People Are What Drive Performance & Profitability w/Jay Niblick Of Wizehire

All right, welcome back to the Business Freedom Podcast. Today's episode is going to be awesome. I can predict that with a high degree of confidence. My friend Jay Niblick has been in his area of expertise and I love guys that go super deep on one thing. And we were just chatting pre record and talking about the struggle that real estate team leaders induce upon themselves when they don't think of this thing like a business where the only thing we have to differentiate ourselves and to make our life worth living is the people we surround ourselves with. Jay, give us like a 60 second intro about your, you, what you do so we can kind of set the stage for our conversation today.

Oh, absolutely. I'm the founder and CEO of a company called Wisehire. So for those of you that aren't familiar with Wise Hire, we help. It's recruiting software basically, but it's a service, so we help small to medium sized business owners find the best talent. That's it. It's very holistic. It involves a whole lot of different things, not just software. It's not just posting jobs, not just personality assessments, but it's a very holistic approach that supports the philosophy we're talking about here today, which is the people are what drive performance, the people are what drive profitability. Period.

And so let's kind of format it this way. Let's think of the three things. If you had to sit someone down who's in the midst of a crap show in their real estate team or they're getting ready to go on this journey of building a real business that has a life outside of what they do. So they're not the rainmaker or the highest producer on the team and they surround themselves with a few agents. Let's say we're talking to somebody that's going to build a completely leveraged real estate team that's serving buyers and sellers at a high level and it doesn't involve the team leader on a day to day basis. And we haven't pre scripted this, so we're going to have to come up with the three on the fly. Let's come up with three things that you would just grab them by the shoulders and look into the eye sockets of their soul and say these are the three things that you must understand if you're on this journey and it sucks or you're going down this journey. What are those three things? Let's kind of lay it out.

All right, so let's see. Number one, we did kind of talk about casually, I say it all the time, all performance is generated between the ears. So it's just a way of saying it's about the people in the organization and who they are, what they're doing, how they think. This is a service related industry. I'm manufacturing something. You don't have the greatest new ip, that's your proprietary stuff that's locked up with, you know, patents and trademarks and stuff. Everybody out there knows how to do real estate. They all can go to the same types of schools. Everything that differentiates you, number one, it's about the people. And I'll say this to the people watching and listening. Ask yourself what makes you better than your competition? Is it the process alone? You know, and all these things support and help? Is it knowledge? Is it the books that you read that they didn't know existed? Is it, you know, knowledge that's out there that only you have private access to? No, it's you. It's your natural talents, your drive, your skills, your ability. So that's number one, realize it's the person and what's going on inside their head and their natural talents that's going to lead to success. Number two, you said it. I don't hate anything, but it bothers me when somebody comes in and we see they're hiring just to fill roles because they want to be the chief rainmaker and they just want to pass off all the stuff they hate to do to somebody else. If that's what you want to do, that's fine. But I love where Lars is going with this. If you want to really thrive, understand rule number two. You're starting a company that means you're becoming a leader of other people. You know, there's an old saying that says you don't want to be the employee. They're going to show up every day and do what somebody else tells them to do. You don't want to be the boss because the boss still has to show up every day and tell everybody what to do. You want to be the owner who shows up on Friday afternoon on the way to the beach and picks up the check. Now again, I love working in my business and doing it all day long, but that mentality is you want to build a business that's sustainable without you at the center of it. And that's rule number three. You and the natural talents are building a business, not just exporting things to a couple of contractors. And you want to remove yourself from the center of that universe. Lars, how many houses out of all the houses? You don't have to share numbers, but of all the houses that your team sold last year, how many did you sell? We.

I've only sold 220 houses and we're approaching like it's over 3,000, not quite 4,000.

Yeah. So you're building a business, you've built a business, you're running a business of other people. And that's where really I think it comes down to you got to make this mind shift. It starts innocuously. What normally we see happen is someone says, I need an admin. I'm so busy. I need an administrative assistant. Awesome. That's like the embryonic stage of starting a company. I have somebody that's a virtual assistant or a part time, but if you want to stay there, that's totally cool. Be the sole contributor. But where you're going and where we're talking to the people I think that are listening, they want that business empire. They want something that is valuable in and of itself, not just for the homes that it's buying and selling, but as an actual entity that could be sold. And that's people. And that's all about finding the very best people. Which means not thinking I'm just outsourcing. But I'm looking for someone who can do this without me. I want the smartest. My rule at Intermetrics and Wise Hire has always been find somebody who's smarter and more talented than I am and then, excuse my French, get the hell out of the way. I think it's crucial, you know, let's.

Dig into the first one. So what I took up, you know, on the. Your first point was about, you know.

All performances generated, all performances generated between the years.

But a lot of times, and I spend a lot of years in business not really, really truly understanding how my people were created and what their natural tendencies are and what they're good at and really making sure that they're the right person in the right seat, especially with salespeople. Real estate attracts folks that aren't really going to generate new business and they're really just think they're going to open doors. Let's dig in a little bit more, especially on this one. Given the work that you've done with, with Intermetrics and Wisehire and how has the evolution been to help team leaders and where do they fall down? Where do they. I know for me, if somebody told me that they wanted to be successful and they told me that they could prospect, I believe them. And I didn't have any signs to it in my first three or four years in the business, then I Finally learned about the disc and I'm like, okay, there is a way here. And then values and then all the attributes. So let's dig a little bit deeper into that. I think that's a worthy conversation.

Absolutely. The biggest myth that I think people buy into in any of these situations, but specifically with team leaders and unfortunately, because a lot of them don't have a ton of hiring experience, they didn't come out of 25 years as a corporate manager that's hired 100 people, is that everybody's great success depends on intelligence and hard work. It's the two most common things I've probably heard out there in the 25 plus years I've been doing this. If they're smart enough and they work hard enough, they can do anything. And when you don't see results, it's because they're not smart enough or they're not working hard enough. It's just not true. It's a wonderful myth and I think it's great for me to tell my three sons, you can be anything you want to be, but what I have to say to them is you can't be any one you want to be. You're you and you have to understand that's what you got to play with. So the natural talents, based on the way your brain is wired, your neural network, they're not fixed, they're slow to change over the course of our lives. I don't behave the way today at 50 that I did when I was 16, thank goodness. But they're pretty stable. And so what those natural talents are for, whether I'm a great prospector or what those talents support as far as roles, they're going to be that way. So when Jim Collins in Good to Great wrote, getting the right people on the bus in the right seats, doing the right thing at the right time, 1, 2, 3, 4. That really was supported by a study that we did. It was a seven year study, 197,000 people in numerous countries. And we looked at literally 197,000 people. And we looked at what correlated with performance in any role at any level. So from the CEO down to the janitor in manufacturing, real estate, insurance, you name it. And we only found two things. And it supports Collins his argument about right seats, right bus, self awareness and authenticity, the only two things that correlated with performance. And so the more an individual had of those two things, the better their performance was. Self awareness is how well do you know your natural talents as the leader that's going to hire them? That's on you. How well do I really get to know what are they great at? Because I've got that first piece we just talked about. Not everybody's the same. They're not all equal. And if they're smart and hard working, they'll all succeed and anybody can do this job. You've got to understand what their natural talents are for. What are they great at, what are they not great at? And put them in the right seat again, back to Collins. You know, and then the authenticity part is being in that right seat. We saw people that knew their talents really well. And as a grace, we're not really introspective. Walk out the street right now and ask some stranger, hey, what are your top five greatest strengths? Go start counting and watch the brain go. Golly, I don't know, you know, and what are the five things that you really think at the most? What do you suck at? What are the worst things? The best performers had that down like a laminated card in their wallet. It was amazing. I mean, it's like they went boom. You know, creative, innovative, prospecting kind of person who's great with 30,000ft, then what do you suck at? Same kind of thing. But the authenticity part was, do they take that and find roles and ways to achieve those roles that were true to them? Simple example, I get into a role that requires me to do something I suck at. You know, I'm horrible with detail. I'm not a detail oriented person. And let's say as an early entrepreneur, I say, well, I'm going to do my own books. It's cheaper, right? Know, I'll do all the deadline scheduling and all this stuff. I'll be my own transaction coordinator. I just need to study it. I need to be harder at it. I need to get better at it. That's my job, to improve in that. Well, if my natural talent is not for detail orientation, which that's based on natural talents, believe it or not, I'm never going to be great at it. And I'm fooling myself and I'm definitely on the wrong bus and in the wrong seat. So one, identify. You know, people are not all uniquely the same. They're all individualistic. They all have natural talents and strengths and weaknesses. And lots of scientific research. Empirical evidence shows if you want them to be the best performer, figure out what it is they're great at and make sure that their job depends on those things. And when it says, hey, you suck at this, don't look at them and say, get better. And I'll stop real quick. I'm not one for not continuing to improve. I think everybody can always improve. But don't tell somebody in the profile case who's a low C. You need to become a high C. I need you for this job to become a high C. You're going to be sorely disappointed. They're going to be frustrated, and you're going to lose a lot of your money.

Yeah. Or a real world example. A lot of folks are attracted to real estate because they sort of love the thought of coddling someone through a transaction. And those people are not great. SC personalities are great for some things. It's generally not going out and finding new business. So we have these team leaders that have surrounded themselves with, you know, four or five people that are afraid to get on the phones and they're afraid to ask people for business or door knock or do open houses or, you know, they just think that they're going to open some doors and they're going to get paid. So one takeaway.

Go ahead.

Yeah. The big takeaway when you've been talking for me is that it's on the team leader to really understand what's in between the ears of the people that are around them and to know that there's only a certain number of positions you have on your team and you can't afford to keep, you know, people that aren't a fit. I see a lot of teams that have like three times as many salespeople as they should to sell the homes that they're selling. We finally have figured this thing out and we have 14 people that will do over 300 sales, seven administrative and seven sales, you know, two showing agents, one inside sales, and four outside agents. And we couldn't be more efficient in what we do, you know, and it's because every position is filled by the person that's uniquely qualified to do that thing. So I think that's. That's a really awesome takeaway.

Well, I mean, I love, and I'm honored to be on this because I hold you guys up as a supreme model. And maybe it's a philosophy that not everybody buys into, but you build a company around authenticity, self awareness or others. Awareness of others and authenticity. Our data supports it. Now, it's a little anecdotal, but when we went out looking at buyer's agents, we didn't realize there were two types. And we would see teams that were telling us, as we're building these benchmarks, best buyer agents, these three, you know, and we're like, how is that possible? You know, and then we realized, wait, there's really two camps. You've got companies that have ISAs that are doing all the lead, follow up, nurture, capture, scheduling them at 2:30 on Wednesday and introducing them to Bob the buyer specialist. Bob's not a salesperson. Bob's a fulfillment person who may be getting commissions like a salesperson, but they're more like a showing agent. And then we found places that didn't have ISAs. And those buyer agents were 80% were there. It was on them to go out in their sphere of influence and find leads and stuff. That anecdotal piece I was talking about, after looking at a million so agents in the US about 70% look like showing agents. They're SCs like you said. And I still don't know if I put my thumb on exactly what it is about the industry that attracts them. But that explains to me why 9 out of 10 agents fail to survive the first two years according to narrative. Yeah, I'm gonna go open houses and talk about, you know, interior design and let's go get lunch and meet new people and you know. What do you mean I gotta dial 100 FizzBos tomorrow morning. You know, prospecting. What? And they, they're not naturally good at it. And then some broker says get better at it and they can't. So that's it. That's your key. If you want to actually build a business, it's on nobody but you. And personally, if you're driven by like a high economic or an individualistic or political, a lot of salespeople are own that, you know, those are your leads. This is your company. Don't just pass it off to somebody who says hey, they can fog a mirror. You know, they'll take a lead. I'm not interested in. That's your money, dude. You know, you want to give it to the best person possible to make sure they take care of it. And the way you guys teach people how to set up the organization, that's what I love. Everybody's in that right seat. You know, they're all, it's granular enough where they've got a job that's ideally suited for their natural talents and they're not supposed to be superman that's doing everything else.

Yeah, and where this translates for the team leader, if you don't get this part right, is that you will have, you'll have the wrong people doing the activities that need to get done. So if a farmer, you know, buyer, agent is working leads or you tell Them to, you know, make 25 to 50 contacts a day, they're never going to get there. And your existence as a team leader is more painful because you have the wrong person that you're trying to encourage to do these things, and you're going to be less profitable because that person isn't as good as the position. They can't squeeze the lemon on every lead because they don't even want to do it. So you get the right person in there, they're going to want to, like, where's the technology? How can I dial down more hours, you know, more contacts per hour? How can I get better on my scripts? Like, show me, like, what did I say wrong there? Audit this call. Like, it's a totally different world when you have the right person in that seat.

I mean, I'm really tight with my money, so, I mean, I don't ever understand how team leaders or business owners just kind of throw somebody into a seat and say, here, do it now. Get better at it. I mean, that's an incredibly valuable resource that leads your reputation, the business that you can pull in and attract just to hand that off to somebody. And people, I think it all comes back to, they don't get it. I think they think, you know what? If you're intelligent and they work hard enough, I did it. They can do it, too. But if you ask yourself, here's the analogy, your own personal example, I should say. So you're watching this. More likely than not, you may have a little bit of a lower C or you're a D.C. but if you're a DI, let's just imagine if you're your own transaction coordinator now, you can do it, but how much does it cost you to do it? How much does it drain you? How much three times longer does it take for you to get it accurately and still miss things? The same kind of thing. Don't just stuff somebody in over there in that job to do whatever it is that you don't want to do because they're going to waste your money or time, make you a lot more frustrated, make you a lot less profit.

Yeah. And the truth is, I mean, what is it like, 85% of real estate agents don't even have an assistant. The most assistants in my market, I can hire a really good assistant. Listing, client care, transaction coordination, you know, marketing coordination for about 15 to $25 an hour. They don't need bonuses. They don't, you know, they're happy just to be good at a thing and do that thing. And Unless you want to make 25 bucks an hour, you can't do that job. Like you literally can't do that job if you want to make 100 or 250. My number when I started was 250 an hour.

Yeah.

I knew I couldn't do like 99% of what I was doing and so I just went on a three year chair to get out of all of it, you know, and I business case for it.

Even if you have the natural talents for it, why would you, if you're at 250, 300, 500 an hour in sales mode, why would you stop being in sales mode to be in admin mode?

Yep, that's exactly right. Let's go to point number two. I forget the way you said it exactly, but you're, you're a leader of other people. Is there anything. And then it was no. Let's talk about the mentality of sustainability. I think there's a good conversation here. It's, you know, I call it beginning with the end in mind. Like it's, it's hard to build an actual business that's sustainable and it's hard to work with buyers and sellers seven days a week, you know, so there is no easy, there's no easy button in real estate. Right. If you achieve traditional success in our industry, you will work seven, sometimes eight days a week. And there's no way around it. The money might be good. Your time is never your own, even if you try to rationalize it and you're super stressed all the time. Let's talk about how, and maybe paint the picture of how this really knowing your people, really, even if you have an existing team, talk about how you take some teams through. Like let's get everyone on the disc, let's spread the disc matrix out for the whole team. Let's talk about sustainability and how this translates. The people side translates into sustainability.

Simply put, I mean the sustainability only happens when you distribute enough of the labor to enough of the right people. You know, it's again back to a lot of the whole good to great thing is I need talented people. There's no way that you're going to grow a business by yourself. You can't. And I don't just mean distribution of labor can't. Like you can't do everything because you don't have hours in the day when you get the right people, when you get talented people. I was talking about scarcity mindset. You want an abundance mindset, you don't want the scarcity mindset. Of I don't want to hire those folks. They're going to steal my knowledge, go off and become my competition. Your job is to make sure that even though they could leave, they don't want to. Because that's again, you thinking like a great leader that's developing the right environment for them to love and be passionate about and it's possible. And when you get those people in there, they're so much more creative and inventive and better and driven than just you alone, that you would never. Even if you could work an infinite number of hours in a day and you were some fifth dimensional creature that said hours don't apply, you're still never going to be as productive as these teams with all these great people because they'll think better things to do, they'll create new ideas. So that sustainability is there for those two reasons. One, it's not about you. You can't do it all. You couldn't sustain that level of work. I mean, I sure wouldn't want to do that for 30 years. So, you know, and when you, you're trading your time for money, like you want to go to the beach for a week, you're not selling any houses, you're not making any money. That's not sustainable. And the people in the organizations are the ones who will sustain that. My ultimate objective would be if I sold or walked away from the business tomorrow, say I got hit by a bus, would it run without me? Would my family still continue to get proceeds from the shares of ownership in the company? Would somebody come in and buy it tomorrow?

Yeah, that organization, that mindset, even if you'll never do that, that mindset is required to build this thing the right way. What advice, as we kind of wrap up here, what advice would you have for someone that they haven't done a great job? So they have an existing team, but they haven't done a great job of surrounding themselves with the really the best fit people in sales and CB talent. What sort of process would you or what advice would you give them in terms of kind of top grading or whatever you want to call it? But what advice would you give them?

That's funny. I was going to say read Brad Smart and Top Grading if you haven't, because it's designed for more organization, larger things. But there's a lot of great lessons to take out of Dr. Smart's work. Top grading is the name of the book. Big picture. Stop. I'm not sure what they're doing as to why it's not working. But I think one of the more common things I see is if it's not working for you, and it's numerous people that haven't worked, it's unlikely external, it's probably internal and that. I mean, are you really looking at yourself like we've talked about? Are you looking at yourself like a developer of talent, a finder of talent, a leader of talent? Because if you're not doing it well, you may just be looking at yourself as the star and the center and you're just looking for support staff around you. It's not sustainable, it's not enjoyable. I don't care what your personality is, you're not going to reach near the heights of a company that actually goes out and builds them. So start thinking about a leader and develop yourself as a leader. Read books on how to be a more effective leader. Want to know how many team leaders I know read those types of things? Not a lot. You know, they don't become experts in recruiting and hiring. They don't read books on leadership development. They don't invest and go back to school. You know, go back and get certificates or just audit classes on how to be a better manager or a leader.

Yeah.

Because that's really what your job needs to be if you're going to do this. You're not the best salesperson.

Yeah. And I think. I think that's where there's a lot of team leaders that really never quite let go of their sales role because there's a real fear that their skill set in leading and managing and holding people accountable isn't where it needs to be. And they constantly go back to their comfort zone.

Oh, yeah. Was it. I forget who said it, but comfort zones are like plush lined coffins.

Yeah.

Yeah. The more you hang out in that comfort zone, the more danger you have of just stagnating, dying.

That's awesome. So let me tell. So if you're listening to this and you want to build something bigger than just you, and you know that people are going to be a part of it, which is the only way to do it. You can't do it all with technology and systems. The resource is wisehire.com. it's w I z e h I r e dot com. And like I said, I mean, here's a guy that's been studying this. How long you been studying this work?

Oh, 24 years now and a few more months.

Yeah, so just go to wisehire.com. jay, as always, it's a pleasure to chat with you. A guy that's just willing to keep moving forward and building a business and bringing something to our industry. Because I know you do a lot in the real estate space. We use your scorecards now, which are super helpful. I know they were new recently, but they're really helpful to be clear on what you're looking for for each position. So just keep giving and we appreciate you.

That's really appreciate it. My pleasure. And thank you for everything you guys are doing. And thanks because you guys are doing the opposite side that we don't do, which is showing them how to build the structures and the places where those people are vital.

Yeah. Awesome. We'll talk to you soon, brother.

Alright, man. Thanks a lot. Have a great one.

Bye.