Would Your Business Pass the Shark Tank Test? Greg Miller Shares How to Think Like a CFO

Welcome back to Real Estate Team Builders. I've got Greg Miller here today. And this is. I feel like we're just brothers from other mothers in terms of our love for the numbers side of business. Right. It's this. You know, it's hard to trick yourself and others when you actually look at the numbers of a business. So the big topic we're going to unpack today is how to become the CFO of your business. And Greg runs a very high level business. 420 sides in 2021 with nine agents selling. And Greg, you're out of production, right?

Correct.

And that's Greg out of production for 3.1 million. 88 in terms of GCI total 88 million in volume. And in a very, very tight market, y' all are getting what you want on the listing side, which I think you said is about 4%. So that's probably a whole nother podcast episode, which we probably won't have time to get into today. But all that to say is that you're running a legit business and it's worth paying attention to what you have to say. So, Greg, fill in the gaps in terms of an intro, in terms of kind of what you do. And I know you're a business coach for real Estate B school and you crushed that role as well. Anything I left out in the intro?

No, I think that's about it. I've been in business about 20 years, always had a team, I guess before it was even known what that was, and did some things wrong. Economic downturn in 2009, 8, 9, 10. Flushed out all that I was doing wrong, corrected it pretty quickly and just slow, steady growth for the past 20 years, and particularly over the past decade.

Yeah, that's another thing I love about you. I have a feeling there's going to be a lot of things that I want to drill into, but I will drill into that comment because I know what you mean by it. Slow, steady growth. And let's maybe start this conversation around how to become the CFO of your business with that comment. And, and I think I know what, what's behind it is that I see a lot, and I'm sure you do too. It's like, okay, you know, I sold 100 homes this year and I want to do 400 next year. And it's like, growth no matter what. I'll throw whatever money I have to, I'll go into debt. I'll sell as many homes as I need to personally. And it's not like this commitment towards a little Bit of growth every year and over the long term you're going to have an amazing business. So maybe kind of just comment on that and we'll get the conversation started about becoming the cfo.

Yeah. Comments. I'm terribly interested in the numbers. I've always been fast, fascinated by production before real estate and after, about how some people are doing or appear to be doing really well and trying to understand what it is that they're doing to produce those results and what it actually means. And of course in real estate, pretty hard to figure out what those numbers really are based on who's driving what type of car. So delving into those numbers has been a passion of mine and it's slowed my growth a little bit because I was wondering, you know, I was always wondering, well, if I grow, if I add another hundred units or 200 units, am I going to really make more money? And how would I know? Is it just going to happen or is it not? So it slowed my growth, but the production, at the end of the day, I was pretty comfortable adding about 30 units, which works out to about one person on our team, whether it's staff or agent. And beyond that, it just felt a little out of control to me.

Yeah, so. So sustainable growth and that really does drive down to there. There's an agent in a market not too far from from you in Detroit. And I had a personal conversation. This team went from 4 million GCI to 6 million GCI and they went from a million two profit at 4 million to 900,000 at 6 million. And so I said, wait, wait, wait, let me make sure I understand this. So I don't, and I'll never say your name, but I don't want to misquote it. You spent $2.3 million to pick up 2 million of sales. And he said, yeah. And I'm like, what the heck are we talking about right now? Like it wasn't even in this conversation of like how to become a responsible sort of cfo, financially minded business, business person. So let's open up the conversation. Let's talk about economic model and you know, how you run your business, perhaps, or how you coach other teams in terms of just like the baseline, everything starts from like a vision around the economics of your business. So talk about economic model.

So when we talk about economic models of the, what your business looks like. So maybe think Shark Tank. If you, most of us in real estate, large company or small, showed up on Shark Tank, the questions would be very uncomfortable. You know, are you, are you doing all the work. Well, probably if you quit working tomorrow, is my income going to still come in? Maybe not. Do you know what your cost of goods sold is? What's your marketing expense? What's your labor expense? And we don't. The industry's just not really set up for us to naturally know those numbers. So going from 4 million in GCI to 6 million in GCI and the income went down, it's so what. What does that. You know, that wasn't the goal. The goal was 2 more million in GCI. And along that line, if you plug things in a toolbox to the flow, a flowchart, and you add just a little bit of work. I did this maybe 45 minutes and looked at, and there's a point in my team where I'm like, I can't go past this. Because in order to go past this, I got to go way past this because I had to add layers of management. And I'm like, well, there's my maximum, or that's where I want to be, my maximum. But if you have a financial model, you know how much goes out to your agents, you know how much, what percentage of your GCI goes out to lead generation, to staff, to general office expenses. You got to figure out where you're split to your broker. If you're at a broker fits in there. If you want to add an ISA department, what bucket is that going to come out of? So I'm constantly thinking about the model I want to. I flipped this over in 2010 because I had a couple bad years living in Michigan during that time period. Maybe about a decade of bad years. And I started with profit. I go, okay, look, if I'm going to do this, I got to make a certain percentage and I'm going to work backwards. Which is problematic because, like, okay, well, where's the splits going to come from? After I start really looking at roughly spending about 10% on lead generation, marketing, 10% on staff, and I got about 10% into general expenses and paying the broker and all those. I'm like, well, wait a minute, how is this going to work? And that's where I started the splits that I'm still on. But just out of that kind of like, well, it's either going to work or I'll just go sell some houses and work myself to death. Because I was already doing that. I wasn't even getting all the money. But step one, economic model. How much goes out to your staff, what's left over to pay all your business expenses, what percentage of that gci, the total amount coming in goes towards lead generation, towards staff and towards your general office expense. And then what's left over to pay the taxes and for the business to profit. And if you can answer those, those numbers, your whole life changes. Because if you're driving on the road like I am and your admin quits and your office manager calls and says, hey, I interviewed two people, I'd like to hire them both and I know what my DCI is and I know I got about 10% towards staff and I run that number pretty tightly. I can go through and calculate, okay, what's everybody make? We added them up. I go, great, we can hire them both. Before economic model, it would one, I just didn't hire people because I'm like, well, if I hire people, that means I spend money. I don't like to spend money. And I actually, it wasn't a, for me, it wasn't a, a marker to not go over as a marker to push both marketing and staff. I was slow to do both those. I didn't like to get caugh. And any recurring expenses, which those things are both recurring.

Yeah. So in, in the team leaders in their businesses, the team leaders that you've been involved in and you get into the numbers with them, which I know is, is, you know, different coaches have different approaches. And yours, and I love this about you, is that the numbers don't lie, you know, so if you're selling 200 homes a year, but you're doing 75 of them personally and you only have like 14% left over, it's like, what are, what are we doing here? You know, so we kind of have to unpack it a little bit. But what are you seeing with like across the board when you get into a team and the numbers and the financials and the personalities of some of these team leaders, where do you think they do you think they just weren't told upfront that they needed an economic model or their personalities are just like, I'm just going to sell a lot of stuff and it's going to work out. Like, what are you seeing across the board with some of these team builders as far as economic model goes?

Yeah. And I don't think this is a problem from, from my viewpoint of real real estate practitioners, realtors or real estate agents or brokers. This is a small business problem. So when you go, when I go into any small business, I wonder what do they pay for that material they put on themselves and what's the shelf life of it and how much they sell it for. And what's a profit margin on that? I'm just always wondering. I don't think most small business owners wonder that at all. They come into work, they sell all the Pepsis, they take the money out of the till, they come back the next day, Pepsi guy comes in and they hope they somehow will take a check that maybe is going to cash next week because they don't have any cash left because they spend it. So real estate's no different entrepreneurs out there. And the one difference that we have is probably a hindrance is there's so much money, so much individual closing, there's so much money that it has to work out. And I've had an argument with one of my team members for literally two decades. Just because we sell more doesn't mean we made more money. And their answer is, well, how could that be? I'm like, well you can. And that's pretty easy. But I think for a lot of us it's hard to understand how more closings can't be better than less closings. But without economic model, without some sort of criteria to know where you're at and know if you bring in $100,000 in January, how much is going to be left over? How much is going to go to your net worth calculator, how much is going to be left over in your checking account, business or personal? And most people just have no idea of what that looks like. Nor have. I think most of us probably hadn't really thought about it. We're just thinking more sales is better than less sales.

Yeah. And we've had the pleasure or the challenge to coach big businesses that have gotten it completely wrong. One of the teams, and obviously I won't say names, but 6 million top line, less than a million of profit. So like about 15, 16% net profit and the team owner does 750,000 of production. You know, so just do the math on that. And the wrong splits with agents, you know, providing way too much value, not securing what they're worth constantly. All of him and his listing agents dropping commission splits to two and two and a half on their side and just not doing the things, not charging transaction fees when they provide a differentiated service. So what specific things? Those are a few of them. What specific things do you see when you see someone come in that's running more than a seven figure business that are just like this is always what I see is it splits, is it overspending? You know, what, what, what do you see with most team team builders?

I Think one is back to the economic model. There's no adherence. It's. I want. I'm thinking about doing this. I'm moving in this direction. Okay, well, what's your parameters? Well, there's no parameters. We need more people. How? Why do you need more people? And we're coaching people that will have. Doing hundreds of units with two staff and then somebody doing 50 units with six staff. So there's no real thought. It's just like. Well, I go, wow, one person, like, I bet they're really tired and complaining a lot. Yeah, they have been. I go, that's a lot of units for people to be processing another. And the other end, people have just. The answer is to add more people. But we're not really asking the question of one. Can we afford that? Is it budgeted? You can't do this. You can't. If you own a hospital, you're just not going to hire surgeons because you feel like it's Tuesday. I should hire some surgeons. No. Do we have the surgery to get done or is it going to be a profitable situation there? And I don't think that's really well thought out. Part of the problem which you hit on was when you. When you're in production and a lot of our team leaders are grossly productive, just amazing producers, you can sell your way out of a lot of things and you can maybe even shift a lot of things off your plate because you have staff around that. It doesn't really make a lot of sense, but was better than just doing it by myself. But it's pretty easy to split those numbers out. Your accountant won't like it. Maybe you just do it on your own. But you go, okay, what am I worth as a manager? How much would I compensate myself for 20, $30,000 a year? Maybe that's what I did. I thought, I'm probably worth that, and I certainly am not worth a whole bunch more. When I was in production and then I'd pay myself for production, I go, okay, there's my production. So somebody else came in after me and took my production on, did the same thing I do from same group of people, and I had to pay them a percentage of that. Is there still money left over? Is there still profit left over? So when you're in the shark tank, you can tell them what your actual profit margin is if you weren't in production. Not to say you don't. You can be in production. It's actually a great way to make a lot of money. But you need to know what that really looks like to make sure that you're not getting paid less by having a team, which is fairly common.

Yeah. So before we hit record, we talked about kind of the economic model being the sort of foundation of everything else. And to teach someone, you know, how to run a P and L or create a budget without an economic model is sort of pointless. So talk about all the other things that are linked into, you know, how to run a responsible business. We talked about CTE and those sorts of things, but talk to them as they relate to this sort of underlying concept of economic model.

So over the past year, I've really interested about this particular subject. So I started to just make notes as I'm coaching different people, you know. Well, have you looked at CTE lately? No, not, not really. Not in the last month. Have you. Do we have any. Your profit and loss, anything up to date? No, I, you know, we saw it end of last year and we're. We're going to get our taxes done. How about a budget? No, I don't really know. How about your net worth tracker? I haven't really filled that in. And the problem all lies back to there is no model in your mind. So doing a profit and loss statement and finding out that you're spending 12% on labor means absolutely nothing. Because is that good or bad? Well, it's. Maybe 1% would be better. Maybe 20% would be better. When you look at CTE and you're doing $200,000 in March and you don't know that 60,000 dol. Thousand dollars is going to be left over in your checking account, which is going to affect your net worth tracker, that there's no. If there's no connection there, then looking at CTE is pretty boring and doesn't really fulfill any value. But if you do have an economic model for me, my. And my accountant is slow. I'm sure not the only one that you're kind of waiting for numbers here, but I'm waiting for those. I'll be getting February numbers here shortly. Because you get to a point in business sometimes where you can't just look at your checkbook balance and know really what's going on. Because I have a tendency to do other projects with money. But if I look at those financials, I'm like, I'm running up the profit margin I'm looking for. My labor costs are 10.4%, lead generation is 8.5% and my general business expense is around 9% and my gross margin is about 65. So those numbers, really. And I grab that. And I guess they could do it themselves, but I grabbed those. And I kind of have to move a couple of things around, but I'm adding those up as fast as I can get them going. Okay, that's good. It's. We're on target and that gets into budgeting. As I'm looking into next year, I know that I'll have $300,000 for lead gen marketing, 300,000 for staff. So all my hiring decisions, all our marketing decisions are rooted in this idea that we're following a model and things are going to work out if we stay within that model. It can be a different model. It doesn't have to look like what I'm doing or what Lars is necessarily doing. But you should have some idea. If you bring in a million dollars, how much is going to be left over? And I particularly, I like to know that. Exactly.

Yeah. And then it also gives you the ability to, you know, there's not a whole lot you can do. When you, let's say you get your numbers for February, the third week of March, and you realize you had overspent in every category and your splits are like totally off, or you had a different mix of listing. Let's say you're just doing listings and you're different mix and your gross margin was off, there's nothing you can do three weeks after the month is already gone. But if you're running a tool like you have an economic model, just for some people that may not have heard the term, it's essentially about five or six rules that you follow in terms of how you spend the money as it comes in. And they're just rules that you need to follow. If you're 250,000 GCI top line or 500, a million, a million five. It basically follows the same, like you learn the rules and you can have those rules follow you in every stage of growth, but without the economic model, like you said, there's just nothing to go by. And you can't do much with a P and L from a month ago. But what I would do, and I know you do the same thing, is like, I'm looking ahead, like I'm already. April is done for the most part in about a week. So like, if I were to pull back an expense or maybe I was thinking of this expenditure, but it's going to fall out of model. Like you just become way more smart about how you run your business and the seasonality in your market. You know, you don't freak out In January, when you're losing a little bit of money because you know that those, you know, the percentages might be out of whack, but you'll kind of be in line in the months where more homes are sold. Um, one other thing I want to make sure, and this is more along the lines so someone listening that is maybe, you know, starting to scale their, their real estate team. You know, what, how do you see this fail? You know, so when you see someone who's like heavy in production and like, you know, they're, they're not running it, there's no CFO element in their business. They're, you know, they're two years behind on their taxes and they're going to make it all up on just, you know, working 80 hours a week. How do you see this fail? For some of the teams that come into our world.

The splits are an issue. So if you're. The amount of money you have left over to run your business is less than the amount of money it costs to run your business, you. You've got a problem. And if you don't know those numbers, you got a. Probably a good chance of crossing that line. And it's, it's pretty easy to stay within the margins, but it's pretty easy just to mix that up. So splits are a problem. Salaries are a problem. Frequently, and I understand, I want to pay people more, not less. That's what do I want to do. But if my competition sets up across the street and is played, pays people according to what their position is worth, and I pay people based on what I want to pay them, I'm going to lose a competitive advantage in the marketplace. It just, you can't, you can't run a business that inefficiently. Same with your brokerage splits. You can't pay somebody over here 10 times the amount that you could get the same services down the road. So not manage. If you just manage those big blocks, making sure your gross margins satisfactory, making sure that your staff not only stays within the guidelines, but you're compensating based on the job that's done, not the potential of a great person that may one point be the vice president of something or other in your organization that currently has three people, so you can't pay that person to do contract close and pay them office manager salary. It might not seem like much, but that's a just a very, to me, a very dangerous situation. You want to hire if you're working. If you own a hospital, you would not hire trauma surgeons. To clean the rooms. I'm sure they do a great job and probably a better job than somebody that cleans rooms for a living. And it's. But you just couldn't do that. You couldn't be competitive to the hospital across the street.

Yeah. So. And that kind of brings up a thought. So for someone, they hear this conversation, they're like, well, it's easy for Greg and Lars to do because you can just tell these guys are wired a little differently. They're a little bit more, you know, spreadsheet oriented, which we are. What did, like, three things, pieces of advice that you would give. Like a prototypical. I'm going to solve it with sales team leader. Like, let's prescribe this, this thing. Like, step one, do this, Step two, do this. And then I also want to get your estimate on a monthly basis or a weekly basis how much time you're actually spending as the CFO of your business. It's not as much as people think. But talk a little bit about that. Like, this is the advice you would give somebody who's like, not a spreadsheet person.

So I would create an economic model. And if you're like, well, I don't know how to do that. You can find the information in the toolbox. Or you could just look at your profit and loss for the past couple years and go, well, there's my economic model. I paid this in percentage and staff this percentage. And you have something actually to go on. And you may need to adjust that. But I would do that. I would look at CTE for 30 seconds a day. Every day I click on the same six tabs. I want to know what my next two months look like. I want to know how I'm on target. I want to know how I look compared to last year. I want to know what my lead generation sources are doing and what my agent's vitality is. And I click on those and it's fast. I look at my piano once a month. I fill out my network tracker. I'm probably spending about. I doubt it's 10 minutes a day, but it sure feels like it. Maybe two minutes a day, but it's consistent.

Yeah. So maybe over the course of a, of a week, less than an hour a week. Being once you have these systems set up and you understand it and it doesn't freak you out. Less than one hour a week, I would guess.

Oh, yeah, yeah. And I had the advantage. I advantage my lack of wanting to hire. I did my business taxes for years, so I would spend a Ton of time. But I really got to know, like, wow, look at that. That. That really recurs year after year, those expenses. I hire somebody, I got to keep paying them. I got. Which means we have to produce. So if you have smarter and you have a bookkeeper take care of this, there's just no way you could spend more than an hour a week and have a better handle on your business, guaranteed than most real estate companies that I. That I think you can find. Because most of them, large and small, are just trying to sell their way out of this dilemma that we're in.

Yeah. And it's, you know, I wish. I guess it's the same thing, though. I'm trying to think of, like, how, you know, when I'm challenged to do a thing that isn't in my natural personality, how I react. So I'm almost like in real time playing devil's advocate. Like, this is. So you have to just trust us in all the thousands of homes that we've sold collectively, in the tens of thousands of homes we've coached under the team leaders that we've coached for years and years and years of doing this at the upper 1% of 1% of our industry, you just have to trust us that whatever is blocking you, if you're not doing this stuff, whatever is blocking you, you need to slow down and push through it and then get into the cadence. These small little time blocks every day, cup of coffee, and you're just doing your cfo. You're putting your CFO hat on. And then I say time blocks. And it's probably the same people that aren't running the economic model that don't have time blocks. So that's probably a whole nother lesson we need to teach you on time blocking. But any parting words here? Given all of your firsthand experience in building a business and also all the top teams that you've coached, what's your final thoughts here?

I think keep it simple. Don't track things that you don't care about or you're not going to make any decisions about. So I think we have a tendency to want to click on every spreadsheet in cte. Like, why are you doing that? What are we looking for? So keep it very simple. Look for a few metrics that you care about. Have some sort of model in mind. Keep and keep plugging away. It's amazing what somebody can go from no idea what's going on. Two months later, few coaching calls, and they'll start. My labor cost is 12.4%. Am I worried about that. I'm like, wow, you went from knowing nothing to now you're reporting these numbers. And be confident when, if you find yourself on shark tanks, sell on your real estate team. Spewing out these numbers is very impressive. If you can know just how many units that I did. What's, what's my gross commission? What's my profit margin? What's my cost of goods sold? What's my lead generation expense? That's more than most people. And it's, we're talking about maybe 10 numbers. So very small changes over two to three month period of paying attention. And you will you not only affect this business, but you start applying it to other investments and businesses that you look at like, whoa, what's, you know, somebody wants to you invest in something, you'll have some real good question from what are your labor expenses? And if you talk to most small business, they're like, what do you mean I work 100 hours a week? What's that mean? Like, no, what's your labor cost and how much of the production is due to you? Or like, well, all of it. And why do you have 10 people? And you start asking these questions like we ask of you and it's a lot funner to ask than the be asked.

So yeah, and I'll end with, with this thought and it's, it's along those same lines. I had a conversation. I went to a random event. It was, it was Jim Kwik, it was a memory expert. So it was like a free ticket I got for buying some crap at some event that. So it was like three things removed from real estate. But it was cool. I learned how to memorize 20 things. Um, but I talked to somebody that had just been on in front of 5,000 real estate agents featured on Apple's website. And no. So she's showing me her offices and I'm like, lots of glass, lots of exposed bricks, Apple products everywhere. To your point, within like maybe three but probably two questions I was just like backing out of. So needless to say, this person is not in business anymore, had launched a brokerage. And I said, so what's your gross margins? What do you blended? What are you paying out to your agents? And she was independent. And she's like, I think, I think 78 or 79% were paying out. And then I looked at the Apple products and the glass and the brick. I'm like, you're not making money. And then she's like, no, we're struggling financially and she just got off a Stage in front of 5,000 real estate agents. So my point of telling you that is that you cannot really. Don't try to avoid putting on a pedestal the guys and girls in your market that are selling a lot of real estate because you don't know what their profitability looks like. You don't know if they're building net worth. You don't know if they're working 100 hours a week. You don't know if their marriage is challenged or their physical body isn't in order or if they kick their dog every day. Right. So that. That fits in perfectly to what you said. There anything to share on that as I kind of laid that out there? Are you seeing the same thing?

You know, it's. And I. I've been to a lot of conferences over the years, and I can't tell you how many times I'm like, I. And I've been impacted by the speakers and then find out like, wow, your life or your finances were really messed up when you were. And I was still appreciative of what I learned, but I think you got to be very cautious about the information you're looking for. So for me, when I was younger, before all the Internet and zoom, it was cars you drove and the house you lived in. And then I'd see the house, and I'm like, that is such a nice house. And I can't imagine ever having enough money in my wildest dreams to afford that. And then I'd see it being sold as a short sale. And I'm like, well, that's even more confusing. I just don't understand what's going on. And yet the car's still running. I'm like, why do they have such an nice car in their house is being foreclosed on? I just could not figure it out. I wasted a lot of time. So much better, I think, to plug in a community that is open and honest and will show you the financials and you can maybe learn together as opposed to this. I'm not saying this industry is fraudulent, but there's a lot of smoke and mirrors going on and a lot of behind the scenes that it does not look good. And it's unfortunately, the way our industry is built. It's built on volume, agent volume, sales volume, not on profitability for the individuals. I was at a conference, 2015, and I think it's San Francisco NAR conference. And Lawrence Yun, the economist, starts out. He starts the meeting. He goes, 50% of agents in the United States makes less than $10,000 a year before expenses and the whole room just gasped. I'm like, that's horrible start. But you really struck me. I'm like, wow, half the people in this room are making less than $10,000 a year before this expense issue comes up. So finding the answers outside of this group or group similar to this is going to be very challenging for you and very challenging when you I dug in this pretty heavily and the life behind this and the destruction for the people that are making a ton of money is really bad too. It's. I don't want to make it sound doom and gloomy, but there are other options out there. My team is very well balanced. I don't work a ton and I make sure my staff and agents don't work a ton either. And you can do it elsewhere if you set up those parameters and you and you focus not just to go more units, more dollar volume, but a better quality of life and more profit for everyone.

Awesome. That's a good point. And the probably next topic we'll have to revisit. You know, how to run a team that's doing the production you're doing where everyone does have a life so everyone has a shot at more money, more time, less stress and the whole B school promise. I would end with this. If you're sort of in in the team building mode and you're like holy cow what just happened on this podcast. I probably should have done this call to action first thing because we might have lost some people when we when I mentioned spreadsheets a couple of times. But I would say, you know, there is a method to this madness, that there's a way to build this the right way. You know, we are blessed to have Greg in our world and be able to feed into and just honestly evaluate these businesses so our team leaders can operate and move forward from a position of confidence knowing that there is a range of a correct way to build a real estate team so it gives a little bit of freedom and is built on the proper foundation. So I would just say go to realestate business growth.com there's a free report there goes through the six stages of growth like step by step, the questions you should be asking yourself, the structure of the team, the tools you should be implementing and so forth. So go to realestatebusinessgrowth.com Greg, I appreciate you. I don't say it enough. You are a blessing to real estate B school. I know to your team and your community and also all the team leaders that get to work with you. Much love, brother.