Real World Lessons on Leadership - Part 2

Hey, welcome back to the Business Freedom Podcast. Lars Hedinborg, founder of Real Estate B School, co founder of High Performance Real Estate Advisors, got into real estate business in 2008 and launched Real Estate B School in 2013. And if this is your first episode, I'm going to ask you to back up one episode. This is going to be part two of a virtual intensive workshop saved session that we held in April of 2020. And the leadership advice from these three team leaders with combined production over a thousand homes, not including what my team does. It is timeless and some of it's based on what's happening in the world at the time they recorded it and it's all just amazing stuff and they've been with Real Estate B School for years and they've just done amazing work within our community. The only thing I ask since this is a members only piece of content is that if you love it, if it's helpful, if it inspires you, I'm going to ask you to share it and leave us a five star review. That is the only ask to share it on social media and leave us a five star review. So stay tuned. Part two of what I call this Lessons on leadership from three team leaders with a thousand homes sold per year combined. So stay tuned for part two. So let me ask you guys a question. You know, I've found that my activities have changed in both businesses, you know, and in terms of just the things that I need to do to help the teams, you know, move forward. How have your activities in your businesses changed since this has all gone down? Like maybe some of you were out of a certain thing and now you're jumping into it and you're shoulder to shoulder virtually. Like how have things changed for you guys? I'm gonna start with Greg. He looks the most ready to answer.

You're talking about how things change most in our business or relationship with our team.

Just like, you know, maybe before you were like the true CEO and everything was running and now like yeah, you're in there recruiting your call.

Yeah. So I generally never tried to sell houses. So I'm like, huh, you know, if I lost some deals, I didn't really care that much. Cause I like to go home in an early time in the day and I find myself sold a few, you know, the higher end deals, I've sold four of them in the last couple weeks that may have not got done otherwise. One of the problems that we, that I ran into. Hang on one second.

That's the awesome part of, as Dan says, Rona Sorry.

I think our kitchen is being remodeled at the moment.

So.

One of the problems that we just run into structurally is we created a culture of going into the office. And that was our cult. If anything else, we were at the office. If you weren't at the office, I'm like a baby. I assume you died or you're missing and you just disappeared. So I'd be always on, gotta be in the office, gotta be in the office. And that was great. Until now, for weeks and weeks we cannot go in the office. And I don't know where people are at or what they're doing. And I have real honest conversations with people. And my agents aren't working. They are working. I'm like, give it to me straight, three hours. And they're like two hours. I got my guys, come on, you can't give up. I don't give up, I double down. That's just my nature though. You press me, I double down every time. And it turns out my team, you press them in this manner and they almost all quit. And they're great workers. So I've had to really get serious with them and motivate them. And we're shut down for another two and a half weeks. We're not working. So trying to connect with people, keep them motivated, something I haven't had to do a whole lot of has been incredibly challenging.

So along those lines, what have you, what have you adopted? You know, have you started the Daily Zooms accountability reporting numbers?

So immediately.

This is like Dave Books real living in quarantine.

Right now.

So what I do, so I did, I did a few things. One, I work at a large brokerage that I don't own, right. The day before the, when this got turned off, I got with the owner of the company, I said, hey, let's start a task force. I put on a task force with daily meetings at one, giving updates at national guest speakers on. So I did that to kind of support the company and my team. Large company, over a thousand agents. I've switched and immediately on day one switched my team from 8:30 to 11:30. We're all on Zoom. All everybody that's not goofing around, I guess is on Zoom so we can see each other, communicate. I switched my team meetings from mornings to afternoons. Hopefully we could get work done in the morning before chaos got too carried away in the afternoon at home, switch our team meetings from one one hour a week to two half an hours. My one on one sessions went from. I was constantly like, hey, don't Worry about it. We'll meet up again next month. And next month would come, I'd be like, hey, guys. Oh, you're busy. I'm bus. Those got real serious. We dialed down on everything. I sent food out to my people I'm concerned about. Some of them literally don't have enough food. We don't have. We have no sales. We have sales going on, but the potential is zero. We're gonna get to here shortly if things don't change. So those type of things, and I did those on day zero. I made all those changes, and it's worked pretty well.

Awesome. Dan, what have you personally had to do in the business that you got away from?

Well, I just want to bring up. So about a month and a half before all this started, maybe a little bit more, we identified as a leadership team, a handful of folks that we needed to kind of part ways with, let's just put it that way. But they're really good people. Two of them are really good, really good salespeople, but just weren't really good. Culture fits. So one of the things we had to adapt to really quickly because we rocked the boat. We didn't blow up our team, but we parted. Parted ways and kind of encouraged, like, hey, this is not the best fit for you. And we had a handful of agents raise their hand, say, yeah, we agree. This is a perfect time. Something just wasn't 100% right with our culture. So we took this time, especially at the very beginning, to kind of push. And one kind of took a little bit more of a hard push to get him to jump off the boat. So we took this time to really dial in. And we've been talking about our culture for months within our leadership team. Just. It's good. But something was off. So we took this time to kind of revisit what our culture we want it to look like and nail down on our core group and then rebuild around the core group. So around prospecting and things like that, we did move to zoom for daily huddles. Same with meetings. But we're changing the language just a little bit around on huddle. Who can help out? Calling this, this or this today? Who can help out on this versus you have to do, like, X amount. That seemed to, you know, that's worked for years, but there feels like there's just a different vibe in the air. And, Lars, you said it on one of the Wednesday calls. We have to listen to our folks. And, Drew, I think you said it as well in that same call. We're Human and people have emotion and to kind of do the normal routine, like, hey, we have to do this, this and this and have a proper cadence. Yeah, there has to be a proper cadence. But let's adjust during these times to do more follow up, to do different style of touches, to have people do a little bit more opportunity time and ease back into it versus, you know, my original approach when all this happened was, guys, we have to do 18 hours of prospecting because we have to pretty much like almost double what we were doing to get the same results. And people listen, people bought in. But as more negativity, you know, brewed around this whole issue and then you have me over here saying all these crazy ass things and pushing people in directions. They, I don't say they don't want to be pushed, but it just wasn't the right time or place. So we slowly eased back into, okay, let's start this. Who can help out with this? Here's this list for you today. More kind of a, you know, who can help out on this approach? And that seems to have like a lot better result for us. And it's not kind of you have to do this, you have to do that. Which most people are okay with when different circumstances because they want the accountability, they want the structure. So that's, that's kind of the big thing.

Have you, have you thrown a headset on and gotten on the phones?

I did, and not as much as I wanted to, but I did just so much so the agents who I could report on actual numbers and I know the first time I popped on I only made it was about three and a half hours worth, but it was 60, 61 dials, 20 contacts, 1 hang up, which is not bad. It was roughly eight or nine conversation meaningful combos with two or three sent over to the lender. Mostly follow ups, but I just wanted to prove to the team that, you know, their, their biggest fear was, okay, people don't want to talk to us right now. And I found that totally opposite. The conversations were actually really long. They were good even though, you know, people were scared. My husband lost his job and I appreciate you guys checking in. Well, how are you doing? So the conversations change up a little bit. But that's, you know, I wanted to prove to the team and myself like, hey, people do want to talk to us. You know, they're not doing anything else. So I have, but not to the extent that I really wanted to. It's more been working on projects and dialing in on some things. I need to work on within the business.

Yeah. All right, Drew, so kind of getting into our next question a little bit too, but what have you had to step back into with the team? And then, you know, I want to ask all of you, like, really to tell us what the conversations are like now with your. With your teammates as well. But we'll start with just that first part. Drew, what are you doing now that you weren't doing before?

Yeah, so much like Dan, I, you know, immediately we went to ramp up the prospecting. Everybody in your database needs to be called. And I jumped right into that with the team, and we really harped on it very, very hard for the first week or so. It was during that time that I also listened to the Craig Groeschel leadership podcast about leading through crisis. And if you listen to it, which everybody on this call should, you hear a couple different things in it. And one of the things that you heard in it was, whatever your first plan is, it's going to be wrong. And. And I was like, no, we're doing the right things. You know, I'm in here prospecting. I get alerted in the evenings about cold leads that re. Inquire, and It'd be like 9:30 at night. And I'm there, like, scheduling appointments with them, which I've, you know, before I would. I'd have been shut down and with my family at that time. But I was really getting back into it. And one of the things that we found early on was, you know, we do a one on one. I do a one on one with the agents every. Every, every other week. So one on one every other week, and then on the off week, they get an email to them. And what I found very quickly was that wasn't enough. I needed to be talking to them, to each and every one of them almost daily, and just have a very open dialogue with each one of them. So for starters, it was taking Greg's approach and really understanding what each member of our team has in their bank accounts and what it's going to take. How many months can they go without a check and talking about that. And I think somebody asked the question, how do you motivate them to work? And it was really based on making sure that they can get a paycheck on the other side of this thing. But it was through talking to them every day that I realized that Craig was right and we got it wrong. And, you know, telling them to prospect for eight hours a day was not the right approach. And I started to hear things from our team. Members. Like, one of them is working in his basement right now. And he said, I was literally, like, trudging down the steps at the thought of getting onto the Zoom Call and prospecting all day long. Like, I just didn't know if I had it in me kind of thing. And it was when we realized that we have just been this team that has been focused on prospecting, and that's the way we held our team accountable, and that's where they got their wins, was whenever they were scheduling appointments and putting properties under contract. And we had to change not only our activities, but the way we held them accountable to help them to be productive during that time, during this time. And so it didn't just mean we were prospecting and that measured your productivity. That was our biggest, aha kind of stumbling block. I think they probably went through it for three or four days before we really realized that we weren't meeting them where they were and needed to make some changes in our leadership.

So let's pick up on that. On that guy trudging down into the basement. What is he doing now to make his day more fulfilling, more productive feeling, and still productive.

Yeah. So each and every person is different. I think this is the same as what Dan is saying. Rather than make somebody do something, we did a brainstorm as a team to decide what activities could they be doing to be productive right now. And some of those are going to be on business activities, like growing your database and putting systems into place. And some of them are going to be in the business, and they're going to be prospecting in different ways. That's not just phone calls. It's also handwritten notes. It's also social media messages to people and text messages as well. And so I've met with each of them to decide what they want to do. One of our agents said to us very early on in the shutdown, he said, part of me wants to be productive in my business, but the other part of me, if I'm being honest, wants to be productive at home as well. Because when the gates lift, we're going to take off running. And anything that I had to do at home, I won't be able to do now. And so part of me is like, I want to spend some of this time doing that. And so we really just talked with the agents about that in their business and said, what are some things that you want in your business that you just never had time to do? Right. Because now is the time that you have to do it. And so each and Every agent has identified what those things are. And then every day we kind of. We took a note from B school, something that you guys do whenever you. Every time you drop in the Facebook, like, what are your top three priorities this week? It reminds me that I need to identify those. And so now each of the agents are identifying every week what their top three priorities are to complete. Then every day they have three tasks that they have to complete that will contribute to those priorities. So they drop those into a spreadsheet and just do into a Google form. So that now on their one on ones, I'm not just doing a scorecard review that measures their prospecting activities, but also what productive activities they completed this week.

Yeah. So what did you say you were going to do and did you do it? How good of a job did you do doing it?

Yeah, and I think there was that, there was a measure of that that was really helpful for us. And then the other was just keeping everybody really engaged and involved. And so I do think that that communication is key through multiple mediums. I mean, I think voxer is one thing, which is how we usually communicate. But I learned, I learned something about my own leadership that I was. That is kind of something that I don't know. I like to do that I'm pretty good at. I guess I'm a pretty good like hype man. We took my son snowboarding and he knows how to snowboard and I don't know how to snowboard, so I couldn't coach him through snowboarding, but I could tell him he was doing a really good job and hype him up through it. And so being able to do that with the team has really given them confidence to stay in it. We also built a culture committee and named the team for it. And so now they each come up with a new activity every week or a new culture builder that we're doing throughout this shutdown. That's not coming top down from leadership, but from the agents themselves and keeping them kind of engaged and involved. And I think there's maybe it's just me. The rest of my team is on here and they can tell me if I'm wrong. I think the fact that we are doing cultural activities to stay engaged also helps them do the business activities and stay engaged.

Thanks for listening to the Business Freedom Podcast. If you're getting value from the podcast, would you please leave us a five star review and share it with others who might benefit from the content I'm sharing? And if you're ready to scale your real estate business sustainably and profitably. There are a couple options for you. If you're doing under 500,000 in annual GCI, or business foundations Program, is for you. Head over to get businessfoundations.com that's getbusinessfoundations.com and learn how you can make the shift from overwhelmed real estate agent to true business owner. If you're doing more than 500,000 in annual Team GCI, there's our graduate program designed for top producers and team leaders who want to grow their team and scale their business. If that's you, go to realestatebschool.com and apply for a free Business Growth Strategy session. No matter where you are in your business growth journey, we have the tools, systems, strategies, training and coaching to get you where you want to be. Remember, only you can create your future, so take action now.