How to Build a 7-Figure Annual Income Pillar With Your Database w/ Kerby Skurat

The real estate industry has failed to create a clear path to time and money freedom. Having helped over 5,000 families in my real estate career and coached thousands of agents to scale their businesses, I know what works and what doesn't. And my goal on this podcast is to share all with you the good, bad and ugly of building a highly lucrative lifestyle business so you can focus on what truly matters in life. You won't find any hype or fluff on this show, just real world tactics and strategies that get results. You just got to do the work.

Welcome back. Real estate business builders. This is going to be an awesome training. This is Kirby Screwrat going through his multiple seven figure income pillar and how you can start, you know, wherever you are, step by step how to build a database out in a way and sort of add value along the way where you can just generate at scale business from people that know, like and trust you in the process to get people from not knowing you, not liking you, not trusting you to be in that pool of what we call your Met database and folks that know like and trust you and they're going to refer business to you. Their journey, Kirby and Christina is unbelievably awesome and he'll tell you you more about the journey. They do over 7 million GCI at this point. When Christina joined Kirby, I think he did like 13 deals before she joined him and he's a systems wizard. Christina is amazing at sales processes and loving and serving her teammates and it's just an awesome story, awesome journey. And while we don't work on the sexiest things at real estate B school, these are the foundational systems that will have you doing multiple six figures of gci, if not seven figures of of GCI from your database. And that's the first Legion lever that we help you install in our million dollar agent method. Go to milliondollaragentmethod.com if you know you want to take another step with us. There is no obligation. It is a conversation about your business, where you are now, where you want to be in the future and if we can help you get there, we'll have a conversation about it. So enjoy this. Part one. We're going to break it up into two parts because it's quite a lengthy training. So this is part one and we'll see on the other side. All right Kirby, so start us off with like a couple minutes on your background. Like the story of how you sucked at life and business before your wife kind of joined you. The 13 sides you left the you were like doing manual labor in a, in a mill somewhere. So start with like the two minute version of that story and then the, that the last three or four years and kind of what you have built, that'll kind of set the stage for it. And then I'm just going to let you roll with it.

Okay. Can you hear me better? Is this better?

Yeah, that's better.

Okay, cool. Yeah. So I got into real estate. Well, I started, came down to the Twin Cities from a small town of 223people. The mill that Lars is talking about. I worked at chicken plant when I was 12 years old and worked there for a while until I graduated, went to college in Hamlin, worked at General Mills for two and a half years, and then in 2008, at the very bottom, transitioned into residential real, first commercial real estate for a year. It was really no different than the corporate handcuffs of corporate America. And it was like, I need to get out of here. I'm an entrepreneur. Lars hears a lot about that just in his journey through that. Corporate was not his GM. And so Residential Real Estate 2008 took my first short sale listing, $113,000 in Minneapolis. And and then from there we just built and built and built. And so that first year, 13 sales, second year, 21, third year, 27. And then my wife, we got married and she was working at a job she didn't like. And I said, hey, I'm either getting busy enough, I have to hire some help, or if you want to come and help me do some marketing and just get your license, you should do that. And so she did. And then we doubled, and then we doubled again. And so Christina is really the secret to us. And I don't know why Lars didn't have her come on and talk because she's the one that has the true horsepower. But, you know, it's been a journey. And we now have a team of about 80. Did 693 sides last year, 265 pending and sold so far this year. So we're pacing to 750, which is our goal. And I'll share some numbers with you guys on all that stuff. Since we gotten, since I started tracking in, in 2015. I'm almost a decade into my tracking journey, which I'll share some numbers on today. We've generated 122,000 leads. We've set several thousand appointments. We've sold I think 5,000 homes. And so I've got some, some definite wisdom to share as far as just learning scar tissue and the Hard knocks of the real estate journey and I'm going to go over some of that today. But the heartbeat of our business has really been our sphere of influence and that's what Larry's asked me to come out and talk about. So I'm going to talk in deep detail about our sphere of influence and how amazing that's been for us over the last 6, 16, 17 years in business now. So you want me to go into my pres. Lars or what are you hoping?

Yeah, 100%. The thing that, and the reason I had had Kirby come on here is that he's, he's sort of like. He thinks in terms of systems and, and scalability. So similar to the way I, I saw. You know, if I'm gonna put something into my business, it needs to be good for like a whole bunch of transactions. I just didn't want a complicated business. And for the most part because I was on your physical mailing list for a long time until you took me off for some reason, I don't know why, I must have done something wrong when I, I stopped getting the curb appeal.

I. We still. I'll go over it, but I'm surprised that you're not on there.

Yeah, I mean, I guess I didn't buy a house from you or refer anyone to you, but you guys have done the same thing like within about 80, 90% the same database program for all the years and you just kept treating it like super valuable. I remember when Christina shared the story of she would mine Facebook friends on their birthdays and build the database manually. And a lot of like every contact was gener like contact in the database was generated via a little bit of effort. Either they close a transaction which is a massive amount of effort, or you've sort of like nurtured some online relationship to get them into the database and you know, turn them into, into a referral source. So I just. The consistency of it is, is I think the most beautiful part. So that's, that's really what I want to. And I want people to adopt this mindset that just because you're. You only did four transactions in the last 12 months from Soi Sphere of Influence or database marketing. This is. Could quite literally be a seven figure income pillar annual in your business. Right. It might take you 6, 7, 10 years to get there, but that's what it could be worth if you focus on it as such. So the stage is yours.

All right, man. Well, yeah, so thanks for having me on just a little bit about my journey here. So Grew up in west central Minnesota, trailer house, worked at the chicken plant. First typo of the presentation. Sorry about that. Went to Hamlin and played baseball. Studied social studies and business. Got recruited by General Mills out of Hamlin, making 42 grand a year which was cool. That was in 2006. 7. Then I got into residential or commercial real estate with Jones Lang La Salle, now called JLL. And 2008, like I said, jumped into residential 13 sales my first year, Mary Christina in 2009 and then in 2010 she partnered with me. This is our family from this year and you had me on in 2020. So I wanted to show the, the side by side here. My youngest daughter has hair. My you know, second youngest daughter can see, she got glasses. My other daughter has teeth now which is cool. So this kind of was fun to go down memory lane and that is awesome. To the kid who's the, the wild.

Child on Christina's hip in the first picture is yeah, he's still wild, looking better.

He's going down a little bit, but yeah. So this is my business journey. So started as a residential real estate like I said. Then I got into home building and remodeling. Did 7 million my final year which is 2019 and I sold that. I was actually part of the team here for a minute about a year or so. Coaching clients. Had 20 direct clients working with Stacy and Lars. It was awesome. But just with all the other demands it didn't, it didn't end up being something I could sustain. So I've been on these a couple of times now to be able to help teach. I started Cove, my building company and from 2020 to 2023 built 50 homes and did 10 flips. And now just starting to get into some wholesaling and some contract automation stuff with a couple other businesses. This is what our real estate team looks like today. It used to just be the very two people at the top, Christina and I. And now we have, you know, operations, sales, we have marketing, we have ops, we have ISAs, we have a training manager. Our team is kind of structured in this way. I'm not saying that this is real estate B school how they teach it, but I will say that it work, it works for us and it's something that we've used to scale. We have 36 full time agents. It's broken out into a pod model and, and just big picture, this is how our, our team operates. Our goal this year is 750. We want to get 45 right people, right seed agents on the team. And so that's kind of the game plan of how we structure and how we build. And we do a quarterly update every, every quarter and talk through this with our team and show them where they fit, how they fit. And we hire and fire based on core values. Very peer to what we teach at the OS and what we work with. So since I started tracking in 2015, this show is GCI. So we've been. Our goal was 42 million. We're at 45 million. Just big picture. This is net profit. So in the last 10 years we've done 8.4 million. 18 profit. Neither Christina. I actually stopped selling about 2. I was a coach by large right about here in 2015, 2016 and I got out of production and then Christina got out of production right about here. And so you can see that you can still run a high volume, high net profit business without having yourself being in production. And so if you follow real estate, B school and what it teaches, I assure you these results are doable. As long as you keep listening to Lars and Stacy and what they teach, you're going to get there. It's just a matter of time. And you will, you will succeed following their path and following what they teach. And so this is our solds from 2015 to 2023. By year you can kind of see we're at 4800 pending and sold as far as sold now through 2023. And we've never changed our goals. So when we set a goal, we don't change it. So you can see the years we've had dips or we've been off and years we've been ahead. But since we started planning our goals, we're at 97% a goal. And then this is the big one that I think is pretty cool. So this is written, written at 97% are met. We've had 14,401 mets, 102% a goal. And sets are at basically 21,000 set appointments, 1.6 billion in revenue. So big picture. And then this is the one I was talking about earlier. Since I started tracking, we've generated 122,000 leads. Our lead to met is about 12.3. Set to met 65 met to written 33%. And our average sale price has averaged at 332 average GCI and a percentage basis. The splits to our, you know, so large teaches a profitability model. Keep your, your gross profit in the right range and that's our gross profit and then gross profit post commission. So it's about 30 million. And then we've spent 6.6 million on marketing. And the ROI here is three and a half percent or 33.30% ROI across all of the platforms that we've wasted money on. Complete losers and the ones where we've just crushed it. But right now I'm here to talk mainly about how you can get this ROI to the highest level possible. That's ultimately what it comes down to, is your investment in marketing is, is, is the thing that will drive your business forward. And the consistency to drive your marketing into SOI will cause your business to be sustainable no matter what happens. When the rates go way down, when the rates go way up, the consistency around your sphere of influence marketing will cause you to have a profitable, stable business. And so the, the goal today is to really help you see the ROI that your sphere of influence will, will pay you. And so I just want to ask you guys, anybody know who this is? You can throw it in the chat. So this, this is Warren Buffett. If, if you don't know. Yeah, there you go. So Warren's returns annually. So I did a little bit of, of Internet research. It could be wrong, but basically he's averaged about 10% and the world thinks he's amazing. I can show you how to return 1000% on your investment year after year after year after year. And Warren wants to know how I'm able to do this. And, and I'm going to show you guys. Warm marketing is the key. So your, your met your past clients, all those people. If you put warm marketing to work for you, you will return 1000%. And so this is my sphere of influence since 2015. It shows the leads, and this includes Agent Soi and our current RSI. It shows how many people we've put into our database. It shows how many people we've met and set how many we've written from our database. It shows the average sale price and then it shows I. Of the 6.6 million, I've only invested 960,000 of that 6.6 million in warm marketing. But my gross profit after paying my agents was $13.9 million. 1,350% ROI on that, that warm marketing. And the reason I want to just kind of share this with you guys is it is so important to invest in your warm marketing, to put that money back into your business year after year after year. It's just the key to a sustainable and profitable business. And I know Lars and Stacy talk about that, but nothing comes close to the warm marketing results. And, and I did show Warren these figures and, and he was really bummed. He, he, he just about started. He's like, how did I miss that? How is, how is Kirby so smart? I was getting 10%. He's getting 1350. And so I want to show you guys a little bit of how we do that. So this is my sphere only. So I only like Christina and my sphere since we started. Laura shared how we got them in there. We've only had an added 1837 people from our sphere into our database over the years. Right. These are the people that are in our sphere. And we're making quite a bit of cash on the people that we've added to our database. Now our past clients, they're outside of that number. But this is just the sphere marketing that we've done. And just on our sphere, this is Casey only, not our agents. I'll talk about our agents in a second. But we've sold 1300 homes, 9.4 million. And it's on that same 960 investment. And so the ROI is obviously pretty, pretty strong. And then this shows my agents that we brought on the team and they've added a lot of people to our database too and their mets and they're. They're written. This is supposed to be like 1306. I think it's cut off a little bit there average sale price. But the gross profit that I've made off the agents and obviously our split's a little bit lower. We pay a little bit higher split on their sphere. But that's still four and a half million bucks that came into the hopper of gross profit after paying agents out. And the marketing cost to. To do that was. Was zero. We attributed all to this 960. So we send it. There's their past clients as well and we invite them to the events and stuff. But this is showing you kind of how the breakdown is between us and between the agents that we've got. And we've tracked that since 2015. How do we do it? So 33Touch one newsletter, one email a month. We have five events a year. We have a social media strategy that's pretty consistent. And we have the birthdays. And so we, we go into. This is our newsletter. It goes out every single month. We just had the state of the market but we're always using our newsletter to talk about the next event or thank people coming to the. Who are coming to the previous event. And so the front of this one was, hey, you should come. And this One is thanks for coming. Right. And so it's kind of like the open and the close, and we're always marketing and inviting to events and that gets people to come out. For our. Our share the love event we had at our office, we bought take and bake pizzas, three buck chuck wine, and we had 680 people drive through our parking lot to get pizzas. And the fact that another 3,000 were invited, they. They appreciate that invite. They may not have come, but they appreciate the invite. And it's the reason they keep coming back and keep referring and, you know, it's the thing that pays dividends year after year. The inside of our newsletter, this kind of shows how we prepare for the spring market. Hot new listings. And we're always kind of, you know, given a little bit of a testimonial for one of our agents. Great way to promote that. The other thing is want to go in and show the calendar so how we plan for all this stuff. So this is what we use for our planning. And we've been doing this. This is 600, 767 rows deep right now. You guys can still see my screen, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So previous years. But basically every single month we're looking at like, what's coming up and we're planning for. For the year and we're putting in like, kind of what are we going to do for our email newsletter? What's the event? What's the newsletter going to have? Top line. And then that's what we use to just kind of like have our marketing team look at and plan the events when the, the dates are going to hit, all that kind of stuff. So it allows us to be able to say, okay, what's the schedule date, what's the hit date? What was it? You know, and just really simplistically go through. You don't need some fancy software. This spreadsheet works totally fine. And then with our event planning, we put the budgets together, kind of looks like this, collect the RSVPs, you know, it looks like this. So at our 2023 PIE event, we had 811 people RSVP for apple or pumpkin pies. We had some vendor offset on that. We got the coffee, got the pies at Costco, got the coffee, cost 13 grand. And I'm pretty sure that our vendors, because we laced a sticker for our mortgage officer on there, they covered the entire cost. We put, you know, event sponsor on pretty much every event we do. And it's just a great way for them to get a Little advertising. And a lot of the times they're giving the pie to their past clients too. So it's a great way to make these events almost zero cost outside of our team to get the. To be able to put it together. But it's, again, that's kind of how our events work. And we're always marketing the events and kind of working through that. So.

And Kirby, go back a second. When you talk warm marketing, we had a question about how would you define warm marketing?

What do you mean by that? So your. Your 33 touch campaign, I would call that warm marketing. Anytime you sell a house, those. Those clients from Commissions Inc. Or Zillow or expired canceled sign calls, all those people go into that database and all those people now get that warm marketing campaign and they get invited to all these events and they get notices what's happening, and that's kind of what I would call warm marketing. So I talk a little bit in a minute about how you still want to be profitable with your cold marketing and track that and I'll show some tracking on the other campaigns that we do, whether it's Sync or Sierra or whatever. But you're always trying to buy cold marketing to fill your warm marketing campaign and drive people back to, you know, refer you know, you more, like you more and trust you more, because then you become that expert that they're going to give business to and they're going to repeat, be a repeat client for. And so that's what warm marketing is. And it really consists of this, like the war. Every. Every single person that's in our database, that. Not. Not the. Then it's the Mets and beyond. So if we've met with them or sold them a house and beyond, they go into our warm marketing campaign. And then we're using the notice of default or notice of address change notice of address change records to update and scrub our database on a monthly basis. So every time we send our list to our mail carrier, they send us back a list that says, hey, these people moved or whatever. And, you know, we'd have our client care team follow up and check in and be like, hey, why don't you use this? Sucks to hear sometimes that feedback. But it's just a great way to continue to keep the list clean. And so I would say that a lot of people think that mailing is dead. I think mailing's the best it's ever been because so many people believe, you know, they're. I'm a contrarian when it comes to mail. I just, I think that putting something in people's mailboxes is really cool. And I think that that's one of the reasons we have such success. So does that answer your question?

Yep.

Okay, cool. So this is our events page. If you go to kc events.com you can see what we've got out there. Just shows like, we have different events on our page. We've done fun runs in the past. We do the great pie giveaway. We have a Saints barbecue. Last year, we had a thousand people out to the minor league baseball game and provided the barbecue lunch. That's. That's a pretty big expense. But it's really fun to be able to invite all those people out. They bring their families, everybody's happy. And again, we have our, our partners help cover or completely cover the cost of that event. And so when you think about the, the warm marketing and the cost to have these events, it can be heavily offset by your vendors. And they're happy to do it because they show up and shake hands and they're. They're able to be able to have a little booth or a little bit of collateral to be able to, you know. Yeah. Here's an example. Casey events page. So photos with Santa, That's a cheap one. Rent a little room at a hotel, throw out some donuts and coffee and invite people, right. Like about three or four weeks before the event. Hire a photographer for 300 bucks. And people come with their families. And we do have a coloring contest for the kids, but you kind of just rent the, the cheapest hotel room you can find and, and kind of set up a fake motif. And it's just a great way to, to get people out. And, and there's nothing to do in Minnesota in December anyway. So it's another great, great, great reason to have people out. But this is kind of our, you know, our big picture of what we're doing from an events perspective. So six big ones a year now, again, I'm going back into, you know, doing the same thing. Works. We, we have not changed. We've maybe made alterations or tweaks. We've gotten better. But when you look at the ROI on these campaigns, like, it just works over and over. And continuing to drive cold leads to get to Mets, and then the, the. The focus on getting those Mets to become clients and ultimately raving fans. I mean, that's what Lars and Stacy in the group teach. It's really important to kind of see that. So Warren Buffet says my favorite folding period for one of the stocks that he's purchasing is Forever. Remember, Warren's only getting a 10% return on investment. My favorite database mailing campaign is forever. And so I just want to make sure that the, the emphasis around why do you do this? It's because you're getting an ROI on that and everybody's like, oh, I need to find the next shiny object with what is it? What's the next thing that's going to be the cool new, you know, lead source. And it's like there is only one lead source that will pay you over and over and over at the level of these, this one pays you and it's your SOI campaign. So, um, big picture, the importance of having this as the foundation of your business. It's like you can't, you can't miss this one. It's just the most, in my opinion, the most important thing to have in your business.

So I hope you enjoyed part one of how to build a seven figure income pillar. The only thing I have to offer you if you know you need to take that next step in your business, is jump on a business growth strategy session. Just go to million dollaragentmethod.com give you all the details there. There's a seven minute video you can watch and if it resonates with you and you struggle with implementation, the Million Dollar Agent method is only a 90 day program where we implement all the lead gen levels, levers, all the appointment processes, all of the sales and consultation frameworks. And if you need leverage around client care, showing agents or administrators or buyer agents, that's in there as well and you get lifetime access. It's the coolest thing ever. So but your next step is not to buy into that program, it's just to have a conversation with us. So go to milliondollaragentmethod.com and we'll see you on the other side.