Meritocracy in Your Business Model with Dustin Oldfather | Ep 067

Over the past 20 years, Dustin Oldfather has connected with and been coached by some of the very best in the real estate business, including several of our guests here on Real Estate Team os. And as a result, he's constantly experimenting with and optimizing methods within his business model. VAs ISAs lead, distribution, training, cadence and more. And in this conversation, he shares exactly what's working best for their 80 agent team that's the number one ranked team in the state of Delaware. How they're pairing local staff that's paid 15% above market with VA to improve performance and to reduce vulnerability. How they've added meritocracy and agent voice to their model, why they've both insourced and outsourced ISAs over the years, and what they're doing right now, and exactly how they're delivering training by topic, day by day. Get all that and much more right now with Dustin Oldfather on Real Estate Team os.

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.

Dustin, I can say about you something I can't say about every one of our guests. We've actually connected in person and had a real in person conversation. And I'm excited to have this follow up one remotely. Welcome to Real Estate Team os.

Really pleasure to be here and excited to spend some time with you.

So we kick this off with a common question, which is what is a must have characteristic of a high performing team?

A must have characteristic of a high performing team is a group of leadership who really cares about the people that are in the organization.

How do we develop that? Is it in the way that you bring your leadership team together and who they are, or is it the way that you carry yourselves as you're developing strategies and figuring out how to work them out into the organization? Is it all of those things? Is it something else? How do you find or how do you cultivate caring within that group?

Well, the way you cultivate caring is by being a caring leader yourself. Interestingly, you ask, I was actually gifted a beautiful book by Sharon Srivatsa called the Motive by Patrick Lencioni. Patrick's a little ubiquitous in business circles, but it was the right book at the right time in regards to leadership. I firmly believe that your organization becomes a reflection of your leadership. And so in the book, Patrick talks about responsibility centered leadership versus reward centered Leadership reward centered leadership would be kind of the common business historic beliefs that as a CEO you continue to evolve, you continue to delegate, you continue to extricate yourself where the E Myth approach, which is keep moving other people into the responsibilities that you are not good at or don't like to do, which isolates you from those, those parts of the business. And then it becomes more of an ego centered leadership, which is like not involved with things that you're not interested in, concerned about. And then it becomes a very top down, you go figure it out and you come back to me. And so personally I've been going through a bit of a renaissance and just being reminded about responsibility centered leadership, which is as the leader, you are responsible for the most complex problems. And so it's not fair as leader with the most experience and the most insight and probably in most cases the most ability to solve those problems, to delegate them without care. And so I have been reminded that it's a privilege to be able to solve those larger problems. And when you lead with care, you lead with taking care of yourself, you lead with creating the space for other people to take care of themselves. I have found that that's now permeating my leadership team. And so the way that I treat my leadership team becomes a reflection of how they treat themselves and how they treat others in the organization. So we've seen a really healthy revival in spirit and culture and organization. You know, I won't give myself too much credit, but as a leader, you don't have any choice but to be the, you know, the North Star for the organization. And if you are not embraced and engaged and caring, then your organization will not be that way, you know, at least in my experience.

Yeah, really good. And I really appreciate the parallel you drew to, you know, whether it's E Myth or any of the other kind of very popular, insanely popular ideas around how to go about, you know, redefining your role as the organization grows. And there are lots of different ways to do it, but the sensitivity that you just brought to that is fantastic. And you know, you didn't want to give yourself credit, but I will give you credit for a few things. One, having a relationship with, you know, the type of person and type of leader who would gift you that book. Two, you actually reading the book. Three, you actually reflecting on the book and bringing it into your own leadership team. So we're going to get into how that team is shaped up. But first, I personally want to know how you went from studying molecular biology at the University of Maryland and time with the US Navy into the real estate business, but also into, you know, capital management or investment mortgage business, insurance business, et cetera. So how did you get into real estate in the first place?

Oh, thank you for the question. You know, we were raised really humble in, you know, kind of a blue collar family out of the D.C. metro. My parents moved us to, you know, a. An upper middle class area and gave us a chance to kind of spread our wings. And so we were, as a family, always a little bit skeptical of salespeople because they were trying to part you with the thing you didn't have a lot of which was, you know, money and resources. And so always had a lot of reluctance, but always excited and had, you know, aspirations in real estate. Watched so many of those no money down courses as a chance to get, you know, to get rich. If you remember Carlton Sheets. Oh, yeah, I bet it still works if you can find anybody who will, who will take paper. But, you know, kind of as I went through and started into school, you know, I had aspirations for a baseball career, got some scholarships, and then just didn't have the funds to put my way through. So I went in the nuclear Navy, spent a little time there, you know, with some of the brightest and best in the world, have some tremendous friends, and got really humbled intellectually by some really brilliant people. I thought I was smart before I went there. And then I realized that there are some people that are really smart. Like the old adage, I wanted to be a boxer until I met someone who really wanted to be a boxer. And that's how it was intellectually for me. So I came back out and started down the path of molecular biology at the University of Maryland. Was going to go into the field of genetics before genetics was cool. And then gratefully, I met my wife out here at the beach. I had lost a close friend that we had spent some summers at Dewey beach. And as a kind of farewell, kind of in grieving. He was in his 20s and just kind of passed away suddenly. And he had just introduced me to this kind of very free lifestyle out here on the coast. And I came down for a summer. That's the summer that I met my wife. She rode by me on a bicycle on Second street in Rehoboth, and I almost fell off the curb. She's way out of my league. But we got to be really close friends and then started our lives out here, kind of tripping around in restaurants for a couple summers, you know, saw the opportunity in real estate and Found really found a home in that, in that industry and have been really excited. You know, we started off together, just the two of us, and now, you know, humbly, there's over 125 of us working together across all the organizations. So it's been a tremendous blessing and it was a great opportunity.

I want to get spent a little bit of time getting into the whole organization and then I'll have you like just give a state of the old father group. But first, when in your real estate journey did you have enough momentum, you know, starting you and your wife, that team occurred to you. So you've been doing this for a couple of decades now. Like at what point in that journey did, did team occur to you, like we need more people around us? What was going on for you at that point?

Yeah, you ask a great question. Because I think right now teams are in crisis across the country and it is an interesting question. Do you want to start a team? Do you want to have a team? And there are teams that are kind of, you know, deciding to go about it a different way. For our part, in 2008, I started my real estate career. In 2005, real estate market scorching hot. I spent all my savings that I, you know, I was like, oh, I need to save up enough money to get through, you know, first couple months and then I'll be fine. So saved up the previous couple years and you know, had enough to basically get through six months. You know, at the end of six months, I was already in debt again. I hadn't sold, you know, maybe sold one property and, and really just had to fight through while 2006, 7 and 8, the market's collapsing while I'm trying to learn a real estate career. Kind of moonlighted and tried to sell solar for a little bit there in 2008. The blessing was in 2008 since people would, I mean it was about 18 months days on market for listings. Every once in a while I'll just, you know, I'll be nostalgic and I'll remind our agents how tough it can be. Like, you know, the idea like, you know, we're at 45 days on market sometimes here and people are like, oh, the market's getting slow. I can't get buyer like, yeah, try, try a year and a half. Try to get a two year listing out of somebody or getting fired after a year of spending thousands of dollars. So the short of it is in 2008, people would come out, we'd visit with them, they would never come Back, they'd either go to South Carolina or Florida, or they'd just never come back. So you'd be excited to have any opportunity. And when you have that much inventory, it was a challenge. And so at that point, we leaned into the Internet consumer. At that point, there was ihomefinder and tigerleads. There might have been one other maybe market leader was out at that time. And Ihomefinder. We just had a little stumble start, and we started with tigerleads, had a tremendous experience with Howard Taeger, and he kept us from going over the cliff a couple times or a few times. We didn't have enough funds to pay for the pay per click for the next month. And so he'd hold it off and really nursed us through that tough time and lifted us up. He's a tremendous leader in the industry, and it really set the sail because we had more opportunities. And that's one of the, you know, something important for agents to think about, you know, what leads to success. It's, you know, skills, efforts, and opportunity. So either if you have opportunities and, you know, neither one of the other ones, you're not going to get very far either. But in most cases, people just don't have the opportunities. And so creating those opportunities is a great place. You know, knowing what you know now, you'd go back and you'd do things very differently, realizing what the opportunity was when we had it, you know, waiting days to get back to somebod, you know, versus, you know, speed. The lead, which is like, you got about, you got 30 seconds, and if not, you're in trouble. And so that generated an appetite for people that actually came to us and were like, hey, you look like something's really good, you know, going on over here. If you have anybody that I can, you know, if you have anybody that you don't want to work with, you know, if you want to refer them to me. And then. So we started a team before teams were in vogue, you know, they used to be called groups or, and, or associates. And then. And then the proliferation of teams came after, I think, pretty significantly after Gary Keller's book. It wasn't, you know, and cap tip to Gary for writing that book, which really helped to, I think, bring a lot of professionalism to the business focus of real estate. Not my leader per se, but I think he's done a lot of great things for the industry, and that book had a lot of impact on my career. But that drove the inside sales team, which drove the model for since we had more people, we had more transactions, we had more transactions which led to an assistant. The assistant then becomes, you know, a marketing specialist and a closing specialist and a listing specialist. And then those positions basically divide up and over time have become basically led to their own, you know, their own departments which are required to kind of sustain the output for real estate that you need in order to be able to deliver that service across all channels.

So, quick promotional plug. Howard Tager was one of our guests in the fubcon sessions when we release. So it's one of the first, you know, 20, 30 episodes. Great conversation. Agree. Fantastic leader. One of the things I've heard in my seat hosting these conversations, Dustin, is when you have, you know, clear growth, clear momentum, as you said. Like, you found a way to have opportunities and that was of course, good for you, but it was also attracting other people to you and created the opportunity to get some momentum and grow. One of the things I've heard with regard to the way that you broke down those rules like this begets this, this then breaks out into that, and then you've, you know, backfill that thing is when one of your staff members, let's say, whether they're working listings marketing or something else, gets to, you know, 80, 85% capacity, you start looking for the next person. That way you're not overspending by hiring too far out ahead of plan, and you're also not burning your people out. How has that kind of push and pull gone for you through the growth of your organization?

Yeah, it's led us to a different philosophy. At least in this next phase, you raise a good point because as you move forward, there's a certain, you take contract to closing or listening to closing, for example, there's a certain number of files, capacity per person. And then within that, you also have vulnerability if you only have one person. So one person you have at 85% capacity, and then they have a bad day, they're sick, they quit. You know, somebody, you know, emails them a better offer because they heard how great they are. You know, you celebrate your people and then everybody knows how great they are. And, you know, so we've always wanted to pay our people top, top of the market. As my friend Sharon says, you know, the only limit to, you know, the only difference between a small organization and a big organization are the number of a players at the top. And so over time we've leaned into that more and more. And it's become, it's become a, you know, a, an absolute essential as we get into hiring, are they an A player? Can they be? If they're not, hey, we're going to do everything we can to help somebody get there. But A players, which may cost 15% more than the market, they vastly outperform, you know, two B players or two C, you know, or B and a. C and A players don't want to be around B and C players. I know this is also kind of business cliche, but it is absolutely true. I experienced it. And there are times where people, where everybody struggles and you always want to lift people up. But then there are times where people are not a fit for the role and they just can't do it. And to be fair to both parties, which means because I'm sure they're not having experience when they're not matching up either. So all that to say philosophically, where we're at now because of the economics and what drives the transaction and the amount per transaction that can go to contract to closing or go to listing to closing or go to the marketing department department, it can't always be a local stateside person that's 15% above market. Right. So if you're going to have a players, our model has been to find virtual talent throughout the world that complements a players here. So a players paid 15, 20% above market other markets to support those people. But then we have a blended cost which is lower than having somebody local. And I've found that our virtual talent is many times more reliable than stateside talent. So a little bit different, you know, because, you know, people get sick, take off. I found that, you know, that the value in the virtual work and the people that are paid a premium in other markets really appreciate that. You know, that may be philosophically different from some other people, but for me it means that you have great people across the board. And when you have great people, and I share this, you know, when we have a pocket of challenge is when you have great people, it's easy. There's no friction. When you have friction after friction, after friction, it's not a good fit. And so that's the blend of our model and how we continue to grow. There certainly are some additional local positions that we're going to evolve to. But for our part, it's a players locally as leadership with virtual A players assisting.

Okay, we're definitely going to get a little bit deeper into the model from an agent perspective. But what I'd love for you to do with as much detail as you would care to provide, characterize the old father Group as it is today, like market size, structure, culture, whatever you want to share about how you all are structured, I would love to hear it.

Well, you know, I heard from Spencer Rascoff years ago, you know, that basically, you know, operating from an inverted pyramid as a leadership perspective and I feel that way every day that you know, you as the leader, you're not at the top of the pyramid, you're at the bottom. Which means you work for everybody else. You know, you're everybody that is in the organization is closer to the consumer than you are. I still have, you know, sphere of influence and personal clients that I work with. But in general my job is to work and be a supporter. And as we talked about earlier, it's to solve the really big problems. And so for my part, you would say that, you know, obviously Maria and I started the companies together. I lead the as the visionary and MAR operates as our hardcore operator. The proverbial rocket fuel analogy. And it has been prophetic. It's certainly true that having that integration has really helped. Now we have tremendous listing to close department. We've got a person locally who was a associate broker also interestingly enough lived and worked and was a broker and agent in Aspen and then also worked in a D.C. market. Just an absolute delight. And then two virtual workers that assist her as well. We have our contract to closing department also great local person, Kim Ross, who leads that department with I believe four virtual assistants and then an additional agent assistant that is local is now working between helping to be a liaison for the agents and we're now exploring an agent assistant model where we have a virtual assistant for. We're beta testing this. And so I always say this, sometimes people want to be careful because sometimes people roll out things without actually having any data on it. But what we've seen is the need is as we've gotten our top producers to 6, 7, 8, 9 transactions per month, they need more than just someone to check in and be like hey, do you want to talk to your seller? Need a little bit more one to one assistance. Can I drop off, Can I handle an addendum for you? Can I call the person for you? Can I drop off? We're all virtual at Compass, but there are just lots of details that need to be taken of. And so we're working with a low, basically someone in house who's going to be assisting as a liaison, the agents and someone virtually to kind of smooth out some of the challenges for agents who are really redlining.

Super interesting. I would love for you to Dive deeper into. You just introduced a topic that I wanted to go to anyway, which is like the business model with regard to agents in particular. I love this ad of local as the gateway to as much international support as is needed, you know, through that gateway for your most productive agents. I've heard that done in a variety of ways, but essentially what you introduced there, this idea of, like, leverage provided at a certain level of production, which then leads me to wonder, like, okay, value prop, then versus now, as far back as you want to go with then compared to now, and what types of agents is that designed for?

You know, interestingly, we've had to. To give a nod to John Cheplak, who says, recruit to the culture you're trying to create, not the one that you have. And so if you think back even two years ago, maybe two and a half, three years ago, where the market was excruciating, I mean, just blistering fast, right? Coming off the pandemic where people were, you know, cash was cheap, people were buying to get away. They were. We had work from home. There was a huge. I think Zillow coined it as the great reshuffling. And basically people were going through a lot because they had a lot of time to reflect. Personally, they also were changing businesses, were changing the way that people came to work. In most cases, you didn't have to. There's still a little bit of a hybrid, I think most places, but it is still different than it was. And there's an expectation of some of that hybrid work. And so that has. At that point, we had an agent who was quick at service that was able to. At the job of had to go meet somebody, write a contract, be good from the contract to closing, and then wash, rinse, repeat, right? Because there's more people than raising their hands than you could write offers for. And they're just trying to get as many offers to stick. Unfortunately, culturally, and I think even for some experienced agents, it drove them to a style that crowded out the necessary skills for this market. And so since people got so used to writing offers so quickly, they. The value of an opportunity or a lead or leads always even go back to Howard. I hate the word lead, but a person or a contact or somebody who may be a little farther up front or now is not interesting at all to somebody. And because of the proliferation and even because of our model where we create appointments for people, once people have appointments they don't want to, it's hard to get rejected. It's hard to people that maybe don't want to talk to you right now. But there's no conversion without conversation. Right. And the conversation needs to be between the agent and the person. There's only so much you can manufacture and hand it. There is something organic that has to happen. And so we've continued to recruit now to a group of people who are more excited and not the people that we had weren't excited but there were, there was a, you know, frankly an entitlement that agents started to feel like, oh well these leads aren't as good. You're like, well it's, these are the leads that are out there. Like we have leads from every channel, all the best channels. And if you don't like these leads, I don't, you know, like go fish. Like I don't know what you're going to get. And so, you know, we've continued to look for people that are professional, you know, go back to Kelly, Gary Keller. I always look for recruiting a style and a motivational match and to make sure that people, that people are excited. You know, you can qualify only so much. At some point you just have to get someone in the kitchen and see if they can cook. And some people that you think are going to be stars don't ever, you know, are out of the industry in a few weeks or a month. And some people that you think, you know, there's no way go on to be some of the top performers. And so I never prejudge, I want to give people the benefit of the doubt if you know, we have some matches in those other categories and you see somebody who's inspired and willing to do the work and then we're willing to do the work with them. And so we've continued to work on that and we recognize that throughout that period of time that other brokerages our opportunity was to have go deeper on training and we've even just having a survey within our team to say which trainings are important. I was talking to an agent yesterday who was saying, you know, how much he valued the trainings. Having a training every day, you know, it was a little heavy for some people but having those opportunities and the one to one communication with leadership, with the different, not always leaders, but you know, your best performers to have a chance and a voice to talk to the best people. We're seeing right now that I think industry wide agents are just fatigued. I think as a group we've all been training a lot of skills and we have to help people to say, hey, here's what you do next and so becoming a training organization, which really we really worked hard at last year to really develop the kind of the training cadence best described. And it needed to be one to one. And so each day of the week we have a limited training, that is with myself, Maria Jesse, our VP of operations or listing director, our marketing director, our contracted closing director. So we're continuing to educate the agents in the organization because there's just, it's a really big lift reflecting on the agents that you're now looking to recruit. I mean, it's absolutely somebody who's got, who's got some sort of technical proficiency. If you're not, you know, PC literate, then you just can't work in an organization. And we've just seen it doesn't be harsh, but if you can't, you know, if you're like, hey, how do I attach this to an email? Like, we're done, you know what I mean? Like, sorry, like, good luck getting the follow up, boss. You know what I mean? Like, do you have my password? No. And meaning that to be diminishing, we want the best for everybody. But this is a, this is an industry that is becoming much more evolved and the consumer expects a much better experience. And I was sharing with our agents this week, you know, hey, because our agents are always in demand. I'm like, you guys are always in demand because everybody knows that you guys are well trained and you're great agents and they would love to add you their organization. So I applaud that and I'm grateful for it. And we'll continue to help people grow. And as Tom Ferry used to say, the consumer deserves a better experience and we're going to continue to work at that and develop it. It's changing. It's hybrid, it's digital, it's one to one. It's a hybrid of how people like to communicate. It's not all text, some text, it's not all email, it's some email. And it's as much in person as you could possibly be to make that connection and to feel close. But, but when you get to that whole digital consumer journey and who we are as agents, there is a feeling that a consumer has, that they're being taken care of and that there's a call response happening as they're going through this process. And every day we're working at it and we're not perfect, but we certainly are cognizant every day and saying, how can we make this experience better for the consumers? Which is part of why we're Built with our own marketing listing and closing departments. You know, some agents go, hey, can we opt out of that? No, because we want to maintain that. We want to make sure we can maintain that level of service all the way through so that one person doesn't forget an addendum and then, and then their deal blows up, the client's upset. How do we, you know, maybe to get to the next conversation, but how do we operationalize the life for the consumer? And of course not perfect, but you know, thousands of five star reviews, humbly. But that has been a constant focus as we move forward.

I love so much of the language that you used around experience. The word feeling. Like when I define customer experience, it is how we make people feel, how we make them feel about themselves, how we make them feel about the problem or opportunity that brought us into conversation, ideally into commercial relationship with one another. I really appreciate too, I've heard when I talk about, talk with people about the way that you're designing your organization in the system that agents are coming to plug into it is so, so much of the motivation. I mean some of it is financial. I mean it certainly needs to make financial sense. And of course, you know, if I can't make more transactions, maybe, maybe I can make more money per transaction and that, that's all there. But the way that you described, you know, we want more control over the experience because you know, you didn't say this explicitly, but I feel it from you like, like that is the differentiator, like that is the most important thing we can be doing. And so the idea of training agents into a system that's designed to control and improve all these different steps so that we leave people with a different feeling, so that our organization, not just our one or two or three best people, but that the organization remains in demand is so important. And I have a note from our previous conversation, one of our previous conversations that training, mentorship, positive feedback and the best leads are what agents want most. I don't know like if that's like a philosophy of yours or just like a drive by comment that I happen to attach myself to. But you know, so much of that last pass was training, mentorship and positive feedback. It's access to anyone in the organization that you think could be helpful to you in this training and retraining piece I think is really important. I remember too that we talked a little bit about getting agents to recommit. I don't know if that's where you were going to go, but like when I heard training and Retraining, it's one, it's, let's remind them of these skills that were important back in 2018 that you may have forgotten about in 2021 that are now important again in 2025, 2026. So there's training and retraining and I think in that there is a recommitment to who we are, the system that we built, how we do things and you know, having people essentially through that process re raise their hand to say, yes, I'm on board for all of this or no, I'm not and let's figure out how to, you know, off board you in a constructive manner.

Originally, what we used to do is try to make everything equitable to everybody. And the more we've done this, the more we realized that fair doesn't mean equal. Maybe 10 years ago we would say, okay, we're going to just rotate all the referral opportunities that come in amongst the team, regardless of where you're at, so that when, you know, when you come in, everything's equal. But that's not fair to the producers. It's also not fair to the consumer.

Absolutely not.

And it also creates an entitlement for people that are new to be like, oh, I just want more of those. And there's enough of that already. So what we've moved to is a merit, you know, a merit based system where somebody comes in the organization. If somebody's, you know, unlicensed, they come in at, we call our pilot level. They move after, after they've gotten through their number of outreaches, they've gotten their sphere SOI amplifier completed and they've done some activities and kind of cut their teeth, gone through our seven days of success. And so we have a very short, compact training program to get somebody, the fundamentals to be able to take a call, get through a script and to be able to book an appointment and work in the system. And so that's, hey, we got to. We also recognize that has to happen really quickly. If you have any sort of long 30, 60, 90 day training program, by the time they get there, they're already done because there's no money. If they sell a Property on day one, they're not going to get paid until day 45. Most people don't even have the cash to get there. You know, it's just the nature of the beast. Different for different markets, of course, but for most people, most people can't go 90 days without income. And so our goal was, hey, how do we get you up to speed? Really really quickly. So a captain would come in, you know, or a pilot would come in, maybe just licensed or, you know, in the year in the business, less than a year, somebody who's had a little bit experience and how do we get you off the ground, start taking some opportunities? How do you answer the call and be able to just start talking to people and get an opportunity to go close a deal. That has to happen quickly or the career just ends for most people. Most people are not going to hang in there for three, four, six months for a first check. And so we've got to drive that quickly. So once they finish their initial activities, they move to what we call our captain level, where they have access to opportunity time, which is inbound opportunities, which, you know, the phone rings during these three hours. These are your calls, these are your, you know, hand raisers, you know, your other opportunities. We also give people access for outbound to our full database. So, you know, amazing. Amazingly, it's almost 200,000 people in our database because we started in 2008. You know, so there's, you know, people always ask, well, do you have leads? I'm like, have more leads than you can call for the rest of your life. When do you want to start? You know, like you're hardcore, like you like to pick up the phone I got you after that. When someone moves to, you know, one sale a month, they move to the next level, you know, which we call our commander level. There are opportunities that come into me personally. And so when I get those direct referrals, whether they're through Compass or through my personal networks, I do work with select clients. There are some clients that I, you know, that it's not fair to refer, but I will refer those to our most productive agents. And so, so we built a merit based system to be respectful of the clients, to compare people with the best agents and reward our best agents at the same time. A place where people can grow and build their skills along the way. And we have found that that has been well received. One of our, something that I'm working on really hard right now is how do we operational. How do we operationalize deep culture? And one of that was having we created a monthly, we call it our General Council. We kind of went with some military themes on this stuff.

Yeah, by the way, I love the naval theme throughout your agent level.

Yeah, we tried a couple different. We tried to find some other ways to do it. That's where we kind of settled in. We settled in this military team.

Put together this council and that's a blend of leadership and. And top producing agents, maybe.

Correct. You know, once a month we get together with our top agents and we just sit down and have breakfast. We go down to Pink Blossom and Lewis and we sit down and have a couple omelets and then, you know, we just open it up and it's a different conversation than when you're sitting in the boardroom. And so, you know, what's the feedback there? And you know, we're rolling out. We're calling our Nexus program. So we hired an inside sales manager. Who else is inside sales trainer. And we've had inside sales teams over the years, but we've outsourced it a couple times and then we're insourcing it again. But within that, I was sharing with those guys because they were like, oh, well, what would the fee be? And we kind of went back and forth on what would fair and what people would feel good about. And then I said, but this will only be eligible to a few people. Like, one, we got to make it profitable. Two, it's got to be fair to the best people. Right. This isn't for everybody because everybody doesn't deserve to it. You know, as much as we'd love to give it to everybody to have them walk in the door, the people that have been here also deserve to be rewarded. Like you're bringing company $. You're participating in helping them in mortgage and title and insurance, which are all indirectly helping the organization. And so why wouldn't we reward our best performers and as a team. Not that they don't know it, but it's good to hear it out loud that, hey, we value. And we're not just going to toss off these, you know, these amazing referrals to people that don't deserve them. You're going to get those opportunities and people that deserve them will get opportunities as well. But that's the kind of organization that we've tried to create and try to instill and obviously working on it all the time. Every day is a chance to get better.

Yeah, I really appreciate bringing agent voices into this decision making. Really kind of fleshing out some of the ideas, figuring out what the right thing to do is. I was going to say what's fair, but like it's, you know, what. What makes the most sense for all the people involved. I appreciate that. Anything you. Any tips you would like to share for people. I've certainly heard from very large organizations that say, you know, we don't use ISAs. We tried it a couple times. It Never really worked for us. And then of course, I've heard from a ton of folks who, you know, we've had them from day one. We do it domestically, or we've had them from day one, we do it, you know, with VAs for you. Over the years, as you've tried inside Sales a few different ways, what are a couple takeaways from that journey that would be informative for people to maybe figure out if they've got the right thing or signs that they should pull the plug or any lessons learned in some of the fits and starts in doing that in a way that makes the most sense for your organization?

Yeah, and I work with some of the best coaches in the world. I'm really honored to work with Mike Shum and Shran Srivatsa and. And, you know, spent a lot of time with John Cheplak and Tom Ferry over the years. So, you know, a lot of the usual suspects with some really, really great coaches. There's been times where, you know, inside sales has been highly productive, especially during that fast time we talked about, you know, 2000 or going back to, you know, three or four years where the market was really fast. It's about speed and it's just about making connection. And as that call has gotten more fast, it's about speed and it's just about making connection. And as that call has gotten more nuanced, at the same time, it has also become more systematic. I think one of the beauties of our experience with Zillow is that we see that there is a cadence to that call that the consumers like. Again, we talk about what's the consumer experience. The consumer experience for them needs to be alm, right? Appointment, location, motivation, Finding out that there's basically a formula for the call. This is sales 101. Right. How do you do that? Right. And so when you can systematize that, it works really, really well. That's when somebody wants to call and see a property. When you're working a little bit earlier in the consumer journey or higher in the funnel, that is a more nuanced call, which really is better done with an agent for the most part. So all that to say is that it does change. Our focus became, you know, and seeing the possibility of the live transfer, which was, you know, you know, now there's real time touring, which we're really grateful for. The live transfer is incredibly exciting because that's what agents want. Again, also creating an entitlement like this is so easy. Oh. That, you know, or they call, they screw Up a call and you're like, hey, you just burned up a thousand dollars. Thanks. Yeah. Oh, sorry. Well, call, you know, the next one.

So.

So anyway, the value of making sure that that call is well trained. And so our focus is on making as many live transfers as possible. And so we pursued that through a third party ISA company. And then we realized that we were capable of insourcing it due to the technology from follow up boss. And so we're like, hey, how do we knowing that this is what the agent wants? And then from a consumer experience, if we can get the consumer to talk to the agent at the time that they want to talk to the agent versus having a lag for the appointment, this is what the consumer wants. They want to talk to somebody when they want to talk to them. They don't want an appointment for an hour, three hours, two days later. They want to talk when they want to talk. And as soon as they're done, they're on. You know, just like all of us, they're on to living their lives. And so our holy grail is how many live transfers can we create. And so we're doing that between, you know, real estate and mortgage and insurance. And so we're going, you know, kind of, you know, early journey top of funnel to have those conversations early. Can we get a live transfer? It's about, you know, for ISA hours. It's about one live transfer for every eight hours. So it's not like, oh, we're, you know, the phone's ringing off the hook and then, you know, you know, one to two appointments per hour per isa. And so the, it's still a blend. People aren't always willing to get there. But the more that I've worked on this, the more I, and knowing what I know between all the coaches that I talk to that it just, there seems to be some breakage no matter how you do it when you're having a third party handle it. And so we've decided to continue to insource that we've had really had tremendous success this year and are now moving live appointments through for insurance, mortgage and real estate through follow up office, which is tremendous because they're recorded. And then they're also the AI gives you a summary. So if anybody goes back to them, I mean this is the experience that agents and insurance agents and loan originators want, Right? They don't want to call anybody and be rejected either. They want to just talk to the person who wants to buy something, right?

Yeah, well, frankly, I mean, just to plus up the idea of the recorded calls and of course that whole communication thread that's on every single contact and follow up bots. If someone's picking up on something later in the relationship for one reason or another, it's summarizing, you know, the whole string of emails, calls and texts from the past, you know, X number of months or even years. So someone can step into that same thing too. Like between agents, if an agent is going to pick up on someone else's situation, maybe to back them up in the case of a vacation or an emergency or something. Or of course, you know, TC an agent as they're working through something. There's so many, so much value in the there. Breakage is such a key word there. And like you just burned an expensive opportunity, you know, of course that's part of the whole math problem to figure out and make sure that you're operating well. And I just want to kind of go back to training for a minute on that because I assume especially between different functions within your organization, you know, that all requires training. So you mentioned like five or six different people who are providing some of this training. You mentioned, you know, one on one access, et cetera. But like any philosophy or approach that you can, you know, share some tips around with regard to training on a breadth of topics. Some of them are, you know, immediate in focus to like this is I'm going to train you to do something that you do every single day better. But at the same time I also need to train you for some of these other circumstances that come up every other day or every week or whatever. Like there's, there's so much in there, like how do you layer some of this stuff and what triggers it? This question for me was like, of course there are the basic skills and we need to train and retrain that stuff. But like even something like, you know, handoffs, where there is breakage, there is, if we can minimize this, there's real, you know, midline and bottom line value to the organization. If we can just move this number by 5%, not 5 percentage points, but 5%, you know, there's real money there. Like any thoughts on like how to manage like all the different things that you can and should be training on. Like how do you all balance that as an organization?

Well, a couple thoughts. One is the training cadence and we were a little overly optimistic about creating a library that people could go to. And then you go to the trainings. People just want to know when they want to know it and they just want to hear it from a person. You know, the seven day success is a tremendous success and then sometimes we'll backfill on some other things. But I found that, that agents, you know, you're dealing with expressives and drivers or they just want to know what they want, when they want to know it, or are they just expressive, just want to be around people to talk about it. Right. So you got to think about your personality styles of the type of agents. Those are two, two styles that are not real excited about sitting down for an hour and watching a training. So it needs to be interactive. And so for our part, what we found that was really successful was a tight one hour training at 9 o', clock, which we have on Monday, which is our open house follow up. So open houses, you know, and not for everybody, but they're a high conversion, conversion lead opportunity. I think statistically about 7% of open house visitors purchase within a year. So that is a very strong lead source. And so we've leaned into that. It also gives agents the confidence because they're out in the marketplace. It's also an activity you're doing something as a new agent, like, hey, I've got an open house. There's a marketing opportunity that goes around that a lot of really positive things around open house, learning the market, expressing right, dealing with people, sales skills, confidence, fun, energy, momentum, something to talk about to your friends, family, neighbors, like hey, I'm at this great open house. Oh cool. And then you're in real estate, like you're getting the experience of it. So open houses on Monday. We have our team meeting on Monday at 11. It's always well attended. We usually have about, you know, 75, 60 to 75 people from the organizations together. On Tuesdays we've done our social media and sphere training. So that is a focus on how do you, you know. For our part, we've created a media submission form so an agent can take a video, they can upload it and our distribution team will actually create it and then distribute it for them. But hey, for some people it's like this is TikTok and hey, you know what, maybe TikTok's not for you, maybe you're LinkedIn. One of the things that I share is like, hey, these are the different demographics that are on the different platforms and the age groups and hey, you're a young person and you think LinkedIn is stupid. But all of these retirees are on LinkedIn and they go to look for you and you don't exist. They're probably not going to work with you. And so helping people to kind of round that out. Another channel where you're connecting with your social media and sphere. So open houses, you know, consumers are in the marketplace sphere of influence is triggering your sphere. We also have our SOI amplifier where people are reaching out, you know, bringing that into our database and then an email campaign. On Wednesdays, Jesse does live buyer trainings role plays where he actually makes live calls with people on the call to say, hey, sure, this is how you do it. Like, listen to the objection handling. All right, now in the second half of the call, you do it. Now that's the hard part is getting, you know, getting an agent to do it. But at least there's an opportunity to. And with Alec joining us as the inside sales manager, we're going to actually have him have a specific time for, as a, as a prospecting peer just to sit down and with somebody who's maybe having trouble refine the list like, oh, he just make these calls and be a prospecting coach. And so I still think that there's that one to one. We always, when an agent joins the team, they had to, they shadow an opportunity time where calls are coming in and someone's kind of showing them how to do it. We need to do more of that. And we're going to on Thursdays. I've led a listing mastermind many times. It's just like, hey, what are your challenges before we get to the lesson, where are you stuck? Oh, I've got this listing and I can't get it sold. You know, just talking to agent yesterday, she know she had joined the company and had a grossly overpriced listing. And we're like, hey, we got to get a reduction. All right, nothing's happened. Another reduction. And then she's like, ah, I don't know they can go any lower. Like, it's the price. You know, it's either, you know, marketing condition or price. And we know from our marketing it's at this point, it's the price. So eventually, you know, after 5 reductions, property sells, you know, and she's high fiving but as an agent, she wouldn't have had the confidence to do that without having somebody to be with. Right. It's interactive. And so an interactive conversation with the agent specifically, hey, do we need a price reduction? Do we need an open house? We have a property we're going to reintroduce. Hey, how can we get that marketing done? I'm meeting with the agent today. What can we do special for this Niche listing that's, you know, high priced and maybe not in a, you know, not in a typical area that would be associated with that high price because it's. So it's not going to be coming up in most search. And then on Fridays It's Agent 101, which is, you know, working directly with, with the conversations with our listing department, our client success department. It's about contracts, contract writing. And then throughout the other kind of magic to what we've been able to do, and I say that with a lot of humility, is having a manager of the day. So each day we have somebody in leadership who answers any calls that come in about contracts, whether they're stuck somewhere. Obviously there's only so much depth that that can get into when it comes to that kind of training. But when you're in a crisis, we found this a couple years ago that people were really frustrated. They're like, oh, I can't get a hold of anybody. What does that mean? Like we're not like unavailable. There was not a natural conduit. And so we said, okay, great. Every day there's going to be someone that you can call, that you can ask a quick question to our general counsel. We ask our leaders to reach out and to mentor discreetly without having a formal relationship. So we'll say, hey Julie, looks like you have a great relationship with Beth. Why don't you just, if you don't mind, check in and see how she's doing. And so we try to keep that glue there. But having everybody know that there's someone to reach out to also takes away the panic of oh God, what do I do? Right. And so having a training cadence that allows for that interaction all the time. We briefly changed our training cadence for the first, for the last few weeks. And we got feedback right away that people missed this one to one training. So we were doing some additional modules. So I think going forward it's going to be a combination of continuing this cadence, which people like, and then intermittently much longer trainings. And you know, we're going to be doing one to one role plays on the buyer, presentation, listing, presentation in the same room, but that'll be on a monthly basis. And I think when you kind of start to layer all of those things along with some individual coaching and some check ins. You mentioned earlier about how do you get accountability. And so we developed a simple business plan for each agent that you kind of look in a real simple tracker. What is it committed to? What do you want to be? And as we Go forward, we're going to be saying, hey, what is the one thing that you can do moving into next week? Because I think as a group, I can't speak for other organizations, but I think agents have been overwhelmed with so much to do and not what to do next and be like, okay, cool, cool. Now you're going to do three open houses and you're going to call these 10 people. And then having a cadence of check ins to keep people focused. We didn't quite touch on it. You had asked earlier and I just wanted to bring it back to light, which was, hey, how do you get recommitment? And so with each of those phases where someone goes from pilot to captain to commander, we have what we call our contract for success. And where we go over, hey, what's expected of you at this level? At this level you're supposed to be doing this. Is this something you're comfortable with? Are you committed to this? And it has helped people to be very clear and also to understand the consequences and the rewards and to be appreciative for those things.

And if there's not that level of commitment, then let's talk about what's next then.

Yeah, we've by choice offboarded quite a few agents. Agents who aren't productive or who stop participating. Usually they will offboard themselves. So we're always looking for good people. You know, we've been at a critical mass of about 80 agents for a better part of a year. And that seems to be a really healthy place for us. And we just want to keep working with the, you know, growing the core of our really talented agents. And this is a business where people leave for good reasons, they leave for bad reasons. And you know, sometimes there are opportunities that come up and you never want to hold anybody back. So I haven't moved many times in my career, just twice, but both times were for good. And they've both been great decisions. And you know, we do see that when agents leave our organization that their production drops off. And I think there's a lot of reasons for that. But it is something that people sometimes want to explore. And then, you know, there are other times where someone just, you know, demonstrated unreliability is a non starter for me. That's a military term. It's like, hey, it's immediately clear what, it's never your fault, but somehow it's always your fault. You know, at the end of the day, if someone's unreliable and they don't follow through, we just, we wish them well and Say, hey, you know what? This is not good for you. Good fit for you. We want to help you find another brokerage and we'll give them a couple options and then we'll help them to move on. That's always hard. But you can't keep people that are not reliable around a group of people that are really trying to do great work because it really creates a lot of friction. And that's the culture that people want to be a part of. They don't want to be around people that aren't doing the right things. And then people who are unreliable are also usually unproductive and usually the people that are complaining the most.

Several things here. One, really nice tie back to the a player conversation at the very, very beginning of this. Two, I love the specificity in who to reach out to today, you know, versus this. I could reach anyone. I love the bias toward in person and interactivity that we've heard throughout this conversation, including, you know, let's get out of the office together and go have these conversations in person somewhere else. In addition to having, like, in person interactive training, so much really good stuff here. We've covered a ton of ground. We're pushing up on an hour here. So I want to hit my three pairs of closing questions with you. Dustin, thank you for all this time. The first one is. And you can answer one or the other. Some people like to do both, which is fine too, but it's designed for one or the other. What is your very favorite team to root for besides your own team? Or what is the best team you've ever been a member of besides your own team?

The best team I've ever been a member of. The best team I've ever been a member of was the Nuclear Navy. I was with the. The some of the most brilliant people on the planet. You know, as somebody who it was not easy to get into nuclear power school and as somebody who felt that that was quite an accomplishment, I was in the bottom half of the class for most of the time, and I would be struggling for 40 hours a week to do what people could come in and, you know, write like A Beautiful Mind and Good Will Hunting. There are some brilliant people out there and that is just a tremendous group of people. The team that I root for is the. Is the John Wentworth Group. And I don't know if John has hit your radar yet. If he hasn't, then you need to talk to him. He's a really special guy. He's got a tremendous story, hardship and a really, really touching And a really traumatic childhood and somebody who's. Who's decided to make the world a better place has a tremendous team. I think they're on pace to do 3 or 400 million in production this year in Michigan. If you haven't met him, he's one of the most beautiful people you've ever met. And his story is really compelling. And so. So he's one of the good people out there that's out there lifting other people up and deserves all of his success. Beautiful.

Appreciate that, and thanks for the recommendation. Now I'm gonna go to something that feels inappropriate for the moment only because it's the next question that I always ask.

That's all right.

Which is what is one of your most frivolous purchases? Or what's a cheapskate habit you hold onto even though you probably don't need to?

I'm trying to think of something frivolous that I bought. Oh, yeah, I'm in love with these JBL Go speakers. They're these little 4x4 speakers and I bought three of them. I only needed one, but I like them so much, I'm always afraid I won't have one because I like to just be in a place. If it's at the beach or if like we're at an event, I always like a lot of little bit of light music to just take the edge off of things. And so these little, they're little JBL Go speakers that are about. They got a little bit of bass, they got a little bit of noise. And like no matter where you're at, you can, you know, you can dial up a little bit of a good time or a playlist and have some fun. And yeah, I don't need three of them, but for some reason I keep buying them because I'm afraid I'm not going to have one when I, when I, when I need it.

That's funny. I have some redundancy in my life and it always feels like it's a. It's a funny, like psychological phenomenon, like 50 bucks.

But I'm like, I didn't need. I don't like, why did I buy the third one? I like, I need one in white because what if, you know, I can't see the. What if I can't see the one in black?

Yeah, what if it's that what if train that leads to questionable decisions. What are you doing when you're investing time in learning, growing and developing? Or what are you doing when you're investing time in resting, relaxing and recharging.

I have somebody who enjoys learning and feel like you're always working on your craft, whether it's through video or through reading. I do like to read a little bit every morning with three kids. Sparta gets up sometimes a little earlier than we would like to. He's in a little phase where he's getting up three or four times at night right now. So that changes some things. But always looking for ways to improve. So you look to coaches, you look to where you can get some bites as information. Getting off site and getting to events like Zillow Unlocked and the Follow. It was the fubcon also as a part of that. And then the Zillow conversion opportunity was great. I think there's some other, some other opportunities out there. I remember years ago going to Gary Vee's event at Raymond James Hard Rock Stadium in Miami. Yeah, that was fabulous. That was fabulous. I had an interesting conversation with Gary there. It was pretty tense at first. He was interesting. He made some assumptions about me before we got started, and it was not the. I was excited to meet a hero. Right. And next thing you know, he was kind of putting me on the ropes and I had to, had to push back, interestingly enough, if I was going to maybe highlight something he recorded that entire day as a podcast, as a, as a, as an, as a, as a beta to see if somebody would listen to 12 hours of content.

Yeah.

And the conversation that I had with him, he actually said in the podcast, he stopped the podcast and said, I want you to rewind the podcast to this conversation because this is the most important thing we talked about. He said the most important thing you could take away from, from this, which is effectively, you need to create as much content as you possibly can at as much scale as you can, while keeping intact the things that you have in place. And then as far as resting goes. Yeah, I build my Fridays with white space. I have a very structured schedule and I think you need to have an ideal schedule and have some flexibility in there. As my friend says, mornings are for ideation, afternoons are for execution. So your cognitive ability, your cognitive strain builds up over the course of the day. So we're best in the morning. So I usually start my day around 4:30. I'll have a little coffee, I'll do a quick read, I'll review my goals and plans. If Maria gets up, depending on how many times Sparta's been up, we'll have a few minutes and we'll talk about the schedule. And then I go to CrossFit, maybe follow that up with a sauna, which is a recovery modality. When I have space, I'll cold plunge after that. It's not every day I get a chance to do it, but some of those things do help to recharge. I'll get the kids out to school after kind of changing and everything. And then 8:30 I'm into my first meetings. And so usually 8:30 to 12:30 scheduled meetings Monday through Thursday. That's between leadership and. And then the different company meetings as well as some of the one on ones. And I'm really, really focused on my family from the time I get home. I don't take calls after six occasionally if there's a contractor crisis, but in general, once I get on the Family Channel, I'm on the Family Channel. I think you need to have planned time off and planned time off in your relationships and focused on your relationships. So Maria and I as a couple always try to find two to three hours each week. It used to be a day, so we would take Wednesday afternoons. And that gets harder and harder to do. But if we can get together, just the two of us, one on one for a couple hours, sometimes on Friday afternoon we might go get a coffee or just go sit down and talk. That's a place that recharges me. And then our travels and so overlapping some of our business travel with some extended trips. So when we go out to Colorado last year, we got a bluebird day up in a basin. It was our first time. We hadn't skied in years, so it was amazing. Fred Gross was really impactful to me and just saying, hey, every year you should have something really, really big to look forward to. Every quarter you should have something that you have planned that you look forward to. And then every day you should have things that you enjoy. And so when you build your schedule, build in things that you love to do so that your life is really meaningful and you have something to give to other people.

I appreciate all that detail. I appreciate you making this conversation part of this Friday. I'm so glad that there was space for it. If anyone has spent this amount of time with both of us, I'm sure they want to know where they can connect with you and learn more. I'm going to drop some links down below this episode. No matter where people are watching or listening, are there any particular links you would like me to include?

Sure. I mean, I'm on Instagram. I'm Dustin ustinoldfather. Everywhere you go, I'm easy to reach. You know, call, email or text or hit me through messenger and love to connect with more people.

I'll have a variety of things linked up right down below. Whether you're watching YouTube, listening or watching in Spotify, listening in Apple podcasts, or watching or listening@realestateteamos.com Dustin, I appreciate you so much. I hope you have a fantastic rest of your Friday and a wonderful weekend.

I want to say thank you to you too for doing this, Ethan. Like you are such a tremendous voice in the space and what you're doing is incredibly important to help all of the teams and other people in the industry grow and spreading the words and helping to share institutional knowledge so that we can all do a better job and serve the community even better. And so you are a special talent in this, in this space and we're really grateful to have you.

Thank you so much. It's very generous of you.

It's true.

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