Hands-On Lead Generation and Conversion with Preston Guyton | Ep 018

He's got a background in computer science and built his first custom website nearly 20 years ago.

I tell people that's the easy part for me, like lead gen is, you know, if you want 100 leads, 500 leads or whatever, I can build the systems and processes. Where you get this.

I mean, you've been involved in real estate as an agent, as a broker, owner, been in mortgage, you've been a general contractor.

What a lot of companies do and teams do is they don't have any of the structure, they don't have any of the systems and processes. So they're like, hey, let's grow first and let's add all that stuff later.

He's a founder in multiple companies, including CRG companies, Easy Home Search, Palms Realty, and the Reside platform. Thanks for talking Timo s today, Preston.

Yeah, man, thank you for having me.

Yeah, overdue. I intended to have you earlier, but here we are. Glad we're doing it now. And I'm going to ask you the opener that I've asked literally everyone now, dozens of people who've been on the show, what is a must have characteristic of a high performing team?

You know, really, it's hard to, it's hard to pick one. But for, for me it's, you know, they got to be committed, they got to be consistent. And really, you know, commitment and consistency are really the two big things that if you look at the teams and you and they got to hold each other accountable, you know, accountability, you look at, you look at those three items and if they do a good job of that, you'll have a good team. What happens is a lot of teams come up with ideas, you know, things they're going to do and all of a sudden they let people get away from. So if you stick to your principles, you hold people accountable and stay consistent. Those are the teams that, you know, that you've seen for years and years that continue to evolve and continue to do well because they hold people, they hold their agents accountable and they stay consistent.

Yeah, I really like that trio very much. I want to dive into commitment a little bit. I feel like it's easy for people to say, yeah, I'm all in, but, but I think it falls down in two ways. One of them, accountability helps solve. And it's like, you know, I, I'm committed in spirit, but I'm not committed in action. And accountability can close that gap. I think the other thing too is that sometimes people don't know what commitment in practice looks like. That seems like maybe what a Training issue.

Yeah, I mean, training issue. And it's also really understanding that, you know, commitment is boring. It really is. Like, if you. I mean, I hate to say, but it is. Like, if you look and I tell people this all the time, they're like, what does your schedule look like? I'm like, it's pretty, pretty boring. Like, every day I wake up, do the same thing. You know, there might be variations in the morning, but a lot of times it's like you're doing the exact same thing at the exact same time. You feel like it's Groundhog's Day because you did it yesterday and the day before and the day before, you know, so that's. It's really just sticking to that. I think a lot of people struggle with sticking to a schedule and building a schedule and staying consistent and staying committed to that schedule and not letting other things get in the way. I mean, a lot of people get sidetracked. And, you know, the big thing, you hear it all the time. You got to learn to say no. Like, you got to feel a little.

Bit boring also, too, that, like, progress is so hard to see on a day by day basis. It's easy to look back a month or definitely a year later after, like, consistent, disciplined behavior and say, like, oh, look how far I've come. Like, day to day, week to week, it's a lot harder to see that progress. That progress is probably what motivates most people.

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely. It's, you know, you got to document it, is what I tell people. Document it. You know, keep notes. Just like, if you're, you know, on a. On a new workout plan, you need to take photos. I mean, photos can. A lot of times you don't feel like anything's changing. The scale is exactly the same. But if you took a photo of day one and you look at a photo on day 60, you're like, oh, wow. The scale doesn't tell me anything, but, you know, the photos do.

Yeah. I am converting that fat into muscle, even though muscle weighs more. That's good. Okay, so I mentioned it, kind of teased it a little bit off the top. But I mean, you've been involved in, In. In real estate, as an agent, as a broker, owner, you've been in mortgage, you've been a general contractor. Is leadership across these different verticals? Like, are the fundamentals the same? It seems like they are, but, like, is there any nuance there?

There's really not. I mean, really, you know, what I tell people is one of the things early on I focused on in 2004 was I learned, you know the, the first website I developed for people that have been around the while was Z57 was a template based site and then the first site I developed custom was with Morgan Carey which was SEO guy back then wasn't real estate webmasters yet. So this is a long time ago. But you know in doing that like getting into real estate, it's leadership is going to be pretty much the same, you know what you're doing in those companies. What I did in those obviously it's different but a lot of like the success in a construction company or a general contractor, a custom builder, a lot of those things are pretty much that they're, they're really a lot of the, A lot of the structure and the companies and everything else are pretty much the same as far as real estate and Legion and all those things are, you know, if you get good at one, if you get good at running one company, it's pretty easy to transition. You know, especially with a business where marketing is so important. Right. Like marketing is super important. Obviously you know the best marketers are usually the best real estate companies, the best realtors. Same thing in construction, like construction. The big reason I got into that was 08 happened and you know, so I was like oh God, what I'm going to do. You know. So I still sold real estate but we started you know, real estate construction and design company and then you know we did that through 2010 through 2020 when I sold out.

Super. I kind of wanted to run through that a little bit before we get into like lead gen lead conversion, a lot of other things you have a deep expertise and passion in. Give us a little bit of an overview of. I mean you already did a little bit but give us an overview of for context, for people watching and listening. Kind of your career arc. I think it's interesting, I think it's unique. I'm already curious to ask some follow up around like leadership in one context to the next but give us that rundown. So how did you get involved in real estate back in 04? Ish.

Yeah 04. So I grew up in Myrtle beach and I was in restaurant industry for a long time. Realized I did not like I you know, worked first job was Sun News going and getting, going to houses, getting people to sign up for the newspaper. So I did that when I was 13. My first job was Pizza Hut. I think I was maybe 13, 14. Then I started busting tables when I was 15. Grew up in Myrtle beach, you know, very tourist, you know, a lot of tourism in the summer. So I grew up in the restaurant industry, went to school and really I was always interested in architecture. Like I've, I grew up in art and doing a lot of drawing different things. I was always fascinated by architecture. So that's how I got into real estate. And you know, it's one of those things like too. I was young, I was in my early 20s, I was like, hey, a buddy of mine got in real estate, he's making a lot of money. I was like, I like houses and I like making money. So that sounds like a great idea. So that's the path I took and then, you know, getting into real estate. Myrtle beach is a place where a lot of people even back then were buying and moving to. So I was like, okay, how can I get in front of them? And I stumbled upon different real estate forums, website forums, and developed the first website and then did a lot of SEO in 2003, 4, 5, and was showing up for a lot of the keywords for real estate back then. So I was generating hundreds of organic leads back then where people put in their name, phone number, email address, and the answer rate was over 50% on calling people because nobody really did that that much back then. So that's kind of how it started. And then from there, 2006, I got my residential contractor's license, started building spec houses and investing all the money I was making into real estate. And then financial crisis happened and all that money went away. So I got on the other side and got married, had our first child, Sophie, and then started the real estate construction and design company out of a need. I saw a lot of people in the custom construction world weren't really up with the times and the technology that was going on and you know, a lot of, just a lot of things for a lot of different reason I started that. And over the 10 years of the construction company design we had, we, we did general brokerage as well. We sold about over a billion dollars in residential construction, real estate sales and design over that 10 year span. And really, really missed the real, we had a real estate, you know, we had, that was part of it. But I just kind of, I was involved in all of it, you know, the design, the construction. I would actually hand draw plans back then when I first started and I just really missed the real estate side. And the more and more I got into leadership and you know, the marketing aspect, continuing to do that, I just, in 2020, it was just time the construction industry had changed so much to where, you know, the codes, a lot of code changes, a lot of different changes. You know, the big thing for me was I received a letter and this happens if you're in construction. That. But we, we had a letter came in. I was getting sued from somebody. I built a House for 10 years before and it was. Had a very good relationship with them during the construction, after construction, and they just didn't reach out to me. There's a letter comes from attorney, hey, they're suing you because something leaked or a window was leaking or whatever it was. I was like, you know what? This is not something I want to do anymore. So I sold out of CRG in 2020. We. We built probably over 100 oceanfront homes. A lot of. We were doing a development at the time when I sold out as well and then got start Easy home search in 2019. We. I was in the mortgage industry for about a year and a half. We brought Revolution Mortgage to the Myrtle beach market with some partners. We're the number one branch in the nation in 2021. And I decided I wasn't a big fan of the real estate or the mortgage industry, so opened up Palms Realty in 2021. And we have 100. We had our quarterly meeting this morning. We did over 280 million in sales last year, about 810 closings.

So that's awesome. Congratulations on that. How, like, what is the theme through these. Is it. Is it partners? Like, because I'm sure a lot of people listening are like, well, I mean, that's a lot of different businesses. Obviously you're entrepreneurial in spirit. Like, it's, it's obviously just part of who you are. We didn't even get to reside yet. But you're a co founder in that as well. Is it, Is it partnerships? Is it opportunity? I mean, I definitely heard, you know, I had a young family and so, you know, needed to figure out how to. To get through this financial crisis. Let's serve some market needs here. Certainly Myrtle beach was probably a great market to be building in, you know, 15 years ago. Probably still is today.

Oh, yeah, yeah. So great market for sure. Yeah.

But like, like, like in, in, in. In crg. I think we heard that pretty clearly. But like, you know, revolution Palms, like what. What's the spark? There is like, I have a couple of good people and this is a good idea. Like how, like, what's the motivation?

Yeah, for sure. You know, the, the. And we also have. I'm partnered with John Cheplak and Chep, like digital as well. They all are, they all go together. You know, I mean, like what I do in check, like digital helps reside, you know, what I do with Easy Home search helps Palms Realty helps some of the reside teams as well. So for me, like, what I'm passionate about is the marketing side, the legion side, the conversion side. But really, anytime you form a partnership, you got to. I think I'm really good at choosing people who end up doing a really good job in whatever career and giving people the opportunity. I think a lot of times in business, people never let their ego out of the way and never allow themselves to hire the right people or to put the person in the right position. I know what I'm good at and that's what I'm going to do and that's what I enjoy doing. I'm fine letting somebody. I'm fine being behind the curtain, not in the spotlight. You know, like, that's, I'm totally okay with that. And really, I think in business you have to align yourself with the, with the right people and understand to give them the opportunities to find success. And if you look back at crg, I had great employees, great leadership, brought on great business partners, allowed leaders to do what they're supposed to be doing and allow them to do the things they want to do with, with revolution. Same thing. I had good partners and the lenders that were there, you know, I focus on the marketing side. The things I was good at, generating leads with easy home search to help the mortgage grow, that side of it grow. Same thing with Palms Realty. I align myself with great business partners that, you know, I do what I do to grow the business and they, you know, they, they're becoming really good leaders and, and you know, we're building a really good team. So no, you know, no matter what business you're in, you just gotta, you gotta hire the right people, but you also gotta allow them to do what you hired them to do. And that's what a lot of times I think companies struggle with is they bring people on in these positions and they never allow them to actually do what they're supposed to be doing.

Yeah, a couple of consistent themes that I've heard in these conversations on the show. One of them is like the right answer. If you're looking for a person or a skillset or whatever, the right answer might already be right next to you and you're just not thinking of them that way. Like you haven't opened the door or explored it or whatever with them. And then the other one is, you know, I'm a super, this is a common team founder story. I'm a super successful real estate agent in one way or another. I've got all these opportunities so I need to bring people alongside me so I can continue to take advantage of those opportunities. And I struggle to turn things over to other people because they're not as good, they're not as fast, they're not as diligent, they don't do it my way. Even though I maybe did a half baked job of documenting, you know, what a successful process looks like. So I really appreciate so much of what you shared there. In terms of approaching leadership, Palms Realty, what do you think are a couple of keys to success? You know, the past couple of years? What, like if you were to highlight, you know, why was this team successful? What are a couple of key things? Top of mind.

Yeah, I mean for me, a lot of the things I did before we opened, we, I had built before we open and a lot of teams or companies build those after they open. Like we had a marketing platform that agents could use that was ready when we opened the doors. You know, we, we hired in a way we've, I've been CRG reran EOS. So I've been studying EOS since 2016. 17. We ran that. We, we. When we started Palms Realty, we were under kind of an EOS structure where we have the weekly meetings and all those things. L10 meetings, you know, the rocks, all those. So we, we built it in a way that from the very early on we had the structure. Like what a lot of companies do and teams do is they don't have any of the structure, they don't have any of the systems, the processes. So they're like, hey, let's grow first and let's add all that stuff later. Well, adding all that stuff later a lot of times means you lose half the people you have. So with Palms, it was important to me because the two partners I had in when we initially launched, we're new to. There was the first business. So like, okay, I want to set all these systems and processes in place. I want to look at the brokerage. It's a, it's not a team, it's a brokerage. But we have a lot of systems in place that are probably more in line with a team because it's hard to be profitable as a general brokerage. So we had to build, we had to build processes systems. We had to build certain, you know, certain legion Company Legion and different aspects of the company where we could be more profitable, where the company could keep more of the total gross commission income. You know, so that's, that was really a big reason we had all those things in place, already had the lead gen in place when we opened the door so that we use that as a consistent way to recruit. You know, we, early on we said for X amount of age, for every agent that comes on, we're going to generate X amount of leads. And that's never changed. Like for me it's, that's the. I tell people that's the easy part. For me, like lead gen is, you know, if you want 100 leads, 500 leads or whatever, I could build the systems and processes where you get those leads. Leads where people fall down is what happens after you get the lead. So we build a lot of those systems. But it's also any company your leadership's going to involve. Like we, we had partners. We had our head of operations we hired within three months. We had a head of agent training and development which was hired in three months. We hired our recruiter after eight months. I mean that's, I'm not saying that's the way to go, but that's the way we went. And, but now our head of operations is actually a real estate agent on the team. So understand, you could write out your perfect business structure on paper, but it's never going to be that way. You got to be able to change and adapt. And you know, we didn't replace the head of operations. My business partners are now have enough understanding where they've kind of stepped into that role and shared it. You know, we have two other business partners now within Palms Realty that are helping in the broker in charge role. And then the, our head of agent training and development who runs our AEP program, he is a business partner as well.

At some level it's a luxury, but it's also, I think, something that people, more people have the opportunity to leverage, but they don't. And most folks probably watching or listening are in this zone of, you know, I'm fixing the plane while I'm flying it, or I'm fixing the engine while I'm driving it, or you know, whatever some of these metaphors are for trying to implement the systems that were absent, you know, because this all just kind of happened. We had, you know, good lead gen and so we brought people around it and now we need to like figure out who's going to do what. So this idea of essentially winning by design Is something that I'd love to see more people pursue. Talk about the idea of brokerage versus Team Ridge. I mean obviously that was, you know, if you had this opportunity to make some decisions in advance of opening the doors, how, you know, how did you all think about it? And you know, for someone who's thinking about, you know, maybe they've got the early stages of a team, they've got, you know, maybe a full time or a part time assistant, they're doing some kind of a, maybe a lead share referral type program with a couple other people, they're thinking about forming it together and this is going to be a decision they face at some point down the line. Or it could be a franchisee who's thinking about going independent. Like when you, when you all were thinking about this for Palms, how did you think about that opportunity one way or the other? Independent vs franchise and brokerage vs team or team Ridge?

Yeah, with. So I've always, I've never. And not saying any to discount, obviously there's a lot of great franchises, there's a lot of different, you know, teams and everything you'd be a part of. But I've always been an independent company like, you know, so we just went that route and it was something that Josh and Nick wanted to build as well. Wanted to build their own brand and build something that, you know, we have a company that there's an asset there tied to the company, tied to the brand. So we went that route and we knew we wanted to be a big, you know, we wanted to be a hundred agents plus and we wanted to give the agents the ability to, when they sell something, it goes under their name, not under a team name. So that aspect, aspect of it. So we never really sought out the team side. But I knew understanding business and the, the margins in a general brokerage and what we're competing against, we had to build systems around training like a lot of the agents we bring on. Like I talk about aep, which is our agent excellence program, we already had that outline when we opened and we knew we had to hire for it. And Tripp, who runs that, who's now a business partner, he was with me at CRG and we knew he would be the right person for it. So he came on and ran that and we, you know, told talk through the structure and everything. We run one of those classes each quarter roughly we bring on about 10 agents per quarter that go through that. So I think there's about 60, roughly about 60 agents on our team that went through the AEP program, you know, so for us, it was important to build these, these type of teaching and training and all that where we can bring on the newer agents or the agents that, you know, have been in business for maybe 12 months, 18 months, started with a company and they're not finding success. And then they come over to us and they go through this program, they go through this training, and they're successful. I tell, you know, I love new agents and I love training new agents, but sometimes you're the all star to the one that didn't have success with the first company to come to you, and they're like, oh, wow, I'm doing all these things and there's all these opportunities. So a lot of the people that go through that AEP were actually agents at other companies. And, you know, in the market we're in now, where you need to have the training, the education, you know, the. All the skills, a lot of them, A lot of them are coming into the AEP because they realized they got into real estate in 2021, you know, they could. Everybody was buying, right? So everybody was an all star. Whether it was a real estate agent, whether it was a, you know, a Legion company or whatever. Everybody looked like they were doing all the right things and that's what market that the market did. So, you know, for Palms, it's. It's been important for us to have those trainings and everything out and to build programs where the company, you know, retains more of the gross commission income.

I imagine that your best recruiting is those stories of people who, you know, took a couple swings in another opportunity or another, you know, brokerage didn't really work out for them. And this kind of training and the systems and the support that you're providing was the difference maker. That sounds like. That sounds like all the foundation for a good recruiting program.

Yeah, I mean, really, we've, you know, we've had a lot of those stories, right? Not only, you know, whether it's agents. You know, we had one agent, he did his first full year, went through AEP. I think he did like 6 or 7 million. We had one agent, she. She did about 6 million last year and she, I think she did a million the year before. And, you know, obviously we're in Myrtle beach. We're still in a, you know, the market that. The numbers, I think are down about 10 to 15% previous year. But the only thing that saved us some new construction, because we have a ton of new construction. So our resales were in the 30% down but the new construction kind of. Kind of helped everything.

Yeah, it's helpful. I mean, if you don't have inventory to sell, thank goodness someone's building it.

Exactly.

Okay. I want to go to, like, this zone that you've built your career in or through, and I want to do it through a couple of like. Like the two ends of the spectrum, kind of, and then have you kind of like, walk into your philosophy because you obviously bias one rather than the other. So, you know, when I. When I heard you say, you know, our. Our goal out of the gate was to get to 100 agents, right? So it made me think of folks who've been on the show before and how they got there, and it really is through lead gen, of course, is one of the primary drivers of a successful team Model means a necessary ingredient. So on episode seven, we had Justin Haver, who, like you, was early in SEO in his local market, was generating all of these leads, and, like, had to essentially form a team in order to capitalize on these opportunities because he couldn't deal with it all himself. On the far other end of the spectrum, you have Lauren Bowen at Robert Slack, who, you know, her growth path with the organization was from four agents to about 800. And for several years, they were the number one spender on realtor.com leads. They've since diversified to 16 different lead sources. But a lot of those are also, you know, partners and, like, folks like Zillow and then you have some, like, I'm sure Justin is in this camp too, but, you know, Gary Ashton started by dominating local SEO and then immediately started reinvesting his money into a variety of different lead sources. And so, you know, for you, I feel like you're definitely way on the far end of, let's grow our own, let's make our own, let's generate our own, et cetera. Like, how do you think about kind of those two ends? Like, do we want to partner and buy someone else's produce, or do we want to essentially grow our own produce?

So I've been, you know, it's funny, Justin, Gary, all those guys, we, we all go way back. You know, they're real estate webmaster clients. You know, one of the questions towards the end, you ask, it's one of them. So it, for me, it's just something I'm really good at, you know, so not every team has that luxury. Not every company has that luxury. Like, I could go build out AdWords accounts. I understand SEO, understand how to write, understand, you know, what needs to be done there. So for me it just made sense. Like what people pay somebody to do, I could do myself. So generating for us early on we said, you know, for every agent we bring on, we're going to generate 20 to 30 leads a month. And that's kind of the number we've stuck to. I think we generated about 35,000 leads last year that I handled all that legion for. So for me it's easy to say that where somebody else is not, you know, so that most of them need somebody. Right. But you could still do it in a way like with AdWords. If you do Google AdWords pay per click, you can still own the account. Like that's the beauty of it, is owning the account. Because as you optimize an account, the account gets better with time and you can convert at a higher level. I think it's so good to have, I mean we, we don't buy Zillowleads, realtor.com or any other national portals with within Palms but we do have agents that do. So it can be successful but it just falls on to that. What happens after the lead comes in, that's really what matters. There's a very good book I talk about, often over subscribed that kind of taught is wrote in 2015, but it really talks about that journey. Like Google did this study and it was 1174. So for somebody to become a buyer and I kind of take that same philosophy when we build out Google AdWord campaigns and all that you need 11 interactions over different areas, seven hours of consumption, so content and then four hour or four different locations. Meaning it could be face to face, could be on the phone, could be reading your emails. So for me, with what accelerates lead gen and pay per click and AdWords, if you have all those things, you could utilize those things in your advertising because Google found that if you do all those things, you could then move somebody into your network of potentially being able to sell to. So that's what I look at as far as the lead gen aspect of it. But yeah, I think either, I mean you see it, right? You talk about Robert Slack, super successful, you know, you talk about Gary Ashton, had a mix of all of it. Justin who there's no Zillow in Canada. So if you want to see what you can do from a standpoint of pay per click, of SEO, just look at what Justin's been able to do. I don't think there's a right or wrong answer. I think the wrong answer is when you do all these things and you get the leads and you have no systems and processes and you don't hold people accountable, then you ultimately fail. That's really, you know, where the struggle comes in.

This is one of the reasons I love hosting this show.