Kenny Truong on Recruiting 500+ Agents [FUBCON Session]

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 a real estate team. Here's your host, Ethan Butte.

Kenny, great to see you. It's been a long time since I've seen you. Glad to be in this conversation with you.

Thanks for inviting me. So excited.

Yeah, man. I want to start where I started with literally everyone who's been in your chair over the past three days. What is a must have characteristic of a high performing team?

I think drive. You have to want it.

How would you describe your own leadership style?

I'm very, very direct. Less compassionate, less empathy, more data driven. That's personally for me. But I have a really great leadership team that supplements each other. So we have a leadership team of four but I'm usually just a person that's really straightforward, learning different things, giving people feedback, especially on marketing, like hey their marketing sucks. I always tell them move this, that and looking at the numbers or it's room for improvement. So if I every time I give judgment or something, I always, always follow up with like things I'm thinking about or critique or feedback, hey, this is how we can prove it. I don't really hope people kind of get to me. I'm pretty blunt. I don't really hold things personally. It's really easy people kind of just to develop their skill to work alongside me.

Yeah, totally fair. When on your specifically your team journey did you become self aware about the types of people you needed to bring around you to have a kind of a well rounded team?

Well, the team. So without going too much detail, I had a team in third year and I gave that up my fourth year. Starting my fifth year in real estate I had no team and then mentored a lot of agents. That wasn't until like the fifth or sixth year when I got brought on to handle all the online leads team that I was handed a team of like misfits I guess like just random people who want to do online leads. So it's kind of fun learning how to work alliance on people. I didn't really study leadership books or anything until maybe around that time learning how to deal with personalities. Diving a little more into this, that, that, that was not, that was not easy leadership either because I worked for the company in lead so I didn't have a lot of say so it was a lot of like advice. So but then that kind of got me learning okay, the People I do want to surround myself. What didn't want to work, didn't want to work directly. What and who. What my supporting agents would be on certain deals.

Yeah, Fair. So were you referring to when you were leading an inside sales team?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Cool. What about that experience has been helpful to you today? Like, what are some of the things that you picked up during that stage? Cause I think it's an interesting way to come into this.

Yeah, it was. Learning how to babysit's not right. We're just learning how to handle people's personality. They're really listening to their wants and needs and seeing how much I'm willing to budge on certain things. That team was definitely not as successful as it could be because at one point we had like growing from 10 to 50 agents. We were spending about 50 grand on Zillow a month. Then we started taking more territory. Then I handled East Bay, then brought a team leader, Francisco, that had a way different style and someone San Jose. So there was like leadership tears again. I was pretty young too that year. I was probably not even 30 years old yet. I think that's pretty young. And you know, as a solo producer, do what I want. Go fast, you know, break things. Now you gotta like cater to people's like complaints and stuff like that. So it was definitely challenging. But. But to go through that helped a lot in just understanding people a little better, studying more personalities and stuff like that.

Yeah. So fast agent team, fast. What is it about fast?

It's.

And I'm sorry, in the back of your shirt is be you, but fast.

Yeah, yeah, it's easy to. Easy to think of. It's. Remember there was a quote I gave it like probably 10 years ago. I was like, let me make sure I got it right. I was like fat, fast and good beats slow and great. So the way you kind of see is like if you're kind of like Uber, right? Uber and Lyft people want. This is years ago. So that was like primitive early Uber. But people want to press a button when things done. I rather get something done that you know, like even like leadership train your team. If something can be done that if they. Someone can do the job at 80%, then you probably work with them. So we dial. Like I rather just do a lot of deals and I'm less of a relationship agent. I don't really in touch with my past clients. It's pretty bad. But you know, I recruited almost 600 agents to my team. So I. I just want to do a lot of deals and get things done. You think about you needed to go down the street for dinner or whatnot again. Well, you probably wouldn't hire a limo. It's kind of excessive, right? But agents as they should, they want to give the top, top of line service and all that. Well, I don't really have time for that. I want to, I want to do a really good job and do as much as I can. So that's kind of like how I relate. Like I rather be like an Uber a Lyft to a consumer where you're going to get exactly what you want. There's five star rating and then this is it. Yeah, yeah. And then I, I started my business in the REO days. I started like right when the market crashed. I haven't actually been in the cycle the prices that bombed out when I started. So back then was like short sales, helping people with their needs, people losing their homes. Most of my clients were investors found me online. They draw me right offers. So building my book of business early on till that kind of fifth six years started running a team, I didn't really actually have that many connections with other with my people. So I built my business on lots of process and structure and marketing.

Cool.

Talk about.

You just mentioned how many agents you've recruited over the years. Talk a little bit about your, your recruiting philosophy. Is it an all the time thing or do you have like time blocks for it on a regular basis? Is something that you're thinking about all the time like talk a little bit about.

Yeah.

So I've recruited personally over a hundred agents to my team in the last three. What is September right now? Since January 2020 we've actually added about 560 agents to the team. I looked at number this morning before my talk. It has been almost organic. We tried the school stuff and the career website stuff. They did not work. Those people on the websites are looking for our stuff and people in school just don't have, you know, just pay 200 bucks for a class. Not a lot of commitment. The way we recruited organically. We've done a lot through social media. So if they find social media they're. They're like similar avatars. The agent that we're looking for. Most of my personal recruiting has been through Instagram. I journal, I go to like over 20 conferences a year. It's September right now. I still have like five or six more to go. I go like meet people from the behind the scenes. Really great speakers on screen. I'm journaling it. I'm adding Captions now people get free. They're getting a free experience from a follow up Boss for Mines without you know, coming here and taking time out of day. So so kind of become a thought leader in that. And most of the smart things are said by other people. So people kind of want to follow that and they bring a lot of information into our side channels. We have ongoing on, on ongoing calls. But more more recently in recent years at Exp Realty, our team, we, we host a ton of events in the last couple years. This year we took a pause to it because people are not in a good mood with the market being lower and a lot of people have kind of exited. So like last year we did a lot of lot of cultural events like panels. I'm doing chronological order. Example we had like Black History Month. We did black all black panel. Then we had a black women panel. And then like Hispanic one. We did like Latin Latina and women in real Estate panel. Then the dad's panel. We had Pride panel. We even did like a Pride party. We had Halloween parties. Think of the miles. So very culturally we were able to bring a lot of people in and then we get and then once we're in we kind of add them to our Slack channel which tons of information on there all the time. Hundred agents are using actively. And they also invited her coaching calls Monday, Wednesday, Friday morning that Elias, my business partner, director of sales is doing some money motivation. Wednesday is like role plays market updates through the week. Friday is a little more open session. They're constantly trying to add people in an environment and most of the people were like over 80, 13. Okay 13% of our business is online leads. Not, not a lot. Not sure. We did 10, 10 deals. So 85% of our business organic. So and most of it's like done through social media so people kind of find you online and so so that our agents doing social media is helping them create business opportunities, but it's also attracting other agents to the company that wants to build a business like that. And I, I, I'm, I post 50 times a day because at these conferences it's other people speaking. So because of that like we kind of build a comedian a very much stat and we're attracting more similar people that want to build a business the way we're building our business.

So much good stuff in there. And first of all that's my M.O. is to hear smart things other people say and share it. You know, love it.

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So I'm clear that Slack channel is open to agents that aren't on your team yet and that training stuff is open to agents who aren't on your team yet. It's just an open invite. Hang around for two years before you join the team.

Yeah, it's like a. I mean Slack is cheap. It's like $6 a user and it's like a smart whereas two weeks if someone's not on it they're deactivated but they can come on any back anytime. Again, it doesn't charge us on our Slack is like the brain of our company. I post in there probably like 10 times a day at least. And we have a channel general chat for random stuff. There's a channel for social media tech tools anytime I see this AI stuff social media tips, training grass yeah strategy. I posted in there. We have a training events channel. It's just a lot of local events. Lots and lots of online training. I don't care the trainings from Sotheby or Compass or Tom Ferry or whoever. A lot of stuff is from Ford too which is a place bank anything so we bring it in and the agents have access to that. We have a channel for market updates. That's my favorite channel. So stuff from like housing wire, MSNBC, Inman, Bam, whatever. Probably like 80% is more catered towards the Bay Area, but Redfin's huge so we have that in there. We have a channel for showing requests so we don't have showing agents on the team but agents can put in fulfill like hey I need help with this. Typically they're paying like 50 bucks a door. They get get their showings all covered by some an agent on team. We have a training for open house opportunities. So yeah, like people need help open their houses and people grab those like right away. Those things fly. They can work and off market listings coming, coming soon. We run our Dillo Flex team internally. We have a channel just for referrals brand our ISA team. People grab those. So slack is like our thing. A lot of the agents who leave my team always like always always ask like can we stay on slack?

So good. You know, you've built a powerful ass. This is one of the things I picked up from Seth Godin as a marketing concept years ago. You know that it's really good marketing when people miss it when it's gone.

Yeah.

Right. So like you stop sending that monthly newsletter, no one's gonna be like hey, where's that monthly newsletter? I love that you've built something that is so valuable to people that even when they're. Yeah. Whenever their best step is to go somewhere else that that's a piece they want to stay in touch with.

Yeah. We regarding news. We actually have a weekly news service but doing it for over a year now called Fast News. It's a rundown things happening in our company like some pull out from slacks. We highlight agent of the week. We've been there for a couple years now. At some point that we want to call it detention. They did something special. And then we have a fast event newsletter with all the stuff that's happening in offices. We have seven retail offices so there's lots of physical in person events happening. And then we have a keep it moving coaching newsletter. Our director sales take all his Monday, Wednesday, Friday coaching calls and we cut out snippets. He has the full calls on his page but we actually cut out snippets on YouTube shorts for that. And our pages look sick. If you go to hashtag team Fast is one page. Fast Real Estate is a different page and Elias Studo has his own. All the graphics are sick with the screenshots, the YouTube style stuff. And then we brought that into the marketing. So we're remarketing a lot of the stuff we use in the company and that's a huge draw for agents to come.

Yeah. Super smart. Do you have a team inside the team that does a lot of that, that work?

Yeah, we have a. We have a full marketing team. I think like four or five people. My. All my leadership people have their own bas directly report to them. We have a marketing. Those projects get completed every single week.

Yeah.

And now we're dipping into AI for first. Not first time. But last week's newsletter first time was like all AI generated. It was all Star wars theme. The pictures, the little blocks we took, all the headshots and recreated. It just looked sick. Because I was known for doing newsletters like a couple of years ago for a good six years where I took pop culture and created things and kind of bring that thing back and I'm in the process. The first draft didn't really look that good to me, but the VAS went really literal. I was like, okay, look at my own newsletter and make something like that for agents. So they made this really cool whole spongebob Bob newsletter. So I was like, okay, we're on the right track, but I need to give, I haven't given them input yet, but we're going to bring back a value add community.

Yeah. So fun. What is a tip that you would have for an agent operating solo who, who may be better off joining a team? What would you. How do you guide that person from a conversational or even a question perspective?

Look at all things you want to do. Because then there's definitely a value at a scale. Because I talked to some top agents. Let's just say someone's making 200 grand a year, even 300 grand a year, pretty solid. Well, you go hire marketing assistant and train, then you got to pay another 10, 15 grand and you got to take the time to train them. And then you need to hire a showing agent and you want to met, you want to coach and you need open house help. Like start really looking. Oh, we also have four full time video editors in the Philippines.

Oh, nice.

We have a studio like this where we. Yeah, we handle that. But then like not all things you hire, like look at that. Like, do you really want to handle all that or you want to plug in the team and pay a small, small fee and have all that accessible to you? Nice.

A year from now, 2024, what do you want to look back on at this time and say I'm really glad that I focused on that or that my team focused on that or that we invested in that. Like what's, what's. I mean, market conditions and that stuff aside, what are you looking forward to building, adding on, improving over the next year?

Something we started implementing a couple months ago I want more of. We put a lot of people in accountability groups. Now the example actually shared earlier, whether we had this intensity boot camp, this four week program, we had 35 agents in there that volunteered to be in there. And in that time we knocked on over 8,000 doors. We had 226 appointments set, 15 escrows. We sent out like 300, 101 videos to people. So I want a whole company that's really strong on the foundational stuff where they're grinding it out and then layered with being able to talk about what they've done or examples of that. They're creating social media about the. Hey, I'm out door knocking today. Hey, I'm having this open house today. This is what's happening so on because I didn't focus too much during this chat. But we're our, our team is our number one priority has been social media. So we really want a lot of different influencers on the team. Creating business, 80% of business that way.

Super interesting. I can see a whole new recruiting path where you can because in a team context I assume you have all the onboarding, training, support, coaching that you could take someone that's very adept at that and has some other related skills and turn them into a new agent.

Yeah, we, we have a 30 day workshop where I would say price and maybe 80% of agents have less than, less than three year experience on our team.

Wow. And what is your like target? Like you know, in terms of a ramp time kind of what are some of your targets or benchmarks for them and like you know when you're talking to them like hey, it's going to take about this long to do.

To do that like a year ago I believe I need to check. We actually have our stats to look at a year ago. I'm sure you do. Our average day to get in contract was like about 60 something days. Market conditions is a little bit harder now so like to get down to three months for first contract. Yeah.

Awesome. Kenny, this has been great. I love what you're up to. You live fast. You feel fast to me talking with you. Yeah, yeah. Before I let you go, fun question for you. What is one of your most frivolous purchases or what's a cheapskate habit that you've held onto even though you probably don't need to?

Cheapskate habit or frivolous purchases?

Yeah, one or the other.

I brought a new toothbrush. I'm really into tech. I don't buy a lot of random stuff, but when I buy stuff I usually buy the most expensive one. I'm really into tech products. Originally I bought the oral B io8 io10 toothbrushes like 400. But I love using it. It makes me happy every time I use it because my 9 ones it start giving out battery life. Yeah, yeah.

What is what. What makes a toothbrush a 400 toothbrush? Like, what was the feature where you were like, all right, I'm in.

I don't know if it feels sturdy as a. This is stupid. The last one had this 3D teeth tracking thing in it. I don't know, but I. I just. I like it. I had a Philips Sonic here with the regular style brush head. It doesn't feel as good to me. So this circle one, um, I travel a lot too, so having, like, enjoyment toy feels cool. I. I didn't. I didn't read that many reviews on it. I knew this one's better than last one. I really liked the last one. I spent so much time reading battery, I forgot what it was. I was like, okay, this is the purchase. Also, don't like to spend a lot of time. I'll, like, research their product, but I don't like one day and I'm done. Okay. If I see the same product on a couple of different sites, I'll just buy it. I buy, like, that's how I buy most of my stuff. I don't really dive too deep.

Awesome. Love it. Thank you so much for doing this, Kenny. Yeah. Continued success in the year ahead.

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