How to Build a 7-Figure Annual Income Pillar With Your Database w/ Kerby Skurat — PART 2

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 it 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 gotta do the work. What's up real estate business builders? If you missed last week's training, last week's episode, make sure you go back one, because today is part two of how to build a even multiple seven figure income pillar out of your database. While not the sexiest things in thing in the world, this is the foundational Legion lever that we focus on in our million dollar agent method program. So. So if you know you need another step in your journey, once you get through this training, Kirby will tell you more about their experience and their growth journey. But if it resonates with you and you struggle with implementation, go to milliondollaragentmethod.com and all you can do is watch a 7 minute video there and book in a strategy session. There's no obligation whatsoever, but it will allow you to really dig into your business, see what's possible and if working with us makes sense, we'll talk about it. If it doesn't make sense, it's totally fine as well. So enjoy this part two and we'll see you on the other side.

Warren again. He's kind of sad about my results, but he's doing okay himself. So Kirby, what's cold marketing? So what is cold marketing and what do you guys do for cold marketing? And I will tell you guys, we have tested everything under the sun, but I'm going to show you Billboard Radio, Zillow, does that work? And, and Lars, I don't know exactly where you stand on cold marketing and what you do. You have any opinions that you would prefer I don't share because I can kind of.

No, I mean one of the questions, you know, how do you take cold to warm? You know, so anything, you know, if you don't have the database and the touch system set up, don't do anything cold, you know, like getting a VA in the Philippines or you know, getting this, you know, funnel system that someone's building that's working great and none of that stuff is going to capture Mega Roi over time. Because you don't have the 1350% thing running at a high level. So that's where like, agents are just spending all this money on all of this stuff. You know, we cut out a lot of that stuff.

Yeah.

Because we have this other, you know.

Right.

Everything else is just to create warm, warm leads. Right. And, and to build the database. And most agents don't actually do the work of, you know, if I sat an agent down for two weeks straight and all you could do is build a database of varying degrees of people that know, know you, like you, and trust you, that exercise over two weeks would be worth more to you than watching all the webinars and researching all the shiny stuff that just doesn't work without question.

And so my, my whole thing is, you know, you look at billboards like, oh, yeah, I got billboards, I got radio, I got Zillow, I got ppc. Doesn't. Doesn't that stuff work? And so I want to show you guys, like, our results and what we've done. Because ultimately, when you look at 1350 on the ROI, the reason that, that we are that I believe you use cold marketing. Use cold marketing to fill your database for more SOI marketing opportunities and referrals. That's why you use cold marketing. You want to do it profitably. But ultimately your cold marketing fills your database. Your cold marketing becomes met, and then met become the nurtures, the watch like the thing that Lars kind of teaches in the big picture database prospecting training that he does. And, and I think that your whole goal for cold is to fill the database and continue to drive the ROI on your, on your, your warm market. So this is commission zinc since we've started tracking 420. So every buck we spent after agent pay, we made about $4 and 20 cents. This is Hands down our best, our best lead source when it comes to cold marketing. And the reason it works is because we work it and we've consistently driven results from it by working the full marketing buyer consultation process, where we do buyer counseling interviews or listing presentations. But you have to follow that process and you have to, you have to make sure that you're consistent with one strategy. And so I would say first get the SOI working and then, you know, expires and fis wells are probably the next cheapest. If you're really good at prospecting, if you're starting to look at cold lead generation where you're going to spend some money. We've, we've found a lot of success with PPC and working PPC and these are the numbers that we've gotten since 2015 on our PPC. This is Sierra. We just launched in 2022. We're trying to get this one live because it allows us to expand a little bit as we have more agents. We need another platform. Not great numbers yet, but an ROI is zero. But it takes a while to mature this database and the truth is we probably have too many leads. So I think that that's one problem that as we launched this we kind of went crazy on our leads and these numbers are not impressive. I, I, these numbers, I like these numbers. I'm not exactly excited about gls. If you're not in gls, I would highly recommend figuring this one out. ROI is super high on this one. Pay per click. PPC is pay per click. For those in the chat there, GLS is, is great and then expires. We're not, we're not super strong on expireds. We, we, you know, admittedly just haven't made a lot of focus around that. I would, I, I would say that it's probably for me, when I started, I never got after it. I felt like buyer lead generation and how we were coached before we met Lars was the, the PPC game was what we did. And so we started that and we got good at it. We just kept that pillar going on and we stuck with it. And you can see that the PPC has worked pretty well for us. This is our just listed, just sold stuff portal. So I was spending in this zone right here in 2017 and 2018. I was spending about 250 grand a year and the ROI was, was not great. We were selling homes. But you, if you don't track your numbers and look at the true profitability of the lead source, you can spend a lot of money on stuff and not make any money. And I would say that Zillow is probably the, Unless you're on Flex, there's an argument for Flex, but if you're not, if you're spending money on Zillow, my gut says if you truly looked at your actual, your actual return on investment on Zillow, you wouldn't be making any money. And we found that to be the case. And now I'm spending nothing on them, spending nothing on realtor.com and spending nothing on homes.com. we have had success with it in the past as far as sales and leads and all that goes. But it's a very expensive lead source to fill your database with. And so if I was going to pick how Do I want to fill my database for more ROI on the warm marketing? I would start with expireds. I would go to PPC once you master expireds and then I would just stick with those and I would recruit agents that to basically do those two campaigns and go deep on those. Those two campaigns is your full lead generation, you know, focus. And then I would look at maybe, maybe adding others, but you probably don't need to. Depending on the size of your market, you're probably totally fine with a really solid SOI campaign, a really solid expired mailing and calling campaign, and then go on to PPC as a way to grow your buyer agent team. But that's, that's really what I would focus on. I keep it simple. We've had a really good farm marketing campaign over the years as far as the consistency of being able to send out. We send out a Discover pubs newspaper to 21,000 homes. But the ROI isn't great. It's fine, it's not great. It gets listings, but it's not a phenomenal roi. And I share these because I want you guys to see like I've got the proof to show where the leads come from, where the sets come from, where the Mets come from, where the money gets spent. And these are real numbers that just make this stuff up. We've been tracking for a decade and I think it's important to understand like where do you make the most money for your marketing dollars? It's, it's going to be your sphere. And sign calls another one. They're, they're unpredictable because it's all based on listings and Lars has a great system for it and we haven't done a great job at making this a huge conversion thing for us over the years. But sign calls is another one where you want to have them out there. You want to use the sign call marketing as best you can. But this is where we probably as a team have failed a little bit too in terms of just being able to return the investment on the sign calls. Builder accounts. This is another sphere, in my opinion. It's not part of our sphere tracking, but this is a great way to build your business if you're looking to, to be able to kind of expand a little bit. Builders have been builders, investors have been good for us over the years. And then radio, this is my ROI on radio, spent 834 grand on radio. And I was spending a lot of money here in 2019 and I was getting leads, but it wasn't profitable. It wasn't even with a Average split of paying out 24%. It just was not a profitable lead source in high volume. And so ultimately I think that I've got a lot of data to show what works and what doesn't for our team and our market. Now we're in Minneapolis, Twin Cities and it just gives you perspective. And so I think that when I, when I look at all this billboard. We did have some billboards, you know, you see if you kind of like the follow me industry that we live in. And so I'm like, oh, I'm. I'm in a, a market where there's a gorilla that has a ton of billboards up. I better throw some billboards up. Doesn't pay a dime. I would have rather had kept that 623 or I would have rather invested that 623 more into PPC or more into my sphere to get more referrals and, and you know, kind of grow it that way. But again, all this tracking is, is what big picture our team has done. So before I go into some, some tactical on how you can use it from, for your agents, I just wanted to, to open it up for questions. Are there any questions on this stuff or do you want me to keep going, Lars?

Yeah, I've got a. You can definitely keep going. But what was I. The, the interesting thing you said is that some of your failed, quote unquote, failed lead sources could be someone's like main cold lead source that they used to put into the warm bucket, like expired FSBOs. You guys just haven't. It's not your personality. It wasn't my personality, so that wouldn't have been the thing. I was more like you where I was able to put some systems in place and get some of the home search leads working early on in the journey. But you need to really like massively, massively commit to that one thing and making it work.

Yeah.

So you guys being good at pay per click, right?

A.

It's a basically a forced registration home search lead. Getting good at that is hard. It will take you 24 months to get really good at it.

Absolutely.

And then maybe another 12 months to delegate a piece of it. Like agents are still thinking like pay per click, give me your thing, I'm going to run and it's going to produce and then I'm on to the next thing. Like, it's not this mindset of, okay, over the next 10 years, this is what your business could look like if you stick to one lead source for 10 years.

Yep.

So that we just See that over and over and over again. That, that the most successful business people are just willing to do the boring things over like every month you send out that quote unquote stupid newsletter. Like are you ever like, oh my gosh, I gotta, you know, you probably don't write any articles anymore, but you probably get to a point like I have to write another state of the market article for this. You know, you know, you want to get to that point in your marketing where it's the same stuff over and.

Over and over again. And I think the one thing that's interesting about people think you need to create new stuff all the time with the, with the sphere. You don't. You just need to make it a little bit more interesting or a little twist to it. But you got to be consistent. I think consistency is going to be the key. And I just. One thing I did want to share about the ROIs here. So once we convert a sale. So these 863 homes that we've sold with commissions in that, that lead source now gets updated as a sphere because we're going to, we're going to count that as a sphere. So a lot of those past client sales that you're seeing, those were grown from our Commissions Inc. Database. And how we track that is that because we're following up and consistently nurturing our database, Commissions Inc. Isn't going to get credit for that three or four or five years of follow up. That's me because I go into all kinds. We, I don't go into listings anymore, but our team goes into listings where we are working with somebody else's past client. And the reason we're working with somebody else's past client is because that agent didn't follow up and have a strong database. They didn't do the things that are required to be consistent with their database and to drive the ROI that we drive. And so they go onto websites and they type in, in our Minneapolis Home Viewer website they'll type in, you know, Plymouth homes for sale. And now somebody else's past client is my past client by way of Commissions Inc. Because they didn't have the database campaign that we have. So I just want to kind of show that the results here are literally first sale results on any cold stuff. And then the past client marketing is, is the, the. Those people that get converted into our database and then we call them Casey Past Clients or SOI for. For our tracking purpose. So that's kind of just one distinction I wanted to make. All right, so let's see so somebody said, is your, your PPC conversion is 8 to it? No. So I'm going to go into the ppc. Our. Where was it? So somebody asked about this. Our average, our PPC, the lead to met is 6.3. But the, the 8, it's like 863 divided by 76, 000, whatever that is. 863 divided by 76, 000. So it's like 1.1% is the, the actual lead to sale over the course of this lead source. And so we track lead to, we track lead to met and then we track met to written percentages. And so if I'm, if I get a hundred leads, I'm going to actually meet with six of them. And if I meet with 10, you know, just to kind of give you round numbers, I'm going to sell about two of them. A house that's on this lead source. That's how this tracking all plays out. And I'm not saying 1.1 is good. I'm saying 1.1 is the reality of what we've done. We can increase that. I'm sure that if we had fewer leads, we would actually probably see both of those, all those numbers increase. But that's just the realistic numbers of where we're at today. So, application wise, how do you build a sphere? So this is Nikki McCain. She's now a sales manager, but one of our, one of our agents on our team that's been with us for I think about four, three or four years now. And so Nikki, at our last quarterly, I, I was gonna just kind of show how she looks at sphere because this is a great tool for your agents to use. I think what I just talked about is team leader, people that are trying to build teams or people that want to build teams, you want to think about the stuff that I just shared about. But how do you, from an application perspective, how do you grow your soi? So Nikki shared very practically, how do we think about and expand our soi? And she shared it from a team perspective. So she said, myth about soi, your soi is just your friends and family and your SI will contact you when they're ready to buy or sell. False. Those are both false statements. Especially if you're on a team. Your soi is everyone that is not a team lead. So you and you have to work your soi like any other lead source to see it grow. If you don't put the effort into your sphere of influence, it's not going to grow. If you're like all send them a mailer, you know. No, it's making those birthday calls. It's making those house anniversary calls. It's consistently touching base with your soi, inviting them to events and then having dialogue with them at the event. So you can say, hey, how are things going? Build that relationship and go deeper. Family occupation. Yeah.

Can you, can you slow down, down on that a second? So let's rewind to when it was just Kirby and Christina.

Yeah.

Talk about Christina's tactic. For three years, she was all over your Facebook page. She shared this last time she presented. She still calls her database.

Yep.

Birthdays still at this point, when you guys are. You have multiple businesses, you know, there's no real reason she needs to do it except it's a discipline that she owns a piece of this larger database and she's committed to doing the work that you ask of your. Your agents. Right. So go through like, the tactics of this stuff where. Yeah, building a database one contact at a time. And like, what are the three or four things you guys do that you can't outsource, you can't set it and forget it.

So I think initially the build out of the database, I mean, we used. What we used when we started was our wedding. Our wedding mailing list. You know, so if you've got that kind of pulled together, that was like 1.0. Like, what's the list that you have? And if you don't have that, you're not married, you're single or whatever. Just use, use a spreadsheet and write down everybody that you know or look at your phone and write down everybody that you know and just go into it tactically and write that list out and start with a list of 100. Just challenge yourself to get to 100 and build that list. And then get the emails if you've got them. Scrub your Gmail or your Outlook or whatever you use and scrub it and see if you get that email and then start to make some. Some outbound, ideally dials to kind of go over family, occupation, recreation, dreams, and then just simply say, hey, you know, I'm updating my database. I want to make sure we get your, your. Your birthday. We like to send out birthday. Birthday cards and to get your birthday so I can have it in my database, in my records and send you a little, little note on. On your birthday. Is that something you'd be. Be cool with? Very few people, very few people are ever going to say no to that. And those, those that, that kind of get a Little bit put off by it. So what it is, what it is, right? That's how sales works. You get some rejection once in a while. But ultimately that's how we built it initially is we would do that. And then we also scrubbed Facebook. Every time there was a birthday, send a private message and then just say, hey, I'd love to send you a quick note. You know, I'm kind of old school. How can I. How can I, you know, send you an encouraging note? Can I get your address? You know, that's. It's very simple tactic, but we built it that way. And then obviously, when you add cold, you have their name, their phone number, and their. Their new address that they're purchasing in your database or even if they're relocating out of state. You know, we. We still had people that were great past clients. We have people all over the US And I'm. I want to figure out why you're not in our database anymore, Lars. That is weird. But we still have people all over the US that are in our database that we send paper copies to and our emails to. So. So I'd say tactically, that's how you build it. That's how you initially build the list. If you're just getting started out, but making sure that you get that any met, anybody that you've had substantive contact with, get them in your database and start sending them stuff, that's kind of the big picture. So awesome. All right, so then this is Nikki, though. She's thinking about how do I grow my database as a member of a team. And so this is how she did it. Brainstorm a list of all your contacts, categorize them into groups, create new lead sources, and then leverage existing relationships. So very, very tactical here. This is really, really good stuff. And so this is what she put together, which is my SOI categories. And she's listing the numbers of transactions or people that she's engaged with. And so I'm just going to go through each one because I think it's important. So traditional soi, this would be your. Your family, your friends, her listings, open houses, other agents, repeat clients, referrals from clients. This is what she actually closed over the last, I think, 24 months. So this is just her traditional soi. This is not our KCSY. Then she's got a real estate contact, so her inspector, her insurance person, her lender. She's got a really good relationship with her lender, Title business, Networking International. She's part of the Minneapolis Chamber, and then shows kind of like what's future or closed. These are, these are the ones that she's tracking towards. She's also involved in volunteering. So Healing Haiti is a non profit. She's a part of. And then future she's got, you know, kind of like she lists out how many are active actually closed and how many are future here. And then she's involved in her church again. Hope Ridge is another one. Food shell she's involved with different past church she was a part of. And then we've got previous work. So she was an attorney and just lists out that kind of stuff. So these are categories that you can use mentally to, to kind of give yourself. Whether you're involved at church or volunteer. I mean it might be something totally unrelated to that. Then she's got service providers, she's got. This is a funny one. So Willow is her dog. She actually goes out walking in the neighborhood or the dog park and she's attributing for herself kind of like, how would I meet people? And one of the ways she meets people is her dog Willow. And then Bennett is one of her kids and Natalie is one of her kids. And then she's a member of a couple of gyms. And so when you think about this right here, there is. If you can't relate to this in some way, shape or form, you shouldn't be in real estate. Just, just hang it up, no joke. Like this is how you make money in real estate is through helping people that like you. That's how you make money in real estate. And all these people that she's meeting with that you have the same relationships, the same networks, every single person can meet people through these relationships and you can help them. That's the goal, right? And so that's how she looks at it and then how she does it. So regular communication, refer. So she takes advantage of our 33 touch. She just puts her list in there and then they get our stuff, they get invited to the invites. But she, she goes above and beyond with all her people where she calls and she emails and she sends out more, you know, like the events page. She'll send them to RSVP for our pizza event. And as a team leader, we pay for that. And that's cool. Like that's just how it works. But this is how she's leveraging the team to grow her sphere. So all of your agents could do this same thing, right? And then I think the, the key there is the transparent one. Just relationships are built on trust. And I think if people are like, hey, don't put me on your list. Don't put them on your list. That simple. But you got an ask to get. And so that's one of the things that she put in this spreadsheet is like, you just gotta ask and just make sure that they know you just wanted to give them valuable advice about real estate and be a resource, not pushy. If you want anything ever, I'm very willing to help. Just call me, I'm available. And very few people are going to say, I don't want your stuff. They're going to be like, oh, that sounds great. Thanks so much. That's typically how the conversations go. And then nurturing. So you, you do have to keep the bottom point in mind. So don't give up too quickly. Everything takes time. That whole 33Touch campaign that was built with the end game, I, I never imagined that we'd be selling. When I started this, Christina, our, our goal, my goal and Christina's goal. When we first got into business, we were like, man, our big, hairy, audacious goal would be to sell 100 homes a year. That would be like, if we could, if we could make it in 20 years, that would be what we would be all excited about. And we've so far exceeded their expectations. But it's because we were patient. Right. And so I think that that's where being patient and consistently putting your time, effort and energy into nurturing these is so key. And so I'm just going to basically wrap it up and say, if anybody has questions, I'm available.

Yeah, we, I've got a couple questions that I'll, I'll go through and then we're going to hit the coach mastermind. And I do think it's like, I, I, I don't know if I mentioned this to you, Kirby, but I've sat in the sales seat in B school for about four months or so. So I did about, and this is recently October, November, December, January, February, half of February. So I did about 150 strategy sessions. And across the board, everyone is just chasing the stuff that is just being sold to them. Yeah, nobody is doing this, right? Like, nobody is actually going through the painful process of sitting down with your cell phone, looking at social media, your contacts in your cell phone, opening your Gmail, using a spreadsheet like the one I posted in the chat and just building a database and then every day adding a couple, three, four, five people to it and taking some time to put a. Some sort of valuable touch program in place. Nobody spends any time on this or even talks about it. And what at this point it's a multiple seven figure pillar in your business, right?

Yep.

So multiple seven figure pillar. There's nothing that's close. Most lead sources are declining to Michael's. Michael made a point. It's interesting on some of those lead sources, you know over the last three to five years most of them have declined.

Yeah. Six 693 homes sold last year and 437 of them were. Were attributed to of influencer pass by marketing.

Yeah. And, and, and still agents are going to look for another thing. Right. So I think you could only have like one or two maybe other things besides this soi war marketing database obsession and it's just not. You were actually one that coined the phrase, you know, in an industry that wants, you know, French fries and rock concerts.

Yeah.

B school is salads and green juice.

It is. I mean but I agree. And, and, but I think that to the point that everybody wants to have a easier business and so, but they're listening to marketers and marketers do not help you get stuff easier. Like and just truth be told, if you put, if you do one thing at B school and you. And the one thing is you figure out how to get through influence marketing marketing working for you and you follow the buyer met and the listing met process. I don't know what you call them now, but just those two things. And you put all those mets in this database and you consistently do the database over and over and over. Your return on investment for B school will be unbelievably high and then your business will be stable and sustainable and your consistency with your business will be stable and sustainable. So yeah, there's no magic pill. It's just doing the hard work and putting in the reps, you know.

Yeah. Awesome. All right brother, appreciate you. Thanks as always for giving back to our community. Really, really powerful stuff. All right, so hopefully you enjoyed part two of our seven figure income pillar training with Kirby Screwat. His journey is unbelievably awesome. And when I look back on his journey it's one of like just total systems running the business. Their business is truly a system of systems and that's our approach in real estate B school. But most agents struggle with systems. If that's you go to million dollar agent method.com and book in a strategy session, there's no obligation whatsoever. But we can rip apart your business in a good way and find out if this is something that you'll benefit from. It's a 90 day implementation program. It's not a forever ongoing coaching program like the other programs out there. This program is in a sea of its own in terms of focusing on implementation first and foremost. So go to million dollaragentmethod.com and we'll see you on the next training.