Production Mastermind - Systems, Follow-up, and Leverage

Ryan, how you doing, man? Looking real good in that nice office setting down downtown somewhere. You're muted, Ryan. Yeah, you're muted, Ryan.

Yeah, no, that's my first time playing with the tech swank. I kind of dig it.

Good.

Yeah, I just got off the phone with a guy from Elliott, Maine.

Oh, no kidding. I got a seller. Well, I got trying to put a place under contract from a seller in Elliott, Maine, of all places. Yeah, cool.

Yeah. He's looking to buy 50 acres out my way and start a farm. Knows nothing about farming and wants to start a farm. So. Okay, that's great.

What's 50 acres go for out by you?

Well, It depends. Like, if it has a house, like, you could get 50 acres and a semi-okay house for, you know, $500,000, $600,000, $700,000, right in that range, you know.

I got a 68-acre listing right now that's at $765,000.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That, um, I'm up in the Well, we're looking in the Finger Lakes area of upstate New York. And so it's kind of like these farms right between all the different Finger Lakes is very attractive for vineyards and just, you know, agriculture in general. So, all right. If you can, in honor of Lars, if you can turn on your cameras. There we go. Oh, they heard me. They said, oh, Ben's going to call us out on the cameras. So If, if you can turn your cameras on, Lars would appreciate that because I know he's going to watch the replay and just make sure that I don't screw this call up. So we're going to start off with some wins. We don't have a lot of people, so I'd love if everybody could unmute and give us a win from the last— well, it's been about a month since I've been on this call, so feel free to dig back in the trenches a little bit and give us a win. Who wants to start us off?

I'm working 4 contracts in the last 4 days.

That's a good win, Anthony, for sure.

I, I got, um, I got my new guy joined me, and I got another guy who's, who's a rental guy who's returning. He's opening up, so I'm looking for— I'll have a little bit more, uh, boots on the ground, and I need him in New Hampshire especially because I just I get too much to do in two states. Sometimes it's just like stuff goes through the cracks. That's going to be good to have those guys back.

That's great.

So I've got 3 last week under contract, another one I'm waiting on some paperwork, and in the process of negotiating 2 more listings under contract and 2 listing appointments this week. So I'm slammed. It's really good.

That's really great. Adam, take a minute and share where— we don't need to know the details of every single one, but give us an idea. Like, is there one sugar pot you're tapping into, or is this just from years of cultivating? Where are some of these deals coming from?

So, so every single one's come out of sphere of influence, um, either, either directly through people that I've known throughout life or through their referrals, and just working my database, you know, and just staying in contact with It's taken a long time, right? It's not been an overnight success, but it's very— it's building. It's crazy right now, but it's very consistent. And, you know, it's just, you know, staying in touch with folks and staying on top of that database.

Yeah, it's funny how it works, you know. It's planting the seed, it's watering the seed, it's shedding some light on it. And, and it just takes time. I started doing it. I mean, I started— I met Lars in 2019. So in like 2020, 2021, 2020 and '21 is when I really started getting my database going. And now, you know, 5 years later, it's the last couple of years, it's really kicked into gear, but you have to get it started. That's the challenge is you have to get it started. And And some people, they don't, you know, they're like, well, I don't have time. Or they look at the quick fruit that doesn't, you know, produce over and over again. So Adam, that's really, really great. I might be calling on you a little bit to talk about what you're doing with your database, but any other wins? Hannah, what's going on up in the great country of Canada? Any wins up there?

Sorry, I'm playing with two screens right now. Um, yeah, no, it's good. There's a lot of activity in the right spots. Um, dealing— still dealing with sellers who are, um, stubborn. Um, but you know, if you can get them under, under wraps, it's not so bad. Um, you can list it. So just keeping in touch with past clients and, um Yeah, it's not so bad. I'm— and I just went to an open house the other day where it was crickets, but that's because I think that seller is overvaluing their house. And so you can see the extremes in our market right now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I want to add that, you know, we all got to always remember that this is real estate, such a long game. An offer I'm submitting this morning, they just signed the paperwork. I've been following up with this guy for like 9 months. I got him from Instagram, you know, and I've just been following up. And he actually, you know, technically his girlfriend had her house listed with another agent and, you know, but he wanted to work with me to buy and, you know, they needed that to sell. And so I was just sending them messages every once in a while being like, hey, how's the home sale going? How are you guys doing? And then we set up a call last week, went to a couple of homes yesterday, and now they've got an offer on something.

Anthony, that's great. And I'm gonna touch on that in just a couple of minutes, cuz that's one of the things I wanted to make sure we talked about today. So I'll touch on that in a minute. Uh, Riley, you have a win for us?

Uh, yes, sir. Um, I'm working on getting a property under contract for $1.8 million. I sent out an offer this morning, so hope, hope that goes good and we get to the closing table.

Riley, is that like, um, Is that like an average price home for you or is that like a big deal for you?

I would say in my market, the average price, probably $800,000.

Okay. So, you know, it's double, about double. Yeah.

Yeah.

That's great. Average price in my market is $252,000. Oh, wow. Yeah. So we got to sling a lot of houses. Aaron, I've been seeing you post some stuff on social. Give us a win from the last couple of weeks.

I got a new listing the other day, actually a referral, so, uh, wasn't something that I bought. So that was great. Um, got that, had a closing last week, got a couple closings next week. Uh, so we're, we're kind of picking up now, uh, getting things in order, trying to get a lot of other things in place. Had a few issues of distractions, we'll call them, but, uh We've worked through them and back on track. So it's, it's so far so good. So love it.

Yeah, that's great. All right. We'll get into a couple of things, but if there's anything specific you want to make sure we touch on in today's call, like if you have a challenge that you brought into the week or if you have questions that you've been carrying from last week, feel free to unmute and let us know or drop it in the chat.

Yeah, I just got some specifics just to the group. If anyone has done the, the expired pillar in the program, as I have some specific questions about some of the letters that are on file and we can get to that, that'd be great.

Yeah, we can go over that. I know some people that are doing that at a pretty high level.

I wanted to ask about the beginning steps of bringing like an admin on.

Okay, we can definitely touch on that. Hey, Janae, we just went over some wins, and if there's anything that you want to touch on in today's call, make sure to drop it in the chat or unmute. So we're going to look at Fired and hiring admin. There's anything else you guys want to know? So just quick background. Some of you people, some of you people, some of you all know me. I met Lars in 2019, connected with him. He helped guide my business to grow it. I run a team, we'll do somewhere 100 to 150 transactions a year. Sometimes I'm really hands-off, sometimes I'm really hands-on depending what the flow is and what the season is in our business. But what Lars kind of teaches on implementing these pillars and these systems into your business, I've done a lot of them. Some of them I have not done for one reason or another, like the expired program, I don't run the expired program. I've helped people run the expired program. And sometimes it goes really well for them. It is a great piece of the puzzle if your market can handle it. We don't have a lot of expireds in my market. We haven't since I started really working on growing my business. Expireds are not a big thing in my market. Um, but let's, uh, before we get into the expireds, I want to talk about this. And Anthony kind of referenced this in his win, that he's just worked and worked and worked with a client for a long time, and now they've converted. And so one of the processes or systems that we should have in our business is converting those leads into signed buyers and sellers. So, um, I'm, I'm, I'm guessing you may have something written. You may not have something written. If it's not written, it's not a real system. So a lot of times people will kind of shotgun this thing, uh, that we call lead follow-up. If you have a real written-out lead follow-up or lead management system, Raise your hand or, or put, put a Y in the chat. Like, if you could tell me, hey, Ben, this is my lead follow-up system. Like, it's defined. I could give it to a 3rd grader and they would kind of be able to figure it out. I would love to know. But what's in the, what, what's in the follow-up? The fortune, right? Fortune is in the follow-up. So I have this on my desktop. I review it with my team once per month, and I want everybody to either dig this thing up— there it goes— screenshot it. You can pull this offline. It's from like the Harvard Business School or something like that. The sales stats. This is— this, I look at this, me personally, I look at it every Monday because I need to be reminded that this does not come easy. Like, we have to follow up with those leads, uh, for it sometimes for a year. We're closing— I'm doing a final walkthrough today on a property that we've been work— or a client that we've been working with for 11 months. It'll be 11 months, it'll be 12 months, uh, in, in May. So, uh, and it's just the process of people reaching out to you, however they reach out to you, and they may or may not be ready, and they are most likely not going to follow up with you. You have to follow up with them. And so having some kind of dedicated plan of when you're gonna follow up with them. And I know a lot of people like to automate this. There's, there's a place for automation and then there's a place for you actually just doing the work. And so, um, we have a couple of different things that we will go through in our process, but understanding that 80% of sales are made on the 5th to the 12th contact. So, um, I had an agent on my team who just couldn't grasp lead follow-up, and, um, she, she just said, I'm not going to chase leads. I'm not chasing leads. I'm like, okay, well then you're not gonna be on the team. And, um, she did 2 transactions last year because you're gonna get some business from people that know, like, and trust you. But even the people that you get referred to from your sphere, you still have to follow up with them. That's part of the process. If you don't follow up, you're not going to do as well. You might make some money, but I guarantee you, if you have a follow-up system in place, you will make a lot more money. So what does that look like? Uh, the first thing is to designate those people into some kind of bucket. Are they a hot lead, meaning they're gonna buy in the next, you know, 3 months? Are they a warm lead that they're gonna buy in the next 3 to 6 months? Or are they like a cold lead? Like it's probably 6+ months or 12 months. Like some people use the A, B, and C. A lot of times your CRM might have categories for people in, in different stages. Our CRM says they're hot or they're a watch or they're a nurture. So I know if I talk to somebody and they're a hot lead, I have to get in touch with them every week. That's the standard. That's our lead management policy. Hot leads get touched every week. A watch lead means we wanna watch them, watch their activity. They're gonna convert in the next 3 to 6 months and we contact them every month. If we go into the CRM, you have a watch that doesn't have some kind of contact, be it an email, text message, or phone call, they can get taken. And then our third category is the nurture. That's long-term. And those are every quarter. So if you have some kind of structure like that in your CRM, it should be pretty easy to get to answer the question, who should I call? Oh, that's easy. You pull up your CRM, you look at who's in this category that needs a call every week that hasn't been called, or who's in this category that needs a call every month that hasn't been called, or who's in the category, like if you have a, you know, a cold or a nurture lead and you didn't talk to them since the beginning of the year, well, we've gone through one quarter, they need a phone call. And so if you have that written down somewhere, uh, then you'll know exactly who to call. And hopefully, you know, exactly what to say. That kind of goes into like scripts and things like that, but You know, a hot lead is somebody that's— they're looking to buy. You're probably showing them houses, or you're, you know, they're just waiting to get pre-approved or something like that. Like, that's an easy conversation. The, uh, the watches that are gonna be buying in 3 to 6 months, that's a, hey Riley, I'm getting back to you about your house hunt. I know you're not ready yet, but I wanted to, you know, see where you're at in the process, see if you have any questions, you and just stay in touch with them every single month because they could be browsing on Zillow and they could just click that button and they talk to an agent and the agent is really good 'cause they're paying for those leads. Next thing you know, your lead or your potential client is under contract because sometimes things move a little faster than we think they're gonna move. And then on the other people, you know, so like all of my sphere, My sphere people, they're not, they're not leads, but they go in the nurture category because I want to stay in touch with them once per quarter. And again, text message, phone call. I kind of know who's who, um, you know, who's really going to be buying or who I just need to stay in touch with. And so I would really encourage all of you to have that same thing. Maybe go by what your CRM, how your CRM categorizes the leads. But have a clear, distinct system that you follow weekly calls, monthly calls, and quarterly calls. Questions or thoughts about that? Is it reasonable that the next time Lars invites me on the call, If anybody's on here, I can ask you what your lead follow-up plan is. Is it reasonable that you would all have something? Yeah. Is it reasonable that you'd all have something written down? It could be like, uh, hot, call weekly, warm, call monthly, cold, call quarterly. Like that's a plan. That's a system, you know? So when you have those things and you know what to follow, there's like no excuses. You know, I didn't have time. Well, okay, that's not really a good excuse unless you're just crushing the deals because I sell a lot of homes and I still have time to do it because I know that's why I sell a lot of homes, you know.

So and this, this follow-up, you're, you're talking specifically call them, you know, that not other forms of contact because I'm assuming you'd still have them on some sort of other weekly drip.

So I— it's a good question, Anthony. I think the drips, most drips, where do they go?

Trash.

Spam.

Spam. Most drips go right to spam. And so I'm not a fan of the drips. What I will put them on, my system has what's called a market report. And so we put everybody on a market report for their area. If they don't own a home, it's just for the area they live in. And it just says, hey, these houses went on the market in the last month, these went under contract in the last month, and these sold in the last month. If I know them— so that's, that's the one thing, they get a monthly market report.

Ben, where, where are you like, what system is that? That's given out the monthly market report.

That's, that's my CRM that I use.

Right? Like what CRM is it?

If I tell you, do you promise not to go and sign up on it?

No, I'm definitely not.

But here's the thing. What CRM are you using now?

Using Follow Up Boss.

Okay. So I don't know if Follow Up Boss has— are you— what kind of website do you use?

I have my standalone agent image website integrated into Follow Up Boss.

Okay. So, um, I would think, um, do you use any kind of home valuation tool?

Homebot.

Okay. So I think Homebot could be something very similar. Like if anybody that owns a home in your market should be on Homebot.

Yeah.

And I think Even if they don't own a home, you can still probably put them on a Homebot for a specific area. I don't know if I use Homebot too, an amazing tool for the money. I think it's a no-brainer. So I use Homebot too. So I would just try and get everybody on Homebot in some kind of report. Does that make sense?

Yeah, no, I have them on Homebot. I was just curious about yours. I guess it's a secret. You're not telling.

No, it's that. No, I just don't like— I've used the same CRM since 2017.

Okay.

May 1st, 2017 is when I signed up for this CRM. And so if so, people hear like how great my CRM is. I don't want you to go switch to go to my CRM because you hear how good it is. Like, and we all know people and maybe there's some of the people on the call. They're like, oh, I'm not doing any deals. Follow Up Boss is terrible. And they're like Sierra, Sierra. I'm going to go to Sierra. Oh, Bold Trail. I'm going to close. Like, I don't want you to do that. That doesn't do anybody any good. And if you've done that, there's no shame, but just commit to something. The one that I use is called Brivity. Brivity CRM website, all that kind of stuff. Um, and, uh, and it works for me. Is it the best? I don't know, but it works for me. And so what I think the point is, uh, Janae, is that you have some they're getting some kind of real estate-related email from you that's targeted to them. And so that phone call is like, hey, I've been sending you a market report. I don't know if you've seen it. And honestly, you might not even care, but I'm wondering if you have looked at it, what are your thoughts? That's a quarterly call or an annual call. But when we do these quarterly calls, we wanna have something to say. So who do we call and what do we say? We know who to call and now we know what to say. Then when do we call them? Well, we know when based on the category they're in. So I don't put them up on some, uh, uh, I don't put 'em on a drip, Anthony. I have the people that know me, my database is in the database marketing. So they're getting weekly emails from me. Those are people that know me, um, or they know my team, somebody on my team. And so they get that weekly email. But a lot of these leads, these are leads that might not know me that we get from wherever, you know, we, because we, we have a really big presence locally. So we get a lot of what we call IDX leads, people from our website, they click and register on our website. We have usually carry a decent amount of listings. And so we get these IDX leads, people just looking at prices. Those are the people once we talk to, like, yeah, I'm not ready. I was just seeing what that house was worth. That's the person we want to follow up with. And Anthony, I think it's mostly a phone call, but once you've talked to them once and you've made contact, then you'll know how to better stay in touch with them. And so sometimes it's, hey Anthony, it's great talking to you. Hey, I want to stay in touch with you. What's the best way? Would you prefer text messages or emails? Okay, you prefer text messages. I make a little note in my CRM, then I know I can text them. I don't think after you've had that initial phone call, I don't think it's as much how you contact them, but that they are hearing from you. Does that answer your question?

Yep.

Yeah, that's great.

A lot of my people, I just text them, you know, like if they're past clients, Some leads, like I've got a lead right now. I did a buyer consultation with him, his name's Matthew. And I'm like, this guy's not getting back to me. And I'm texting him, I'm calling him. I sent him a property. I'm like, hey, this looks like it's right in your, you know, the exact same thing you wanted, wanna take a look at it? Like I'm working this guy and he is just silent, you know? And either he's decided not to work with us or he's realized that he can't get what he wants for his price, which that happens in the buyer consultation. You know, you want all of this and your price is this, it's just not going to work out. Um, but that's the kind of person like I need to, you know, he's pre-approved to $250,000. What he wants is like $3,000,000, $3,250,000, but I need to really stay on, on top of that one and, and I need to work it. And, and you know what, if you work with a lot of buyers, you'll, you'll hear them. It just wasn't ready. You know, we think, man, like, it's, it's on top of my mind to get this person under contract. Some buyers are starting out, looks like they're just starting out, they're just looking, you know, they're not really like super motivated. They're not as motivated to buy as I am motivated to sell sometimes. So you have to reconcile some of those things. Any other questions about the lead follow-up process? All right. Anybody here besides Anthony thinking about hiring an administrative assistant?

I have a guy that I'm gonna, um, he's licensed. I'm gonna— he's gonna start and learn the craft by closing the deals, getting comfortable with the paperwork, and I'm gonna blend him in until he's ready to become independent. So that works real well. Yeah, so if it's not— but it's not a— it's not a traditional paid— I mean, I'm not gonna— he's got me— I'm gonna pay him on closings and this and that, give him some cash. And his situation is pretty good right now. He's semi-retired, so, but it's going to be good in that way. Yeah, I'm not hiring like the paid admin. I'm not there yet.

Yeah, sure. Did you hire an in-office assistant or a virtual assistant?

In office.

In office. And what was your experience around that? Like, were there challenges?

Yeah, so, you know, I was very much confused about the direction. Then I went inside the Million Dollar Agent Method, and it's got that admin, like, hiring course. So I went through the training, um, I set up the DISC profile thing for her to fill in. She completed that. I went through the interview process, broke out just the duties the way it's, it's in Million Dollar Agent Method, um, and even before I started to advertise, she just happened to jump inside my inbox. So I was like, oh, perfect. She was like looking on social media and found me, and I sent her the link just for her to fill in. So she did, and she met all of the DISC profile qualities and went through the steps through the training, and she's been perfect. Like, she really— she set up my whole 60 Touch and did all the things. So um, and continues to just do all the things, you know. I'm walking her more into the buyer or client care side of things now, but as far as, you know, just getting my business stood up regarding database and such, she's been amazing.

Yeah, that's awesome. Do you want to share a compensation range with us?

Yeah, so, um, I am paying her $17 an hour She and I hired her part-time, um, to start. So Monday, Wednesday, Friday from 8 to 4 with a 1-hour lunch break. Um, and she's been pretty good with that. She wants to come on full-time, but I gave her a goal like, okay, this is what I'm trying to do on my business. I know for a fact I can pay you this at this level. If you help me get here, then I'll bring you on full-time. And so she's on board with that. And so that's what what we've been working on.

Yeah, that's great. Uh, so I'm just gonna highlight this so, so everybody knows where it is because it gets, you know, questions get brought up. So in the Million Dollar Agent Method, under Pillar 4, um, scale your business, grow your team, there's, uh, different trainings here that you can go through. And so these are really good. They just provide great, just good things to think about and processes and things like that. I am typically going to always recommend you start out with a virtual assistant depending on your business. So most people that are kind of dipping their toes into this, they're like, I don't know, you know, they're scared about the money and I was too. And my mentor back in the day said, Ben, figure out how much it's going to cost you for a part-time VA for 12 weeks. And so for me, it was 10 hours a week, $5 an hour. So $50 for 12 weeks, $600. He said, save up $600, hire a virtual assistant. If it doesn't change your business in 12 weeks, let that virtual assistant go. That virtual assistant will celebrate 7 years with me in June of this year. Changed my world. Amazing. Um, and so if you have never had an assistant and you're not sure where to start with that, whatever their costs now, I mean, I was just messaging, one reached out to me that I know on Facebook and was like, you know, looking for work, $7 an hour. You know, $70 a week for 12 weeks. Save that up, bring somebody on, follow the, the, um, kind of the plan in, uh, Million Dollar Agent Method of like, these are tasks that I can give them. And then just give them everything you can. Everything you can give them, you give them. You can't give them showings, you can't give them listing appointments, you can't give them buyer consultations. So anything you can give them Give them that and let it free up your time to make more phone calls, to do more of the lead follow-up or some of these other things. And it will change, I believe it will change your business in a really good way. Now, there can be some challenges to doing that, you know, of like, hey, I need to let go of some of the things that I was doing and Maybe I need to be— I need to have some grace, first of all, for these people if they make a mistake. Like, it's okay, uh, the world's not going to end if you make a mistake. But, uh, understanding, like, the things you can give them, let them work on it, and, you know, understand what they're good at and make sure you take the time and hire the right one. Um, Anthony, is there anything specific around hiring an admin that you'd like to talk about?

Well, I guess I'm just curious what, what's, what's like the normal duties you try to have an admin doing early on? You know, how do you really find someone good? You know, how do you do compensation? You know, kind of what I'm running into is, is, you know, I've, I've had the last 7 days have been crazy. I probably worked 80 hours and I'm behind on things that I follow-ups that I need to do, and I'm hoping to catch up on them today and tomorrow because thankfully it's not as busy. But, you know, some things that, that would have really helped in this last week would have been, you know, a gopher to go put out signs for me. You know, I wasted a whole bunch of time driving to throw out signs. I had to drive, I had to drive an hour to pick up signs on— gosh, what was that? Thursday, and then I drove an hour to go put out signs. And the problem is I live in a rural area. You know, I've got listings that are 2 hours away from each other. You know, like if I went from one to the other, you know, I drove, I drove 200 miles yesterday.

Do you not have a sign company to install your signs?

No, nope, I don't. And, you know, part of the problem is, again, like I'm in a rural area, you you know, things can be really far from one to the other.

Yeah.

And, you know, I don't know if it would really make sense to pay someone to go and put a sign out on a $165,000 property.

It would, it would make a lot of sense to do that.

Okay. And then the other thing that would, would have really helped is if I had someone, and this would require a licensed person to have at least started writing offers. Because I've wrote, I've had to deal with like 4 offers in the last, you know, 4 days and, you know, doing different paperwork and stuff, you know, would be helpful. And I guess that's, I don't know if transaction coordinators write offers or if they're just more about, you know, managing the contract.

Yeah. I mean, I can have my virtual assistant write offers up. Like, you don't need to have a license to write an offer. In my area. Now I would either look the offer over before I sent it, like, hey, write the offer, send it to me as a reviewer in the— we have a signing system, you can have a reviewer— or I would, you know, have some parameters where you get the final say of it. But there you should be able to like reach out to a VA and have them put that offer together. You know, there's only a certain amount of points. Now if you talk to your client, you get the points, you send it to the VA. Having a runner though, in most markets, a runner's going to cost you probably about that $17, $18. And if it's a rural area, you might even be able to get it for less. I had a retired police officer, Anthony, working for me, and that's what he would do. At the time, we had a pretty big foreclosure business. And so he was out doing inspections, he was doing signs, he was picking up lockboxes, and it cost me $15 an hour plus mileage. And, and it was money well spent, you know, whatever, you know, you want to keep your people budget, your staff at about 10% of your gross commission income. So you know, you're doing $100,000 a year in commission income, you wanna keep that staff 10 or less. And so you can get a lot of signs put out for 10 grand. But if you're, you know, so that an admin or a runner, I see a runner as somebody different, you know, 'cause if they're just running signs, I mean, really how many signs are you putting out per month? Probably, you know, even if you did, 120 listings a year, you're talking 10 signs a month. Um, you know, that's 20 hours a month, you know, 10 drop-offs and 10 pickups. Um, but that's kind of how you would just, you know, run the numbers on is that, you know, can you afford it with, with your budget there. But it— one of the good things, if you are on this call and you've never done a time study Um, Paula, I don't know if that is— I don't know if the time study is in the Million Dollar Agent Method. Let me look for it. But it would be— it's really hard. It's really hard to do a time study. But, um, some— Anthony, for someone like you, it would show you exactly what you're spending time on. And then you could bring that to one of these calls and say, what should I not do? And Lars or I or whoever's hosting the call could walk you through and say you shouldn't do it. But essentially what it is, is you take, um, 2 weeks, 14 days, and you write down every 15 minutes what you've done and you track what you've done. Now, what happens inevitably, and you have to kind of work really hard against this, you get through like the first 4 or 5 days, you're like, wow, I am wasting a ton of time. I'm doing a lot of stuff I shouldn't be doing. And so like the next week or week and a half looks a lot better because you're more cognizant of how you're spending your time. But if you could really just go for 2 weeks and just do your normal schedule and just track it, you would realize that you're, you're, you're not doing the highest leverage point, which is prospecting, lead follow-up, appointments, negotiating deals, or the last one, building systems. Those are the 5 things that we all on this call should be spending the majority of our time doing. And if you tracked it, I would, I would imagine you're, you're not. Sometimes I'm not. There's weeks where I'm like, Wow, that was a terrible week of like time, you know, structure. And then some weeks I just crush it, you know. Now it helps, I've got 2 assistants. I have an in-office assistant and the virtual assistant. So it's a lot easier for me because I know I have to write that check every 2 weeks just to like hand stuff off. But when you do that time study and you realize, wow, I'm doing a lot of like 15-hour $15 an hour stuff when you could be doing a lot of the $100 to $200 an hour stuff, which is, you know, the sales part of it.

I get it. Yeah, I've got— I just calculated, I got 14 hours of driving since Thursday.

Yeah. And now what's your average price, Anthony?

I mean, I don't know. It varies so much per year because I'm in a rural area, so I get, I get stuff all over the place.

But here, you know what your county stats are for your county, like the average price for that?

My last year, my average was $295.

Okay.

So, but you know, I've had years like the year before was $462. So I mean, it varies.

Yeah. So every commission check, roughly, let's call it 8 grand, right? On a listing, it should take you about 5 hours. So if you're on a buyer, let's say a buyer takes you 20 hours at $8,000, that's $400 an hour. Like, I would say, like, kind of when I went through this process, And, you know, I was at $250 an hour. Like, that's where, like, that's what I wanted. And Lars will tell you the same thing. Like, when he was kind of going through this, it was like, let me make $250 an hour because that's $500,000 a year. Now, when I've, when I've like really started building the team, I mean, I was kind of at like that $100 an hour, which is still $200,000 a year. $50 an hour is $100,000 to $100 is $200,000 a year. And that's great money. You know, 200 grand a year is great money. And so if you're at that $100,000 or that $100 an hour, but you're doing, you know, $15 an hour times 14 hours, you know, that's 200 and You could have paid somebody $210 an hour. You could have went and worked and sold a house for 1 hour and paid somebody to do all of that work for you. So it is a little bit of shift. And so you have to start small on this. And I would either start by getting a virtual assistant that can do all of the stuff that, you know, whatever social media— we don't do a great job at social media, but it gets done because of the VA. All of the contract-to-close process, the VA handles it. Um, the VA handles, you know, ordering all the signs. I mean, we, we order signs. Um, any communication between agent or attorney in my area or lender, she handles it. And then she can work some of the back end of the CRM because she knows it really well. And so database marketing. VA can handle all the database marketing. There's a, you know, time there putting together your weekly emails. So I would start off by getting a virtual assistant, handing them all of that stuff. You keep the driving because you can still make phone calls and do stuff during the driving and then eventually try and work yourself out of that runner position and bring somebody in to do that.

Oh yeah, I had a lot of phone calls and that's 14 hours. Yeah, yeah, probably about 8 hours of phone calls. I kid you not.

Yeah, yeah. So just track what you're doing that, that a VA could do. Bring a VA on for 12 weeks. If you watch the training in, uh, Million Dollar Agent Method, you'll see kind of some different places to find a VA and some of the things that we use. Um, and then you could always pop back, you know, on one of these calls and work through some of those challenges of getting a VA on board. But it changed my business. The people that I've met that bring VAs on changes their business. My sister's the president of a large real estate company. They have 17 virtual assistants in their real estate company. And these are smart people. These aren't like, you know, people coming out of the fields. Like a lot of these virtual assistants, they have like MBAs, you know, they're smart people and they're really, hard workers. And so I would not be scared of a virtual assistant at all. So kind of the numbers, Jenae, that we look at, if you're looking at like, what am I spending on people, staff? Ideally it's around 10% or less, 8 to 10%. For me in my business, it's a little bit higher for a couple of reasons. One is the nature of our work is a little bit more admin intensive, and so I pay a little bit more in the admin stuff, but my marketing stays a little bit less. So in a perfect world, our expenses are no more than 30% of our gross commission income, 10% to staff, 10% to overhead, and 10% to marketing. If you can, and then as you grow, you'll get to a critical point. You start to grow more. You can kind of keep those expenses the same and just add more deals and then maybe compress that 30% into like 25. Then you're doing really, really well. Yeah, Kimberly. So the 5 areas of focus, and this is like you'll hear a lot of real estate people talk about. You make money when you plan, when you prospect, when you lead follow-up, when you're on appointments, or when you're negotiating deals. So when I met Lars in 2019, like, that's where you make the money. I gotta plan, I gotta do those things. And Lars taught me the power of the S which is the systems. And so Lars had told me like, hey, if you go into this year where we were working on building my business and your production dips a little bit, but you start to really build systems in your business, that's okay because over the long haul, those systems are gonna carry you further. And that's exactly what happened to me. Dipped a little bit in production, built the systems, and then kind of went back up. And, um, and again, I don't run a perfect business, not by any stretch, but we do have some really amazing systems that generate a lot of stuff for us. And so the systems are laid out in, um, the Million Dollar Agent Method of the pillars. So the first system is we need to attract leads That's pillar number 1 is just attracting leads. Pillar number 2 is converting those leads into signed buyers and sellers. Pillar number 3 is now we need to deliver this world-class experience. So attract, convert, and then deliver a world-class experience. And then number 4, the pillar, the 4th pillar is how do we scale that? So it's not just Ben or Anthony or Aaron. It's, you know, now it's a VA or now it's an assistant like Janae has and now it's another person, maybe a buyer's agent. So attract, convert, deliver, and scale. And in that scale, we really wanna hone in our business and our systems. But, and listen, I don't think everybody needs to have a team, but you need to have leverage. And so some of the people, like they'll find leverage in the assistant, Some people will find leverage in a showing assistant, so they're not, you know, having to show 20 houses a week, you know, and they'll just pay that showing assistant like a per door or per door plus. So those are a couple of ways that you can get leverage if you don't want to have like a bigger team.

Hey Ben, with that like 30%, 25 to 30% sweet spot that you were talking about, Is that like as a whole, like you looking at a system like the Profit First method? Like, I guess what I'm asking you, like, what are the other categories that you go on based off of those numbers aside from just the marketing piece, like taxes and, you know, other things as far as the percentage of GCI?

Um, well, I think that you can still run Profit First. Based on the whole, based on the gross commission income. And so you just have to run it. I just think when you budget, so when you go to budget for the year 2026 and you're like, okay, I'm going to budget $500,000 of gross commission income, you know, that's 100 houses, 50 houses, right? You're in an area, $10,000 average commission. I got to sell 50 houses to make $500,000. Wow, I'm gonna need some help. What am I— how am I gonna— you know, I gotta spend some money on stuff. So I'm gonna budget $50,000 for staff, $50,000 for marketing and advertising, and $50,000 for overhead. And then how you do Profit First— I don't run Profit, I have somebody that handles my Books that runs Profit First for me, so I personally don't do that. But I will say, I will, I will never forget this. We started running Profit First in 2020, and in 20— in, it must have been December of 2021, I had— and, um, yeah, December 2021. So we'd run it for almost a full, you know, 2 full years. My account says, hey, you owe $18,000 in taxes. And I'm sweating. It's the end of the year, right before Christmas. I'm sweating. And I looked into my tax account on my online thing and had $18,400 and something in there. And I was like, man, I hated writing that check, but I was thanking God that we had Profit First in place because it, came out to perfect. And I remember sending it to Lars and some people like, um, I hate that I have to pay this. I am so thankful that I have that money in that account. So it was a— it was, I think, probably first a great system. I just— I have somebody that handles it that— because, you know, I'm good with numbers, not all of the percentages and stuff that goes along with it. All right, let's touch on the expired program real quick. And, and, um, and Ryan, we can dive into this, uh, on the next call too, or a little bit later. Um, this is— this, uh, I've helped a couple people implement this in their business, and so I'm going to say this from the very beginning, and Lars will say this as well. This is a heavy lift. Of all the systems that we have in here, this expired direct mail is a heavy lift. Now I have somebody that I know that built this out 100% by themselves. Took him about 40 hours. He loved Canva, so he went in and he created these Canva templates and stuff like that. I had somebody else that implemented this system, they had a VA help them with a lot of it. It took them about 20 hours. So going into like, hey, I wanna do the expired system, to do it the way that Lars coaches on, you have to be ready for kind of a heavy lift. And if you know that going into it, it's not a big deal. If you know, hey, I'm gonna be working on it from April 1st until the end of the year. That's okay. It doesn't matter how long it takes you to put the system in place if you get the system in place. Because let's say it did take you a legit 8 months to get it in place. It shouldn't take you 3 to 6, but let's say it took you 8, then it's done. It's done and it's in place and you can run that system for years. So just know going into it, so I, if you, if you go in to like watch the training and understand it a little bit, and then you say, yeah, I got the capacity to take this on, um, then I think it's a really great system. Um, somebody in our group, um, has a listing from the expired system from, from sending out these mailers. And so When it— did you have a specific question about that?

Yeah, I just, I just— one of the, like, this kind of stuff here, and I've done that, like, this kind of stuff here all seems organic and, like, in line with what I do. Um, as soon as somebody contacts me, I can feel comfortable making the human connection. However, there's some pretty bold letters that are like, I'll sell it in 10 days, or you don't owe me any money. And then like I did that stuff when I was my own broker, but I'm not my own broker anymore. I'm like, oh, I don't know, it seems a little— so my question is just very specific. Has anyone used the letters that are in the, um, drive, the shared drive that we have access to?

Yes, a lot of people are using those exact same letters.

Okay.

Yeah.

And you, you, they're kind of— let's sound like, ah, it means you got to price it like Damn right.

Yeah. I mean, this is you selling it at your price, right? And, you know, and some of this is marketing stuff. Like, that's what Lars is really good at. Lars is really good at marketing. And everybody on the call should know Lars's heart. He's not like, let me go screw somebody to win a commission check. But this is marketing and this is what gets us in the door. And then we can have real frank conversations with them about their property and about the price. Because I believe if you're in this group that Lars has assembled, there's probably nobody better in your market to sell somebody's house other than you. Like, like, that's just like, you're probably really good people if you're on this call and you probably really care about people over a commission check. And so use this as a tool because you want to help people. And you know that if somebody's property's expired, they're probably kind of vulnerable. And we all know the people in our markets that have like those slimy agents that you wouldn't want a slimy agent to get into this person's house because they're going to just sell them on a bunch of crap. So you have to know that you are the best person to help these people. And yeah, sometimes it might be like, hey, this is really what your house is worth. And I guarantee I can get it sold at this price. That's what it's worth. But the letters are to get you in the door and to have the conversation about what the price really is and what your, you know, what your marketing process is. But yeah, these exact same letters are what people are using. And I think the biggest part of it And the people that we've seen succeed, Ryan, is they have a plan and a system. Now, uh, one of the guys in our group, he's based in the, uh, Virginia area. He— his VA runs everything, sends him a list that, like, has— she fills out, like, the, the labels, the envelope labels, the mailing labels. He goes into the drive, he clicks the list, he prints them off, stamps the envelopes, puts the letters in there, and he takes them to the post office. He bought one of those stamping machines, you know, that one of those mailing machines, because he was sick of buying the stamps. So he bought a postage machine. But you have to get the system down and you have to follow the system. So it's day 1, this letter goes out. Day 3, this letter goes out. Day 4, this letter goes out. And you have to stay on top of it because it's not just— a lot of agents will send one letter. Hey, I can help you sell your house. Hey, I know why your house didn't sell. Hey, I've got a buyer for your house. And they send one letter and they never hear from them. They're like, oh shucks, that system doesn't work in my market. Well, no, it does, but it does based on the, the, you know, sending the whole process of letters. Now you're not going to get every single one one. A lot of homes expire for different reasons, and they're, you know, they're going to use their agent. But I, I know that it works because I have talked to people, and I know it works. People are getting—

I believe you. I'm just— yeah, I'm just saying, I think, I think where I balked was I'm an English teacher, poet, writer, like, you know what I mean? And I'm like, oh man, that's not like my voice, and I wouldn't like really say that. But like, It's going to get us in the door, get us on the phone for conversation. Yeah, that's cool. You know, then I can say, I say, hey, like, you know, that bold print is— yes, it is pretty bold because I take my job pretty serious, take selling your house pretty serious. Let's— can we get into some deeper data? Let me show you the computer. Let's roll, kind of, kind of situation versus like 29 days or your free money, like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, that's how you're reading it. So you know what, what you could do, Ryan, is if you have some kind of AI that knows who you are, take this letter, put it in AI and say, hey, here's my goal. I want to use this type of letter and I want to make it in my wording. Like, like write this like Ryan would write it.

Okay, cool.

Based on what you know about me, write this like Ryan would write it, but have a hook that I can, you know, get them to reach out to me. And then just, you know, take the concept of what the letter is, modify it to yourself, and then try that. See if you get some feedback. And if you need to tweak it, you tweak it. But the, the, the goal of the system is that you have all of these things lined up and you like, there's no reason why, you know, day 3 mailing doesn't go out. Like it's all planned. And so we have it in the CRM. That it triggers a task for, you know, property to get, you know, mailer number 2. And so you pull up your tasks and you're like, oh, this is what I need. If you don't have— I mean, the VA, if you have a VA, they can build it out in there. But once you get this running, the beautiful thing about this system is once you build it out and it takes time, then you can have somebody run this system for you. There's a guy down in Nashville, he works a full-time job as an electrician He runs this system with a stay-at-home mom. The stay-at-home mom logs into RedX. They have Follow Up Boss, gets the rights, writes out the letters. And you'll see like in, in the video, like you get a mail sorter, you know, like the big box mail sorter with all the slots. And you just put your, you know, day, all the letters, you get them all printed out. Some of our clients are, you know, people in the, the program here, they'll use postcards. Postcard number 1, postcard number 2, postcard number 3. And you just get that system built out. And once you build it out, whether it takes you 20 hours or 40, you get the system built out. Now it's built and you just have to run it.

I think I'm still— I'm still— I mean, I had a good year and some of the numbers you talked about were there and the taxes and all that, but like, until I psychologically can get 3 to 4 every 4 every single month of the rest of my life. I'm going to be on edge and like, I don't want— I don't want to be on it. I know I can do it. I, I want— I want to do it for a month, or I wish to go fishing.

Yeah, well, listen, as, as good as my team is, like, we just— we nosedived in February. Part of it was the weather, but my December and my January were record months for me. My February wasn't. So you're gonna have some of those those waves. But real quick, before we end, I want you guys to look in the chat. Um, Paula put a couple things in there, uh, the time study, know your numbers if you want to kind of break down the numbers, uh, looking at admin tasks versus agent tasks. If you need some help, you're thinking about bringing on a virtual assistant, you can go through there. Um, the, the Million Dollar Agent Method, if you just kind of follow what we're along through there and, you know, implement this stuff. Lars, I think Lars is back next week, but any questions you have or challenges or anything, make sure to bring them to these calls because this is where we want to walk through these things and help you guys build your business. Right. Hey, thanks for taking the time. It was great to see everybody this week and hopefully I'll be back in the next couple of weeks and reconnect with everybody. Thanks, Ben.