This is the Time to Grow Your Team - The Right Way!

What's up, Business freedom Podcast listeners, this is part four of a series, and really, in this series, we broke down how to scale your business, even in a crisis. And when I say scale the business, I don't mean just do more sides or sell more homes. I mean grow it in a very specific way where at the end of it, at the end of this growth journey, you have more time to yourself, you have more money to enjoy that time off, and you have a whole lot less stress. Most of the real estate team leaders I know, the folks that have successfully grown their business in terms of the number of sides or families served, is that they have less time to enjoy things they want to do. They don't have a whole lot of money to show for it, and they're super stressed, and they're usually selling a lot of homes themselves because they haven't set the thing up the right way to begin with. So. So the thing I want most for you is your ability to be free from your business. And I was wearing a shirt on the last podcast episode that was road map to freedom. That's sort of our tagline, you know, real estate, B school. The B stands for business. And the whole point of this is that we provide a roadmap to freedom. We allow you to set your business up in a very specific way where you can actually be free from the business and the business can absolutely serve your life. If you missed the first three parts of this series, if you're just new to the podcast, you definitely want to go back three episodes. The first episode was entitled how to scale your business during a crisis. Part two was called the step by step process to create your future. And part three was why knowing your numbers is critical to your growth. I lost some of you on that one because I talked about numbers. And this part four is, this is entitled this is the time to grow your team the right way. So there's a right way and a wrong way to grow your team. And I wanted to spend a little bit time today going through that. And so. And here's the thing. If you don't bring in leverage in the form of people, well, first of all, you got to set up the systems the right way and bring in people and empower them to run those systems. You're going to fail at life. Chances are, I hate to say it that way. If you don't do it the right way, you're going to end up working seven days a week and be super stressed, not make a lot of money and spend too much time in the business. That's what I see over and over and over again. So if you don't grow your team, you will not have sustainability. And by sustainability I mean you won't have the ability to actually enjoy life because you're working all the time and you're super stressed all the time. You don't even have increasing net worth to show for it. So that's what I wanted to spend time on today is how do you grow your team the right way? And it doesn't really mean or matter that you have to go to 50 people on your team. People think that if you're going to go from, you know, let's say you're at 3 to 500,000, you're a top producing real estate agent now and you are scared by what it might look like to go to two, two and a half, three million. Like you just think like, I don't like to manage people, that's too stressful. The overhead, all of that. There's an absolute process that you can follow to do it. But also realize that it doesn't take as many people as you think if you set the thing up the right way. So last year we did, I think like 2.8 or so million, 2.8 or 3 million in total revenue. And we average for the year. I think we ended the year at like 12 total team members and I think was pretty well split 50, 56 administrators and six in sales. And because we're heavy on admin, because we have them run a lot of the systems and processes to take the stuff off of salespersons, our salespeople's, our sales, our sales plates so they're not overwhelmed doing stuff that we can have other team members do. So everyone on our team is in a specific position and they get paid what that position is worth. And so we've literally broken down the job of real estate agent into the eight or 10 positions that it takes to be a successful provide the best consumer experience possible. And that's really what we advocate in real estate B school. So when it comes to growing your team, there's three things we need to focus on. Number one is how do we identify and attract true talent. Number two, how do we hire and onboard the new team members? Number three, what's the cadence and culture that you're going to carry out on a day to day basis? So let's dig into number one, identifying and attracting like real talent. It really starts with, you know, I'm always, lately, I guess more and more as I, as I Get a little older and farther along in my business growth journey, think about who I want to spend my time with. And if you're, if you built a team where you don't love everyone and you don't want to serve everyone that you've surrounded yourself with, that's a pretty good indicator that you might have the wrong team members. You know, you're shoulder to shoulder with the wrong people. So that's like the first sort of tip here is that you have to surround yourself with folks that you really want to help them win business and in life. And so when you're looking to identify folks to bring on your team, your core values are everything. And it's not these core values exercise that's like a business school exercise. It's a very sort of in the dirt, like, who am I and who do I want to surround myself with? So we have six core values. I'll go through two of them with you. The first one is we hustle and work hard. And the second one is we embrace accountability and discipline. I have always hustled and worked hard and I've always embraced accountability and discipline. And so for me to be surrounded by someone who doesn't want to hustle and work hard and that will not embrace accountability and discipline, they're just two things that are not negotiable for me. And so when you look to bring people into your world, you want to. The other side of this is knowing who you want and then going after them. You repel folks. You want to repel folks based on your core values and what you stand for. And so if I'm running a Facebook ad and especially in this climate now where we're in crisis mode and there are good real estate agents that are going to fail and get out of the business if they don't become part of a really well run real estate team. I did a podcast. I'm looking at my what episode is it Predict will you benefit? Yeah, I think it's 209 episode. 209. How this crisis will benefit. Well, run real estate teams. You want to check that out in terms of just how to position yourself and why now is the time to go after after real talent. But back to my example, like me knowing that I want to be around folks that hustle and work hard and they embrace accountability and discipline just makes the whole process easier because I can say, you know, are you willing to do the work? Are you worried? So here's what the ad I would run. Are you worried right now about the future of your real estate business and then are you willing to do the work required to double, triple your production while, you know, thousands get out of the business here locally in Charlotte, North Carolina we went from 15,000 to 5,000 back in 2007-2012 that our roster here locally of agents went from 15 to 5. We're up to 17 now. It's getting ready to go back down to 6 or 7. And that's what I predict, which is a good thing. I think a lot of folks shouldn't be in real estate. I think, you know, as harsh as that sounds, I think this, this profession needs to be left to the professionals. And I think a lot of folks that have got in and aren't, aren't nearly able, not even close are they able to really represent their clients at the highest level and compete with folks that have not even just compete, but provide a level of care and due diligence that's required to really do this profession at the highest level. So that's the first part. Identify and attract. Once you know what you want, you can easily go after it. And there's a whole bunch of, you know, we do email marketing, we do social marketing, we do a coaching blog which we, you know, provide value in our, in our market. We do a lot of cool things to identify and track talent. Second is how do you hire and onboard talent. So you have to have a written step by step process for your hiring, how you go about hiring. And that includes like the interviews. We have two in person interviews. We have a working interview we call a skills assessment. So if new business development, if the act of calling people is a prerequisite for being an agent on your team, which it should be, you really need to see if they can actually do that thing and if they actually enjoy it. Otherwise I think you're just kidding yourself. I think so many times we go after folks that, you know, going back to core values, you know, there's potential, emerging, improving talent. Most 9 out of 10 times a real estate team leader will bring someone onto their team who is never had any sales experience before. They've never had a phone position where they were talking on the phone before. And they're new to real estate and so it's potential talent. We're ready to go into this shift. This crisis is getting ready to put us into a period of time where really good agents aren't going to be able to do their job because they're overwhelmed and they're fearful and they're going to be looking for well run real estate teams. So the hiring process has to be really clear about who you're looking for and the questions you ask and the questions you ask about your core values and your skills assessments and your reference checks and all of that. And then how do you onboard them? You know, we have a very clear process. The quickest path we can possibly get them to getting paid a commission check. On our team, we have bonuses. We actually pay them to achieve certain metrics in their training program. They can earn up to $9,000 in their first 90 days, excluding any commission checks that they can earn. They can earn in bonuses alone, 2,000 in 30 days, 2,000 in their next 30 days, and then $5,000 in their last 30 days as they hit their targets. And it's getting them the direct path to getting paid, which is how many appointments can they set and have us meet those appointments in their first 90 days. Is your onboarding set up in a way that it's the most direct path to getting a salesperson paid in real estate? That's the missing link in real estate. That's why 82 or 84% of agents don't renew their license on their second anniversary. They're out of the business. Eight out of 10 are out of the business before 24 months in. And so you need to make sure you have an onboarding process. The third part here in terms of growing your team is the cadence and the day to day culture. You know, do you have a culture of productivity, a culture of performance and is, do you have a well oiled cadence that you follow in sales? You can't really succeed at a high level if you're not running a daily huddle. And there's not like extreme accountability around. What'd you do yesterday? What are you going to do today? Where are you stuck every day Monday through Friday and then are you starting every day with some sort of role play or script with your team? Even right now when this, when everything's virtual or you're starting Your day at 7:30 with your team, where you know, we start in prayer, we script for, you know, 25 minutes. We're on the phone at 8, we go 8 to 8, 50, 10 minute break, 9 to 9, 50, 10 minute break, 10 to 10, 50, 10 minute break @ a minimum, right? You should be going from 3 to 4 to 5 cycles of 50, 10, 50 minutes. Laser focused new business development. 10 minute break, 50, 10, 50, 10, 50,10, 50, 10, 50, ten, 50, ten. If you have no appointments that day, that's how your sales needs to run right now. That's the cadence. That's that culture of productivity, culture of kicking ass and taking names when everyone's getting out of the business. And if you're not leading your team that way, or if you're a top agent and you're not approaching every day that way, where you have a huddle with yourself or huddle with your spouse or your kids and say, all right, this is what I did yesterday. This is what I'm going to do today. This is where I'm stuck. Can you help me, Snoopy, or whatever your dog's name is like, you have to have, you have to own the cadence. You have to own the culture you're bringing, even if it's just you. And so is that really a part of who you are? And, and if you think business is going to get easier in the future, especially with the economic fallout of what's going to happen. But also just if you've heard me talk on the podcast about just the shift storm that we were in, this was probably a year ago. I've started talking about the shift three years ago, two, two and a half years ago, maybe three years ago. And recently I've been talking about a shift storm where just consumers are shifting, the models are shifting, the economy is shifting. And what was the fourth shift anyway? There's four parts of it. It was a shift storm. And the point I'm bringing up, if you really think business is going to get easier and consumers are looking for less from their service providers in all of the services that they consume and that they pay for, and your ability to get paid highly, get paid really well for the services you provide, it's absolutely linked to the way you set up your business and how you actually show up. You know, if, if, if you're thinking that you can't play this game at a high level and you could still do well as the months and years go on, even outside of the economic crisis or the shift or whatever you want to call it that we're going to head into, even before all of that, you should have been thinking about is my business really providing world class services to buyers and sellers where at the end of it, they're willing to just sing from the hilltop about how awesome their experience was with your real estate team. And if you're not setting it up that way, you're going to lose this game. So that cadence and culture even plays into how you show up for your clients from the moment you have a conversation with them all the way through the Entire process of buying or selling through the time that they close. So that, my friends, is grow your team, identify and attract talent, hire and onboard new team members and then the cadence and culture of productivity, of accountability, of performance. So that's the four part series. Hopefully this has served you. That was my goal going into this series, to really break down what it means, truly means, and all the different parts that come into play in terms of scaling real estate team the right way. And when I say right way, it's building a business that serves buyers and sellers at the absolute highest levels and provides positions for all of your team members where they can just crush it and they're not guessing on what to do every day. They have systems that they're running at a high level so they can show up for your clients at an even higher level and provide that real level of service that you want to be known for in your market. But you don't want to be the one to deliver every aspect of it because it's not sustainable and you'll burn out and you'll lose a marriage or you lose your physical health or your, your spiritual health or your emotional wellbeing. Like there's all these things that will break down if you don't do this thing the right way. So that's my wish for you. And I have so much love and respect for you. Even though I may not even know you personally, I pray for you regularly. I pray for our industry. It is broken in so many ways. And my hope for you is to be a bright light in a dark world right now with the crisis. If you're at a point in your journey where you know you need to have a conversation. Right now I'm doing business growth strategy sessions. It's either with me or one of my business coaches where we could just have a conversation. It's a 45 minute coaching session about where you are today, where you're going to be in the future, that three year vision and what's holding you back and what we can do about eliminating obstacles. What are your strengths and weaknesses? What do you bring to the table? Where are the things that you need to focus on? You know, do you have a plan built, you know your numbers, do you have a plan in place to grow your team on a solid foundation? So I want most for you is time and money, freedom and freedom from stress, which conventional success in our industry does not allow. And so, like I said, much love and respect. We'll see you over@realestatebschool.com if you know you need to have that conversation. Just go to. There's orange buttons all over the site. Just click Apply now or book in for a strategy session. We'll see over there. There's a bunch of free resources over there as well. Especially our newest one is our Market Shift toolkit. You can grab a copy of that over there. It's 12 my best trainings as they apply to the shift that we're headed into here real soon. Much love and respect. We'll talk soon.