Identifying Talent for Your Team - the DISC Assessment

You have you ever missed the mark when hiring a real estate agent to your team? This is one of the things in my business growth journey that I have failed over and over and over and over with. And the system we have now is the best that we've ever had to identify talent, to get them interested in joining our team and to get them onboarded and making money for themselves and the team as quickly as possible. And it has been every bit of, at this point, 13 years in my journey to figure out all the things that we've done wrong and to remedy all those things so we increase our chances of success in hiring sales folks onto our team. I was preparing for a training to our members internally today. Every Wednesday we do a training and the training for today as I'm recording this video is need an agent? Start here. So it's the entire process that you need to follow to attract folks into your world to just the interview process, the ads you'll run, the position agreement, the expectations interview, the accountability around it, you know, how to onboard them the right way, the offer letter, like everything you could possibly. The assessments we run, how to do the assessments, all of it. Even just marketing around recruiting. And so all that is happening today. And there was one part of it that brought up just a lot of emotion for me. Not like crying emotion, but just a reminder of the mistakes I've made in hiring. And every time I made a mistake in hiring, like, you know, you bring someone into your world and you think it's going to be great and it's not great. And then you're like, man, what happened? I put into a list. The list was as long as nine or ten sort of things to look for in a candidate. And I boil it down to six things at this point. And this was, you know, when I went from a solo agent in 2008 doing 44 transactions to the next year's. The first year I hired an agent was late in 2009. He did four sides. I did 54 sides. Roughly then, 2009, I hired a couple, no, 2010, I hired two or three more agents. We went from 58 to 118. And I think I only hired one more administrator. And I think one agent, probably one or two agents, didn't work out. I added one or two and went to 178 transactions. Then that next year, 2012, I was getting out of production along the way And I did one of the 248 transactions we did. So in all of those years, I failed more in this area. And this list of six things are just blood, sweat and tears in terms of the things I hope you never have to experience. And so let me share my screen, I'm going to show you what I'm going to go through here on our training. Let me share here. Yeah, so this should be good. So if you listen to this on the podcast you may want to jump over to YouTube or I'm going to go through it anyway. So there's nothing, nothing, nothing really to do. So this, this is a nice eloquent way to present all of the things that I have done wrong in hiring in my real estate business. And so these six things have a lot baked into them. So number one thing to look for if you want to have someone that is going to succeed in a sales position on your real estate team is that they need to be the primary income earner or their family needs their income and they want to make more than $100,000. So if you do a disc profile that has a values index, if you don't know that is, it's a deeper dive training. But the values index of disc assessments basically says if they're motivated, if they're economic high or economic low and you need them to be off the charts economic motivated and they have to need the money and want the money. And so I've made a lot of mistakes of I had a great agent join my team in 2010. Yeah, 2010, good agent, over 10 years in the business and she didn't need to make money. And so she was, I think she was mid-50s, sort of a typical real estate agent. Like at that time the average real estate agent was a 57 year old female. I don't think she was 57, I think she was in her 50s and second income. And so she didn't need the money so she wasn't willing to do the work required to be successful. And to, you know, it was just constant sort of excuses and dragging her along. So that's number one. Number two is that they're going to adhere to the system and that includes accountability, includes new business development, which is prospecting. You know, in order to be successful in real estate you have to have a system. If your sole agent, like if you're a solopreneur and you don't have a team, you still need a system, you still need accountability and you still need to focus on new business development or prospecting every day, sometimes five to six hours a day. If you have nothing else going on and you need accountability around that, you have to have a system, you know, by which everything operates and so a high performing real estate team. So my real estate team at this point is really highly coordinated. Everything is done at a high level. Our sales folks only do the 20% of activities that get them, the 80% of results that make them money. We have a lot of leverage, a lot of systems, a lot of technologies, marketing, all that is handled for them. So they have to want to be part of a system. Actually number three is that they have to want to be part of a team and not do their own thing. Let me back up to number two. I have hired plenty of agents that they just weren't willing to be accountable and they, they didn't want to focus on new business development. Like they didn't think that was the job. People get their license and they don't realize that it's a sales job. Any sales job has a component of new business development associated with it in any industry. This is not specific to real estate. Somehow we, we invite people onto our team and we're not clear with them that it's a hard job and you've got to focus on new business development and all that stuff. Number three, they want to be part of team and not do their own thing. I've hired agents that secretly, they were just using the team as a stepping stone. In theory, that's okay, right? In theory, that's okay. One of our business coaches today was on my real estate team. And when he joined my real estate team, I knew that he was going to eventually want to do his own thing. He was just a hard charging, entrepreneurial mindset, growth oriented type guy. Dan Jones, he did almost 300 transactions last year he left my team and he did 60 for a couple of, couple years. And I've worked with him for the last four or five years in, in our ecosystem in real estate B school. For the most part though you, you're going to fight an agent. If they want to do their own thing, they're going to want to do their own branding. They're going to want to have their own review page. They're going to want to their name on a yard sign. They're going to want to. We're not building businesses like that. We're building a real estate business that doesn't. If any name is attached to anything, it's your name. My name is not even on the real estate business anymore. It's high performance real estate advisors. Right. So and that's built internally and externally. You need folks that want to be part Of a team. And they see a team as a benefit in the crazy market that we're in right now. Not the market, just with the shift storm with technology, consumers, business model and an economic shift at some point is going to hit or a housing shift of some kind. So they really want to be part of a team. And you can ask questions about that. Right? Were they a swimmer? No. Were they? Yeah. Were they a swimmer in college or were they, you know, a basketball player? You know, there's questions in the interview process that you can identify. Uh, number four is a record of achievement and they can demonstrate it. This one, if you go to YouTube and you Google relationship advice. Steven Furtick. S T E V E N and his last name is Furtick. F U R T I C K. He's my pastor for 10 plus years now. He started a church that was super small and he's built this amazing megachurch which. No comment on mega churches. In some ways it's really great. In some ways it's super challenging because there's a lack of community. Put that all aside. Watch that. It's like a minute or two video where he goes into patterns versus potential. You do not want to hire someone for potential. In the video, he talks about women, you know, loving on and wanting to be with men that have no pattern of achievement or success or no pattern of being a solid guy who's responsible. You know, they've got debt, they've got porn addictions, they've got like all this stuff. But they see the potential in them. And so we don't ever want to hire for potential. It's only pattern. Patterns and patterns. You can ask questions about. You can go through and ask questions about, you know, tell me about, you know, this job specifically. What did you do here? Tell me about in college when you worked two jobs while you got a dual degree, right? What's your pattern of achievement? Or am I just hoping you're gonna, you're gonna do this job at a high level? I have hired on potential more than probably any anything. And it is so easy to slip into because you wanna believe that the person is telling you what they're telling you is going to come true. And it doesn't. You have to find the patterns of this person. They're not going to change when they join your team. You have to find their patterns, right? So in the interview process, you need to find those patterns. Number five, they're driven for more, so they want more for their life. One of our core values on my real estate team is we have a growth mindset. So folks that join our team, you know, they have to want to grow. They. A question here in the interview process is like, tell me the last three books you read, what you thought of them, why you read them. Give me examples of how you're growing in different areas of your life. If they're married, tell me how you approach marriage. You know, how are you doing to grow in your marriage? How are you doing to grow in your faith? Right. Tactical things, they can show you a pattern of growth. And number six is no personal drama. They have to be a culture fit. They have to have a great attitude. It's another one of our core values. We bring a positive attitude and the personal drama. That stuff is going to come into your world real fast. You need to figure out if their spouse, dinner with their spouse is part of our interview process. You need to figure out if their spouse is on board with this real estate career and if their spouse is crazy and what their spouse thinks of this whole thing. And the reference check, right, you need to make sure that the reference check, you go super deep in the process. So those are six things that I have learned over the years that have been eye opening. You know, I've never been one to back down from a challenge and the failures and the trip ups and the struggles I've had with bringing people into our world. There have been times where I wondered, man, is all this failure and bringing people on worth it? Because you're not only taking on additional responsibility and time, you're investing in this person, you're also convincing them to change everything they're doing and join your, your team and become part of your vision to grow a real estate team that's going to do things differently. And so it's a big, it's a big responsibility. They're stopping everything and joining you and now you have to invest in them. And that could be, you could have systems built out and leverage and training and a cadence and you know, hopefully you've got that stuff built out. So it's a big deal when you get someone to come on your team and you need to make sure it's the right person that they're worth investing in. Bottom line, they have to be worth investing in. So hopefully that was really, really helpful. I have story after story after story. I think I'm, I hate to say, probably easily over 100 folks have come into my world that are not in my world currently. And that's not a proud statement because I've learned everything I've learned a lot along the way. And part of it is that, you know, in, you know, since 2007, there's just been a lot of opportunity. A lot of salespeople are just looking, you know, a lot of them were just mistakes, and a lot of them are just looking for an easy way to achieve at a high level. And it's not possible in any market, is it possible in any sales position, in any vertical, it's really hard to be successful. And so a lot of times we just want to believe that real estate is somehow different, and it's not different. So you have to look at, like, what is a top salesperson? What do they look like? What do they sound like? What do they, you know, as you're kind of going through the interview process and even the marketing process for your. For your recruiting. So hopefully this was helpful if you're at the point in your journey where, you know, you want this growth, you want to build something bigger than yourself, you want to not only make more money and have more time off and reduce your stress, you just want to have an impact in people's lives. You want to have an impact, bigger impact in your community, you know, more clients to serve. What I can offer you is a conversation about your business. You can click on the link, or if you're listening to a podcast version of this, go to realestatebschool.com and there's an Apply now button where we can just have a conversation. It's called a free business growth strategy session where we'll talk about what. What your business looks like today, what you want it to look like in the future, what kind of growth you want, and then what's holding you back and how do we fill those gaps? So. Realestatebschool.com or click on the link on this page to apply for a business growth strategy session. There's a few questions that you'll answer. My team will jump on it and schedule a chat with you. So be good. We'll talk to you soon.