How to Create a Customer Service Experience That Puts You in a League of One w/Kerby Skurat and Cristina Edelstein-Skurat

This is Real Estate Team Builders and I'm your host, Lars Hedinborg, the founder of Real Estate B School. The real estate team building world is driven by big egos who boast about how many homes they've sold or how much GCI they've earned. We don't hear much about their low profit margins, the long hours they put in each week, or the unbearable stress they endure. In fact, I've discovered that most real estate teams are losing money when you consider the amount of personal production their owners must do to make ends meet. I believe that if you want to profitably scale your real estate team without working crazy hours, enduring unhealthy levels of stress, or coming up short at home, then thinking like a business owner, building sustainable systems and empowering your team are absolute musts. You won't find any smoke and mirrors or hype here on my podcast, just the real world tools, systems and strategies that work. So if you struggle to balance growing your real estate business with focusing on the areas of life that truly matter, then this show is for you.

Welcome back to Real Estate Team Builders. This is really, really special for me just because I've known Kirby and Christina, it feels like for a long time I've just watched your guys journey and your guys, like just you achieve at such a high level consistently. Where it really was like this organic growth engine in your business is that you guys just provide a service that is unparalleled in your market, probably in the country. So these guys are out of Twin C, Minnesota and $268 million of volume and I think 49% repeat and referral or about half repeat and referral. 7.7 million GCI, 777 sides in 2020. So we were saying like, for sure God is speaking something into this business at this moment with all the sevens. Like, I know seven is a number of completion in the Bible, so I was suggesting that you guys should just hang it up and. And be done, but I don't think God has that has that in your sights. But guys, give us a quick intro of like, just the quick backstory we want to focus on. Like, how does this even possible? You guys have achieved something that I've seen very few people do in our entire industry. And so maybe Kirby, break it down with an intro and tell the story of how you were really just not. Not really putting it together until Christina joined you. Like, just tell that whole story for us.

So. Thanks, Lars. It was. It' been. It's been a long time. It's over a Decade that we've. We've known you, which is cool. And I would say to kind of give a brief intro. Grew up in a small town in west central Minnesota. Came down to Hamlin to liberal arts College in St. Paul. And right after Hamlin, I was recruited to work at General Mills, the company of champions, which the golden handcuffs became a reality for me. No offense to those that work it in corporate, but for me, it just wasn't for me. It wasn't my jam. And so after two and a half years there, I was like, hey, the market is free falling. It's 2008 and now is a great time to just basically say, I don't need this college degree and this amazing job and I'm going to get into residential real estate. And my dad, I called my dad and I told him and he literally thought I, like, I should be checked in. And so that was interesting. But I decided that residential real estate was for me. And so in 2008, started selling and first year I did 13 homes. I started in March and that first year was 13, and then 24. And then Christina and I had met. 2008, 2009, she went to Africa and did economic development work for a year. We dated long distance. And I flew over, proposed surprise her, brought her back, and she and I got married in 2009. She had a corporate job she wasn't happy with. She was in marketing. Marketing and communications. And I said, listen, I'm getting so busy that I have to either hire an assistant or you should come and join me. First year of marriage, which is most people were like, do you guys want to get divorced immediately? And. But we, we did it. And the first year that Christina joined me, So I went 13, 24, 27, Christina joins me and we go to 60. And we were like, dang, this is blowing up. And I'm like, yeah, it's because, you know, we got the pretty one now. And everybody's like, they want to work with us. So we decided that we needed some help. We hired our first assistant. We were like, oh, my gosh, 40k, we're going to hire an assistant. It's crazy. We were thinking like, you know, as one of our friends, we were thinking it was going to go sideways the next year. We did 121, 90, 154, 192, 256, then 340 and 449, 650, and now, you know, 777 last year. So that's kind of the long and the short of it. And really, it's come through, like you said, Lars, half of our business being repeat and referral. It's come through building a. You know, I read the red book in 2008 when I started. The 33 Touch has been the heartbeat and the lifeblood of our business ever since. And really then finding ways to take sharp guys like you and get good ideas into our business to scale through profitable systems. So that's kind of the long and.

The short of it, Christina. Unpack a little bit. You know, when you look at the journey, you know, and you plug into the business and you guys see what's possible with a little bit of leverage. You know, we talked about showing agents and the sales process and, you know, your raving fan sort of system. So we're going to unpack a lot of that. But first I have to tell just a story about one vivid memory I have of you, Christina. So you were. You guys are both just servants, hearts. And you just really, the reason you're so successful in business and your clients come back to you is because you serve them at a high level and your agents as well. And so you were presenting at a Revs intensive workshop, and I think you were like 11 months pregnant. I remember it was really pregnant. But also that year, like, you just had this personal mission for no other reason that you knew it was possible to sell like 150 homes personally. And you've since, like, totally systemized the business and you're out of production. But kind of with that introduction, kind of unpack, like, as you saw the critical pivot points and leverage points. Anything to add for the intro? For sure, but starting maybe with the. With the showing agents?

Yeah, I mean, I'll quite start there in the sense that when I joined Kirby, we were recently married. And then after. After a year or so of working together, we were pregnant with our first kid. And at that point, I was showing about 100 homes a week or a month. I'm sorry, but that's a lot for one person. At least 100 homes a month. And we doing all our own prospecting, calling our own leads, working everything, listing all our own homes. And so I remember telling her, I'm like, I don't know how I'm going to do this when I have. I can do it pregnant. You know, this baby's been in hundreds, if not thousands of homes, but how am I going to do it actually have the baby? You know, so he's like, I heard about this thing called showing agents. We should just try it. Which was really mind blowing. In 2012, nobody was doing it. We'd heard about it from one other team somewhere. And I will put a plug into that. Networking with other people is the best way to grow and get really good ideas. Curving and I love to copy Preneur as Kirby says. And so we don't need to come up with our own ideas. We just take what works. And so honestly, it took a lot of courage because in an industry where especially back then, people saw the agent as the sole person who did everything. Like somehow you were magically supposed to be a people person, a numbers person, a stager and a photographer. And so we slowly, honestly from there started finding experts in different areas on our team. So we started with the showing agents, which is a complete game changer. And I was super highly recommend establishing that in anybody that's wanting to grow their own business because what it did is it elevated us, at least to the point where instead of running around, we were negotiating or closing clients and the rest of our time we could spend hiring people, starting to train them or develop them. We definitely started without having a clue what we were doing. And you know, we look back and sometimes we, we giggle at how immature we were and the way that we tried to manage people and things like that. And thankfully we've learned a lot along the way now. And one of the biggest things I'd say there is hiring better people than us in every way that we can. We don't want to be the smartest people in the room. And so, you know, slowly as we've hired people and developed them, I think that the heart of a leader has to be there, of really caring. I think that that's one thing that makes our culture special and why people have stayed with us eight plus years is because they know we really care about them. In fact, our kind of thriving passion is we really want to help people thrive. That's it. That's why we get up and that. And so in our hiring and developing of people, where how do we help them become their best or if they're not the right people, out as quickly as they can so they can find somewhere they're going to thrive. So honestly, most of our leaders, well, actually all of our leaders started off as agents or some type of starting role and now they're the ones that do all the training and development, all the management, the people, all the hiring and recruiting. And there's so much better in it than Kirby and I could ever be.

So tell me when you were in like showing 100 homes a month and pregnant with your first. And was it the vision for growth that forced you to rethink the time you spent showing homes? Or was it like, hey, there are really good agents that can do this job, you know, better than I can for a lower compensation. Like, what was the mindset that the core belief around replacing yourself and showings? Because I think some agents are still like, how could anyone but me show a home? It's like, you know, so what, what was driving you there? The growth or the mindset or both?

I think Kirby might answer differently. For me personally, it was survival. Like, I could not maintain that pace, especially knowing that I was going to have a child. So that was my main first initial motivator. Kirby had to, you know, we had a lot of conversations, but work through. You don't actually have to be the one doing X just because you've done it. Other people can do it. Thankfully, we made a really good first hire because she was with us for four years. And so that made a difference because we had a good synergy. And then since then, you know, now I think our team has, I don't know, probably 12 showing agents. They're all part time, they work when they want, but it works so that all our agents have access to that. You have about 35, 40 agents or almost 35 agents right now. But we're hiring at a very quick pace. And so, but that made a big difference was just being able to, I mean, I did sit down, I trained. You have to train your showing agent how you think and how you want things done. And you have to be willing to train them. Sometimes I get feedback from my clients of, hey, you know, your showing agent was too opinionated on her personal taste on the house. My wife loved it. But then she said something I just, you have to go into the courage of leadership and have those conversations. Nobody intends to screw up in their job, but we don't let them know they can't get better. And so there were those conversations I had to have. I had to stop myself from being like, oh, it can't work to have showing agents because they're not me. Instead I have to develop these people to think and be like how we have always done it. So those were kind of good starting learning lessons. In the rest of the process towards hiring agents, developing agents. And how do you maintain the quality to develop raving fans?

Well, I mean, I think some of the teaching that you've experienced with Strategic Coach, you've obviously framed some folks in real estate B school around the idea of unique ability. And so for me, it was thinking about what is Christina's unique ability and how do I capitalize on that as much as I possibly can? Because hers is literally human interaction to get people to understand the value that we offer and bring them into our system to help them buy and sell houses and do it in a way that's a great fit for them and achieves their goals. It wasn't showing houses. Now there's somebody that's myopically programmed. Their individual perfect gifting is showing houses. They love it. They want to do it. They want to make the clients feel valued, heard, and get them in those houses as quickly as possible. And so I had to really think about what's Christina's highest dollar productive activity and figure out how I could get her to be able to do that more frequently. And she would agree that that was where her mindset was too. So focusing on the highest dollar productive activity was the thing that I found to be the most important. Not that showing houses is not. It's very important, but it's not Christina's highest and best. Right?

Yeah. And it's interesting, the last thing that you said, it's not that entering a listing into MLS or taking photos or producing marketing materials or showing homes or running a sign out or picking up a check, those things are critically important. But when you look at someone who's struggling to grow and scale business, they're doing all those things right. And there is someone. There are people in our markets created to sit in a pickup truck, and they love it. They're like, I get. I'm free. You know, I get to, you know, decide what my route is. House to house. Like the year. Tell us about the year you did 192 transactions because it was as lean as you possibly could do. 192 transactions. Right. Like the two of you and like one. One licensed assistant. Right.

And. And a showing agent by then.

Yeah, yeah. So. So. And I think that blows people's minds as well. Where you really. So you're. You're out of showings, but now were you guys split in sales? Christina, you're working with buyers, and Kirby, you're working with sellers. What was the dynamic of even that small unit that you guys had?

Yeah, it was primarily that. It was primarily Kirby doing listings and kind of the marketing side of it. And then I was doing the. All the prospecting, setting the appointments and that kind of stuff. And then the buyer side, our assistant helped us with all the listing management and all those Back end details of paperwork. And then our showing agent was one that showed all the houses. And maybe. Maybe then that year, we hired our first buyer's agent.

Yeah, we hired our first buyer. Our first buyer's agent that year. Ironically, it was when we were interviewing at the coffee shop.

We didn't have an office line.

We were at the coffee shop interviewing our showing agent, and this dude overheard us talking, and he's like, hey, are you guys in real estate? And we're like, yeah. He's like, I want to be in real estate. So then we had an interview with him, like, right after the interview with her, and hired him as our buyer's agent. So it was like, right out of the red book on how to hire perfectly, you know, so be like, oh.

You want to come join us?

Come on. It's going to be great.

Yeah, he's like. He was fresh out of college, no experience, nothing. No license. We're like, well, go get your license, and you got a spot, you know, so.

So. So you're out of showings. You guys are really trying to stay in each other's lanes. Showing agent, you've got someone that handles all the administrative stuff. You know, you and Kirby are in listings and buyers. But then the next step to go from. From that world is to sort of memorialize the sales processes. So talk about, like, what that looks like to really, like, okay, this is the way that we talk to people on the phone. We motivate them to come meet with us. This is what we present. Talk about, like, the. Maybe the thought process around building a sales system and then how you guys implemented it.

Well, I'll just say something, and Kirby can finish up. But a lot of the ladies that might be listening to this podcast might know a brand called Ever Eve for women's clothing. And if you don't, then bring your wife there. But they're. They're kind of nationwide now. But we. We had met the owners, and I remember one thing she said she was. She said that the reason. One of the reasons she was successful with her retail clothes, expensive women's clothes for the most part. And it's because she sat down and documented every little thing she did. Like how she held her coffee cup so that when people came in, it felt like they were coming home to a friend, how she would talk to people, and that's how she trained her people. So that's basically what we did. We sat down. Like, what is every detail that we do that we know? Because we do it, it becomes natural for you so you just do it. Right. But not everybody thinks about a detail like actually put your phone on, do not disturb, not just silent and it's still buzzing. That is a very unprofessional way to do a listing appointment. And then you have to shut off your phone and it distracts everybody. Right. So if you do every detail, you document that you train to it. So we've done that with our home buying consultation, our listing consultation, everything. How do you do comps, market analysis correctly, how to do follow ups? We have, you know, content calendar. Like, if you don't know what to say to the people that are warm nurturers, what do you say to them? So that it's not just the same question, are you ready to buy or sell? You know, so that's one end of it. I think that makes it very replicable and easy to train. And others can train it. Now we don't train it at all. Our team trains that. And then Kurba, I don't know if you want to talk about the CRM and kind of how we manage our systems on the back end.

Yeah. So I mean, the other thing that we did is, was Christina was at a high volume. We realized that the use of systems and technology was extremely critical. And whenever we would get stressed out, we would say, how can we do this simpler? Or how can we make this better? How can we systematize this specific thing so that we would end up with a really solid assistant? And then we started giving the assistant assistance, virtual assistants specifically. And we built a pretty cool, robust platform around that too. So the Lee. I always think about it from lead to lifetime. Like I want, you know, one of my early coaches said every, every real estate transaction, you get fired the day that house closes. But you got to visualize that every time they walk out of that, that meeting, they have an opportunity to be a referral partner, a sales force within your business. And there's likely $25,000 of additional income that could go into your business that's sitting there. If you stay in touch with them, if you invite them to your pie event, if you invite them to your pizza event, if you have a barbecue, if you continue to provide value, it's just a 33 touch on steroids. Something that I know you teach Lars at a high level. If that becomes the reality, the warm business is hard to miss. If you do it right. It really is. Because one, you got to care, two, you got to be proactive. And three, once you develop those two things, you can become an expert because you get so many at bats it's pretty easy to move down that path. But going back to the system, when Christina was in 156 transactions, it was her and Bonnie who's now our director of ops. And they just jammed them home and made it happen. But we were always thinking about how do we make this more efficient. And we were using doesn't matter what the CRM is, I'm not going to share what we use because it's not proprietary. It's really complicated in fact. And I wouldn't recommend building it on that. But we have stuck with the same thing for since 2009. And the reason that it works is because we've built it out, we use it. You don't need to like there is no magic pill when it comes to CRM. Realtor.com will work. Pipedrive will work. Chime will work. Commissions Inc. Will work. Salesforce will work. They will all work. Guess what doesn't work? When you don't use it, you don't build it out effectively. That's what doesn't work. And so if you think that your CRM is a problem, you're completely mistaken. It's you not taking the time to develop the systems into the CRM that you need to develop. Plain and simple.

Building a successful business at a certain point becomes really boring. Like you work hard in the beginning to get some momentum and build up the critical systems and then it's just like, don't mess it up. Or like in Kirby's case, like go start another business. Don't mess with this business. So what was I going to say? Yeah, and one thing and curb you had presented not too long ago. Being out of our world for a while and then just presenting kind of what your business is. I think most agents don't put the effort into building the systems for client care. And how do you drop the seed on the first phone call that they're going to be a client for life or we're going to ask you for referrals. And I'm sure you guys have integrated whatever it is you integrate throughout every part of the business. But you did it where now it's like what, 3, $3.7 million of GCI comes from people that are in the database. And most people don't treat their business like it could ever generate almost not automatically, but it can generate automatically a seven figure income. And when I saw you present your clients for life, your touch system, that son of a gun has been doing this like the newsletter, like we all want it to be like, okay, so what, like what, what's, what's new? It's like, no, it's not new.

There it is. Just came. Just hit the mailbox.

I used to be. I'll take offense. I used to be on your physical mailing list and somehow I dropped off. So I don't know why that is sad. I used to like read it and like study it in the market in Twin Cities. And it was really meaningful to me seeing how cold it looked, you know, in the, in the winter there.

You're just jealous.

But talk more. I don't know if there's anything else to add around that. Like, if you treat your client experience and the systems developed to be able to support a level of client care that is extraordinary, that's going to be the engine of your business.

Well, I think one of the things that I'm thinking about as you ask that question is setting up the systems only works to the extent that you use it. Right. And so one of the things that we do very intentionally is we have systems to monitor that. The systems are essentially used in the sense that what's the point of having a birthday reminder call if nobody's going to do. Doesn't matter. Even if I'm in San Diego on vacation, I try to make my calls no matter what, because that is one of the biggest sources of me getting the referrals or oh, by the way, we're thinking about moving in the next two years. And then guess what, you're meeting with them in the next month. And by you, I mean my team Now, I set it up for my team, but we're meeting with them and selling to have a house a year. You know, we're not passively waiting. So whether it's that or whether it's the home anniversary or whether it's their follow ups on people they've never sold to, we track all of that in our system. We can see how many days has it been since our agents updated the notes. And so our sales managers now hold them accountable to that because I think it's a natural thing for human beings. We naturally want to give ourselves credit for doing more than we actually do. Right. You hire a buyer agent, they tell and you're like, where are you at with getting appointments? Oh, I make hundreds of calls. And then you look and 12, it felt like 100 to them. So they're not lying in the sense that it feels like 100 to them, but you're going to get the results of 12, which is basically nothing versus hundreds, which is what it takes. Right. And so the accountability that we do and the hands on training helps them a lot. In fact, this morning I just had one of our new agents. She literally just got her license two weeks ago. No joke. I'm not even joking. So two weeks ago she was prospecting and she was telling me, man, I made so many calls that I was so discouraged and I almost stopped. But I finished making the number that I committed to, my very last one. They picked up. I was so shocked, I didn't even know what to do. But then she figured it out. She set a listing, appointment, listing and buyer appointment, and then obviously immediately calls her sales manager and trainer who goes with her to the appointment. They end up signing a $680,000 listing. And this girl literally just got her license.

Our average, our average price is 350, by the way.

So that's not our average price point. That's like nicer here. I mean, early for Twin Cities. So. But that only happens because she knows that we're training her and we're holding her accountable to actually hit her debt. Certain metrics that we know drive the business forward. 12 isn't going to get there. 99. Well, it's 100. That's going to get you consistently to the right traction, you know.

Yeah, that's, that's amazing. Yeah. And it is like, you know, we like to kid ourselves, you know, that. What's the expression? We judge others by what they actually do, but we judge ourselves by our intentions.

Yes.

And even as team leaders, you know, we see a lot of team leaders just bring people in and they're like, you do the work, I don't want to do it anymore. And I don't know if you have this in you as a personality trait, but I remember, I forget what you called like a buyer. Behaviors that work or something like essentially laying out the buyer. I mean, it was really like things you could tell. You had a living, breathing document of every situation that had happened more than three times in a six month period was in this training. So is that something that is naturally part of you or did you, again, you did it because you knew you were building something. A big business that can serve a lot of people. What made you do that?

Well, I think the discovery of that. There's probably a certain part that's natural in me, but I'm also always intentionally looking for opportunities. So I've trained myself to naturally take that. And the second portion is. Yes. I mean, obviously I've made a shift in My business development, you know, from where I first started, just surviving, trying to show more houses to where we're at now. So wanting it to be scalable and equip my people. But ultimately I trained people from the beginning. If you are prospecting, you have to look for a friend. So honestly, I believe that part of the reason why we're very successful and me personally, my secret sauce is I do every intention to treat people as friends. So if you treat a stranger like a friend, respectfully, right. Factor in, disc, talk to them how they want to, all that kind of stuff, you're going to do well. And so I wanted to document how do you do that, because it's not as natural for most people. Right. And then we're in Minnesota, right? People always joke about Minnesota, passive aggressive. And so people don't want to make anyone uncomfortable, blah, blah, blah. But there's a reason why people are attracted to someone that's friendly and they want to work with a social person that's a little more outgoing. People don't want to hire someone that's shy or quiet. They want to hire someone that's going to get their home sold. So if we can train some of these things, draw it out in them still being themselves. But that's so replicable. If you can get people to understand that and be that, yeah.

Awesome. All right, so I'm going to leave you with each with this last question, and I want you each to answer individually. So y' all are not the same people that you were back in the days where, like, Kirby, you were leaving the corporate job and Christina, you were coming back from mission work, and you're like, yeah, for sure. Let's do real estate. So what advice would you give yourself, like, early on in the journey, like, hey, Kirby, telling yourself, like, watch out for this. Like, you're going to come across this like a whole bunch of times. And like, this is how the advice you would give to your younger selves and it might relate, you know, almost to, like, Christina. You kind of just mentioned it, like you've had to become a different person, you know, as you. You led more people and you were wanting to impact more people. So what advice would you give yourself? And each of you can answer. I'm interested to hear the answer.

Do you want to go first, Gerber?

Sure. Yeah. So, I mean, like, we've obviously built something. I mean, I still sit back and I think back to, like, my first listing in northeast Minneapolis at a short sale that one of the guys in the office that I was at. Was too busy to take. And, you know, I remember working that through Wells Fargo and getting the deal done and just how exciting that was. And then to sit back and think about what we did last year while I'm running a different kind of partially running a different company. And it's just amazing to think of the growth and success that has happened. But I would say that the thing. And obviously somebody's listening to this podcast, they seek higher knowledge. I've always gone after and tried to find good, smart people that have been there before me. And this is not a plug for real estate B school. However, I believe that if you are not getting coaching, you are literally wasting money and time with your life. Like, that is a undeniable truth.

I couldn't agree more.

Wasting money and time purposefully. Like, you're literally. You're not even aware maybe, but you are literally wasting money by not spending money on coaching and personal development. It's like, without fail, the number one thing that has driven us from selling one house in Northeast Minneapolis to 7.7 and a very and large knows my financials a very strong net. Like, not 7.7. Oh, yeah, we don't make any money and we sell a bunch of houses. Not our business model. I don't have any interest in that. It's literally a very profitable business and we're using that to build other profitable businesses. And so, like. But the only reason that happened was because we, at some point along the journey, we're like, we don't. We're not so smart. Like, the pride, I think, gets in the way. Oh, I can figure it out myself.

Sure.

After 20 years, you might figure it out. Why don't you sidestep all the pain, anguish, and anxiety that comes along with not having a, you know, not having a trusted advisor that you can lean on and get the coaching that you need up front. I mean, I would have gone back in time. Like when we hired our first coach, which wasn't you, but you were in that same program, Lars. Like, it was probably three years into the journey before we did that. But once we did it, it was like lighting a fire under the business. I mean, literally, like, we were. We signed up for Tiger leads. I remember we were camping. We were kind of just so I agents at that point, doing 60 in that October, we were camping in northern Minnesota and we got our first Tiger lead. And Christina's like, what should I do? I'm like, we better call it. So we called the lead. And then, you know, hundreds of transactions. I mean, probably 600 transactions from commission Zinc later were, you know, it was smart to take the advice from that coach that said, hey, maybe you guys should sign up for Tiger Lead. Had we not gotten the advice from that coach, we wouldn't have 600 transactions, we wouldn't be sitting here. It's just like all that great advice that comes from guys like you and others in the industry. I mean, leaning on that has been the cornerstone of our success and development as business builders.

I think I was going to say something a lot with the coaching, but along with learning is pointless if you're not going to do something with it. And so you have to tie it to a committed action. One of the things I think I observe a lot in people is they feel like they didn't need to do everything. And so then either they get overwhelmed and don't do anything or they try to do it all and they fail at it all, which is more self defeating, right? So I think in all the coaching we have gotten, one of the things I have appreciated is, you know, very often in those having some measurable plan, like a long term vision, that feels scary, but somehow you can fathom achieving it with the right actions but always bringing it down. The things that you can do today, this quarter, this week and then following through on those really, because yeah, all the learning in the world isn't going to do anything. I think you have to decide who you want to be and where you want to go. I mean, we started off as we were, both grew up poor. When I quit my job to join them, I had all the benefits and stuff. So it was like I have to sell a house and by month four or work broke, you know, so I didn't care what it took, I was doing it. And then, you know, you fast forward to like hiring a showing agent. It took a lot of really hard work to get where we're at now. It's not like you just hire it and then it works out. So with our first child, I worked six days out of the week out of the home. Still, I don't look back at that with pride now. Was it what I had to do maybe to get here? I don't know. I honestly believe, like looking back now, I'm like, if I would have, if we would have made some strategic business decisions sooner, earlier with now what we know, I might have not had to burn through that. Now I take a full day off Mondays. I've been with the kids ever since. Our second daughter Mommy day is the best. But it Took a lot of intentional effort to get there and sacrifice to say no. Like, no, I'm going to pass this to my agent, this client. If they don't work with us, I have to be okay with that cost because I'm building something bigger and I'm going to train agents that my sphere and my friends and family want to work with. Right, too. But it's not, not flawless. We've lost people along the way, clients or whatever, and I really do believe that we're better leaders and our business is better. What we're providing for our clients and our agents is vastly better. But it sure does come with learning and growing and a commitment to do the work that it takes to get there.

Yeah, that's amazing. And we'll end with that. And I'll say if you're listening, and not that my journey was a straight line, but we've had hundreds of people sort of come through our world. Go to Real Estate Business Growth. Kind of outlines the six general stages of growth that you'll experience and all of this insanity that we seek to help you avoid some of the pitfalls. So realestatebusinessgrowth.com, kirby and Christina, you guys are amazing. I have really always just appreciated you and your journey, the way you've gone about it, and it's just been awesome to watch what you guys have done. In an industry that chases growth at all costs, you guys just haven't gone down that path and, you know, so it's been amazing. Goes without saying. If there's ever anything I could do for you guys, you just let me know. But I appreciate you guys.

Thank you.

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