003 Barry Jenkins on the Trouble with Seeing Yourself in Other People

No matter where your business is today or where you want to take it, you'll get there faster and more profitably with an operating system. Welcome to Team os, your guide to starting, growing and optimizing real estate team. Here's your host, Ethan Butte. For insights into starting, growing and optimizing a real estate team, we're talking with Barry Jenkins. A couple of fun facts before we get started. His best selling book is titled Too Nice for Sales. The Too Nice shop is loaded with training courses and two nice T shirts. And he just may be working on another book, Too Nice for Leadership. And he's not only the owner and team leader of Friends in Real Estate, he also serves as the chief marketing officer for the brokerage Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate Native American Group, and as an executive at Y Lopo. Thank you so much for talking Team OS today, Barry.

Super excited to be here and to be a part of the show. I'm excited about the collaboration.

Yeah, man, me too. I appreciate everything that you've done in the space in general, the diversity of activity in the way that you're committing yourself and your time and your talent. So I do have a couple of questions about how you balance all that at the end. But I want to start, Barry, where we always start on the show, which is a must have characteristic of a high performing team. When I offer that, what does that bring to mind for you to be.

Able to pivot, you know, and when I say that, it includes the ability to pay attention. You've got to be able to pay attention and then you have to be able to make changes. Our industry, like many, but ours in particular is volatile at times and you can kind of get into a rhythm of doing things the way that you've always done them because it's always worked and if you're not paying attention, you don't adapt. And so now that I believe that pivoting and adapting is so important, I actually see the challenge as the opportunity. It's a much, much more peaceful way to live.

Really good. I appreciate a, that that mindset that you, that you offered there the end or gave us insight into at the end of that take. But I want to double back into paying attention, give a little bit of guidance, maybe speak to someone who is much earlier on in their team building journey, let's say. Yeah, what should we be paying attention to? You know, I think that's, that's a big part of the challenge of, you know, what am I paying attention to? Therefore, what am I sort of more prepared to Adapt, like, what should even be paying attention to?

Yeah, so it's interesting. What made most team owners get too busy to need to start a team is also the thing that works against them as a leader of their team. Because with clients, all I need to do is respond and accommodate and get them to like me. And so that's what helped me build my success. And now I'm trying to lead people. And so if I'm not paying attention to the overall business, things like money, bills, overall direction of opportunities, what I might be paying too much attention to is the happiness or unhappiness of my sales team. And so their metric of how happy they are accidentally becomes my direction as a business owner. Because again, my client was the person that I was always trying to make happy. And now my agents are my clients in a matter of sorts. And as such, I'm allowing their happiness or unhappiness to dictate my next steps. And so you really have to not only pay attention, but you have to be able to understand what you should be paying attention to.

Yeah, absolutely. And I love what you offered there about. I think there's a very strong relationship and maybe we can spend some more time on it between the client experience and the agent experience. I mean, you as a team leader are shifting out of production at some point. Maybe we'll get into that detail too, you know, are shifting your attention there. But I think the two of them are at some level, two sides of the same coin from your seat. Would you generally agree with that idea? Like, and again, the better position in agency agent is in, the better they're going to be able to treat the client.

Oh, absolutely. I think. I think, you know, it's a matter of who, understanding who your client is. And in this case, as a team owner, my agents are the people that are creating revenue for me. Yes, they're meeting with leads and past clients of mine, but ultimately my agent's activity determines my revenue. And so of course, you should pay attention to them. But at the end of the day, you need to be paying attention to the whole business. And so a common challenge that team owners have is they get a lead source. That's a sure thing. And it comes with a really hefty referral fee. Let's say 40%. Right. And so I get this account, everybody's excited, I give the referral fee, I'm speaking from experience lead to my client or to my agent, they close the deal. My lender's thrilled, my title company's thrilled, my franchise and the Franchise fees. They're thrilled. My agent's thrilled. The provider of the referral's thrilled. I'm not making any money. Right. And it took me, I wasn't paying attention. It took me a year of that of just burning through deals and wondering why everybody else is getting rich around me. And so I just had to, I had to quiet the excitement of all the people that thought I was amazing. And man, they gave great Christmas gifts to me that year. Let me tell you, I got some of the best gifts ever. I just wasn't making a lot of money, you know? Yeah.

Yeah. It's so funny. If something seems too good to be true, there's something that you should maybe pay more attention to. So this, the theme in both of the responses you just shared with me is this idea that we need to be paying attention to the business at a very fundamental level. I think that is not what attracts a lot of people to the business. I think it's one of the most compelling things about the team model. As someone who is not on a real estate team and still compels me very much, it's one of the reasons I love these conversations is that a lot of people aren't good at that. They don't want to get good at that. That's not what brought them into the business. And so in the type of model that you've built, you can now put those people in their best position to be in these revenue producing opportunities. And you're paying attention to those things because it is something at some point you decided you cared about. Would you agree that maybe a little bit of a lack of understanding or perhaps a blindness or even an ignorance in the kindest way possible around essentially P and L is a reason why some solo agents are not more successful and or more of them should be joining teams?

Yes. Because many times an agent doesn't start a team because they want to get rich. The agent is starting the team because they already are rich. They already are successful. In fact, they're too successful. And now they're looking at quality of life. How can I even out my day and scale this to where I can manage all of this activity? So their metric of what a good decision is typically is does it increase my quality of life? And what they find out very quickly is it's hard to stay profitable when you're just, just focus on your quality of life. And so then they dip their toe back into production and they live in two worlds for a while. And that is a two headed monster doing two different things and it's very, very challenging. So, yeah, I mean, it's a very tough road for a lot of them. But what I would tell people that are embarking on this journey is what it took to get you where you are today as a successful team owner, or, excuse me, a successful agent is not necessarily what it's going to take to get you to that next place in your journey. That's why the original question about pivoting and adapting is so important, because you've got to learn a new set of skills if you want to run this the right way.

Yeah, really good. And we're definitely going to be getting into that too. I know I'm making a lot of promises to folks watching or listening right now, but before we go too much farther, I would love for you to characterize in whatever way you would like, your team, or even your team Ridge, market size, structure, culture, history, anything you want to share, just kind of characterize your team as it is today.

Yeah. So as it is today, my brokerage and I are one in the same. I used to have my own independent team within the brokerage, and over the last, I would say six months, we made the painful transition of merging all the agents. We've got about 90 or 100 now, and all of them in some capacity are getting opportunities from myself and the brokerage. So the entire firm is established off of agents getting deals from us. But we very much embody and embrace an ownership culture. While we're a teamerage, we also aren't micromanaging our agents. What we do is we allow them the opportunity to succeed and we allow them to set what their goals look like. We hold them accountable to what they say they're going to do. Because for maybe a stay at home mom, she might not have the same goals as a breadwinner for a family. Right. They might have different metrics of what success looks like. So it's very important for us to allow the culture of entrepreneurship to thrive. And we tell people in the onboarding process, if you need us to call you in the morning and ask, are you going to get the job done, respectfully, we are not the place for you. That is not the culture that we've created. And what we're watching is we're creating really successful business owners under our model. They're bringing agents in, they're recruiting agents under their team, they're building teams off of our opportunities. And it's really exciting to watch.

That is really interesting for the ignorant among us. That's me. Could you, you know, I feel like, you know, lead gen or providing opportunities has always been a part of kind of essentially the brokerage value prop. At some level, you know, like you're to want to come to my office because we do, you know, get into the nuance there a little bit. How is this fund? Like, I know that it's different, but I don't know exactly how.

Yeah. You know, saying you come to our office and I'm going to give you leads is not our core value proposition. What we do is we have an array of opportunities. Some of them corporate, like relocation accounts or REO accounts. Some of them are online lead gen platforms like Y Lopo and other vendors like that. And in all of them, you know, we're providing actual human contact, contact to contact. We have ISAs calling the online leads so that our agents aren't spending all day prospecting. And that's the subtle difference. I think a lot of times brokerages say here's the leads, but then the agent becomes the de facto call center. And we really want to optimize our salespeople's time, much like you would any entrepreneur or business owners. So what we've done is we've really streamlined in our follow up boss lists. I've got 265,000 humans in my follow up boss right now.

If you everyone in all the market areas you serve.

No, we've got 1.6 million humans in my market. But I will say that if you go through the lists in my CRM for my agents to call, they maybe have 200 in one list, 300 in another. So what we've done is we've really skimmed the upper crust of opportunities so that when our agents go in and it's time to call leads, they're dealing with the highest intent and the most likely to actually speak. That's become very valuable for our team because it allows them an opportunity to actually control the amount of conversations they're having. When I first started, my broker told me to pass out 50 business cards a day and make sure I buy a dishwasher for every client that buys a home because they'll always remember that I bought it. That was my marketing strategy. Right. But that was, you know, 2000. Things have changed a lot since then. Yeah.

And the government would still take a nice new dishwasher.

Sure, maybe.

Okay, so in all of these conversations we're going to double back into some of these themes that you've introduced. But I think we'll through the storytelling that you're about to do for us probably fulfill a couple of the promises I made off the top of this thing. We like to peel into a specific moment in your, in your life and in your career where you made a large realization or had to make a large decision. And what you shared with me when we met earlier was this idea of achieving number one in the market and realizing that it just wasn't worth it, which I thought was super interesting. So I didn't ask you any follow up questions at that time. So I would love for you just kind of share that story a little bit. I think it's going to tie into this kind of two headed scenario that you described earlier. Like am I in production or am I leading a team and is it worth it? Of course it wasn't for you at the time. So I'd love for you to share that story, the decision that you made and, and perhaps the rationalization around why it wasn't worth it to be number one on your own.

Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I had come out of the market crash of 2008 through 2010, suffered financially greatly. And when I was able to get another shot to sell a lot of homes, 2011, I gave it everything that I had. I recognized that I had squandered opportunities previously. And so when you see a really, when you've been waiting for a really good pitch and the pitcher finally throws the one you've been waiting for, it's like the old bait that you lick the lips. And that's what I did. And that year I sold 125 houses without any staff, no assistant, no agent, no, no admin. It was just me selling 10 to 15 homes a month. And I was absolutely miserable the whole time. But I didn't want to squander my opportunity. And so I went to the Realtor Awards that year. It was a banquet. Food was, was okay ish. And you know, the music was okay ish. It was all fine. The big moment arrived and they had the slides of the winners and, and they put, they put the number one agent in the market in my ca on the slide. And for about three to three and a half seconds, my face and my name were just right there. And honestly, it was a fantastic three seconds, right? It was the best sugar rush ever. But like any good sugar rush, there's a sugar crash. And as soon as that went away, by the way, people weren't even really looking. I was looking like it was important to me. But you look around, I'm like, nobody cared. And I recognized that me getting that award, as great as it was and as honored for the success as I was, I recognized at that moment that that wasn't enough for me to sacrifice my quality of life all year. And so I decided, instead of being the one that receives the award, that I would next try to be the one that gives the award. I decided that it would be better and more fulfilling for me to empower others to find success if there was a way that I could leverage what I was doing and do that. And so thus began the journey of figuring it out, of walking it out. And at that time, I was highly discouraged from starting a team. I met with several brokerage owners and went on retreats. And people at that time were the rooms I was in. I'm sure there were people that liked teams back then, but the rooms I was in, everybody kind of discouraged it. But I didn't listen to them because I didn't have an option. I couldn't live the way that I was living anymore. It wasn't satisfying, and that's what led me to do what I did.

What do you think some of the. Well, I. What were some of the objections that you were getting as you were introducing, hey, I'm thinking about doing this, like, and it sounds like it was overwhelmingly, don't do it. Like, what were some of the main arguments there? And how much weight did you give them? And how did you kind of see past them? Because you obviously had a vision for yourself and it wasn't being validated. In what ways were people rejecting the idea? And what did you see for yourself through that objection? Because you're obviously going to people you liked and trusted.

Yeah, yeah. Globally, everyone melted it down to a personnel issue that agents are too hard to manage. And if you're not the broker, you don't have enough control, that there's just not enough opportunity out there for agents to work. And they're not going to work hard anyway. Basically, it was just, they're going to waste all your time. You're going to spend all this money and it's not going to work. Trust me, I've been there. I've done that. And look, I'm not a bullheaded person. I do appreciate wisdom, but I also felt like that I pastored a church for 10 years and running a volunteer organization. Nobody was getting paid. I wasn't even getting paid. You know, you learn how to motivate people and help them. And I just felt like that there was somebody out there that I could help change their life. And so for my I gleefully walked into it naive with a little bit of past performance of running a volunteer organization. And I kind of pressed into it.

Love it. What was the first 12 months like in that process? And remind me, where are we? Like what year are we? Just for market conditions for folks that were like, oh, I remember that time.

Yeah, 2012, 2013, solid market, really happy with it. Serendipitously, a few people from my childhood approached me around the same time. They were all in the food service industry and they said, look, we watch what you're doing online and we want you to teach us. And so I took people from my past that I grew up with and I began to help them. And I wouldn't let them quit their full time job. One of them actually quit without telling me because they started to get some deals under contract and I just, I was, at that time, I wasn't ready to let go of the big volume production numbers. So every deal was in my name. So somehow it made sense to me to sell 250 homes in my name by having other agents do all the work. And that was a mistake. Like that was, that was a really strategic misstep on my part because it added so much pressure to me. The compliance. If you don't turn in your earnest money deposit check within five days, you could lose your license. And I had scenarios where I'm calling the agent, they're not answering, like, hey, did you turn in the check? You know, like, it was horrible. But that's, that's how I got my start, was me basically scaling myself through three humans. And we did phenomenal. And, and it wasn't that moment about the EMD check. That didn't happen until probably 2015. Once we got beyond 200, 250 transactions. That's when I began to rethink my strategy of putting the deals in my name because it just, it just was too much for me to handle.

Yeah. And can I assume correctly that as you were making that shift, this is probably when you were. You strike me as a very tech forward real estate leader. I. This is a huge assumption. So steer me wherever. Wherever. The truth is that the shift maybe from getting agents to do more of their activities in their own name was maybe part of the window where you got a lot more aggressive here as you shifted maybe a lot of your time and attention from managing all that production very, very directly to probably designing systems to support these people so they could do them the way that you had learned was best from your experience.

Yes, spot on. I developed a Series of forms that my agents that we still use in some capacities that would fill out at different moments in the transaction. We viewed, we looked at the emotional highs of a transaction. You're writing an offer, you got the deal under contract, you're submitting for your commission. We use those emotional highs and those moments where the agents were compelled. If you're going to get paid, you don't mind answering a couple extra questions. And we leverage all that data to then feed back into our transaction management platform. Follow up Boss, Past client databases, past client gifts, all of it was keyed off of our agents inputting that data. And I built it all around that time that I began to look at my, my workload and say, okay, it's time to optimize things a little bit.

Yeah, really good. I love this kind of moments that matter perspective and the idea that like they're super motivated right now. This is the best time to get people to do what they don't want. It's funny, I spent the second half of my career to date in software businesses and it's the same thing for real estate software sales. It's like we need more information into the system so that we can make better decisions in the future based on what happened and when and how in the past. And of course there's this repeat and referral nature to, to gathering a lot of that stuff as well. Any other things that you know for someone, that's where you were, let's say, in 2015, 2016, 2017. Just from a business maturity standpoint, I'm sure you're talking with people all the time at different stages of maturity. So when you're talking with people about where you were at that time, you're built like, I'm assuming, what, where are you now, 12 agents or something? I mean, at that time, 15.

15 agents.

Yeah. Yeah. So like, like what, what was the next phase for you if you were to kind of like oversimplify the journey? Like, you know, where are we in that journey and what was the next big step and what maybe made that possible? See what your contacts are doing on Zillow. Monday, December 8th join follow up Boss for a sneak peek webinar where you'll be among the first to see how to get Zillow. Searching, browsing and insights for the contacts in your database directly inside. Follow up boss. So when a past client of yours gets that late night and extra bedroom would be really great right now, kind of feeling you'll know before anyone else who's showing high intent to Buy or sell insights about what's happening right now so you can deliver a personalized touch at scale. See what your contacts are doing on Zillow. Monday, December 8th at 1pm Eastern, 10am Pacific. Learn more and sign up through the link in the description below. You're in your podcast app. Check out the description of this episode right down below. It's the first line and the first link. Now back to the conversation.

Yeah, I would say that once I got to about 20 agents, so just a little bit more, I needed administrative and support for about 40 agents. So what I found was the skeleton crew that I had servicing 10 to 15 agents. They weren't able to keep up with demand. And so I had to make a big decision. Do I decide to grow to 50 and if so, do I go ahead and start making those hires now? And it was a big decision and I did make the decision to grow and I did that successfully. But it was a really hard transition to go because I also had to change how leads are distributed. The access that agents had to me, right. They used to be able to text me at 9 o'. Clock. Now it's like, it's just not, I can't, I can't do it anymore. And so figuring out middle level management was a key component for me to grow. And boy did I make some mistakes there. I mean I, I was coming again from a place of not valuing my contribution to my agents. I was so grateful that they were with me. That and I even, it was even worse with middle management because they were the barrier between agents calling me at 9 o' clock at night. And so I gave them the moon and the stars. I devalued what I had, I overvalued what they had and I over empowered them to the point that they did what most people would do. They took it and ran. And so that, that began the story of like, I'm growing, I'm growing, I'm growing. I'm not growing, I'm not.

So, so, so share with me who like were these. So for example, maybe the, the lead buyer agent was one of your better buyer agents who seemed to have some of the qualities and perhaps some interest in taking on more and different responsibility. Like how did you, how did you build this middle management layer?

Yeah, so the way that I did it incorrectly is I gave them all the listings that the, that my team had. So I made them listing agents and I gave them buyer agents to work the listing leads. And so I built squads and so they had the listings and Then they had the agents. So I basically was replicating myself under the assumption that I wouldn't take advantage of me. So they're not going to take advantage of me. I saw myself in my people. And so as a result of that, I had to make. I didn't want to do that again because they, like I said, they took the listing leads and they went and build their own businesses. And so the next round, when I built the middle level management, I decided everybody gets everything. So they get the listings, they get the buyers. We're not going to designate who's who. And then I'm going to have people that I compensate for their time with agents. Because what I found was after about six months to a year, the amount of need that the agent had decreased to where I could manage it during business hours. It was really the first year that was demanding. So I developed a mentorship program to where agents would latch on to other seasoned agents and the seasoned agent would get a cut of the first three deals that they would do together. And so thus decreasing this organization within my organization. And then over time I made business acquisitions and business like merging with brokerages. We just bought another brokerage with, with 30 agents maybe a year ago. And to where we, you know, they aligned with us and we made an offer and we bought it. So it gets to a point where the numbers get bigger and the volume gets bigger, but if your operations and your systems are in place, you can just plug and play and it doesn't work. But if I was to summarize, the mistake was I empowered the wrong people with too much freedom and too much power. And my resulting change from that is decreasing my ask of middle level management and isolating what I really needed them to do. And that worked really well. We still use that model to this day, by the way.

That's fantastic. I love it. And gosh, I have a couple of different directions I want to go based on a couple things you shared there. But I'm going to stay right here for another minute. I want to double back into this. What I heard was that you were. And by aggressive I just mean you're hiring beyond your immediate need with regard to administration. And it sounds like you were hiring in such a way that you could handle twice as many transactions or twice as many agents, which in theory that should be slightly parallel. So how did that go for you? And specifically I'm asking because I think a lot of people don't have that courage. I think most people are hiring specifically out of need. Like, oh my Gosh, we're at a breaking point. And there's a little bit of that in the way that you were describing the situation of your skeleton crew supporting 15 people. But if we're going to really step on the gas and make this thing happen and see what we can do do here. You made a commitment not to go to, let's support 25 agents. You know, you went beyond that. So talk a little bit about, you know, was that a courageous decision? Was that a, you know, two of my key trusted advisors told me this was a good thing to do. Was this gut instinct? Was it opportunity? Maybe, you know, had good people that you were that that were available to hire. So like, let's just take two more because they're awesome people. Like, how did this go for you?

Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. I think I did have a real estate coach that was really emphasizing growth at that time, which I'm grateful for. And I think that my core challenge was I had built from 2012 to 2015 or 16, my agents I was able to plug and play. I only needed them to shake hands and kiss babies. The writing of the offers, the transaction management, the past client nurture, the lead generation and lead follow up. I had system systematically done everything except the human to human connection, which got me to a certain point. The challenge with it was I wrongly assumed that as I continued to augment my agent's day that they would take that time and they would work more and they would make more money because I thought that they were like me, that they would take every little window of opportunity and they would scale. Well, that didn't work out. What they ended up doing was I made their quality of life better. Right? So as I grew, I recognized that, you know what? I can't do everything for them. And that resulted in a period of time that was very painful for me because I had to watch people that could have been great and were doing average with me doing everything that when I went to them and said, look, we're decreasing services, I didn't pitch it that way, but I'm just going to say it that way to you guys. We're decreasing services. You know, this is what you have to do now. I saw them shy away instead of stepping into it. And that was a hard lesson for me that not everybody wants to take every opportunity given. But it worked out because as I had a more realistic view of what my salespeople need to do and not do, what I found was much like an animal in a zoo that's being fed every day is then put in the wild. That animal can't survive. But when an animal lives in the wild, they survive. They figure out how to hunt. And what I was doing was I was keeping my agents cocooned in my systems, and they never cut their teeth. And the margin as a real estate agent is finding the people that are in the middle of their journey. The real growth is finding the people that are not quite there. But you learn how to talk to them if you can master that. The revenue potential is just incredible. But everybody's fighting for that few people that know exactly what they want. And I was trying replicate that for a group of people. And it was honest, it was sincere, but it was misguided.

Yeah, really good. And you've just kind of come all the way circle to this idea of knowing what success looks like to each person and holding them accountable to their own definition of success. I'm gonna do something fun with you, Barry, that we're not gonna be able to do on all these episodes because not everyone has written and published a book. I'm gonna read you a few quotes from your own book just to kind of put it in the context of the conversations we're having on this show. Good. So on page eight, early on in the book, you referred to the year that your team sold 850 homes. And the quote is, without sacrificing our souls, our mental health, or our family life. And so to me, this feels like one of the greatest value props of A, a good culture and B, the team model. But like, how is this something like share a little bit about that. Why is that important to you? And where does that fit with the team and the culture and perhaps even the way that you were able to recruit some of these kind of sweet spot people?

Yeah, well, if you recall my story, I experienced extreme levels of success in my market to the detriment of the quality of life that I enjoyed. And so when I began to roll out the kind of the new realm of services and automation for my agents from 2016 through 2019, my focus was how can I augment their performance so that they can do money making activities all day long. And so for me, I was able to find this sweet spot much like a cyborg with a, you know, the humans running, but they maybe have augmented legs. Right. That was kind of my vision for my. For my sales team, because now they take time off, they go on vacations, they're able to turn their phones off. I hold them accountable to what they said they were going to do that week. But as long as they get it in during that week, they take time off. I encouraged taking a day off on the weekend. To not apologize for being at your kids baseball games. Right. Like to not apologize for not having your phone when your kid's sick. You know, standard quality of life boundary setting. Because I really wanted to play the long game. I wanted to find people that were going to kind of journey with me and create revenue that's bigger than just, you know, me getting rich. It was about empowerment and empowerment culture. And so for me it was, it was a real big picture moment.

Love it. And just again, a kind of a simplified follow up here. Like, I feel like that is very, very difficult to do for most solo agents.

Oh, totally. Because you're doing everything. You're your transaction manager, you're your sales team, you're your divis dev, your relationship nurtures. You're doing it all yourself, which can be done. But it's a different kind of person that does it all by themselves. It really is. And I admire them.

Yeah. I mean, to me that's the potential future team leader versus someone who really wants to play to their strengths and they're aware of their own strengths. And perhaps some of this quality of life dynamic that you've been sharing. On page 36, you talked about the shift from Zillow and Realtor leads to Google and Facebook leads. And the context was, you know, it's a different type of lead, so you have to figure out how to engage with them differently. But the quote was that Zillow and Realtor leads became, quote, too expensive to build a team on. And so my question for you is not specifically about what was going on at that time and why this was a thing, but just share a little bit of insight for people who are thinking about lead sources, cost of lead, like how do we put all in terms of things to pay attention to? Obviously cost of acquisition is a thing, as is lead efficiency and who's following up and how. And how do people feel about it. And all of this talk a little bit about the critical nature of profitable leads to not just team success, but really team growth. I feel like that's one of the primary levers that drives people to say I need to bring more people alongside me. Whether that's the first three agents I bring into the team or whether it's the, you know, 105th, 6th and 7th.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, I love that quote from Richard Bronson. If someone offers you an opportunity and you don't Know how to do it or I'm going to mess up the quote, but do it anyway and figure it out later. And so with Zillow, for me, all I Knew was with realtor.com and Zillow, we were closing a lot of deals. But what I started to see was in 2016, the average sales price in my market ballpark was maybe like 200,000. The cost per lead was getting approaching like 400 to $450 a lead for us. And as I began to grow my agent count, I realized, like, this isn't. I'm going to have to increase my budget to the point that this doesn't. This doesn't make sense for me. Now. I wish I would have made it, made that decision early on. I wish I could tell you, oh, I got a spreadsheet and I analyzed the trajectory. No, what happened was I went a year, looked and was like, why, why do I feel broke? Like, why am I not making money? And I looked back. So I looked back and I discovered. And then I made a change appropriately. And what's cool about that story, though, is what was a problem, what was considered a failure turned out to be a journey that I embarked on. And I mastered subject of Google and Facebook leads, which then became a new career at Y Lopa, which became a book. So, like, this is why I'm so passionate about telling people the challenge that you're facing is many times it's the thing you've been hoping for. You just can't see it yet. You just got to walk through the door.

Yeah, really good. It kind of goes back to this attention thing. Like, you didn't know how much attention you should be paying at the time until you did.

Right.

And then you adjusted. Yeah, really good. I think I'm fulfilling another promise I made about a half hour ago now, which is the relationship between client experience and agent experience. And the quote is from page 54, provides so much direction, information, and insight into what the person should be doing in order to accomplish their goals that a person would be crazy to choose anyone else. Now, that was written in the context of how do we be of service and value to people who don't know what their timeline is, who don't quite know what their budget is, who don't quite know what they're looking for. And in the book, you provide so many great approaches to the conversation, some critical questions people can be asking to aid in these situations. But. But the thing that I, that I got on immediately and made me think of agent experience from Team leader perspective is, you know, provide so much value that in order that helps them accomplish their goals that they'd be crazy not to work with you.

Yeah.

As an agent, share a little bit about that. And maybe do you see? I'm sure you do, but do you see both sides? And if so, how. And perhaps how does that motivate you?

Yeah, absolutely. Well, look, you can't motivate someone else unless you know what they're motivated by. And the nice agent has a compulsion to please. And when a consumer doesn't know what they want, all the nice agent knows is they don't want to talk to me. Now, maybe they say it, maybe they act like it. You know, there's a vibe or all three. And so the agent rushes off the phone. And my call to action for this agent in this situation is to put on the posture of a super passionate and curious teacher. And when the person says to you, I'm not ready, I'm waiting a year, instead of rushing off the phone, press into the question. That's fascinating. I'm so glad to hear you're taking it seriously. How did you decide you're waiting a year? Just this subtle change allows me to take on that role and actually help the consumer get out of their own way. Because look, people pay a lot of money for therapists to lead them down the path of self discovery. And effectively that's what you're doing as an agent. And so when you do this, yes, it is an incredible lead conversion strategy. But what's more important than that is it's also an incredible human strategy. You become important to this stranger that changes that authentic dynamic between you and the consumer. And now you're winning business not by using tricks of just get them to say yes three times and then ask them for the money on the fourth. Right. Like, what is that? You know, like I just. You're doing it for the right reasons and you happen to be handsomely compensated as a result.

Yeah, really good. And so when you talk about this as a human skill, again, I feel like there's a relationship here with perhaps, you know, again, some of these goal setting and accountability conversations with agents. Not that you're necessarily gonna ask the same question, but the same spirit of what you just described there from an agent client perspective is probably very true of a leader agent dynamic at some level. You know, when we talk about accountability, like this goal setting and accountability piece, are you directly involved? Is this some of your, you know, kind of the mentorship or shadowing program that you have Set up? How do these conversations go? How often are they? Is it like an annual goal setting and then like a quarterly review? Is it a, an annual goal setting with like bi weekly kind of accountability check inside? Is it like a steady flow of asynchronous communication? Is it some of all of the above? Talk a little bit about that.

Yeah, yeah. So what we found is we ask our agents when they're joining, if you were to fast forward 12 months and look back on this day. We want you to tell us what success looked like. What did success look like in your first 12 months as an agent? We allow them to define what it is that they would perceive as successful. We reverse engineer that goal, whether it's revenue or units sold, marry it to the lead source that they're on. So let's say it's Google and Facebook leads. And we say, look, if you want to make X based on industry averages, you know, if you want to have one to two deals a month, you're going to have to try to reach 100 people a week, talk to 20 of them and keep one or two. That's a lot of failure to find one or two people a week to realize your long term goal. Is this still your long term goal? And some say yes and some say no. So for us, it's about them setting the expectation, us reverse engineering the work. From there. I meet myself and one of the other owners. We do a sales call Monday and Friday. We begin the end of the week and end the week with a sales call. And some of it is accountability. What it's become recently is us taking agents that are doing what we've asked them to do. They're realizing their goals, they're following the process. And much like you do with me on the podcast, we interview them. We found the social proof of agents doing the work and finding a measure of success to be so much more compelling for their peers than anything I could say. I try to tell them, like, hey, I'm a big deal, I wrote a book. But they don't care.

It's like the life of a parent as well.

It is, it is.

Listen, I'm very accomplishing. People respect me. Why don't you?

Yeah, so funny.

I love it. That's really, really good. Any other, like from an operational perspective, you know, like day to day, week to week, what is a good, you know, day or a good week look like for you? Specific to your real estate team and then we'll kind of transition to some of your other opportunities and responsibilities to all the other humans and, and situations in your life and how you find balance. But like, you know, in addition to, for example, this, this bookended sales call twice a week kind of what else, what else are you, are you choosing? Because I feel like you're at the point in your business where you've tried a lot, you've failed a lot, you've learned a lot, you've been very successful. You probably. My guess is that you're doing as much as you probably want to in the business. And so I'm just wondering kind of personally, what is that for you? What still brings you to life and. Or what do you still choose to pay attention to, indirectly engage in such a.

You ask really good questions. Can I just say that for the listeners, I'm just a curious person.

I have this privilege of hanging out.

With people like you, being asked great questions. This is such a good question. The most rewarding thing I've ever done professionally was writing too nice for sales. The amount of people that reach out to me on a weekly basis and share specific moments in their life where the book added value has brought me a tremendous amount of joy. And so I am. That's my Delta. That is what I'm. That's why I'm writing another book, because I said, okay, apparently what I'm doing matters. So that's my Delta. From there, I've committed myself to product engineering training with Y Lopo full time. What's left is my team. And so for me, the team is about keeping the brokerage and the team is about keeping it on its guardrails. And the way that I do that, I have management and accountability software that manages every appointment, every missed lead, every lead source that's not performing. And so I'm able to go into this twice a week. I have admin that goes in daily for some of the nudge tasks that come up up, but they're literally just twice a week. I'm just looking at the delta. Which agents are low performing, they need to get into training, which agents are. So I'm quarterbacking and software and teams using the tools we require. Follow up boss. If they're working leads, you know, it's, it's a part of our process now, measuring appointment to closing ratios, of measuring conversation to appointment ratios. And so for me it's all about quarterbacking. And then when I see a need, I just attach them with one of our trainers or mentors. And so what that's allowed me to do is to have a lot of margin in my personal life. To spend time outside of everything. I just said, to spend time doing things that matter. So we fostered children with the city of Virginia beach for two years. And the city of Virginia beach told me, they said, said, look, these people are addicted to methamphetamines. One of them, the baby girl, was born on drugs. She was three weeks old. And they said, don't expect much from the parents. And I laughed and I said, I motivate realtors for a living. Just give me a shot, right? And I'm two for two. Two families in a row. Because I would go to them and I would say, I will take your baby and I will give her a good life. But if you treat me like an uncle, I think your, your daughter would have a better life if you were clean and you got her back. And, and so that, that vibe is the, where we stay. Because normally there's a stigma. Like I got the act together and you know, the, the other, the other, the drug addicted one doesn't. And so for me, I was coming alongside them. And so those are things that motivate me. Me, I love it. I'm passionate about it. It's what brings me to life. I don't know if I answered your question exactly, but that's, that's, that's the answer.

Yeah, that's good quarter. I guess the one word is quarterbacking. And by the way, I realized that I had every intention before we hit record to do this.

Wow.

And I totally failed to do it. I can't believe it. Anyway, but you're for folks who are listening to the podcast and like a traditional podcast player, I just put two nice for sales on the little book stand behind me actually means a lot, man.

It really does. Thank you.

Well, I had tended to do it before I hit record, but I was just so busy like, you know, reviewing my question list and all this other stuff. So one follow up there. You mentioned, you mentioned mentors and trainers. I assume the mentors are perhaps kind of the, the more experienced agents that some of these younger agents are coming alongside. Talk about trainers. Like, when did you install like some formal training role into the team or what does it look like, I guess when you say trainers, what does that mean? Because I think it's super interesting.

Yeah, it is. So we have a lot of thinkific courses that we've built for our teams and our agents, and so they take those. And what we tell the agents when they take it is you're taking this so that when you meet with either your mentor or the Agents have a training link that they can book a call with me as well. And I don't do a lot of those, but I still do occasionally. And the goal of them taking those courses is so that they can ask good questions. So they take it. And what we found by framing it as this is so you can ask good questions. We find the frustration level has decreased significantly because instead of getting mastery out of the course, they're getting exposure to new information. And we found that most of our agents are visual tactile learners. So we have to have the computer open, my computer open, click, click, click, click. And again, I don't do that a lot. Their mentors are typically sitting with them one day a week. You'll see all of them with their laptops open. But we find that the typical successful agent really needs to work alongside of somebody. So we scale by having the courses and then we apply by having the mentorship programs.

I love it. I especially have a very positive feeling about the side by side, human to human interaction. And not just because a lot of people learn better that way, but I also think about just that dynamic of these two people in close physical proximity working on something with kind of like mutual benefit, you know, and what that means for someone's willingness to actually make a call or pick up a call when someone needs help or someone is able to help somebody else. Like, I really like what you're doing there. We spent a lot of time together. You've been very generous. You have a lot of commitments in your life between the various roles and responsibilities you've given yourself. I feel like for you, it's probably that itch to be of service and value and to help other people. But it's also probably just intellectually engaging for you to get your mind and spirit onto new and different challenges and opportunities. So I appreciate you spending this time with me. Before I let you go, I've got, I've got three pairs of questions and you can pick which of each pair you want to answer. You ready for that?

I am, I am.

Okay, cool. So the first pair is around teams. So what is your very favorite team besides your own real estate team? Or what is the best team you've ever been a part of, a member of, not counting your own real estate team.

Best team I've ever been a part of is I played basketball from middle school through my senior year and my senior year we won the state Virginia championship. And we weren't the best team talent wise, size wise, but we had, we worked together in a highly unique way that has transcended 20 years to where we're still working in each other's nonprofits, we're supporting one another's initiatives. Writing it Forwards I wrote a forward for one of their books. They became brothers. I happened to also be the only Caucasian on the team and so that allowed me I was an upper middle class kid and I was able to grow up with people that were very different than me. That environment changed me forever. Race relations for me, all of it just phenomenal experience. And my coach pushed me past what I believed I could do on my own in those years and so very fond memories for me.

Love it. Really, really well done. This one's not this one feels so shallow in response to what you just shared with me, but it's a fun one. What is your most frivolous purchase and.

Or.

What is a cheapskate habit that you continue to hold on to even though you probably don't need to?

I am definitely not a cheapskate to a fault. So I would say the most frivolous thing I've purchased. I I really enjoy shoes more than I should. And StockX sells sneakers. They resell them and I bought a pair of shoes that were really expensive, very exclusive, very uncomfortable. And I did not realize that Stockx does not allow you to return them, couldn't sell them. And so occasionally, like literally yesterday I wore them to the I had to go pick up something and I was like I'll just put these on and they were so uncomfortable and I was so irritated the whole time. But yeah, so that's definitely the most frivolous.

That's funny. You should, you should just retire and put them in a plastic box somewhere you can see them from time to time and remember how attractive and rare they are without ever having to be in such discomfort. Last Last Page Care what are some of the ways that you keep learning, growing and developing? Or what are some of the ways you really enjoy resting, relaxing and recharging?

Those are both. I could answer both. But I will say that I this year I've lost probably £40 and I'm in the best shape of my adult life. And through that process of four, three, four days a week doing hot yoga, five, six days a week lifting weights, running 5Ks, doing ice baths, all of these health related activities has changed me in a really fundamental way to where I can sit in discomfort in a way that I can't say I could my first 42 years on the earth and that that has allowed me to embrace hard things, hard Emotions. Right. I go to therapy. It used to be every week. Now it's once every year, twice every month where I just check myself and I sit in those. I used to avoid hard feelings and now I press into them. And I think it's all a result of this new physical journey that I've been on. I've learned a lot about myself and that has now moved into other fantastic areas of my life.

That's beautiful. And you, another really graceful thing you did there. I feel like you found a middle way between both questions. You know, I have not asked these pairs all that often, but I could like, I could see this falling into really either camp. I think most, most of us would put that into development and growth, physical and personal and emotional and all this. But it also, there's, there's a bit of rest, relax, rec charge in there as well. So really well done for folks who've enjoyed this. They've been with us over 50ish minutes or so. I assume they might want to learn more about you if they don't already. Where can people connect with you, Learn about the work that you're doing from a real estate perspective, from a book perspective, from a Y Lopa perspective. Where would you send people that enjoy, enjoyed this time?

Yeah, I would say Instagram would probably be the best. Real Barry Jenkins. R E A L Barry Jenkins Jenkins. Or you could check me out on my book website. 2niceforsales.com awesome.

We will link those things up wherever you are watching or listening to this. And we put it in the podcast players, we put it into YouTube, we do shorter stuff on Instagram, TikTok and elsewhere. Wherever you are watching or listening, there is probably a link to these things immediately adjacent. Barry, I thank you so much for your time. This is absolute pleasure. I love what you're up to. I love the way you're doing it. I love your motivation and you shared a lot of life. Real helpful stuff.

Thank you, Ethan. I appreciate it.

Thanks for checking out this episode of teamos. For email exclusive insights every week, sign up at realestateteamos. Com.