Laurie Finkelstein Reader on Operationalizing People Over Profits | Ep 002

No matter where your business is today or where you want to take it, you'll get there faster and more profitably with an operating system. Welcome to Team os, your guide to starting, growing and optimizing real estate team. Here's your host, Ethan Butte.

For insights into starting, growing and optimizing a real estate team, we're talking with Lori Finkelstein Reader, a few fun facts before we get started. Her team has served more than 7,700 families in sunny South Florida, generating nearly 3 billion in sales volume over the years. They're currently number one in South Florida, number three in the state and top 40 in the nation. A business coach herself, she's been mentored by Gary Keller and earlier this year realigned her team with Keller Williams. Thank you so much for talking Team OS today, Lori.

Oh my gosh, I'm so excited to be here. And that was quite the intro. I loved it. Thank you.

Good.

All those nice things you said. I give all those props honestly to the incredible company that we have and all the humans in it.

And I just your care to take a moment to share that I think is going to is representative of, I think with the some of the ground we'll cover in this conversation because you strike me as a very culture oriented, pro human oriented leader and I think that's going to be a theme throughout. But we're going to start Laurie, where we always do on this show, which is a must have characteristic of a high performing team. When you think back about your team building journey, what is, what are one or two must have characteristics?

I love your question because if people can really get in touch with those characteristics, it makes things a lot easier and a lot more fluid to build what you're trying to build. And you know, I come from a family, I was raised that you serve others right and that the more you help others get what they want, the faster you'll get what you want. So a characteristic, very clear characteristic, is one that says to you that not only did you enter real estate, you know, because you want to have a great career and make a living, but you are really here to build a relationship with the other person and that you genuinely care about their outcome. Right. A lot of times in sales, you know, you hope that you have a salesperson that genuinely is invested in your outcome. I don't know that that is always the case, but it is a very important characteristic to have.

Absolutely agree. And I think what I want to dwell in for a minute with you is this idea that it's really Easy to put up sales goals. We need to be goal oriented, we need to be production minded, we need to have an eye toward profitability. But all of that is enabled by our fulfillment of other people's needs and interests.

Yeah, I mean, honestly, Ethan, when I got into sales, like I was born into a real estate family, by the time I was 10, both of my parents were brokers. I always say my first open house was when I was 11 or 10 or 11 years old. But, you know, definitely understanding that when you enter the business, it's our job, it's, it's, it's. Hopefully that is a passion that you have, that you have empathy, that you understand that people who are transacting in real estate, my experience has been 50% of the time it's a happy event and 50% of the time it's a very unhappy event. And being able to connect with human beings and meet them where they are at that time in their lives is critical to really become successful in our industry. I mean, I run a very relational business relationship. Business versus transactional.

Yeah. And so how do you operationalize you and you're delivering all the surface and you're, you know, you're one person delivering the service. How do you, how do you scale that across 10 people and eventually 100 people? Is it a matter of recruiting? Is it a matter of ongoing training and coaching? Is it a number of these things? Is it. Have you had to send people out of the team who aren't willing to operate in this manner? Like, how do you operationalize that?

So for starters, Ethan, I have not sold a house in nearly six years.

So.

So I came out of production and decided to work on the growth and development of the team about five to six years ago. And one of the ways to make sure that your culture's intact, to make sure that people are delivering the same level of service? Because I'm asked this all the time, how do you scale that? How do you duplicate it? You have to have standards, right? Very clear, defined, refined standards. And sometimes, you know, I've met agents that have come across my path and they're very high producers. But culturally we are not aligned. And not that they're bad people, they're great people, they're great agents, but we're not, we're just not aligned. And you have to be committed to that standard. The standard cannot have a wiggle, wobble. The standard's like concrete, right? So you're either meeting the standard or you're not meeting the standard. And I think the toughest thing for leaders. I mean, I always say I'm a work in progress when it comes to becoming a great leader. It's really hard because especially in my space in real estate, like, we genuinely just love people. Like I love everybody. I mean, you and I met and I'm like, I really like this guy, you know, just super easy. But so I let the standard manage the culture and I let the standard manage expectations. In terms of any agent working with a buyer or a seller. Like you just, we just have a standard and either you meet it or you don't. You know, it's, it's very black and white.

Yeah. How do you talk a little bit about that standard? Not like what it is or where it's set, but you know, are you sampling other people's engagement? Do you have like a layer of folks, like, like team leaders, like within the team kind of how, like just one step deeper on like the practical side of standards.

So it, it all falls back to training. Right? I mean, I'm a huge believer that no matter where we are in our career, we all need coaching, training. We need to be held accountable. If we're not, we're not growing. And I'm also a big believer that the data, all the data within your company, Whether you're a two person company or a 200 person company, the data will give you a lot of information, you know, and having I run an 8:30 morning meeting, I'm about 15 years into this meeting. So 8:30 every single day without fail. It is now on zoom since we sailed through the COVID thing, but it is on zoom now and that meeting is very heavily based off of training to help us and give us tools so that we can continually meet the standard. And honestly, I'm looking to beat the standard. Right. I want to keep getting better. We talk about a five star experience. Like five star, everybody's giving five star. We need up our game. So. And it has to be a language that you speak within your company. It's behaviors, it's how we treat one another. It's, do we have tall? Do we have any tolerance for people who don't treat other people correctly? You know, I don't have that tolerance. You know, I had, I had an experience really quick just to tell you the level of standard. I had one of my coaches, they were, they were coaching me in a, in a, on an entrepreneurial side of our business and we were in a meeting and it was a leadership team and I didn't appreciate the way the coach who was A fantastic coach spoke to one of my leaders and it really rubbed me the wrong way. And I got to see who she really was potentially. And I had to part with them because I'm very married to how you make people feel. Do they feel included? Do they feel a part of it? Do they feel equal? Like that is a non negotiable for us. And let me tell you, people know how we're built and who we are and we're not for everyone. And that's okay.

Yeah, really good. I mean that language that you just closed on there, how you make people feel super resonant for me. For about four and a half years and over 270 episodes, I hosted a show about customer experience. And I would ask everyone to define customer experience off the top. And it really, you know, there are all these mechanical parts, you know, like in real estate, you know, there are all these kind of stages of the relationship, stages of the transaction we can organize around. And that is the experience at one level, but it's the mechanical level. Ultimately what I learned by asking hundreds of business leaders from a variety of roles and positions that exact question was that customer experience boils down to exactly what you said, how you make people feel. It's that emotional resonance, that feeling that people leave each transaction with, with. And that's why I appreciate so much you isolating one particular example of a moment in which someone left your agent and you feeling less than you desired to be or deserve to be in the moment. And so high degree of sensitivity to that. I really appreciate it. Go kind of high level. You can take this wherever you want. I mentioned some accolades off the top, hard earned. I'm sure you've talked a little bit about the culture of your team, but just characterize your team however you like, the market that you're in, the size, the structure. Just talk for a minute about your team at a high level.

I would love that. I want to just back up one little inch and respond to what you were saying about how we make people feel, how we make the consumer feel. So when you're running a business, a real estate team in my case, and you've got 100 plus people in your company and we want to grow at 200-200- that real estate agent and your staff are just as much your customer as the consumer. And it's just as important to me that our staff and our agents feel the same. Right? That they feel that they are respected, that they're views and what they believe in and how they choose to live their life. That we respect them, we honor them and they are no different. That is a passion of ours. And I mean, I feel like that just described my entire company, but high level of who we are. We are in the south Florida area, which encompasses all of Miami, Broward and Palm Beach, St. Lucie counties. We are about a company of around 90 to 100 people right now. We're going through some transition, which is really exciting to tell everybody about that in about a month, but we're going through a little bit of a transition. We are a, what I consider a high producing team, a mix of agents that work their own business and they also work our team leads. Everybody. A lot of people join us because they love the idea that we genuinely enjoy giving back. Right. We, we, we just celebrated our 10th year of our back, our 10 year back of our backpack drive where we sponsor about 1000-1200 precious little adorable kids who maybe otherwise wouldn't have that opportunity to return to school with a backpack stuffed with everything you need. Right. Because to me it's like building any child's confidence, putting a smile on their face, getting them ready to go and crush the year. So we are very passionate about giving back, taking care of others that not just our clients. I'm talking the community. And we do all kinds of, we do all kinds of different things that connect us to the community. We don't want to just be the real estate agent that gets to be in your transaction. We want to be the company that is a resource. Right. So that you need something, you're stuck, you know, that you can reach out to us and that we're here for you. We've been in business, I've been in business 25 years. So it's been, it's been, been a ride, it's been a long time. It just become, it just keeps getting more fun for me. So I, I would just tell you that I give all the props and credit to where we are and what we've accomplished because of the human beings inside of the company.

Yeah, that comes through very, very clearly how I, I, and I appreciate the commitment to these community events. Is that you said 10 years on that. Is it, how did that emerge? Like, and is this, is this like whose responsibility is it to kind of coordinate this stuff? And I do. Just going back to your. Kind of like how we make people feel. Customer experience and employee experience, or in this case, you know, client experience and agent experience are two sides of the same coin. I like that you bring in the community at large as an additional stakeholder in the business and part of the way that you define success, when did that occur to you? And like, do you have someone who's part of their job is to coordinate these things or is it like, does it emerge naturally out of the team, like for folks that want to bring people together and do this kind of community engagement?

So number one, I feel a responsibility and have for many, many years that sometimes we have to help others learn how to give. Right? Not everybody grew up in a family where they were taught how to give back, how to help win. It's for some, it's something we have to teach. I'm very passionate about that. I've had the experience that when you teach someone how to give and they become a part of that, then they go and teach somebody else how to give. And it is a very much of a pay it forward environment that you're creating. And I can tell you, we going all the way back to the beginning with backpacks, it was like, hey, how can we get a group of us, let's just all go out and buy 50 backpacks instead, stuff them and help some kids go back to school. There's not one human being that can own any of these types of, of undertakings. So what has happened now that you're we're doing this thousand backpack this year where our goal was a thousand, we got to 1200. I was mind blown is that you do have someone who is heading it up, but then we have lots of people who opt in to be part of that panel. Then honestly, everybody is, is kind of like scrapping to say who gets to deliver the backpacks, who gets to stuff them. When you're part of that culture, it's a natural, right? It's not a. We're not pulling teeth. Everybody is like, hey, like where are we in the backpack drive? Okay, I'm going to five below and I'm going to buy five more backpacks. You know, we also do a toy drive and when we got to deliver the toys last holiday season to a foster home or it's a foster environment, like a whole ecosystem, the lady told us no one ever, ever in the life of their company had delivered that many toys from one per. From one group of people. So. And you know what's really cool, Ethan, is that there's so many people in our community that want to make a difference, but it's hard to do it on your own. So when you open it up to the community and let's say Mr. Smith, he's like, wow, I can go and buy four toys and drop them off. But I'm part of delivering a thousand toys. Right. So you're, you get to connect to something so much bigger. You know, South Florida, we have a lot of hurricanes, unfortunately. And we have been known to put together some of the fastest, most amazing hurricane drives. We just know how to mobilize. Like, you know, that's just. We can sell houses. Yes, we're great at that. But we know how to help people. I always tell them I'm far more impressed by the number of toys we delivered, the number of backpacks we delivered, the number of people we could help than I am by how many houses we sold. To be, to be honest with you.

Yeah. And I think again it's, I see it as mutually reinforcing. Yeah. I think turns, it brings people to life and it makes us all want to do more. Not just do, just do more, period. Including on the business side of it. So this brings me up to, you know, in these conversations, we kind of talk around something I described for myself as a decision point and with you, I thought it'd be interesting to really go into this idea of people over profits. Profits. It's on some of your social profiles. I think what you mean by it has already come through in this conversation. We're only like 12, 15 minutes in what I do.

I mean it's simple. It's win, win or no deal. Okay. Either you and I are going to win in the transaction or no deal. Right. That could be myself and another agent, myself and the consumer, myself and the staff member. Doesn't matter. It's like we are going to figure out a fair and equitable way to leave this situation and it's going to be about our relationship. Far more important than the money we're going to make that is attached to that. Right. Most people, it's money first and then relationship. We are relationship first and then money.

So that's, that's where exactly where I wanted to go is. I feel like it's a leap of faith for some people to, to trust that that's the case. As much as people use, you know, relationships over transaction as a language, I just don't feel like it is a true decision making filter for a lot of folks. Would you observe and if so, why do you think that's the case? Like why can't more people get to this place where you are without a great deal of hand holding or guidance?

I think that because there was no policing and it was permitted, people could get away with things, but not Anymore. Right. You know, no one's going to work with you without reading your reviews, without going checking you out on social media. And I just think human nature, human nature, People will typically do the least that they need to do. Right. If somebody says, you know, you get the, you get to, you get the carrot if you take two steps and you get the carrot if you take 30 steps, everyone's taking the carrot with two steps. So I just believe that now if you're in the real estate space or any space, I don't care what space you're in and people are reading your reviews. I mean, I have thousands of reviews and it matters to me. When we're working with someone, I'm thinking the whole time is, am I earning a five star review? Because if I'm not, I better, I better step it up. Right. So I think that before we were not policed, people did not need to. And now we are. And you must.

Yeah, very fair. And, and, and policed by the market in general. And that information is out there.

Right. If the consumer is really in charge. I mean, you and I, no matter what we're doing, no matter what we're buying, no matter what we're, where we're traveling, it doesn't matter. We're gonna decide and we have options. And so if we don't like option one, bink, we're gonna click to option two. So we've got to do the right thing. And I like the policing because it helps everybody behave better.

Yeah. Can you think of just to like, really bring this home for some folks? Can you think of a time when something wasn't quite win win and you either A, modified the situation or B, just backed away from it? Like, I want people to understand what this looks like in real life.

Yeah. I mean there's so many. I'll just give you personal. So as a real estate agent, you know, I would go on listing appointments all the time or I'd be working with buyers and I got in many situations where maybe a seller would ask me to do something that I didn't feel, feel was the right thing to do and it didn't align with my standard or my culture or who I was. And I was not going to stay with that situation just because for a paycheck. Right. I, I walked away. I would walk away repeatedly. And we teach our agents the same, you know, listen, if someone is not showing you respect and they're not treating you right and they're not, you know, they're just disrespecting you to a high, high, high level. Maybe that's not the right environment for you. You know, maybe don't focus so much on the paycheck. Focus on making sure that you're so leveraged in your business that when somebody is not treating you right, you can walk away. Right. I'm not, I'm just not for sale like that, Ethan. You know, I've had agents with come in my company. Here's another great example. Fantastic agents that can sell houses, but necessarily maybe their behavior, maybe the way they're treating others is just completely disaligned with the company. The company might lose a couple hundred grand, but that's okay because that person, I've watched it with my own eyes, could potentially poison lots of people. So you have to be really connected, not so much to the money, but more to your reputation, to what you believe in, to who you are. The money always comes. The money is the easy part.

Yeah, I appreciate this. The language we often use is like toxic culture. In this case, you said you used the term poisoning and it's the same effect. You know, toxicity is poisoned at some level and it, and it spreads and, and it goes back to where you were before. On standards is whatever you begin to tolerate is the new rule. Like the exception is the rule. So you need, if you're going to set the rule, you need to, or the standard, you need to enforce it. Otherwise, you know, any exception to it, the rule or standard doesn't hold anymore. It's not even a thing.

Yeah, people get confused and they think that the top performer in the company is the definition of who you are. But really the definition of who you are is how you made the person feel, how you treated them, how did you make their experience exceptional. Right. That's who you are. You're not a number of transactions.

Yeah. And that's kind of another zone I wanted to go to or at least how I was going to tee it up is like we look at a successful entrepreneur and business builder, team builder like you. You know, an organization of 100 people. You know, nearly 8,000 families served nearly 3 billion in sales over the years. And it's easy to look at that now and make some assumptions about it. I'd love for you to break that down like take us back. How did the start. What was your initial ambition as you started getting your feet under you? I mean, it sounds like you had a little bit of a jump start because of your family and some of maybe what you learned from them intuitively, not just about the business but about the way to treat people, but take us back 20 years or something. What was your ambition at the time and when did the team occur to you as this is something I really want to do and build?

Yeah, I, I love telling this. It's because I want other people to, to know that what it takes and that everyone's got the potential that wants to do it. Well, number one, I got into real estate because I found myself going through divorce and I was now a single mom with two kids. I was on the no option plan, right. And, and I got into sales. I thought to myself, I am not doing real estate because I watched my parents do it. No chance are you getting me in real estate. And my mom, who still till this day tells me what to do, she's like, honey, you're going to get your real estate license. You're going to love it. So I said no chance. She signed me up without my permission, which is my mom and I got my real estate license and about six weeks in I literally went to my parents and I'm like, why didn't you tell me to do this sooner? This is the greatest thing ever. Like I'm getting to help people and meet people and you know, I, you mentioned growing up in real estate. I think I learned from my parents how to serve and take care of humans more than I did anything about like the details of sales. I don't really think I had a whole lot of sales training and then got into the business, had two small kids, they were three or three and six. They are now 32 and 29 and they have each made me a grandma, which is the greatest thing on the planet. But you know, I started out as a, a very naive, no clue what I was doing. ETHAN REAL ESTATE AGENT and the thing that seems really accessible to me, not having any leads or having anything, was to work people who needed rentals, right? People needed to find a place to live. And I started helping renters. Maybe one day I can tell you the most greatest rental story on the planet. It's the best. Started doing rentals and I didn't know any different. But to treat a renter that maybe I was making 50 or $100, I didn't know any different to treat them if I was making a thousand dollars or $2,000. Right? So to me it was just like build a relationship. I honestly didn't know any different and started building relationships. Worked really hard at, you know, I sat in open house five days a week during when I dropped my kids off. I'd find vacant home. I'd find it. An experienced agent. Hey, can I sit in your vacant property? I'd set up shop every day until my kids got out of school, started meeting people in the neighborhood, found some buyers. Buyers became sellers, renters became buyers, and pretty quickly, it only took me about maybe 24 months, my business started to grow. It was growing not because I was a great realtor. It was growing because I had built so many good relationships, and people wanted to refer me. They appreciated me, they knew I cared about them, and I was coming from a genuine place. So I started getting lots of referrals. And then I realized, well, like, I can't. I can't manage all this, you know, Got my first assistant, and right away I got a buyer agent. And something I've been. I've done really well in my career because I've mostly done things really wrong. But something I've done really well is I've never been that person to try to hoard business and keep all the money to myself. Right. I understood that you can win through and with other people as well. So I brought on a buyer agent, and they started working on my buyers. I stuck with the sellers, and organically, it grew. It just. The more people we helped, the more knowledgeable I became, the more I gave back, the more my business was growing organically. And that's pretty much the story.

And so buyer's agent first. I think that's relatively common.

Yeah.

Any missteps in, say, your first 5, 6, 10 team? I'm sure there are.

I mean, maybe we don't have enough time for my missteps.

Maybe characterize briefly or share a tip. For better or for worse, in that. In that period between the beginning, you've got a. You've got a buyer's agent working with you, and up to the point where you first started thinking. Thinking about getting out of production, because I think that's where a lot of folks get stuck is at that point of, can I afford to move out of production? What could people be setting up along the way to prepare for that moment?

I never wanted to get out of production. It happened because the company was growing. And we, as a company at that time, we were able to sit down and talk about, like, what would be best for the whole. There were people who had been there for me. I have an agent that's been with me for 18 years. I'm like, I have a lot of longevity in my team. And you know what? We decided that it was time. It was a group effort. And I came out of production after 20 years. But if somebody's entering the business, look, I don't care if you're in the business six months or six years, depends on, depending on where you are. I know I've said this a few times, but relationships and database, so these are the two, these are the two non negotiables, right? Every human being that you meet, that you have a conversation with, that will walk away from the conversation trusting you and your, your, your, your opinions, they should go in your database. And that's something I didn't do in the first five to seven years. I, I wasn't collecting data. No one told me to collect data. I had no idea, you know, so I just looked at the whole county as my database, which was crazy. So every person you meet, take the time to build a, you know, have conversations with them. I built my business on the soccer field, on the hockey, at the hockey rink. You know, there's so many different ways I could give you 50 ways to build your business, but I would say collect the data. More than just collecting the data, you must positively, unequivocally, you must romance your database, right? Having names and numbers and email addresses and all these types of things is useless if you're not going to do anything with it, right? So it's really building a plan. And this can be for a brand new agent from the day you get your license on, doesn't matter where you are in the career, is having a very refined plan. Like how often you're going to send a handwritten note. Yes, we still do handwritten notes. How often are you calling? How often are you going to do a pop buy? How often are you going to break bread and go to lunch or breakfast or have a coffee, you know, and then really identify maybe five people that are like your star clients, the people who are going to send you business throughout the year. And then you really want to get together, want to make sure. So I think what I didn't do was I didn't collect the data early on. I have obviously for the last 20 years, but in the first five years I did not. And the other thing I did wrong, well, a lot of things I did wrong. But I think this is really good. It'll help whether you're in a small team or just two of you or 10 of you or 20 of you, is you gotta, you gotta learn when to say no and walk away. You know, like I said, I love everyone. So I would hold on to relationships, other team members, maybe staff members, I would hold on because my heart hurt to separate from them. The business piece, like, honestly, Ethan, like I said it before, the business part's easy. The money's easy. But for me, emotionally, someone leaving me or me having to remove them, that was. Hurt my heart, so. But you have to be able to walk away from people. And I learned many years ago now that when someone comes into my life, I really celebrate them. And when it's time, if that happens, I celebrate that season ending. But it takes time to get there. A lot of us want to hold on much too long, and that can really damage your business.

Yeah. You made me think about something very, very subtle that I imagine happens to almost everyone who's in a position like you, where you are the. You're at the center of the business. You maybe have one or two or three people around you, but it's still you. It's your brand name, it's your network to date. And you have to start passing some of these people off. Like, I've known this person for X amount of time, or this person was in my wedding or so and so's wedding or whatever the case may be. And so talk a little bit about that because that's like a little bit of a hybrid. It's not like this person is no longer good and healthy for me or that.