The Power of Systems in Your Business!

Hey there. Lars Hedenborg, founder of Real Estate B School. I just got off a video conference, a zoom call with one of our members. And the cool thing about being part of Real Estate B School is that we have some smart folks that are running systems in their business. Businesses that are just blowing my mind. And so this member, I'm not going to say her name or the market that she's in. I want to sort of position the conversation and the thing I want to share with you today around the power of systems in your business. And so this agent, essentially she was new to a market and she knew she had to generate business consistently. She wasn't much of a prospector, so she wasn't like a smile and dial, you know, cold calling type personality and which I love. This system happened to be an expired system. So five years ago she entered her market and she just determined that expireds, and not only just expireds, but a very small segment of expireds, high end, either horse property, luxury lakefront or historic property. So she had just sort of four niches that she was going to target. And so in a month where, let me see if I can remember the numbers, like 1,000 expired or 500 expires, she would only use this system for 50. And it's a direct response marketing system. And what that means is that if you've ever studied Dan Kennedy, he's like the godfather of direct response marketing. That means you put something out there into the world that has a direct call to action, like it's not a pretty picture of you and your family. And like I have this cool logo and here's my headshot and just because I have this brand or image, you're going to do business with me. This is straight up. I'm going to speak to somebody that has an equestrian property that has come off the market and you're going to get a sequence of letters and postcards and emails. If she could secure the email address and texts, if she can get your cell phone number and not even phone calls. And here's the amazing thing, and I've been doing direct response marketing systems to expireds for like 11 years now. And so I was the student in this conversation that we were having. She has, what she noticed was that in higher end properties, those owners are not rushing to get their homes back on the market. They're, they're more in a situation where they're going to evaluate their options. They're not going to pull the trigger and line up agents to get their home on the market. The Next day when it expires or whatnot. And these sellers were in these niches, they were taking two, three, four months to relist. And so she put together a 90 day sequence that, that had 45 touches in it the first seven days. It's every day and it starts with just an awesomely designed expired package. And she ran the whole system out of top Producer, which you can get a top producer license. And basically every day just hits the print button. And even the way she designed the envelopes and the color of the envelopes and the type of stamp and there's this special marker like she. And the way she knows her numbers, she on average, she doesn't call the 15th touch, on average is when she is contacted. And she's built a more than million dollar business on this one lead source and has a team of five agents now in a market where five years ago she didn't exist. And so the moral of the story, there's two morals. Become a world class marketer in real estate. The only way we survive it is not by giving Zillow a bunch of money. It is not by giving your local radio station a bunch of money. It's not just think of any other. Yeah, it's not paying Google a bunch of money or Boomtown or Sync or any of those lead gen platforms a bunch of money to generate pay per click leads, right? And just grind out pay per click leads, right. Become, do the work to become a world class marketer. That's like the first lesson. And I was just, I think I called one expired back in the early days when I was getting into real estate and I was like never doing that again. That was awful. Like I don't want to develop thick enough skin to do that consistently. And so I went down the path of just becoming a great marketer. And, and so she told me 15, 15 was the average. So that means some are calling in at five touches and some are calling it at 25 touches. The average of the two is 15. And she said the longer they are in the sequence, the more ready they are. Just to come over and list my home, tell me the price and we'll get this thing on the market. You know, in the beginning they're getting hit by a lot of stuff and they're usually a little annoyed or intrigued maybe about one of your marketing pieces. Maybe a couple weeks in. They're still interviewing a couple agents, but when you're 30, 45 days out, nobody is sending them anything. And this is what I told her at the end And I'll get to my main point here. I said, you know why this is so awesome? Because nobody will do it. I said, and she's going to do this for our group. Lay out all the pieces, all the sequence, every postcard, every letter. She's going to lay out all of it for us. And nobody will do it even in our group. Well, I shouldn't be hard on our group. Our group is, we're a bunch of consistent implementers. So I think we have a shot at getting a good majority of us to do it in our markets. The main point of all this is that she built a system that is now run by an administrator, 60 to 90 minutes a day. And so, yeah, she has some postage, you know, involved. She has, well, you know, labor. But an administrator runs that system in 60 to 90 minutes a day. And like that is like just the. Hopefully there's an awakening where if you can do the systems work and let's just use a marketing system as an example, an expired system. She's in a hot market where there aren't a lot of expireds. Do you know how well positioned she is? As the market shifts here, the market will shift right, right now, as I'm recording this, the market is on fire in every market around the country. The market will. Well, not every market. There are some markets where people are moving out of cities to kind of, you know, with COVID and all that stuff. But, um, and so she built a system, she used her system, her system hat, you know, it might take 30, 45, 60 days to implement this system, to really go deep on this system. And you know, she even used Market snapshot from Top Producer. We gave up Top Producer years ago. It finally was time, it just wasn't. And for this system, I know Top Producer well, it's the only tool that, the only affordable tool where she could manage her mailings right in like mail merge right into documents. When you send out one, it triggers the next. Like it does that really, really well. And so, but it takes a little bit of effort to set up. You know, if it took 60 days to set up five, six hours a week, you know, for eight weeks. If you had 50 hours to set this thing up and then you get an administrator to run it for five hours a week, even at 20 bucks an hour, that's $100 a week plus postage. You know, she's getting, I think she said three or four deals a month and high end deals, you know, 750 to a million, five is sort of the average price range of these homes that she's going after. And so I was just inspired to kind of get on here for this weekly edition where I really just want to bring some value no matter where you are in your business growth journey to help you look at your business a little differently. And most top agents and team leaders don't really understand what it means to implement a system. And this was just the best example of a system which in her business is an income pillar. And I call these oil wells. Like when you set up an oil rig, right, it's messy, it takes a lot of effort to break through the ground and drill and get to the good stuff. That's what a system is. It requires a little bit, even a lot of effort up front to set everything up to establish that oil rig. I don't know anything about oil. I don't even live in like a state where there is oil. I just envision in businesses where we help these business owners, these real estate agents or team leaders, we help them set up these oil rigs, these oil wells where each one is good for 50 deals. So if you want to have a real estate team that sells 250 transactions, you need a database, you need an expired pillar or oil well, you need a yard marketing program and you probably need what's like the next best. Yeah, social proof, right? We're generating a few deals a month just based on our presence on Google. In terms of our reviews, we have like 585 star Google reviews at this point. So you search, you know, best real estate agent Charlotte, North Carolina. You will see high performance real estate advisors. Um, so I thought there were some encouragement in there where maybe you think you're not a systems builder or you don't have that part of your brain. Look at your business and decide like another gaping hole so to kind of carry on with this, this marketing systems theme. Another gaping hole for most agents and team leaders is their database. They haven't built a system to capture contacts. So increase the number of people that know like and trust them. So increase the number of contacts in their database and then feed it systematically. Right. Every month we send out an e newsletter. Every month we send out a print version of that newsletter. Every month we send out two or three videos, you know, high quality, you know, value packed emails or videos to our, to our database. You know, we've gotten away from events. I don't know that we'll ever go back to client events because they're so expensive. And then our social media is a system, right? Three to Five times a day we're posting something that our community can engage with. We have our database as a custom audience in Facebook group. And it's just a system. It runs whether I do any of it or not. And so think about your business in terms of systems and where could you set up? Even if it's on a marketing standpoint, how could you implement or install these oil wells, these oil rigs that are just going to pump oil out and just pump out, everyone's good for. You know, the vision I have for each one of these lead gen levers is that each one of them is good for 50 transactions. It may take you three to four years to get to 50 transactions. You start with a couple, you know, do one a month, then two a month, three months, four months, you're at 100 sides, you add a third, maybe two years in there, three years, once the other two are stable and you're at one a month, two a month, three months, all of a sudden you're at 150 transactions. Add that fourth oil rig that turns into an oil well, then you're at 200 transactions. I think a lot of times we overcomplicate this business and we don't really think of ourselves as marketers. And most of marketing, it's, it's good to come up with the copy and, you know, the creative part of marketing, but most of it is just systems work and knowing your numbers. And she did say this comment, she said it doesn't matter what you send. She said, I said, wait, what do you mean? Like, I thought it was like brilliant copy says, yeah, the copy's pretty good. It's, you know, I'm the horse expert, I'm the historic homes expert, I'm the lakefront expert. So she's kind of niched out these and changed the language and the copy and the different verticals that she's serving. The bottom line, though, was that it's the frequency and it's the fact when somebody calls on your 30th mailing or touch point, they are, they know you're consistent, they know you're a bulldog, they know you're going to do what it takes to get their home sold because everyone else has tapped out at that point. And so I just thought that was interesting. She said, even if they throw out, you know, she has a certain color envelope with a certain type of pen, and I'm not giving it all away because she gave it to our inner circle, our members, a certain type of stamp, I will say it's not the flag stamp, it's a different one on the back. She would do something very specific where even if they were throwing it away, they. She got the impression that she wanted to. She's like, I don't care if they throw it away. Because it was just. I was racking up the impressions and I was like, man, I hate to even say how few mailings we do to expireds. And I think we've done, you know, we were at three and we just increased to five. And here she is telling me 15 is the average. And I'm her teacher, supposedly. So the whole point is make sure you are a marketer. If you're not a great marketer, become one. Make sure you understand that systems, you know, are the things that's the thing that will grow your business and give you a little bit of relief in terms of just time and money freedom. And then make sure you align yourself with people that are thinking about their businesses differently, you know, and that is the takeaway for me as I was listening to her teach me something where not that I think I should know everything. And I was just blown away, like, jaw dropping in this system. So I just thought was awesome. If you're at the point in your journey where, you know, you want to be around a group of folks that are looking at their businesses differently and they're willing to share their best stuff, that's another part of it that I was just super proud of, the fact that she was willing to jump on a call with me, lay the whole system out, share all of her collateral around it so that others that had the gumption and the grit could install it in their businesses. If that's you. And you know, you need another step to your journey and you know, you need to be around folks like that that are going to push you to think like a business owner versus a real estate agent. Chances are, if you're watching this video, you know how to sell real estate. There's a better chance, though, that you don't know how to turn it into a business. And that's why real estate B school exists. If that is you. I have my little stress ball here that I keep. If that's you, just take action. Book in for a business growth strategy session. It's just a confidential conversation about where you are in your business today, where you want to be in the future, and what's holding you back. What obstacles do you see and how can we help you break through them. If there's an obvious business relationship, you know, with real estate B school and we can be of service. Of course we're going to talk about it. And if they're not, that's totally cool too. So go to the link below and we'll see you over there. Be good.