one or two minute version of like your journey, what life was like back when we started working together. Just give them the quick snapshot of what you guys did last year so that everyone will pay attention and drop what they're doing and really listen to it to you. And then we'll kind of get into. We might have time for a couple topics. I really want you to spend a lot of time on how you're empowering your agents to increase their net worth, your team members, and then what you've kind of done in that area as well. So give us like the couple minute version of your journey.

Yeah. So is it more Q and A or do you want me to. I put together a presentation if you want me to go through that.

Yeah, just start off by just saying like where you started and what you did last year.

Yeah. So started in 2008 after a career in corporate America. Worked at General Mills and then Jones Lang lasalle after graduating college. And I just didn't really like the golden handcuffs that were paying me what they were paying me at that point in my life. And so I decided to jump ship. And in 2008, I started in residential real estate. And that first year, I sold 13 homes. And last year, after building the team with Christina over the course of the last, I guess, 12 years, last year we did 549 home sales. So it wasn't quite the profit that Lars wanted. But I'll definitely. I'll share a little bit about that too. And we can. We can chat more as the slides open up.

Yeah, for sure. So let's. Let's just get into it. You can definitely do your thing. I'll sort of shut up.

So it says somebody else is sharing. So I don't know if there's.

I'm probably sharing, unbeknownst to me. Let's. I think I'm probably just sharing. All right, hold on, let me. I was sharing my music. There you go. You should be good now.

Okay. All right, so I will put this in present mode. Can you guys all see the screen okay?

Yep, sure can.

All right, sweet. So this is my family. I grew up in west central Minnesota trailer house and started working the chicken plant when I was 12 years old. I put these slides together this morning. So I spelled plant wrong there. Apologize. Went to Hamline University, played baseball. Hamlin's a liberal arts college. After three and a half years, I finished early and started at General Mills, making $42,000 a year, which is what you want to do when your dad says go to school, get a job, spend 30 grand a year for private education, and make $40,000 a year as a business analyst at General Mills. So after about three and a half years there, I went on a fishing trip with a guy that worked at Jones Lang LaSalle, which is a commercial real estate firm. And I worked there for a year and then transitioned out of that after just realizing that it wasn't punching holes in Cheerios, but instead more golden handcuffs of corporate America jumped into residential real estate as the market was free falling. And I just started doing short sales and finding whatever I could to do. And I was chasing a girl named Christina at that point and ended up marrying her in 2009. And that was honestly the biggest sale of my life. She is amazing. And if any of you guys have the opportunity. She presented on the stage at a previous event, and I think it is one of the. We still reference it and use it as some of our training.

And she was 10 months pregnant. She was 10 months pregnant. At the time too.

Yeah, 10 months. Yep, exactly.

She sold like 400 homes that year.

She sold the most she ever sold in one year was 154. But she's an amazing salesperson. So if you have an opportunity to watch that video, I think it's in the real Estate B school archives. She joined me in 2010. And so it was 2008, 13 sales. 2009, 24, 2010, 27. And Christina joined me at the very end of 2010. And so we jumped to 60 in 2011. My business journey. So I started with Christina back in 2000. I guess I would call it 2008. I own a home building remodeling company as well. So I'm just in the. In the process of selling that. I was a coach with Stacy and Lars for Real Estate B school for a while and that was a really fun time. It was about a year of being part of this organization and getting to go to a couple events and I see some familiar faces on here. And I'm just launching a new building company called Cove Builders. So this is our last four years. So I'm a big numbers guy. I track it. I'm pretty transparent with it. So last year we did 4.6, almost 4.7 million. Top line, a net profit of 942,000. 20% net on 540 home sales. Net per sale was 1700. Our agent count at the end of the year was 22. So we were selling about 25 sales per agent. Some were at 70, some were at 5. But that's what we ended the year with. And we had six ISAs. So it's kind of our numbers. And you can kind of see we went from 2015 to 2019 from 2.5 to 4.6. And our net profit we had a couple years where I didn't listen to good advice and was spending more money on mass media than I should have been and righted the ship a little bit and got back on track in the last couple years. And so our net profit is back on track and I'm guessing we'll be in the 25% range this year. So this is our team structure. The goal for this year is 650 home sales. We have a visionary integrator. We run the EOS model, marketing lead, sales lead, training lead and ops lead. And then they all have people that report to them. From a names perspective. This is kind of how it looks and so gives you perspective of what our team structure is. And we have sales trainer that takes all New agents and onboards them and then they go into sales manager groups and each sales manager is paid a small override. And then Christina is a sales lead and so she, she's able to really work with those agents. And then we have our training lead who oversees the listing manager. We really believe a lot in ascension. So through the course of our business, we take people and put them in roles and then we ascend them up into leadership roles. So managers into leaders and team members into managers and so on and so forth. So today Lars asked me to talk a little bit about marketing. I have a cool tool that I want to talk about as well that I kind of stole from Tony Robbins. It's an agent productivity budgeting tool. And then at the end we'll just do some questions. So the first piece is the marketing. So what's working? SOI has been the heartbeat of our business since I started in 2008. And since 2015 we've sold a thousand homes, 1030 homes from our sphere of influence marketing. PPC is the next one, which is 395 sold since 2015. Zillow, which is the third pillar is 302. And then farm and radio, we've sold 313 since 2015. So those are the four kind of bigger paid pillars of our business. And I'll go into each one a little bit deeper. So this is Our number. Since 2014. I track set, met, written, sold and I look at the leads. Leads of the gray box. So since 2015 we've generated 56,000 leads. Our lead to met is 11% and our met to written is 35.3%. So it kind of shows you year over year what's happening. And then this is the SOI campaign. So the 4600 leads is kind of our database. That's all the people that are in our database. We've set 1300 appointments, met with 1200 people. We've written 1030 and our meta written, as you can kind of see there is kind of 80%. So how do I engage the SOI? And so we do a 33 touch, which is straight out of the red book. We do five events each year. We do some social media marketing and we reach out to our past clients for their birthday and their home anniversary. And so the big leader though is that 33 touch marketing. Every single month we send a four page newsletter. This goes out to about 4,000 people every single month. It's the front page. And this is our most recent one. So to our community we're in this together, it kind of addresses the COVID 19 and how we're handling that. This kind of does some money saving tips on the back page. Then inside we have our hot listings. And then just some ways that we've engaged with our clients. And this goes out every single month. This has paid us over a million dollars a year for the last five years. It's a great news, great way to engage with our clients. It's a great way to invite them to events. We also do an email newsletter. So it pretty much mimics our newsletter and takes the pieces right from it. And we put together some stuff and all this is clickable right to our website. Then we have our listings on there. Same thing, money saving tips. And then we always include something with our kids. So that's Chago and Millie doing their little cart thing there. So kind of fun to see that. And then our events. So our events page, if you go to kirbyandcristina.com events you can get a picture of that. Every year we have, I guess, six events. So our fun run was canceled because of the. The COVID thing. We're actually changing that to a Hope isn't canceled. We're giving away Hope isn't canceled signs and just having our agents drop those off in people's front yards. Kind of a cool way to do another event amidst the COVID 19 virus. So we just sent that email out. We're getting requests for people to literally have us put signs in their yards. You know, obviously we're wearing gloves, but it just says Hope isn't canceled. It's got some hearts on it. It was something that my daughter kind of came up somewhat with where she was making a little thing and we were talking about things that were canceled this year. And she's like, well, daddy, your mommy Hope isn't canceled. And so we kind of stole that from her and put that together. Our KC barbecue and Saints game hopefully is coming up. We do that every year. And then our great pie giveaway November photos with Santa Share the Love is our wine and pizza event. And then our state of the market address is basically every spring we invite our database and the city of Plymouth where we farm, we invite them out and we do a plated dinner and have them come out and hear us talk about the market. And that's always good for, you know, 10 to 20 sellers that are thinking about selling this year. And so that's our events campaign, social media. So that's one way we're kind of making it an impact.

Let me I'm stopped here for a second. So when you go through all of that, your 33 touch.

Yep.

The thing that could be lost in a guy that's now doing, you know, a husband, wife, team that's doing 500 plus sales is the fact that that was always the plan. Like, it didn't, like, somehow magically change or like you, you. You know, you can. The paper newsletter, because paper was going out of style. Like, the consistency that you've employed in that one pillar in your business is the reason it's so successful. It's not that you're not a great marketing mind. So I'm not trying to minimize that. It's more the consistency of it. It just is what it is.

Yeah. I mean, this, this 33 touch, if you're not doing it, you're literally wasting money on any other spend that you have in your business, in my opinion, you know.

Yeah, it's sort of like an obvious thing to say, but I just want to make sure everyone. There's not a whole lot of magic in business. Sometimes the things that get boring, we want to change, but they're the things that when you're like your sixth year into doing this and it goes from 200k GCI to 500k, then like in your ninth year, it goes from. It hits a million and then it's a million plus, you know, forever. And then the thing you guys did with birthdays in the early days, you know how you would. Christina would go into both of your Facebook profiles and she would. On everyone's birthday, she would message them and bring them into the database. So an active building of the database. Yeah, I don't want that to be missed in. You know, it's easy to watch a presentation like this and just miss that. This is the same thing you did when you sold a hundred homes.

Yeah. It's never changed. The only thing we've done is watched. Every time you watch your database climb, your bank account climbs, that's basically what happens. And if, you know, as we've looked at our marketing spend over the last month and a half here, and we've made significant cuts in certain areas, this will never be cut. I mean, this will print until we're done. It's just every single month. Because people know us, like us, and trust us, and it's back to the old school stuff that you teach Lars, which is the Dan Kennedy marketing. He's the godfather of the newsletter. And the newsletter is what will make money for you year after year and month after month. You know. So awesome.

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