The 6 Disciplines to Dominate During the Shift

All right, so raise your hand if you like the word discipline. And I know it's probably not the favorite word I actually debated should I use the word discipline or should I use the word habits? Because habits is so much catchier. But I think like a habit feels like something that you just like naturally do, where the discipline to me is something that you choose to do. And I think that there's things that we all know we should do, but that doesn't mean that we do them or want to do them. So anyway, I mean, I think, you know, when, when Lars asked me to speak today and share a little bit about our journey, I wanted to share some of these things. And you know, I do want to just give Lars a shout out because I do remember being in his room and learning and he was sharing stuff from high performance coaching he'd learned. And Lars always just brings his 100% a game and is always learning himself and working to be able to bring things of value. So we have always appreciated that so much about him. And I think we share a lot of four values, which makes it extra fun to collaborate together. So thank you for inviting me. And a little bit about me. So I've been married 13 years, 10 to Kirby, who is my wonderful husband. Random fact, he flew out to the Congo and surprised me and proposed there 14 years ago. So that's how we ended up getting engaged. And now we have four amazing children. And here in these pictures, our oldest just turned 10, which makes us feel really old because all of a sudden you're like, wow, we've been parents 10 years. No wonder we're not anymore in our 20s or 30s. I actually just turned 41 a few days ago. So I grew up in Mexico and I also lived in the Congo in Africa. And we have a real estate team with about 35 full time agents and then other support agents and staff. We have a home building company that Kirby runs. You know, we have rental properties. Those are the primary focuses from a business standpoint at this time. And for fun, we love to travel, go on vacations and go to our lake home, which if you know about Minnesota, people love cabins on lakes. And we ended up doing our 10 year dream early and bought it during COVID which we would never go back. It was like the best decision and we've had so much fun as well as fun sharing it with people. And I love food and good food. So anyway, there's a little bit about me and Lars. Do people pitch in with questions? Should I leave open for that or Just towards the end, I would say.

I mean, definitely sprinkling your question as you guys have them, but I would just go through your stuff and then I'll pay attention to the questions and then we'll have time afterwards.

Okay, that sounds great. So, well, what are the six things that we'll talk about today? The disciplines that have, that have really transformed my personal life and business. I think, you know, let's take care of. There's. There's kind of two categories, which is you as a person. Take care of your physical body, mindset and soul, and leverage your home to be life giving. And the three that have been part of my business success, specifically with real estate, is master the sales process, get really good at the phone and loving it. And relationships are the key. So you guys ready for this? Let's get rolling. So first, take care of your physical body, I think is one of the things. And you know, actually this morning I was thinking about it and I'm going to start actually with number two is number one, because I think that that's really like where, where I start or where I would recommend starting as a platform for the rest. It was actually kind of fun to see you guys in the chat. I wasn't able to participate in the earlier sessions, but hearing you talk about some of you guys, at least from that spiritual side, it's pretty cool. And I think, you know, what I, what I observe it well. And what I, what I know to be true is we are spiritual means are more to us than just our physical body. And when we develop and nurture the deeper side in us, everything in our outlook changes, our priorities and the way that we live. And that's been a huge part for my life. We need an anchor, something that we go to when the going gets tough. Also something that we go to when the going is great. So we don't get proud because pride comes before the fall usually. And so that's really been a huge thing for me. You know, I think that if most of us look around, we've heard at some point, and some of you guys might even know people, right, who've had huge levels of success and yet end up committing suicide, right? Because I think there was a big realtor in California not that long ago, very successful. And so really, I think what it comes down to is financial success and success in life. It does not have that true lasting meaning. All of us look for meaning. And so that's, that's really huge that I would encourage each of you to. To find a deeper sense of purpose. So for me that anchors me consistently and I go back to. And that's what the framework by which I live my life. And it's huge for me. And there's a lot of resources out there that are not necessarily Christian that can help you. Like I've learned a lot from Tony Robbins and several of his events that have really helped me process and put through the time of defining who I am. And that's, that's the. One of the points I really want to talk about today is the more clear you are on who you are as a person and where you're going, then, then what you're doing is going to align and you're going to have that integrity with yourself about all the other disciplines that we're going to talk about today. Just a little plug in Date with Destiny for me was my favorite event of his and I what kind of junkies we went to all of them. But one of the things you had to do there is right at your Destiny board and there's, there's a couple things in there. One you're writing like, hey, the mission of my life is X. I know Lars is huge on that. He had us work on stuff like that when we went and we've gone to these events. And one of the things that I appreciated a lot is he had you work through your toward values and you're away from values, meaning because we're not even aware of the things that we live by sometimes value wise. Right. Like so for example, one of the ones that I learned of was everything's going to go badly. And so even for example, this week some things happened and I caught myself realizing, wow, I'm responding like everything's going to be going badly instead of looking at it from the values that I, that I want to have that are, that are true of who I am. And so being able to acknowledge that has helped me completely transform the way that I approach things versus just that incentive gut reaction that we have from our childhood based on whatever experiences we had. So anyway, the more you can figure out who you are, that's. And put the time towards that and do it regularly. So every year I spend some time by myself, which doesn't happen easily when you're a parent and I'm sure you all know and I spent some time really thinking and praying for hey, what is, what is my focus going to be this year based on my circumstances or the opportunities we want to grow, or my family's needs or my team's needs or my own needs and then I put the energies towards that. And I usually try to live with no more than four to six that are areas that I'm focusing on developing. I usually try to have at least one or two that are personal, one or two that are business related that I'm feeling really focusing on as things really encourage you to read book or listen as realtors and as busy people. If you work out or you're driving listening to books. Audible is my best friend, but it is a game changer for growing and changing the weight of your approaching life. Whether and I actually switch it up a lot. I read like a personal book, not. Not novels or anything, although fun things. I'm trying to bring it into my life from a reading standpoint and I have over the last year a little. But I usually say what is something that's going to develop me as a person? And then I switch it off and the next time I'm reading, typically something that's going to develop me from a business standpoint or as a leader. Previously I had a lot to do with sales skills and things like that. And I still sometimes sprinkle sales stuff and how can I develop in my coaching of my team and think bigger and then always I would highly, highly encourage you. Find a mentor, find counselors, you know, you got issues, just go get help. And it's so awesome. It's so awesome in your marriage and whatever category it is because that will catapult you to the next levels in every way. So that's my encouragement. I'm going to go back to number one. So with that as a framework, right? Like who I want to be, who you want to be, and having that clarity, when you've got the clarity, it's true to you. You can't make it up right now in my opinion, if you really spend the time doing it and identify who you really are and are comfortable with that and decisions you're choosing to make from there, then some of these other decisions you make, these other disciplines will be far easier to follow through on. So I think taking care of our physical body is huge. There's a quote that my dad told me of once that I will never forget. But he said, you know, there's this guy that just worked and was amazing and did a lot of amazing things in his life and I can't remember what his name is, but the point is he never rested and ended up dying in his 30s. And one of his dying quotes was, man, God gave me one horse to run with and I beat the horse to death. So we don't want to do that with our body. We've got one body, one life. We want to take good care of it because when we do that, we're able to make such a more powerful impact for the rest of our lives. Right. And we want those lives to belong in a way that are meaningful to ourselves, our family and waters. So I think exercising is huge. And one of the things that I really recommend is be realistic. You know, I see a lot of people that are like, oh, I never work out. Okay, now my goal and I'm going to work out seven days a week for now or every single day. And it's just like that's not going to happen. It's not sustainable for most people. Some people do it, I realize, but it's very few people that do that. So it's far better to make a commitment that's far smaller. Once a week, once you hit once a week for several months, go to twice a week or whatever. But like don't, don't make the jump so big. So I have for years and years and years, I just do three times a week, I do 30 minutes, but I just wrote 15. If that's something that helps you to kind of conceptualize if it's small enough to do it consistently. But it is a game changer when I have hard days, even when I was pregnant, all four pregnancies, or when I'm tired or sick, like I do everything I can to stay consistent. And you know you're going to have a little zeg there, right? You get really sick or something, but generally try to stay consistent. And the energy level that, that it causes in you start your day, you go strong in your whole life, long term is going to go, go better. My, you know, I think we stop building true muscle after the 40s, I think it is. And so you want to build as much and maintain as much food as you can and not let it dwindle down. So keep it easy. I think that one of the things for me that you'll see kind of this as a pattern in a lot of the disciplines that I talk about, I try to make everything literally as easy as possible so that I actually can follow through on it because it requires very little thinking on my part once I've done the initial decision making about what I want to do. So there was pews in my life where I did a lot of running and biking. Then I did T25, 25 minute hardcore workouts after I had kids. If you Know anything about that? You know, it's pretty rough on a woman's body. So I got into a workout program called Every Mother, which was really very transformational and helpful, and I highly encourage it for any woman who's had children. And now my husband and I do the mirror. So like literally a physical mirror that has a workout program, live coaching on it, live classes and thousands of workout classes of every type, from yoga and dance to strength building and kickboxing and all of that. But we actually work out together now, which has made it really fun and challenges both of us to do harder workouts than we would typically on our own. But what I really like about it, when I think about easy again and we don't drive anywhere, I don't have to get in my cold car in the middle of winter in Minnesota. I'm not losing, you know, 15 minutes driving here back and forth to the gym. I'm not stuck talking to people when I don't have time. And when you have kids, that's, that's a real, a real issue. That morning time and evening, very, very, very difficult to ever actually work out. So we get up, the kids don't bother us, they know what we're doing. We get our workout in, in and out, done 30 minutes. So again, easy, easy, easy, easy. Totally recommend it. So. And really, the more you do whatever you decide with your physical body, I know we could go into talking about eating, health and all that, and I'm not going to go into that today. For me, this is one of the biggest things, is just do it consistently. Start small, stay consistent, and then you can build from there. But I don't feel a need to work out five or seven times a week. I mean, sometimes I am doing activities five or seven times a week or for a walk or things like that. But my, my commitment to exercise is three mornings a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, just doesn't change. Just like I'm spending time personally journaling and reading my Bible, spending time with God every Tuesday, Thursday and then on the weekends. So just very, very like simple and structured first thing in the morning. So I'm going to go then to number three of the personal ones. So leverage your home to be life giving. I think that's huge. Well, we're entrepreneurs and we're hustling and we're working hard. And when you work in real estate, which doesn't end, it's not 9 to 5, right, it's starting to finish. And we all know we've had Those calls at 10 or 11pm get that deal done or save it from dying. We need our home environments to be as supportive and life giving as possible. Because the worst thing that can happen is you have all these responsibilities. You come home, you raise your hand, right? If you experience this and then you're like, oh my gosh, the bathrooms haven't been clean for, oh my goodness, I have no idea what we're going to eat and I'm starving and now I'm hangry and I got to open the fridge and come up with something. And all of the sins just. And that pressure we feel, they weigh it down and it really, if we start feeling that guilt or that, that pulling us back, it doesn't allow us to live in our best space for our home life as well as for our business. Right. And for our clients and all that. So some of the ways that I found that really disciplines that help us just prioritize. We prioritize our marriage before we had kids, just made the commitment on literally Thursday nights since the day we got married to even now that's when we've got our date night. And you know, our newborns joined us for about the first month and a half or so or whatever. But once they started getting, you know, whatever, stay with the babysitter with the rest. So and that's great because having that dedicated time away, that's not the exhaust at 9pm time after you've gotten the kids to bed and. Or whatever. I mean, it's just huge. So it's fun. I think being able to do that is very important. And then we've also invested in times of growth. So sometimes it's been participating in certain coaching programs together. Sometimes it's been, hey, let's go to counseling and grow in this area individually and in our marriage and whatever it is. And sometimes it's just like, hey, let's have a little more fun in this particular area. So that's been really great for us as two strong personalities and with a lot going on, that's extremely helpful. Again, going to the easy thing delegate or find easy system that makes the weight of the whole life easier. Right. So cleaning just get a cleaner. I mean, I think Lars may be one of the first people that really was like, dude, you got to get cleaners. But it's a game changer. And we've been doing that for several years. And it's not that we're not physically able to clean. We clean all the time, like the maintenance cleaning, but the deep cleaning. Awesome. Not having to worry about that at all. It's huge. So groceries and menu planning, that was like our witching hour when we come home from work. Anybody else experience that or otherwise you're eating out too much and that's not great for you either or your budget sometimes. So we did a lot of research and found an app called Paprika. Okay. Which I highly, highly recommend. New menu plan. You add all the recipes super easily from the Internet or manually add it to the weekly. To the weekly menu. And then you add all your groceries from there. Compile them different news. You can share an account. So Tika shop. Well now our nanny shop. So we order online most of the time so that you know, ordering online makes groceries easy. So when you don't have to think about it and then you end up with your go to recipes, the ones that work and you have enough variety. Again, less decision making makes it so much better. And then for us, we ended up going to getting a nanny by the time we had a third kid. So that also we made cooking dinners part of her job description. So the day that she works for us, that's what she does. And it makes a total game changer. We come home. It's already hard enough to be patched from work, but at least now we don't have to like work cooking and we can show each other as a family. And that's. That's been so wonderful for us as a parent, one of the leverage things I would encourage is spend one on one time with each kid, as is often even every day, at least 5 or 10, 15 minutes of like attention on them. It makes a huge difference. So Kirby's been really good about doing like daddy daughter or daddy Sundays. They love that I do my, my times with them differently, but I think investing in that is huge. And again, speaking to moms mostly, but like the mom guilt thing is a real thing when you work. And so being able to do that and make sure that your kids feel loved gives you so much more peace. Like it's okay you love the nanny, they're loved at school or whatever. I'm still showing up for them when I'm showing up. So being intentional and not accidental really helps a lot to make sure that you're living according to the values you want here. And then for us personally, I don't want to be all work and no play. We love vacations, building memories and fun experiences. And personally giving to charity is a huge part of our lives. And so we plan for that like, hey, how much do we want to give? Hey, what vacations do we want to go on this trip? What? Okay. All right. So now I'm going to transition to the business side of things. Okay. So the, the fourth thing, the fourth discipline that has really, I guess transformed our success is mastering the sales process. Now I'm imagining most of you, or if not all of you, have at least personally been selling homes for whatever period, and you're probably still selling homes or now starting to manage or managing your team selling homes. And again to the easy part, right? Like creating systems around everything that you can possibly control that is repetitive or repetitive enough is a complete game changer. You've done it, you know. You know, we created a lot of our systems around what are the things that wake us up at night, the buyer send the earnest money, right? Well, let's just create a system around all those things. Take the thinking out of it. Because taking that the thinking out of it and reducing the stress and then we just follow the process and people are always like, wow, how do you remember everything? I don't. My sister reminds me for it. I just follow it. So anything that causes you stress that can be proactively managed, I would always encourage you to create a system around it. Now I'm sure, you know, there's a talk about getting an assistant or showing agents. That will be a whole part of the systems that I could go into as well. But that's what I would really encourage. Everything that can elevate you to being your highest and best and the leader you want to become for whatever kind of business you want to be building is huge. And then here's another one. Now I'm imagining most of you because you're here with coaching, you are doing this. But if you're leading a team as well, I think one of the things I really coach my agents, but real estate agents love to think they work and they don't always work, right? So like if you treat your job like a full time, real job, you will always make a lot of money, right? Like how many people in the world make a like 100k6 figures when they're not working at least around 40 hours a week. I mean, maybe once you have your successful business, right? Or millionaires don't count, but like normal people, nobody gets paid that to just show up 15 hours a week. And then we have agents that sit there wondering why they make the salary 15 hours a week, right? So I just like show up, get up every single day, treat it like a real job, right? Who's read the book that Frog money, right? So do the hardest, most important work every day. Who knows what the hardest, most important work in real estate is, right? Make those calls. We'll talk about that in the next discipline. And I, I believe that if you treat everything that you do in real estate and in your work kind of like ping pong, then you're, you're going to do really well. So the ball should never be in your fort. Just pass it back, pass it back. If you read an email, touch it once, respond, file it, delete it. People always ask me now, wow, where do you start getting successful? Like, oh, just answer the phone. We call everybody back every time. Um, and it's, it is a game changer. So just the less the balls in your floor, the more things move forward. Um, and you also train yourself to have higher capacity that way. So the touch at once concept is huge. With just about every task you can do again, it makes it easier. You're going to have some emails, subtle tasks that are going to require more time than that, but they should be minimal. And the majority of your, your activities that bond people down, like email or text, just such at once and take care of it. So that's it. That's a, that's a huge one. So number five, get really good at the phone. Raise your hand if you like calling people and being on the phone. I have some people shaking their heads and a couple people raising their hands. Thanks for the honesty, everybody. Well, I'm one of those weird people that became a lover of the phone. But I remember the absolute terror the first time we got a paper click read on our new home search website and I looked at Kirby and I was like, what do I do? Well, call it, I don't know what you say, but I just started doing it right and then we eventually got coaches and people that help us be better at it. But what, what I've gotten from it, right, is that the only way to grow, to love and get better is just by doing it. And the more you do it, the better you, you are in it. And I think that's really what happened with me. You know, I single handedly was the one that managed all of our home search website leads for a couple years. I set all the appointments, worked all the leaves, sold about 60 homes by the next year out of that website. So, and so I learned a lot and you have to talk to a lot of people to do that. And this was like a tight relief which became commissioned or got bought out by them. So just the testimony there that it can work for everybody, for you, for your agents, just doing it and learning. Here's a strategy that helped me to get really good on the phone. Okay, There's a book called Go for no. The premise of the book is exactly the title, but it really makes a difference because if you want to be like sell ice cream, right? That's just, we're not going to be liked by everybody when we're calling people about real estate. So most people get discouraged calling people on the phone because they're wanting a yes. We all want a yes. You know, and when you instead are realistic and say, hey, I'm going to get rejected and you almost make it like a game, it completely changes your game, right? So instead of saying, hey, I'm going to go for setting five appointments today, I would go, I want to see if I can just get 10 people to say FMU by the end of the day. Not intentionally, right. But we're going to do it. We've all gotten hung up on and I'm just going to see how many friends I can make along the way. And instead of checking, instead of feeling bad about all the hang ups and you know, nice things people sometimes say when they do that, you start checking it off like in your brain. It's like, I achieved another goal, you know, and in the process of that, it's actually very rare you're going to have hit 10 of those in a day if you're learning and getting better at scripts and conversations, right? And by the end of it, you're probably going to have your goals of what you want and set achieved. But the mindset of it is different in that you're, you're very realistic with that. So understanding the math with numbers, with phone call to me has always helped me. Again, I keep going back to I like it easy, I like to know where I'm going because then I can function within that. So you buy 100 leads online, likely is 30% of them are going to be bad numbers. The other some people might have realtors, whatever. If you make a hundred calls, you're probably at bets going to get 10 live conversations of those. If you're good at the end of the day, you're going to set about 1. So there's a math and you're basically going for 99, not set appointments out of a hundred call, but you should end up with one by the end of the day. So that helps me. And if you can understand your math or start to track it, it really helps you to be able to approach it with that kind of eye wide open thing and train your team with that as well. So I'd encourage you to learn scripts, get good coaching with that. There's a lot online, but getting an actual coach, we're doing real role playing. A lot of teams in a lot of groups will do role playing and that is huge. We do that every week on our team and give feedback and get the feedback. One of the first script coaches I had, he was really direct and would make me cry. However. He did make me cry. However, what I will say is that he really taught me like that if I hadn't gotten that coaching, I wouldn't have gotten better. And so I'm really grateful for that and I think that has enabled me to be a better coach with my agents now with more sensitivity possibly. But you need to get and give real feedback to get better. And in regards to being able to get good at the phone, listen, if you ask really good questions, you're going to get really good answers. And if you ask kind of lousy questions like yes or no questions, most of the time, especially at the onset of a conversation are good, right? So you're going to get yes or no answers. That doesn't give the conversation going very far. So as I've trained my team and the best people on my team are very good listeners and very good question askers because the more you, you get them talking, right? What's everybody's favorite topic? Right? They always say people's favorite word is their name and people's favorite topic is themselves. So if we can get them to talk about themselves, they automatically like you more. And so then the more they trust you, the more they share with you, the more if you ask quality questions, you understand the problems. And really what we're doing in real estate is solving people's problems. So if they don't have a problem, we can't help them anyway, right? Like problems, can they buy or sell or what the challenges. So anyway, that's what's gotten me to love it and, and for me it's just an opportunity to be able to build another relationship and to see, hey, can I add value to this person's life at this particular time frame? No joke. I was, I was doing a live session calling, training my team a couple of weeks ago. And I'm not even joking, literally there was someone with goats in the background that answered the phone. So that was the first. You always get a first on everything. It was pretty great trying to have that conversation. So anyway, that's that. And then the last point, number six is relationships are the key. And so that, that I think there's so many levels on that. But what I do want to, to be clear is you have to stay personal in your business. And everything can't just be about the numbers. Everything can't just be about the money. Even though obviously we need numbers and we need money to make a business work, those are very real and very important things. It's about the people. There's really like two categories of people and so one of them is your team. If you develop and have a team, we have to see them, we have to love on them, we have to take care of them. Especially, I'm sure a lot of us have experience with the low levels of unemployment. It's not easy to keep and retain good talent. And it's not just about good talent, but it's about right, fit in your culture and with you. Can they. Can they roll the way that you roll? And you want to keep those people and they will stay if they feel invested in, seen, loved and encouraged, they likely won't otherwise. So. And then obviously for any business, you need clients. So that's really a huge one, especially as you grow, like, right, like. So most of you probably sort of like Kirby and I, you're the main person selling, you know everybody by name. And to be able to grow and scale that and transition it to be agents, it takes development there to be able to retain the trust and retain that business over the course of years. So Keller Williams, right, Gary Keller, he wrote a book, the Millionaire Real Estate Agent, but he talks there about developing your 33 touch. Essentially you have to touch or be in contact with your database 33 times a year for them to remember that you exist in the sense of like you're the first person they're going to think of calling. Right. And so that's very important. So we developed a new newsletter, a printed newsletter. We have four to six events every year that our clients appreciation events. And we do market updates and CMAs. We have a homebot. So we do all sorts of things. We actually touch them far more than 33 times a year now, but a lot of events and stuff. And of course they love it because that's like a party every time and free things every time. So that's. That is really one of our favorite things and it keeps us with some moments of face to face with all the clients. So. And this is another one as part of our 33 touch. But I probably would lose a Couple of these before I would ever lose this one, which is we call people on their birthday and their healthy anniversaries every year. And we've done that since basically since COVID 19 started. But it is probably 100 times X your return because very few people do that actually like physically call anyone for the birthday. You know, calling people for their house anniversary. They always feel really special and it just is again a reminder for them that you are their agent. And we've created systems, of course, to make it easy for all of us and our agents because now they're the ones that are handling all our sales and they're the ones that are handling our clients, are the ones that are working with our sphere now in our past clients. And so they, they get the reminders, they call. I still call my friends, some of my past clients because I like to like, I honestly make so much money off of it because I regularly set appointments off of it, whether from them or referrals, just because I stay in touch all the time. So as we've grown in scale, even with 700 some homes a year, still about 50% of our business continues to be repeat and refill business, which I mean when you look at scaling, it's not easy to continue to scale that portion of it unless you're developing rating fans, which is what we're really about. We want to make sure that our, we indoctrinate this and our agents, we track it, we celebrate it, right. Like we read out loud the five star reviews that we get every single week and Zillow, and that by the way is great from your Google presence and Zillow presence and the agents love it and it helps us really know who's, who's succeeding very well. So. And yeah, so loving your team, loving your clients, keeping it personal enough and seeing them and celebrating them, it's always going to pay off and allow you to scale more. So that's what I got. Any questions?

Yes, we're going to take every bit of the next 23 minutes to get everything we can out of, out of you. Can you tell us you presented and I forget where you told us this, but it was a strategy that you used when it was just you and Kirby and like one licensed assistant. But you would go into Kirby's and in your Facebook account on like how did you build the birthday system? Because you still call people on their birthday, right?

Yeah, we do.

Yeah.

So I think it was I, I for the, for a whole year I went every day and you know, in your Facebook reminders. It shows you who's got birthdays. So for a whole year I would go in and I would message each person that we knew. Sometimes you have people that you literally like, don't know or aren't in the country. So then I will skip those. But pretty much everybody else and I would just say, hey, it's our, our goal this year to send everybody that we know a happy anniversary or a happy birthday card and just want to what's your address? And while I'm at it, what's your number? And email so we can stay in touch. And most people would respond and give it to us. And that's how we part of how we built our database with actual real valid contacts. Right. Because, you know, I'll see, like agents will join us, they'll give us their SOI list and it's like a random exported list of our old co workers, half of whom don't work there anymore. Right. That's not a very quality database of people. We're not actually going to, you know, you don't have good contact. So I did that for the first year and then just kind of tracked it after that. But it was a very big game changer because some of those people that like, were acquaintances, they started feeling like friends. They started feeling like we were their friends because who else calls them and sends them how to, you know, happy birthday cards? And you know, even one of them ended up using us a few times, but her husband had been talking to someone at Zillow and she goes, what are you doing? We're going to use Kirby and Christina. They're the ones that send us cards for their birthdays. And we weren't even really friends of the Tower disappointances. So yeah.

And then another thing, and maybe you can talk, talk to this a little bit. The consistency that you guys have employed just in your. Your touch program, you know, you guys have been doing that newsletter. Didn't feel. Haven't changed the look and feel of it. Like it works. All the emotional stuff is built in. Talk, talk about the consistency of it because I have fallen prey to this, you know, where, ah, we've been doing it for a year. You know, let's change it up. You know, but you guys have been doing the same thing year in, year out for the most part. It's not, it's not to say that you don't improve it, but talk about the consistency that you employ in your business.

Yeah, I mean we, we will do br like refreshes and stuff. Like that. But yeah, for the most part, I mean our printed newsletter, it's just always been, you know, like a double sided word pager or whatever you can say. And generally the template's been fairly similar. And yeah, we usually try to focus on having something that's more personal with them. So like you know, the client depreciation events or we'll have like market updates that we really try to avoid having completely like generic articles, you know, we really try to avoid that. So we try to make it much more like personal, interesting, engaging. We're featuring testimonials or client success experiences. Our E newsletter, that one. We actually revamped our format last year so I'll give you guys to this as a freebie. But our deliverability was okay. We were looking really do I improve this? And so we did a lot of research and ended up finding out that the less links you have, your deliverability is much higher. The more links you have, you appear more spammy and certain words like that. So now we run every single new E newsletter. We run the title through a spam filter, check which most CRMs have something like that and then we'll tweak it because we didn't even know that some of the words we were using kind of like gave it up, gave off the feeling of being spammy. For example, like if you try to do something like oh, we sold our whole, you know, our client's home for $40,000 more. If you use that in the title, that's going to show up as spam. Because 40,000, you know, is. Or money. Money is usually used as like a spam context. Right. So being able to run that through that. And then we used to put like a link on the video for the picture plus click here link like don't want anyone to miss clicking. And that adds up to a lot of links. And we added too long. So now we actually have it down to about three sections for the most part, only one link per per thing. And most of our E newsletters now we have about a 25 to 30 some percent open rate which is huge. That's like massive for, for email. I mean when you're emailing thousands of people, that's. That's really good open rate.

Awesome. Tell us about the team structure. So Amanda asked a question about the team structure on the admin side and the agent side.

Do you guys want me to speak about it as today?

Actually no, since we have time talk about the evolution of it. So talk about. I think you and Curbium One licensed administrator. Did like 192 transactions.

So you're non licensed assistant. Who did ended up managing a lot of our marketing and was our listing coordinator. And then so we hired her and then about six months later hired our first showing agent which we are showing agents. We've always only ever had hourly. Like whatever you work, we pay you. We've never paid like consistent salaries or anything like that. But yeah. So by the time we hired them that year, we sold 120 homes and then it was under 92 and grew from there. We ended up hiring our first buyer agent about a year or so afterwards. Actually he overheard our interview for our first showing agent at Caribou Copy because we didn't have an office or anything. He's like I've been thinking about getting into real estate and like we'll get your license and join us. It was a really great name for our hiring process. But he turned out to be great. And he's actually a very successful agent in California now. So we're still in touch with him. He's great. So then yeah, from there we, we started hiring a couple more agents. Ended up hiring our first marketing coordinator because Kirby, I mean with selling homes it was just like too much trying to do that and grew from there. So I mean we've kind of gone through different iterations but for the most part having you know, an operations, HR type of person, a marketing person and then a sales department is primarily where we've been. Now we have, I mean it's a fairly big organization now, but we have key leaders and that's really what we've been going for. Two years ago we said, okay, our goal is to develop true leaders in this organization that are going to take over pretty much all of it. I'm the integrator. Kirby's a visionary. I'm the integrator. But I, I put pretty much almost all of my time into my leaders and in decision making now. And I just do occasional coaching with the agents on things that they feel like I'm. They need me in. Like they like me for scripts and low planes sometimes because I'm a nerd and I love it. So. But yeah, so then we have our sales director and she oversees our sales managers and all of our sales agents. And then we've got our growth and development director who basically is the one who oversees recruiting and our training department for new agents. One of the things we found is putting our best sales piece people or sales managers overseeing brand new agents. They hated it. With a passion like, no high producer wants to show someone how to click the CRM again or how to write their first offer. Not that they don't want to be nice since, like, seriously. So now we have a training department which completely helps insulate the rest of the productive team. Because as we all know about only about 25% of hires end up being good. Right. Agent tires just. I don't know, that's just a statistic I here nationally, over and over again, you hire 10, you're going to keep about two and a half good ones because, you know, not everybody's going to do the job if you want producers or people that are going to do a good job. So our training department takes them, onboards them, does all the initial training, and basically works with them through the first five sales and then they graduate right into one of the other groups because by then they know enough what they're doing. And we make even experienced people going through this process because they still have questions on how we do things. We have. Right. I keep talking about processes and systems, but that's what makes it easy. But people have to learn it. So we have that all along the way with them. And then once you graduate, they go to the sales division, basically and are officially graduated. And then our marketing department, we just have an amazing marketing director and she's got a coordinator under her and two designers that are overseas. And then we outsource different portions of marketing sometimes because you're not gonna figure every part out yourself and everything. But for the most part, that's what we've got. And then, yep, that's kind of how we have our team structured.

Just a practical tech question. When you guys send out the newsletter, what program are you using?

We. Well, we have infusionsoft. So infusionsoft is a pretty robust program that I'd only recommend if you're in a really build it out and invest in building it. If you do that, it is a game changer because it's like your massive assistant. We have all the different campaigns that run that help us not forget anything. And everybody follows a process from lead to sold and then oversold follow up. Right. Like anniversaries and things like that. But that's what we use for our newsletter. You can build it out in there and send it out directly through there.

I. I've had Kirby tell us before, do not do infusionsoft. So that was not for you to write down. Like, I'm gonna check out. I promise you it is. It is a beast. It can run like your business and seven other businesses all at the same time, all tripwired. But you will lose your mind unless your, your mind is wired that way.

Kirby side is wired that way and one of our virtual assistants and our previous operations person. So I mean everything. But it takes a lot of investment in building it out. So I really, I, I, that's why I said don't do it unless that's truly like you're going to scale it. So yeah, I think a mailchimp or chimp or there's a lot of different programs people use that.

Yeah, mailchimp is super easy to use. Take us through the touch program again. So you guys are doing physical monthly newsletter, e newsletter. So that's 24 touches. What else are you doing?

So we have four to six events per year. I mean, obviously with COVID and stuff, things change.

But each, each event has a direct mail, a phone call, an email.

Well, not a phone call, but we're, we're looking at hiring a part time client coordinator that we want as part of that event. Like different than an isa. Like she would be like our chief love officer, if you want to call it that. So they get the printed newsletter and a new newsletter and then an actual postcard invitation. So kind of all three of those. And then a text message invite as well.

So with four, with four events, there's another 12.

Touches. Yes.

Yeah, another 12 touches, essentially. So you see you're at 36 between a newsletter, e newsletter, four events with the touches.

Yeah. And then the anniversary, the birthday and then. Yeah, sometimes, sometimes we'll do the CMAs, just give people updates. We also, as part of our campaign in following up after the first anniversary, we also send them an invitation to, I think it is Homebot, right, The one that sends the, the monthly market updates on your behalf. So that's kind of a nice way because on the back end they can update their mortgage balance or what you think their home is worth. So you can kind of track whether paying more attention to that. And the system alerts us, hey, they updated their mortgage amount or something.

So I don't know if you told me this or Kirby did, but you guys did. 777 homes last year for 7.7 million. We all agree that you guys should just, you know, seven is the number of completion in the Bible. So you guys didn't take the advice and just shut it down. Um, but 50% of the 7.7 million. I think the reason people don't focus on their database is that they don't Think it could be a multimillion dollar income pillar for them. So was that just something you realized over time or you just, you were so committed to, like, you know, because most people scale, but they don't scale with the core of their business being their database, which you guys have done. So you guys did 3.85 million last year of GCI with both of you out of production from your database, not your agents database, but from your core database. So talk about that a little bit. What's the mindset around the database in your company?

That's a really good, very good question. I think I talked earlier about that kind of the mindset stuff about growing and learning and always learning from other people. I think it's rare you're ever going to have someone talk and not mention that the database matters. And so I think we don't have a need to reinvent the wheel if we're like, if it works, I'm going to copy preneur it. I'm just going to make it mine and make it true to me. But I don't know, it just made sense to my brain. Like, why wouldn't you want to forever retain the people that have always already worked with you? So I think it was a commitment from the beginning, but also because we kept hearing it over and over again and I kind of looked at it like, well, if, if somebody called and invited me to things, I would really like them more. And if they took care of my needs after I bought a house and didn't disappear on me, I would like them more and refer to them. I mean, it just made sense, right? And I mean, gosh, over the years we've chased so many squirrels when it comes to buying leads. Because just like every speaker can also tell you about buy leads from here, buy leads from there, I don't know. Right. And you can waste so much money that way. So one of the short answers to your question, Lars, would be we track. And so we track our ROI on everything that we spend with marketing and it's, it's without a shadow, not even close of a doubt. The very highest ROI is always our database. Always, always, always, always. It's so just like not undebatable. So it's a no brainer in that sense. Plus the conversion is like, I mean the appointments that I set from that for our agents, it's about a 90% conversion rate. And right when you're buying leads, I mean, I think Zillow from lead to sold considers 7.5% to be outstanding. That's Zillow, right? Like supposed to be the bottom of the funnel, better leads. So I guess to me that's a no brainer as well. Why wouldn't I want to do easier work that produces better? Because it really is. It's like that funnel, like the top of the funnel, those new leads we buy. You have to make a friend out of nothing and talked about loving the phone. But that's not easy. It takes a lot of courage. It takes a lot of time, a lot of discipline and a lot of people to not waste all those leads if you need to stay in touch with them enough to, to get them down the funnel. But now you guys like. One of my agents just sold a house this week. She was a lead from 2012 that I converted, helped her buy her first house. About three years ago she contacted us again. An agent on our team helped her sell and buy a bigger house with her new husband, her daughter. She referred to us because she got married or whatever it was. So then they bought with us and then now she and her husband want to sell and travel the world and she wanted a cash offer and I asked her questions and I was like, dude, if you're going to sell it for that price, I'll buy it myself. I think you should meet with my agent first. We sold it for $80,000 more than what she was willing to take. From a cash offer perspective, that's well from one lead, but that takes a lot of work over the years, right? So anyway, I could probably talk about this forever, but that is, that, that is a huge thing of like your, your effort is so much easier with people that already know like and trust you. So if you do a good job, your agents do a good job with every lead, every closing and you're getting five star reviews on Google or Zillow and you're staying in touch with them, there's no reason they should ever work with anyone else but you.

Is there a practical discipline that you can give us around? You know like you had a time block in your calendar outside of that Facebook, you know, taking them from online to offline. Do you make your agents time block, you know, for database management or what's like a practical thing we can, we can all do to turn it into a seven figure pillar.

So we train all of our agents and I didn't talk about this when I talked about this team structure. But every agent is in a small group under sales manager. So every single week they make weekly commitments their TO dos. And every week you have to report back on whether they did them. And the expectation is you're going to complete at least 90% of them. So in those most of the time a lesson crushing their sales and their conversion meets the minimum metrics. Their to dos are always going to have to do with following up with the leads to set appointments or following up with their met people to sell homes. And so we train them on everything from that and what we call pushing listings. But expectation is every week they're going to be pushing listings to their buyers like actually hand picking property that they say, hey, want to go look at these? Because everybody we know that the auto emails are only going to get me so many passive emails back that say can you show me this house at 4? But if I suggest three properties, my chances of showings are vastly higher every single week. And we train them that if they're smart, if they do it on a Monday or a Tuesday, their whole week is more lined up. Or they can use the showing agents versus Friday. People are like, oh, I want to see houses this weekend. Then all of a sudden you know you're out of dinner with a family and six people want to see houses and then you don't have any showing agents and you're stressed out and now you can't go to your kids soccer game or whatever it is. So we do try that to be as proactive as possible. And the ones that listen and follow that always do really well and consistently sell homes with less stress. So that's how we help them stay in touch. And then stuff we also do. So that's kind of from what the weekly cadence. And then we'll also do just different cold challenges or CMA challenges or push listing challenges or things like that too so that it's kind of more fun. And then I'll end it with a happy hour or whatever.

Awesome. We'll do two more questions and we'll let you run. So are you doing the same events every year or do you switch it up?

For the most part, the same events. So we did do a couple different ones that or we had to switch things around just due to Covid. But I'll tell you what our consistent ones are. So our next one coming up is our Thanksgiving pie giveaway. That was our first one ever. Ever, ever. I think the first time we ever did it we had like 20 people come and we should have at least 700 people come. They pick up a big pie from Costco Applewear Pumpkin which they just raised at $2 pie. So get yourself some sponsors because it gets really expensive, but it's again the best ROI anyway. And then we give them a pound of coffee from terrible coffee which is like Starbucks here. I don't know if you guys have that there, but that's kind of the Minnesota base one originally. And so they come by now. We do that with drive thru style. We used to have it in the office and people would come in highly recommend that if your database is manageable like that because it was the best time. People love to come. We would have hot chocolate, coffee, cookies and activities for the kids like a thankfulness wall. People would write it was really, really fun. But now, I mean our office can't have that many people park and come and show up and do that. We do a drive through style now since COVID but it's far easier. But even then, 700 people picking up five. Even if it's a whole day, that's like a constant flow of people. So then we usually do pictures with Santa for kids on a Saturday morning. The pie giveaway is always the Tuesday before Thanksgiving because that way it's still fresh. And people can be the ones who bring dessert for Thanksgiving but not too close where everybody's already gone. And we have so many people at our database now. They literally plan on that and they sign up for their family gathering to bring this up because they know that we're going to provide it with them. So that we did the pictures with Santa. We. This one goes on and off sometimes, but state of the market address which we used to do in our farm area. We have a newspaper in our city that we are in that is one of the better price points too. We have done a fun run that was not anymore. We did a couple years but it's just logistically fairly complicated again because when you have. When you. Some things are easier when you have 100 to 200 people. But once you get 500 or more showing up to the events, the logistics and expenses get complicated. So you just have to be more creative. We did last year we did a fall like family pictures event with bouncy houses. And while that was fun, it was pretty much a logistical nightmare. So we are not doing that one again. But it was really fun. If it was much smaller, I would for sure do it again because people love it. The one we we also do every single year is the minor league baseball here is called Saints. The Saints team is super fun. Like the. The feel is amazing. They make the environment super fun. And it's obviously far smaller than the Twins bigger stadium. So we do a. We host tickets and a barbecue on what they have called the green lawn. And then every. I forgot to mention, it's every event, we type in charity. So based on how many people come, it's an incentive for them to come too. But we make donations on their behalf towards feed by serving children or a local organization here or one in the Congo where I used to work. So. But the Sanski and barbecue is the only one where we actually give cash prizes to our clients as a thank you. So ever since we were really little and had like 50 people shipped our first one at our local park where we literally grilled for them in our first barbecue, we've always added a zero to the number of sales we've done, and that's how much money we give away in cash prizes winners. So last year, this. This last summer, we gave away $7,770 in cash prizes. So a bunch of $500 ones and like a $1,770 big prize winner. And so anyway, that's super fun. And that one, we had about 900 people. That was crazy.

Awesome. Thank you so much.