Keri Shull on Onboarding and Expansion [FUBCON Session]

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Thank you so much for making time for this, Keri. I'm looking forward to a conversation with you and I want to start it where I've been starting with everyone, which is a must have characteristic of a high performing team. When I offer that, what comes to.

Mind, the first thing that came to mind is integrity, and the second is optimism.

Okay. Speak to integrity as a leader, I.

Think it's very important for people to have confidence and trust that you have their back, especially right now, because it's not easy. And so where agents have been very successful for years, they're finding that they're having to work harder and harder. And if they don't have trust in their leadership, they leave or they retreat or they end up in another industry right now. And then the optimism side is it's about hope and being in the right mindset and continually bringing yourself back to that place and then as a group coming together and sharing that optimism as well and focusing on growth in the future. I think whenever you stagnate, then it's a really rough path.

Yeah, absolutely. Is integrity for you more nuanced and complex than walking the talk and talking the walk and like the integrity in what seems to be true is actually true here. What they say is going to happen does happen around here. I can trust the situation. Is there more nuance to it than that or is it as simple as.

That, that the clients can trust because they're very scared right now too. And so I think if you weave that into every piece of how you're operating. Everybody talks about it, but is it real?

Yeah.

Right?

Yeah.

So I think the high performers, it's. It's there.

Yeah. Really good. In terms of optimism and hope, how much of. Because I heard a little bit of forward looking there, like vision. Like, I know we are in this now, but this is where we're going. Is that kind of layered in there as well?

Yeah, I think I have four children. And so thinking back, there was a point where we always had a goal, right? Like, okay, we want to be number 1 in Arlington and then we want to be number 1 in Virginia, and then we want to be number one in the DMV. And as we kind of checked those boxes, there was a point where I really felt that I lost my vision. Because I didn't know how to connect it to something that was really, like, clear.

Yeah.

Right.

And so I'm sorry, is that as in, like, what was this for? Like, number one isn't what I thought it was going to be. Like, that's not, that's.

No, it was like, what's the next. Like, do we want to be number one in the world? Well, I don't even know if we want, like, I don't know if that's what we wanted. And so around the time that I had my first child, I remember feeling this, like, oh, no, where am I leading this ship? And I think if leaders are honest with themselves, they face that, especially right now.

Right.

Because some of their numbers aren't where they used to be. No one likes moving backwards. Right. And so I think the optimism is important. And the ability to go inside and figure out what is the vision. How can you support the lives that your team wants to lead, that your clients want to leave? How do you do that in a way that keeps them committed to their own growth and the team's growth?

I love that you just introduced that. It's a place I wanted to go anyway. Individual growth and team growth talk a little bit about that balance in that I hear a little bit of accountability, responsibility. We're responsible individually, we're accountable collectively. Talk a little bit about how that dynamic has worked for you over your career.

Yeah, I was always really driven. There's two things that are really important to me. One, I'm very freedom oriented. So just coming from a situation where I had a single mom, right. I was programmed like, what do I need to do to set myself up so I have freedom? Freedom for me is with time and money. And so I've always been focused on giving that to my team. And I've built the structure around them having massive support. Right. And to the point that I actually elevated leaders that would then have a partner when they achieved certain metrics. So with the responsibility and accountability, they had a clear definition of what they needed to do. And it's 36 transactions in a one year time frame. If they hit that, they qualified to have the team pay for the salary of someone that would support them. So the way that that worked in our organization over time, we had 16 teams. And one of the hardest lessons that I learned is that I was thinking, okay, the average income of my top five was 570,000. I was obsessed with getting it to a million. I'm like, oh, I want to create this. And the reality is that I created Work Life Balance. I created, but I lost a lot of those team members. Compass came in in my market and started paying massive bonuses. And the lesson I learned there is I wasn't focused enough on what they wanted for themselves. I was focused on what I wanted to give them. And they had incredible work Life Balance. Most of them did not work much on the weekends. They didn't work in the evenings. But some of them wanted to build their own team, and I wasn't tapped in enough to their ambition and their drive. So I think part of being a leader is also being focused more on what someone else wants than what you want for them.

Very much so. I really appreciate you sharing that. And I wonder, how did you adapt from that? Because as you were describing it, I was like, oh, this sounds super interesting. This seems like a really cool model. Is that still in play at some level, or have you adapted to support more team growth within your team? Like, how? Because obviously it occurred to you. You're like, oh, this isn't what I expected. I need to figure this out. I need to reflect on this. Where did you land on that?

I think the initial response of having these people who are making amazing money have amazing Work Life Balance leave was like, wow, I cannot shock. Like, I'm shocked they made this decision and then it was to get really honest with myself. I don't believe people leave for money. So what as a leader do I need to shift? And how I'm approaching the growth of the team. And one of the things that I realized, someone being on vacation for six months and making $700,000, well, do they.

Need that extra 300k?

You know, well, and that. But also they've lost their vision. And I'm not giving them the gift of clarity and understanding what they want next because, whoops, I talk with my hands. Somebody who goes on vac that much, they're not in an energetic flow in their business. And I didn't catch that. I was like, wow, this is awesome. Right? So I think the question about how I adapted, I looked at it and said, okay. And this realization has just happened, really, in the last few months as I've reflected on, well, how do I utilize what occurred to be a strength for the team? And what I realized is stronger leadership and more mentorship for each agent when they're coming on is really my desire. Right. So the focus before was a lot on the agents at the top and giving them support. And it's not that the agents who are coming in didn't have support I think we have some of the best onboarding and training that exist in the industry, and that's how we've been able to create such successful agents from day one. We hire a lot of agents that are coming from other industries that, you know, day one in real estate, they get their license and they're there with us. And I love that, and I want to continue doing that. But I think because I created these silos, it made our organization very vulnerable to having people recruited away. So my thought on how to position it in the future, number one, I made the change to expand. That decision gives me the appropriate path for people who want to outgrow the team. So now, instead of not seeing it, now that I see it, I'm like, wow, why don't I lean into that and recruit top producers that want the systems, the structure, the leadership training, recruit them into the team with the idea that there's a path off the team in three years, and they get to take a portion of the team that they've mentored and grown with them. So they're leaving the team with the team. So that's. That's what's next for us. And I'm very excited about it.

Yeah, it's really good. I would love to hear a little bit more about onboarding. You mentioned in the beginning, you just hit it again. You obviously have put a lot of time and energy into it. Talk about that, like, from just from a very, very practical standpoint. I mean, I'm sure you always had some onboarding, and at a certain point, you're like, this needs to be. Let's commit to this.

Yes.

It's kind of what I feel from you.

Yes, I'm extremely committed.

Yeah. So what did that commitment look like? Who' feeding it? Is it you? Did you hire someone specifically to, like, build this thing and continue, like, tweaking it? Just talk about, like, the kind of the nuts and bolts of a great onboarding effort.

Well, to give you a little personal story, I started my career at ReMax. I had a broker that had Lyme disease. So he was in the hospital for almost two years. It was really. There was some very, very serious things going on. So as a new agent, I felt extremely isolated and that I didn't have support. So as soon as I started growing a team, I was obsessed with onboarding. I remember, like, how do I write a contract? Like, trying to ask basic questions, and no one was there. So for me, I look at it, I think a lot of people don't have time in our Business to guide someone through the actual conversations that they're gonna need to have. And so they lack confidence. And I love role playing. I came from a background in new home sales and I was given the gift of really incredible sales training and situational training. So someone would come in and role play with me in my model home and then they would come and test me that I could go through the role play effectively. So we've set up our training very similarly. When someone comes in, we walk them. It's a two week process. Nine to five for two weeks. And you asked about the actual nuts and bolts. I do have somebody who specializes in onboarding, but all of the content over the years, I've focused on breaking it down into processes. Exact, duplicatable, repeatable processes that someone can follow. And I believe we elevate their presence as an agent and how the client feels in the relationship. Their first day they're competing with agents that have been in the industry for 15 years. And the client is saying, I'm choosing you because it's obvious that you just have so much more experience. Right? Well, they do have experience because they've been given everything we've learned in the billions of dollars of real estate that we've sold and kind of tied it in a bow for them. So we walk them through how to utilize the phone as a tool in their business and not be afraid of it. And I do force. I'm using the word force. Right. I force them to confront that fear on the phone in the first two weeks of training. So they start making calls their second day.

Love it.

Yep. We set that expectation, like right up front. They come, they have memorized the script. One of the key things that we tweak all the time so we never say, oh yeah, we've nailed this, let's just keep doing that. One of the things that we realized is real estate agents don't like to read. Like, they will scan but not read.

I straight up had this conversation at breakfast this morning.

Did you really? Oh, my gosh. So we would send this, like very detailed email about all the steps to take before they would come to their first day of training. And what we would find is they might get through like the first or second step, but they weren't completing. And so then we were spending all this time that was ineffective time with people in the room getting their systems set up instead of having them ready. So we started doing this is just tactical, an onboarding call on Fridays where we walked them through the email. It's 20 minutes we set the expectation. What is showing up on time? How can they be prepared? Why is their homework, like all of the things that help them to be in the right mindset and successful, and that's made a huge difference. So Monday morning, we are running when they come in, and then they're really ready to start producing appointments. Another thing that we tweaked recently, we actually got a big board and we made little horses and we put their pictures on the horses and it's a race to see who gets to 10. And they're essentially victorious in their group. And then they get the first booked appointment when they all qualify for ISA appointments. So that competition, there's some people who are staying late after training, like, they want to be in the top dog spot. So I love bringing that to the group. Another really critical piece of how we train. I think that agents struggle with thinking on their feet because they haven't been in a lot of situations, some of them, in their career in the past, where they've been on the spot and the client has been asking them questions and they haven't known how to navigate it. So we play a game called Hot Potato, right, where we're doing the script training and I'm having the Potato Throne. And I do this myself still. I love it because I love role playing for my own learning. Right. So I like to have them have a positive association with it. But I'll take the Hot Potato and then say the question in the script and then they'll throw it back and I'll throw it to the next person. So they never know when it's going to be their turn. They never know when they're going to be on the spot and they have to get really confident in the material so that they're excellent when they're in the situation with a real client.

Yeah. I love that technique and I appreciate a variety of details that you layered in there. I think they're going to be helpful for people to like, oh, yeah, I could add that in. It's really helpful. You mentioned the ISA team. Yeah. When in the growth of your team, did you say, this is the next element that we need to add in and figure out?

I might be one of the only people that give you this answer early on. So I started as a solo agent in 2010 or 2008. By 2010, I was thinking, I don't know what's next because I didn't have the examples of teams. So I went to a Craig Proctor event. It was the first time I had Social proof of these incredible team leaders. And one of the things I realized is I will be very strong at marketing. I'm fearless when it comes to spending money to make money because I had a really inexpensive lifestyle. Right. So I thought, I'll invest in this and I'll grow it. But what I couldn't envision myself doing was sitting at a desk and calling. So I hired three ISAs, not one, three right off the bat. Because I talked to enough people who had ISA teams and they told me, oh, I hired this and then it didn't work out. Then I hired that ISA and it didn't work out. And I thought, well, if I'm going to do it, I can always turn up the leads and I can always recruit agents if I have leads. So why wouldn't I hire three, train them at the same time, have them compete with each other so that they're really cognizant of producing results. And it worked out really well.

Yeah, that's awesome. This cohort approach to a variety of situations, not just even hiring into a real estate team, but in general is so smart. I think it is more effective in general, not only when there's like that friendly competition that drives people, but then it's also not, hey, you're going to pioneer this thing. We think we know what it looks like, but there's no model for you. And we'll be around. And we've done some of this work before. We've never done it 100% of the time, but we believe you can do.

But you're going to be great.

Good luck. Yeah, totally.

It's just a whole different dynamic camaraderie too. So they have.

That's why I added friendly to competition. It's like, yeah, yeah. It's been super helpful for me in my career and I've almost exclusively done essentially creative work. I've never been in a sales production role. I guess I have early jobs, like professionally, but. But I still recognize that dynamic. How far can we push this new tool? Oh, my gosh. Did you see what he just made? Oh, what did she just do? So, like that. It's a really powerful dynamic. I enjoy it and I appreciate that you saw that from the get go. You're primarily DMV, D.C. metro area.

Yes.

For people that aren't familiar, I had to look it up.

Oh, okay. Yes. Well, thank you for sharing. Dc, Maryland and Virginia.

Yeah. But you also operate in Florida. I mean, probably not to the same complexity or scope, but talk a little bit about operating in two Markets.

Yeah. So for me, and this is a challenge that I'm still working on, it was very difficult. So imagine the first two years that we moved to Florida, it was during COVID So it was so easy and the market was crazy. And so I thought, oh, I've really got this nailed. No, no, I didn't. It was a false sense of confidence. Right. So I was flying back and forth. My goal was to fly back and forth every other week and attend the in person meetings once they started again, what ended up happening? I struggled to maintain that schedule. I have four children that are 2, 4, 6, and 8.

Okay.

So that was challenging. And I felt like there was never enough time. Like, I am a leader that likes to spend time with my people and I like to coach them. And I did not figure out how to do that virtually to the level of success that I would want to. And one of the challenges is I didn't set my organization up for that because when I left for Florida, I wasn't moving. I was just going on a trip to Disney with my children. And Covid hadn't started, and then I kind of migrated there. So fast forwarding to Today, we have 57 agents in Florida, so we actually have a large group there, but they're part of our exp organization. They're not under the team structure.

Okay.

So we're not currently running the same model there. We're just supporting their growth there. And it's moving like wildfire, which is really exciting. I think my ambition in the future is to have expansion teams. And I think that the way that I would structure it, I would need really strong leaders in place to make sure that the people were getting the mentorship, the onboarding support. Like, we've structured it so we can onboard from all different locations successfully in our current setup. But yeah, it was really challenging for me not to be boots on the ground.

Yeah, I'm sure. And it's also, I mean, the next challenge, the way you described it, is very often that person you're describing, someone I can trust implicitly, someone I know is going to carry this forward when I'm only 25 or 50% of the way devoted to it for some window. And this is going to kind of scale back and then this is your thing. Typically that person kind of comes up alongside you, but that's harder to do when there's kind of this geographic dynamic. So there's a lot there. But I'm excited for you.

Thank you.

Speak to the solo agent who hasn't really considered A team for any of a variety of factors. I'll just toss off the most common ones. Generally speaking, maybe ego. Like, I don't want to, you know, I don't want to have my brand name under another person's brand name. There's the split. A lot of people don't understand the cost benefit, including lifestyle opportunities, as well as faster growth. Like, I think. I think joining it is a bit. Joining a team is misunderstood. I think it probably feels to a lot of people who might be better off in a team model like they're giving up in some way or something. There are a number of dynamics there. But speak to that person a little bit like, who is a good. Who should be thinking about joining a team? Not starting one necessarily, but joining a team that might be held back by any of those factors or any others that you may have experienced by talking with folks.

Sure. I think the way I would talk to somebody would vary depending on their level of success. Right. So I think if you're somebody that is getting started in your real estate career, there's no reason you wouldn't join a team. I think that the split only matters if you're doing transactions. And there's a reason 90% of agents fail. You need to be in an environment where you learn how to create the right relationships to generate business on your own and to continue growing and expanding your sphere of influence to be successful.

Right.

And if you're trying to figure it out on your own, it's extremely difficult. So that's what I would say to someone just starting out. I always say, is the split more important to you or the money in your bank account at the end of the year? And that's just the facts. Like, if you're thinking the split's more important, then you're not going to be very successful in speaking to sellers about commission either, because your mindset is just broken. Right. Then the agent who's successful. I think that there's different levels of success. And so one of the avatars that we focus on is the agent that is starting to be really burnt out because they don't know how to hire. They don't know how to put structure around their sales process to be able to make it duplicatable for someone else. So there's a lot of very talented salespeople that are unicorns.

Right.

They're winging it every day and they happen to be amazing at connecting with people. But that gets exhausting because some of them have tried to hire an assistant or tried to hire A transaction coordinator or tried to. And they say to me when I coach them, like, am I just not a good leader? Well, you haven't figured out how to take what you're doing and systemize it.

Right.

So someone like that might benefit from joining a team, especially a team that's focused on growing them to what their goal is.

So.

So my focus now is when I'm talking to people like that avatar that are really successful, but they're getting burnt out. Okay. How do we put the right people around you? That's a permanent solution to this so you can continue to grow and evolve. And what I mean by permanent, people aren't permanent. You can't rely on that. But systems can be right as long as you're evolving them. So if we want to harness what someone's doing really well, like Casey Anderson is one of the agents that is responsible for a tremendous amount of our growth in Florida. How she approaches her business is very different than how I approach my business. So my mindset isn't. There's one way to do it. My mindset is, let's evaluate your core strengths. If I had listened to my coach, my coach wanted me to be the ISA last, I would have never built a team because I guarantee if I were sitting at that desk all day, I wouldn't have been in my core strength. So I think finding alignment with a leader that's going to focus on your strengths and build it around you is important while systemizing it so it scales.

Love it. That was a fantastic response. And one thing I especially appreciate about it is the layered in there is the idea that even if your ambition is to start a team, joining a team is a great way to start that process.

Well, why not see how it's working? Like, you want to go to one of the most successful teams in your area and say to that team leader, I'd like to start my own team in two to three years. How would you feel about me learning under you?

Yeah.

And if their response is, well, if you want to start your own team, this isn't a good fit for you. That says something.

It does. Yeah. That's interesting. We don't have time for this aspect of the conversation, but you just got me thinking about some of the cultures and situations wherein the team is, like, tolerated at best, versus ones where it's embraced. And you've obviously found a great deal of success embracing it. I do think that the success in the future is going to be more based in the approach that you're taking. I wish you continued success there has been an absolute joy, Carrie. And before I let you go, I would love to know from you what it looks like for you to continue learning, growing and developing. How do you prefer to do that? Or you could speak to how you prefer to rest, relax and recharge.

Okay. I'm going to tackle how I like to learn and grow. And it's conversations like this and being in the right rooms that has served me really well in my career. I shared the first event I ever went to. I had social proof. For me, if I see someone else has achieved something, I'm like, wow, if they can do it, I can do it. It's inspiration. And so anyone who's feeling a little bit off, I would encourage you to go with notebook ready to learn. Have engage the people who are creating results and find out where they struggled, how they did it, where you can relate to their success, and where you can add value to them. And when you do that, you're just going to exponentially grow as long as you execute.

Yeah, really well done. I especially appreciate the conversation dynamic as well as in the room because it implies it's these kinds of human to human moments where we can sit down together. Appreciate you doing it, Carrie.

Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much.

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