Lars Hedenborg (founder of Real Estate B School) uses a Zac Brown Band concert as a metaphor to argue that real estate teams must systematize operations and create differentiated, premium client experiences to remain competitive. He contrasts consumers' rising expectations (Topgolf, Apple Store, Lifetime fitness) with many agents’ ad-hoc approaches, describes how his team uses a first-office meeting and other systems to stand out, cites team scale numbers for Charlotte, and invites listeners to a free business growth strategy session at realestatebschool.com.
Hey there. Welcome back to another edition of the Good Bad Ugly of building a real estate team. This is Lars Hedenborg, founder of Real Estate B School and co founder of High Performance Real Estate Advisors in Charlotte, North Carolina. Today I want to chat about. I went to a concert recently, Zach Brown Band and the takeaway, the big takeaway from that concert and how you can scale your real estate business doing the same thing that these guys are doing. And if you're at the point in your real estate team building journey where it just, there are parts of it that hurt and you're not getting the time, you're not getting the money, you have too much stress, it's time to reach out. That's the only plug you'll ever hear on the podcast is that we've got free coaching session for you. Alright, so that's my public service announcement. So what the heck did I learn at Zach Brown Band? It's this, it's that. So we were sitting, we have really good seats and the show was unbelievable. I looked over the shoulder of the girl that was sitting in front of me and I saw that she had. Maybe this is like common knowledge if you go to concerts. For me, I didn't know, I thought, I thought every concert they were just like not winging it, but I thought every concert was different. This girl had a set list pulled up of this tour and it was down the rabbit hole was the name of the tour. Zach Brown Band and she had the set list pulled up from a show that they had done in like nashville or something. March 19th I think was the show. And so I went, I just googled, I said set list. Zach Brown Band and it got on the same site that this, this girl was on. And pretty much every song was the same. They were doing it live and it was amazing. Every song was the same and they went, we left right as intermission, right now, not intermission. We left it just as one song before the encore. We're old, we want to beat the traffic. And so the takeaway, you know, I mean that it was unbelievable. The level of like the skill and precision every song was done with and then the amount of like interaction with the audience and just like the seemingly ad libbing it made me think of, you know, how does this correlate to, to business in general and then real estate specifically, you know, we have. So in this, there's probably 12,000 people that went to this concert. In those 12,000 people, there's probably 3% they say of any given audience is ready to Buy in the next three to six months, the thing you're selling. So in out of 10,000, what does that mean? Thirty, is that right? Math. So three out of 130 out of a thousand. So 300 out of 10,000. So roughly three hundred and sixty out of 12,000 would be looking to do something in real estate, potentially, maybe, maybe less. Maybe there's 100, there's a segment of that and they're seeing a world class performance, you know, happen in front of them and then they're going to go at some point in the next three to six months to meet with a real estate agent and they're going to compare. Everyone's comparing, right? Everything. They're consuming all the time. We're competing with that as business owners. You know, we have topgolf in our market, which is like the next level golf driving range. We have Lifetime fitness, which is like 10 levels above local gyms or a local YMCA. We have an Apple Store, which is just a completely different experience than if you go to Best Buy.
Right.
So consumers are just being fed these amazing experiences, Zach Brown included. And Zach Brown didn't just happen to deliver that. Yeah, they, by having the 99% of it down because they practiced. They've done this tour before. It's a system for producing a predictable outcome which is an amazing concert. They're not showing up and hoping it goes well. And so I think a lot of times we treat our real estate businesses like we just hope it's going to go well and we're not thinking about the disruption that is happening underneath us, where if you can't sit down with a buyer and negotiate 10, 15, $20,000 of compensation for the services you provide, you're going to be shit out of luck in the future. Like you're not going to be able to compete on the listing side.
Right.
Are you just hoping that you can get what is typical in the industry or do you have a menu of services that you're able to differentiate not only what you do versus other options in the market, but even just to give them different options because they're used to having different options.
Right.
At this concert there was lawn seating, there was VIP box seats. We were in a VIP section that had special access to different bathrooms and places to get concessions and those sorts of things. We had a $50 merchandise credit that we were offered. Like you have to think about your real estate business as you're competing just in everything that consumers are going through. And you need to sort of put yourself into that playing Field and y', all, I think we are so far out of that ballpark and we're not even thinking about our businesses in relation to what consumers are getting in other, in other industries. And so thinking through this, it really has forced us as a real estate team to, to rethink how we work with buyers and sellers. Every buyer and seller comes to our office first to get to know us and to see how we do real estate before we'll show them a home or we'll go, you know, list their home or check out their home.
Right.
It's a different way that we do business that allows us to differentiate ourselves in a sea of options in the real estate market. There's 15,000 agents in Greater Charlotte, right. And we only have what, four lead agents, two insights. So we have seven sales agents on our team that'll do 3.6 million GCI this year.
Right.
We've got the system. We built a system to deliver the highest level of buyer and seller services, residential real estate services that you can get anywhere. And part of that's aspirational because we're always working on making it better. That's our goal though, is to be the premier provider of buyer and seller residential real estate services. So you can't compete with us. And again, that statement's aspirational. That's what we're building though. And if you're not viewing your real estate business that way, you are out of business. So like I said when I started this thing, if you're a team leader and you're just like knee deep or eyeball deep in crap all day long and you're in production, you're managing your backstage, your admin team, you're managing your front stage, which is your inside sales, outside sales, or you just have buyer agents in your world and you don't know which way is up. It is time to make a change. It's time to reach out. It's obviously it's self serving because it's real estate B school. And I honestly don't know of a better option for you to go to to figure out what the model is you're building, how to do it profitably, how to end up somewhere where you have more time, more money and less stress. That's the equation we're working against. So if this rings a bell with you, just go to realestatebschool.com and just request a business growth strategy session. There's no obligation, you know, there's no hard sell. It's just to help you get from where you are, where you probably don't have the time you want, you don't have the money you want, and you're super stressed. And it's overflowing into your personal life, into your relationships as a husband or a wife or as a mother or a father or your relationship with your creator or your physical body.
Right?
You may not be taking care of the physical body because you're so stressed and you don't have time to do that. Either way, it's not worth it. And we've got to make a change right now. So go to realestatebschool.com, get on a business growth strategy session. I have a lot of love and respect for you doing this work, whether you're a small or large or medium real estate team leader. It's not easy work. And so we're here to help. And we respect you for doing it. So we'll talk to you soon. Bye bye.
