The 6 Disciplines to Dominate During the Shift with Cristina Skurat (Part II)

What's up? Real Estate Business Builders. Lars Hedenborg here from Real Estate B School. And this is part two of Christina Eddleston SKU Rat Sharing the six disciplines to crush it during the shift. And you want to pay attention. If you're coming into the podcast now, go back at least one episode, but we're sharing all of the sessions from our digital Summit. It's our Business Growth Digital Summit. We put it on twice a year and Christina's team sold 777 transactions last year. And one year she personally sold 150 transactions while she was pregnant and she had at least one or two other little kids at home and she just crushes it in business and in life. And she goes through three personal disciplines, three business disciplines. There's no way around these disciplines. So stay tuned for part two. I hope you enjoy it. If you haven't grabbed a copy of the Real Estate Business Growth Navigator yet, grab a copy@realestatebusinessgrowth.com or I had the honor of working with Kirby and Christina early on in their journey in Real Estate B school and they went through these six stages. So grab a copy of the Real Estate Business growth navigator@realestatebusinessgrowth.com enjoy part two and we'll talk to you soon.

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 maybe buy or sell or what the challenges. So anyway, that's what's gotten me to love it. 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 doing a live session calling, training my team a couple weeks ago and I'm not even joking. Literally there was someone with goats in the background that answered the phone. So that was a first. You always get a first on everything. It was pretty great trend of 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 where, where I do want to be clear is you have to stay personal in your business and everything can 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, but 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 talents. 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 and 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, 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 an E newsletter, a printed newsletter. We have four to six events every year that our client appreciation events. And we do market updates and CMAs. We have a homebot. So we do all sorts of things. We. 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 Kirby and I 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 our sales and they're the ones that are handling our clients. They're the ones that are working with our sphere now and 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 referral 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're indoctrinate this in 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 for your Google presence and Zillow presence and the agents love it and it helps us really know who's succeeding very well. 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 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. 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 would 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 wanted, 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 got attracted 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 Kurti and Christina. They're the ones that send us cards for their birthdays. And we weren't even really friends of the entire disappointances. So.

Yeah, and then another thing, and maybe you can talk to this a little bit. The consistency that you guys have employed just in your touch program, you know, you guys have been doing that newsletter. Didn't. 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, oh, 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 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 four pager or whatever you can say. And generally the templates been fairly similar. And yeah, we usually try to focus on having something that's more personal with them. So like either the client appreciation events or we'll have like market updates stuff 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 to improve it and so we did a lot of research and then 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 client's home for $40,000 more if you use that in the title that's going to show up with spam. Because 40,000 or 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 had it too long. So now we actually have it down 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 like what we're actually no.

Since we have time talk about the evolution of it. So talk about. I think you and Kirby and one licensed administrator did like 192 transactions.

So we had 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 my first showing agent, which we are showing agents we've always willingly 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 and caribou copied because we didn't have an office or anything. And he's like, I've been thinking about getting into real estate. I'm like, well, 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 started hiring a couple more agents. Ended up hiring our first marketing coordinator because pretty. I mean, with selling bones, it was just like too much trying to do that and. 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, fairly big organization now, but we have key leaders and that's really what we've been going for two years. Have always 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 the visionary. I'm the integrator. But I put pretty much almost all of my time into my leaders and in decision making now. And I just do occasional coaching with agents on things that they feel like I'm. They need me in. Like they like me for strokes and low flames 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 ages. One of the things we found is putting our best salespeople 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. And it's 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 go 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 they 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 going to figure every part out yourself and everything, but for the most part, that's what we 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 only recommend if you're going to 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'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 mind is wired. That way.

Kirby's mind 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 into building it out. So I really, 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 chamber, 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 event has a direct mail, a phone call, an email.

Well, not a phone call, but we're looking at hiring a part time client coordinator that we want as part of that event. That like different than an ic. Like she would be like our chief love officer, if you want to call it that. So they get the printed newsletter and the 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're at 36 between a newsletter. E newsletter for 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 and following up after the first anniversary, we also send them an invitation to home. I think it is home lot, 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 when they're 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 agreed 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 multi million 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. So you guys did 3.585 million last year of GCI with both of you out of production from your database, not your agent's 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 in 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 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 wings. Because just like every speaker can also tell you 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 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 Solo 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. I 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 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 and 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.

Um, 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 I was. Their 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. When 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. And all of a sudden you know you're out of dinner with your family and six people want to see houses and 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 call 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 up 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 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 based one originally. And so we 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. Right. 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 by. 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 this. 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 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 ship to 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 $7770 in cash prizes. So a bunch of $500 ones and like a 1700 $7 one big prize winner. And so anyway, that's super fun. And that one we had about 900 people. That was crazy.

Thanks for listening. Would you please take a minute to share the show with other agents who may be struggling? And if you love the podcast, please leave us a five star review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast podcast platform. And make sure you visit ScaleOrDiebook.com to get a free copy of my book. It's a nuts and bolts guide to building a real estate business that gives you true time and money freedom so that you can live your life without regrets. Thanks again and see you on the next episode.