Kendall Bonner on Brokers Embracing Teams [FUBCON Session]

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Here's your host, Ethan Butte. Kendall, thank you so much for sitting down with me. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, my pleasure. I'm honored. Thank you.

Awesome. I'm going to start with a must have characteristic of a high performing team. When I offer that to you, what comes to mind?

You know what? I think that every high performance team needs a system and a process that they follow that is documented and that is scalable, duplicatable, predictable, super.

How in your journey, I assume that when you talk about a process, what was documented and organized started small and just got bigger and bigger and bigger, maybe based on demand, like, oh my gosh, we need to figure this out now. Oh, we need to figure that out now. Talk a little bit about the journey of organizing exactly how you're doing things. And then of course, then it's a continuous journey of continuing to improve those things. But talk about early days. How did you sequence or prioritize kind of what you needed to organize?

Well, to me, what's funny about this and me even saying this is that I am not a documenter by nature. I feel like I've been trained into a lot of things and I think that's the one thing people do have to realize is that doesn't matter. Something doesn't come naturally to you. You can teach yourself, coach yourself, train yourself to think and do the things that, you know, your business needs. So to answer that question, I. For the team, I'll start with the team because that's the most relevant recent experience that I have with this. You know, we, you know, in meeting and talking to other team leaders and thought leaders and growth leaders, you pick up a lot of tips, a lot of ideas. And it's always great when you can figure out where they got the idea from and you can get to the source. Right. And a lot of times those sources are books, right? And so one of the books that really, you know, outside of my husband, just naturally being a documenter, cause that's his role, that's, he's the one that has always been about document process. We engaged in the book traction, right? A lot of people know that book, the EOS model. And that was a game changer for our team. And it started with two days off site, the entire staff and we brought in one agent on the team to have that perspective. And we went through all the steps of building out, you know, our, our one year target, our three year target, our ten year target, our niche, our purpose, our core values. And of course we would, you know, argue about it, what it should be. And it was, it was both fun and horrible at the same time. But it started with just writing it out, putting ideas together, shutting yourself in a room and just getting hyper focused and then really just writing down all ideas until you can start to put together what ideas make the best solutions for what you're trying to solve.

Yeah, that two day offset, I'm very familiar with it.

Yes.

Not eos. I used scaling up in the, in the company that I was in where we did that and we did every quarter. Is this a quarterly things? It's semiannual. Is it annual? Is it? Yeah. How do you approach it?

Yeah. So we do one annual meeting, that's two days. And then the other three quarters we do a one day quarter. So we do the same. And then we have a meeting pulse of a weekly meeting for the staff where we do what we call ids, which is identify, discuss and solve whatever challenges the team or the organization is having. And that's about a two hour meeting every week for just the staff.

Yeah, but it's two hours because it needs to be.

Yeah.

You're not just blocking it for two hours and hanging out.

True story. Yeah, yeah.

So that's the thing, like I think, I think a lot of people hear that and they're like, well, we could, it just. We can't afford that. And it's cliche to offer in response, but it is a good mental exercise. Can we afford not to?

Yes, yes, yes, yes. You have to. I said this to my agents the other day. It's like if you want 6 figure 7 figure income, you have to put in 6 figure 7 figure work. Right. And you have to put in that level of effort. And too many people think that they can get into, especially our industry. Right. Real estate's kind of known for being flexible, for being, you know, you know, get rich quick kind of concept that we often think that we don't have to work as hard. You know, I mean, I read a statistic for NAR that the agents are reporting, or realtors are reporting that they work an average of 30 hours a week. I don't know that I've ever worked just 30 hours a week ever.

I can tell you the answer is no.

Yeah, I mean I was. Funny story about that. I'm also an attorney. Right. So at one point in my career, I had a billable law firm position. Right. Where I had to track every minute, you know, six minute increments, and, you know, we would bill out our client and it usually took me about 60 to 70 actual hours to bill about 40 work hours or so. Right.

Wow.

And so it was a lot. But. But when I became a real estate professional, that first 12 months, I'll never forget, I worked way more than that, but it felt different because I enjoyed it. You know, I really was into my work. I would, I could. You couldn't pull me away from the kitchen counter at 10pm doing whatever paperwork I needed to do to assist, you know, and my. My customers at that time. So it was, it was definitely a shift in mindset.

That's awesome how you just teed up a variety of things. I want to talk to you about some in my mind, trying to prioritize them. I would love to talk a little bit about your background in law in the transition. And now reflecting back, what skills were highly transferable and what were some blind spots that you had that you're like, oh, I need to develop a new muscle.

Oh, gosh. So great. Fantastic question. I think that the best transferable skill I received was from, you know, what I did at my law firm was. But when I. Right before, when I transitioned, at that time, this specific job I had, my husband and I owned our own law firm and we were doing bankruptcy law. And so, you know, with that business, we had to advertise. We had strict advertising rules as lawyers, first of all, so it's very different than real estate. But we had to get people to choose to come in. Right. So we had to have that phone inter call that, you know, the inbound call converted into an appointment, get them to come into the office, and within one hour, get them to feel like they could trust us, that they liked us, and that they wanted to do business with us and give us money at the end of that hour. Guess what that taught me? How to be a great listing agent, right? Yeah. And so that was a huge transferable skill. The other one with that was a script. You know, we had a script. I had a list of items in my head that I wanted to go over with every bankruptcy client that I met with to make sure that they were fully informed, because I never wanted anyone to sell me. You didn't tell me that. So I always made sure I knew all their questions before they had them, and I was going to answer them all just naturally through the natural conversation. The Other skill, I had to ask a lot of questions as a part of bankruptcy. I had to get people to open up and tell me their deepest, darkest secrets, in some ways about, you know, what was going on in their life. Right. Very vulnerable conversation. And so all of that taught me empathy, taught me how to, like I said, be a really great listing agent from that transferable skill. Now, as far as some gaps, I also jokingly say I was the most naive, smart person because I, like many others, got into real estate and felt bamboozled, you know, like you don't know what you don't know. Right. Like you get into this business and it's very different than what you expect. Right. And what you think it is. And I did not interview any real estate brokerages. I had one I wanted to go to. It was a mile and a half from my law firm. I went there, I saved a letter, they marketing letter they sent me for two years. And I went in with that letter and I said, I want to work here. Who do I need to talk to? And that was my experience. And I ended up working there. I was a listing agent and in my first 90 days started taking listings and closing them and actually took two in my first 30 days after I finished all the trainings, like that week, I took two listings and 90 days later I had my first closing. And it was a short sale and never looked back.

Love it. I want to know now about a detail you just offered there, which is what was it about that letter that made you hold onto it for two years? Because you probably get a lot of. Because I assume it was unsolicited.

Correct.

I assume you get a lot of those still to this day, all the time. What was it about that letter that made you hold onto it?

Honestly, it's because I knew the location and it was sat outside of one of the wealthiest communities in the area. And I thought naively that just by working there, I would be able to tap into that business. Yeah. And that's why I kept it. Yeah.

Well, I will also say in that response, I mean, this does. You were very well prepared to obviously be a listing agent based on your prior experience.

I didn't know that, but yes, I didn't realize that at the time. But looking back, reflecting back a thousand percent.

Yeah. What was the period from getting into the business to starting your own team and what was kind of the spark there? What was the vision and what went well or poorly in that transition?

Oh, gosh, okay. So there's a whole brokerage in the Middle of that story. So, yeah, I. When I got licensed in 2011, I fell in love. And so I basically quit my job at the law firm and told my husband, I'm not coming back, but I'm still here, but I'm not taking any more business. And I went right in as a listing agent and started actually making money and doing really well during that time. I also was able to find a really. A niche that was underserved, which was that short sale market. And being an attorney, I had a significant advantage over my. My peers. So, of course, that led to great production. Production numbers at that time. And so I remember I transitioned to a different company, was recruited for splits at that time because I was such an independent agent. And I remember while I was there, I received a phone call offering me a franchise. And I remember thinking, like, I never want to be a broker. Why would I do that? I love what I do. I'm a listing agent. I'm good. I didn't. I was generating buyer leads. I was giving them away. Like, I even had a. I'd. Eventually, my second brokerage taught me to have a team. And so I had one buyer's agent, which, ironically, since we're at fubcon, she's here too. She leads another big team in my area. I'm so proud of her. But, you know, I didn't really enjoy even that being a team leader. It just worked because we worked well together as, like, partners. And so when I was asked to consider a franchise, I thought it was a prank call. I didn't return it. The call. They had to keep calling me. And eventually they called me and got ahold of me. And what caused me to want to do that particular, like, to start another business was we were. My husband was burned out in the law firm. The bankruptcy market was kind of scaling down, which is great for the world and for our country, but I think he was burned out and needed something else. And my husband's an entrepreneur at heart. I don't care about entrepreneurship. At least I've realized that now. I thought I did, but I really don't care that much about being the business owner. I care about leadership. But I started the brokerage to give my husband a project, and so he helped me build a brokerage. We started as an agent of one myself. We built it up to 50, 60 agents, and then we. Two years ago, well, Covid happened, right? So this is how it leads up to the team. Covid happened in 2020, and it just wore me out, actually. The nurturing of the office and, you know, just kind of surviving that. And, you know, the margins on a brokerage are very different than a margins and other types of companies. And I was just like, I was learning all these skills, too. Like, I had this passion for technology. I had this passion for lead generation and marketing and video. And I felt that those talents were not being effectively utilized in the brokerage space. And so my husband had been, you know, talking to me a lot about trying to start a team, and I just thought I was a terrible team leader. So I was like, why would I do that? And I couldn't see myself doing it without going back into production myself. And so two years ago now, or may, I'll say two and a half, I had a vision and I envisioned that I could run a team. I envisioned that I could do it without getting into production myself, and that I could take all the skill sets I had learned as being a broker, a record and a leader in my brokerage and transfer that into. And pour that into a different group with a different mindset and a different goal. And I started right away trying to put that together. And I started with just finding agents. And I said, who's going to do this with me? That's where I started. And then I figured out lead sources. Then I figured out. It took us a while to figure out a name. Then I started figuring out what I was going to do with these agents and how we were going to coach them. So I did it in this kind of weird order, but it started with recruiting. And that is what's led me to where I'm at, you know, today with the team.

So there's so much there. Thank you, by the way. That was very detailed, but also still concise.

Thank you.

Well done. Yeah, thank you. Pardon my ignorance, but what happens to the brokerage in that scenario? Did you. Did you go like team ridge and turn it into a team model or did you sell the brokerage? Or like, how did that go?

Yeah, I actually ended up. So I started the brokerage. I would say that would have been 2021, mid year 2021. And so that six last six months of the year, the first six months of the team, I lived in two worlds. I was a team leader and I was starting a brokerage. And I was actually afraid, to be honest, to tell my brokerage agents that I was starting a team because I had limited beliefs and I had this mindset that they were going to rebel. And I think that ended up doing more harm than good. I should have just Been honest, like, hey guys, I want to start something and I want to do it and I hope you guys will support me. And so it took a little while before they found out, unfortunately, again, my bad as a leader. Right. Not communicating. And then what I did was in 2022, I turned the brokerage over to the sales manager or branch manager that had been working with for. Since I started the brokerage and I let him run it for a year. And I just stepped away because I wanted to see can I live in both worlds and but you know, kind of and not divide my time and I could focus. I believe in focus. And so I let him run it for a year and I focused solely on my team for all of 2022. And at the end of that year, I realized I don't want to go back, sadly. Like I was like, I don't want to go back to being a broker anymore. And so heading into 2023 in January, I decided to see if someone would buy my franchise and so I could get out of that contract and be just again focused on the team. And so I did find someone who was interested in acquiring our company. And I actually made it happen in several weeks. It just took weeks to do. Yeah. The other buyer and I were both attorneys so that I think streamlined things. And I'm also a negotiator who knows what she wants and will say no if I don't get it. Which that's the most powerful tool you have in negotiation is the power to say no and to be silent. Follow the no with silence. It works every time. And so. Yeah. So you bought the company and then I was able to continue to work with my team and that's where I'm at right now.

That's awesome. I'm really, I'm. I love all of the self discovery that's kind of inherent in, in all of those stages. And I also appreciate. So I guess I'm asking for clarity now on behalf of other people that are in some version of any of that situation. The two things I think I heard from you about what was so attractive about the team for you was that one, it gave you more freedom to be. To play more to your own strengths and interests. And two, it sounds like it's more profitable.

Yeah. So that I would describe. I would say there are two reasons and profitability actually wasn't it. The first one was exactly that it would play to my strengths. The second reason I felt that I wanted to do the team was because I wanted to serve two groups of People who I feel are underserved in our industry, which are newer agents and agents whose sphere of influence isn't large enough to support a career. That was my target audience for my team. And so I didn't go out looking for a bunch of agents that had big, large spheres. I went after agents who wanted leads and wanted the value proposition that I believed I was offering. So that was why. And then it just so happened to be more profitable. Yeah, but that wasn't my original intent. I know. It was my husband's, you know, definitely one of his. But that wasn't my heart when I started or when I made those decisions.

Yeah, this is a gross, gross overstatement, but I don't. Well, maybe only one gross. I don't think it's that overstated. I would love, I would love for you to steer this in from your experience. My feeling is that the vast majority of new agents would be better off in a team, at least to get started. Can you imagine any exceptions to that?

Great question. I can't. I believe teams are the future. I did a podcast, I don't know, back probably 2019, 2020, where I asked a high performing broker owner with a large organization, as well as the president of my brokerage franchise at that time, and I said our teams, a disruption, a distraction, or I forgot what the other D was, but basically the future, right? Like, is this, is this what we're just going to the new norm? And it was interesting hearing them talk about their perception of teams just four years ago and to think about how far teams have come in the last four years and how critical they are to the industry. I really do believe that while, you know, because I've lived in both worlds, I've been the broker who didn't have a team, who had teams within her company and tried to find, you know, it's hard to be profitable with teams because they eat up a lot of the margin, right. They, they want low splits between themselves and the broker and because they, they need to be able to do that, but they're also funding a lot of services and things that most brokerages no longer do or want to do. And they also can be powerful levers for a brokerage to gain market share, gain volume, gain bodies. Right. So, you know, I feel like there's this relationship, opportunity that should exist between brokers and teams that has been challenged in the past. But I think one of the fastest ways we can solve it is if more brokers start their own micro teams within their company, like a, like a Beta team or, you know, a minor league. Right. Where they can spend a little bit more money, which most brokers are willing to do. They're in business. Right. But they also get a higher return on investment and they get to help better the entire industry. I think that's part of the problem. We have so many agents coming into the marketplace without the proper support, training, and education. And part of it comes because I think we still have this. You know, everyone talks about mentorship, and I actually can't stand it. I said mentorship doesn't exist in real estate. It's too difficult. Right. An agent that has the time to mentor probably doesn't have a lot of business. And the agent that has a ton of business and would be a great mentor doesn't have the time. And so what agents need are not mentors coming in, because mentors are typically free. These are thought leaders. These are people you don't call for every question you have on the planet. Like, they. There are people that kind of give you wisdom and guidance. That's what mentorship looks like in reality. So. But what agents actually need when they come to business, they need a coach, they need a trainer. They need someone who's going to actually teach them the details of the business. And that is not effectively done in mentorship. And it's impossible to do it, in my opinion.

Yeah. Well, I think, gosh, I'd be surprised if anyone would disagree with that in principle. And it becomes this, like, the language that we use, and it happens everywhere. It's not exclusive to real estate. It's not. Not exclusive to this situ. Like, I've been talking a lot in these conversations about accountability. It means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And I think mentorship is just being misused to say someone is going to be assigned to you to field all your questions so that I don't have to answer them. And you would say that's not mentorship. And I'd say that's not mentorship, but someone else is calling it that. But, yeah, we know that it's coaching and training. Probably.

Yeah. But, you know, but people are selling, you know, mentorship as this. Like, hey, I'm going to, you know, just call me if you have a couple of questions. But that's. That's not what these agents need.

Right.

They need to be proactively taught. Yeah. What to do and how to do it.

Yeah. What does onboarding look like for these new agents? Ballpark. I mean, you don't have to, like, drive into all of it. But like.

Yeah, well, funny you should ask because right now we're literally debating shifting our current onboarding process because it's such a heavy lift. I will tell you though, every agent that we've had on our team that's gone through it, loves it because it's so comprehensive. But our onboarding has been two weeks. Monday through Friday, 10am to 4pm they come in with a binder, they have notes, it's live lecture, in person with slideshow. I mean, it's pretty well thought out. And at the end and throughout the process, we do assessments. So we'll do a role play call. So the first call they make isn't with an actual person. It's, you know, with the actual lead. It's with one of us. We do a roleplay consultation again. So the first time they do it is with us. We also have them write sample offers. I don't care how long you've been in the business as an agent, there are so many agents have not been properly taught how to fill out the bar, you know, the contracts. You know, with Bill and I both being attorneys, that's something that we're a little more, you know, we care a little bit more about that than probably most people do in the industry. And so we want to see you perform in all these areas before we'll even give you opportunities and plug you into our, our systems.

Yeah, really fair. I appreciate that. And I also appreciate the bias toward in person versus because you could very easily record these as videos. And it's like, hey, the links in your inbox, that's, you know, that's day one, two and three of onboarding. So be sure to watch those videos. Like, talk about. At the risk of asking for the obvious, but I just want to hear the way that you would describe or express it, like why you make that commitment. Because I think it's easier and you can see if people watch the videos or if the videos were played. There's some amount of accountability there. But I prefer your approach. Why did you set it up that way?

Interaction. Yeah, people learn. So my son taught me something. My son has dyslexia and we learned when he was very young that he did not learn writing his words. Like, you know, his spelling words. Right? Like writing him 10 times. Did not teach my son how to read. What we did was in the car on the day of the spelling test I would take, I would write out a note card and I would say he would go to Cat C A T Cat and it was this hearing that my son learned. Right. And I thought to myself, I would never learn that way. I'm visual. I need to see it, I need to read it, I need to look at it. Everyone learns differently. And some people are kinetic. Some people need to do it and need to feel it, touch it, feel it, you know, and so I feel like that in person, opportunity allows for all those energies to mix and for you to be able to not just touch one area of learning, but multiple. Right. So it's not to say that I don't learn by seeing or by hearing, but I learn better if I can see it and hear it.

Yeah. It also allows for whomever is leading that session or that portion of the onboarding to kind of read the room a little bit, too, and grab along and bring people along with them and call people back into it in a way that, goodness knows, watching things move around on my screen for another hour is not gonna do for me.

Well, and it's personalized this way. I get to share the stories. My husband calls it the like. Not the filler, but like the. The context, you know, it allows you to add flavor to the conversation, to the training, make it more real, make it feel personalized. Even if you're telling the same stories over and over again. Right. They can still feel more personal because they're happening in an interactive environment.

Kind of a random question, but not really. I know you consume a lot of books. Do you like physical books, digital books, or audiobooks? Or do you mix across them?

Great question. I used to start with just physical, and then probably with the evolution of the Nook from Barnes and Noble, I tried it, and I've never gone back. I love my. I'm actually now on a Kindle, and I love it. I carry it with me everywhere. In fact, one time I left it at Veronica Figueroa's house in Puerto Rico, and I made her ship it to me. It's that valuable to me. I was devastated that I left it. And then I love. I just recently, in the last year, started to really fall in love with Audible. And that part of. Was, you know, I love. I learned to love podcasts, too. Right. And podcasts. The problem for me with podcasts is sometimes the content doesn't come out fast enough, you know, or it's not long enough to really kind of go deep enough for me, you know? So books listening to books, especially when the author reads them and they add some color to what they've written, that becomes a very easily consumable form of content. For me.

Awesome. I'm with you all the way there. I'm sampling Kindle, but I'm not fully committed.

Oh, I'm all in.

And audiobooks are tough for me because they're just so many of them are so long, it's hard for me to go. Why? May I get. This is way too far afield, but, like, I have, like, a philosophy, too, about speeding up podcasts. Is it speeding up?

Yes.

Okay, well, the 1.2. Yeah. The 1.2 is the reasonable. 1.5. Yeah.

1.2 to 1.5 depends on who's reading. True. Yeah, true.

The super money. If you want to, like, learn something, learn something. Get the audiobook and a digital or physical book and have someone else read it to you while you're looking at it. Like, it's, like, full on. That's if you want to learn it. Yes, if you want to learn it. Not just experience it. Anyway, also a huge fan of podcasts with you, obviously, this has been an absolute pleasure. I appreciate you so much. And before I let you go, fun question for you. I would love for you to share either a very frivolous purchase you've made or a cheapskate habit that you continue to hold onto even though you probably don't need to.

Yeah, so I'm going to go with the cheapskate. When I was a kid, my mom used to have me cut the ketchup packets and squeeze them into this ketchup bottle to save money, and I just found that back then was crazy, but it's actually kind of a thing. Still, save those ketchup packets.

Love it. It's way better than throwing them away. You might as well extract their value.

Yeah, I don't like to waste.

Cool. I appreciate you, Kendall, and I really enjoy this time.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. It's been true. Honor and pleasure.

Thanks for checking out this episode of Team OS.

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