Operations and Your Real Estate Tech with Chelly Herren | [Techtember] Ep 043

How to increase operational efficiency and agent productivity while reducing redundancy by simplifying your tech stack. A thoughtful and disciplined approach to measuring the true cost and the true benefit of a piece of technology before you commit to it. Specific tactics to increase agent understanding, adoption and buy in of new tech. That's just some of what you'll get in this Tech Timber episode. With a proven operations leader with a passion for real estate technology. I know you'll learn a lot from Shea Herron right now 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 a real estate team. Here's your host, Ethan Butte.

Shea, thank you so much for being here and thank you so much for everything you do within the follow up boss community.

Thanks so much for having me, Ethan. So, so happy to be here.

Cool. I'm going to start with you where I start with literally everybody who appears on the show, which is what is a must have characteristic of a high performing.

Oh, that's a good question. I would say a high performing leader is probably the number one characteristic of a high performing team that I have come across. It's just a characteristic that I feel like the team kind of always wants to be aspiring to be some version of that leader. Whether it's like production wise, whether it's how efficient they run their business, whether it's, they're just attracted to that person because they're a charismatic leader. I feel like strong leadership is, is probably that one characteristic.

Really good. I like that you roped in there some characteristics of a high performing leader and I feel like part of what I hear in what you shared there is leading by example. And then also, you know, when we're recruiting, I don't know if we want to turn this, this Tech Timber episode into a recruiting conversation, but you know, there are a lot of things we need to deliver. We need to, we need to have the right kind of financial arrangements, splits, fees, services to make sense for someone who's joining our team. But I think a lot of it is this intangible. I'm joining this person which is part of the high performance piece. So talk a little bit about like leading by example.

I agree with you that I think that, you know, if you had laid out a bunch of different team options, if you were an agent who has had a few different options, you could compare dollars and cents obviously with splits and Things like you just mentioned. But also I think that you would be very, at least I would be very closely looking at who is the person who leads that team. How do they lead by example, what do they do on a daily basis or how have they been successful in real estate in a way that makes me want to follow them or learn from them or be coached by them. And I know there's examples of team leads who maybe don't even have a huge real estate background. They're more running a team because they're very good at aspects of running a team that are super important important. In my particular case, I'm super lucky to have someone who runs our team who is an incredible role model and he is a very high producing agent who's worked very hard to get to the role that he's in. And I know for our team members it's really a neat opportunity for us to get to watch him how he runs his business, how what a well oiled machine he is as far as how he carries out his prospecting activities and you know, everything down to the paperwork that he process, he uses on a listing appointment. So I find that even if agents aren't aspiring to be him, they might be aspiring to be operating at a level that may be a little higher than where they have been previously in their career and they can take bits and pieces from him and apply them to his business. We're always saying, or to their business. Excuse me, we're always saying to agents, we're not asking you to be a miniature version of Jeff who is our team lead and has been in the business for 20 years. We're just asking you to, you know, take bits and pieces of his coaching and his leadership and apply that to your business because that will help you level up.

That's great. I would love to arrive at when you join Jeff and the role that you serve in that organization, but I'd love for you to do that. Backing up. One of the things I love about your background in real estate is that you've led both operations and you've led sales and marketing in different contexts. So I'd love to have you kind of just walk us into where you are today from where you started in the business.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Well, I'll give you a brief, a brief history, but I got licensed back in 2005 as kind of something that I, I knew I wanted to have a real estate license because I have some family members who have been in real estate, but I wasn't quite sure where I wanted to take it. I had a business degree. I actually was interested in supply chain management when I was in college. So real estate wasn't really on my radar. But I knew I wanted to get that license. So my early days I worked for a land developer that was very interesting experience. Got to see a lot of different things there. And then he started a real estate brokerage that I helped found and began the early stages of operations was my main focus in my role. So that was like very quick growing 0 to 100 agents in just a few years. Two different locations, two different cities. So that was really fast moving. And I would say that that is what started all of my real estate operational and sales curiosity. I hadn't really sold prior to that. I've mostly focused on management roles for my career, although I have had some time in sales as you mentioned. So I asked a friend if I could hang my license with him when I was kind of in transition, when I was getting ready start my family. I have a 10 year old daughter and a 6 year old daughter. And he said sure, yeah, sounds great. That was Jeff Hyland who I currently work for. And he called me up one day and said, I have a great opportunity to take on a build a relationship, but I would really need some help from someone like you who could help keep track of things for me. And I said, well, why would you help me? I'm not really sure if that's the best fit for me because I really don't have a big background in that part of the business. But he said, well, let's just give it a shop. So we went on to grow new home sales or builder division of his team over the course of a few years and that became quite successful. We had hundreds of sales for a few different builders here in the Prescott Arizona area. And then in 2020 he came to me and said, you know, we have a few agents on the team now, I have a few buyer's agents and I'm busy enough that I have a need for more agents to help me and I want to grow the team, but I would really need the help of someone like you to help me grow the team and help me oversee everything that goes into that. And would you be interested in kind of transitioning to that type of role? And with age of my children especially, I was very interested because operations had been my background. I liked sales, but I was very interested in kind of helping him grow that part of the business. So that was in 2020 and we were I think around maybe four agents or so on our buy side team at the time. Maybe six. Four to six, I would say. So that was kind of the beginning of the journey that I'm currently in now, which is team management for the Highland Group.

That's great. Characterize for us the Highland Group, like high level, however you like. Like you already mentioned you're in Prescott, Arizona. I can imagine there's been a ton of new construction, you know, over the past decade or two there. Size of the team today, kind of culture structure. Just give us a snapshot of what the group looks like today.

So we are 18 agents, not including Jeff. Jeff is still in production team lead. He's listing at over 100 transactions a year. So he's very, very busy still. We have agents on our team who focus on mostly buyers, but also do focus on listings. There's a small specialized group of them that focus on listings. And then we have six staff members and three ISAs. So we're around the 25, 26 members at any given time. As far as our team, I would characterize us as a high producing real estate team. We have a minimum standard on our team and then the per person productivity for our team. If you take Jeff out, because that's kind of cheating if you keep him in there, but you take Jeff out, we like to keep that number up, over 20 per person productivity. So as far as the team itself and kind of our culture, we like to have a lot of fun but work really hard. So, you know, we're just all very focused on client experience, making sure that, you know, each of those clients that we work with leave feeling like they really got their real estate needs met and that we stayed a step ahead them all along the way with sort of like an anticipatory way of serving them so that we can keep them informed as to what the next step is. And we do that in a lot of different ways. But I would say that that's, you know, having a five star client experience is something that has been part of our culture for a long time. And so I feel like we attract agents for that reason. We attract clients for that reason. And then when I say work really hard, it just means everybody's working really hard to keep those clients happy. But then we also have to remind ourselves not to be too serious too all the time and be, you know, have a lot of fun while we're doing it because ultimately it's pretty neat to be able to help people find a home. And truly that's, that's kind of it's exciting to be able to. To participate in people's lives and in one of the biggest transactions that they ever will do. So that's kind of an overview.

Absolutely. I agree with you completely and I really like this idea of. I've come to the understanding over the past year or so of talking with hundreds of people, primarily team leaders and operators such as yourself, that the team affords more opportunity to do that than some other formats, particularly for solo agents, just because there's so much support and leverage. And what I'm doing here is kind of teeing up where I want to go, which is, you know, we can have the per agent productivity conversation a lot of different ways and we do here on real estate Team os, certainly there's the kind of the coaching training side of it. A precursor to that is how we recruit and onboard people. But what I really want to do in this Tech Timber episode with you in particular, Shay, is get into how operations in general and technology in particular also helps keep agents in their most dollar productive activities and on track in order to be highly productive, because that's the key to a successful organization. So I guess we'll start with technology in general. Like talk about your philosophy of the tech stack overall, how do you think about it, what role does it play? And then we'll kind of get into a little bit of detail there. But when did you become passionate about technology and what role does it play in. In your thought about how you're designing the operations of the team?

So when I, in 2020, when I was asked to get involved with managing the team, I took kind of a survey of everything that we had going on. The awesome staff that was in place prior to me joining their management team had already found Follow Up Boss. So that was a great win. And we actually onboarded with Follow Up Boss in the early spring of 2020. So we had a lot of time in that initial month or so to sit around our CRM before we realized that the real estate market was about to explode. So that was, that was great timing on our part. As I looked through everything that was in place in the team again, there was a great staff. Jeff's had a transaction coordinator that's been with the team for, I think she's going on like 15 years is what she'll celebrate as far as her anniversary this year. She's really grown with the team. We had a great operations manager who had put a lot of structure and great stuff in place. So I wasn't walking into like starting from scratch But I definitely wanted to survey everything that was happening inside the team and then figure out if there was any ways that we could become more efficient, that we could streamline things, that we could just make agents more efficient. I think in my brokerage experience that's really what I determined is that, you know, an efficient agent has a lot of time for those income producing activities. The inefficient agent who may not yet understand all the tools that are available to them or struggle to get the right tools in place, may work really, really hard on a lot of activities that aren't necessarily income producing and aren't going to help them to get further in their business and help more clients. And so putting the right tools in place became something I just was basically obsessed with. So Follow Up Boss was like the foundation of that. And we were pretty simple back then. We had, you know, Follow Up Boss and then we had a website, an IDX website that basically helped us to attract clients and to keep our, you know, existing clients in a really easy environment to search and then the agents to have a lot of transparency. But quickly we, I determined that we had a lot of different systems that we were updating constantly. Like we were, you know, whether it be a spreadsheet or some tracking documents or it might be, you know, a separate software that we had. We were constantly moving in and out of different platforms. And so we all sat together in a room early on when I started this role and we really mapped out, and when I say we, our staff mapped out our client experience and so we kind of just went step by step through the client's experience to make sure that the communication that the client was receiving from us was always really consistent. And that kept their experience feeling very high touch, but also made sure that we were very concise and clear in the communication that we had and making sure that each of our steps in the process, I guess of like managing a transaction and getting a client from a interest level all the way to a closed transaction and post close was just very clearly defined. And we were on the same page about that. So that was step one to that process. And then once we identified all that, I remember I had attended a webinar that week where Automations had been released by Follow Up Boss. And I thought, you know, there's so much of this that we just identified that we could be putting into Follow Up Boss in say an action plan and that would give so much more transparency to our team without having to go in and out of two or three different softwares. I'm going to see about putting this all together in one place. Basically I took transaction checklists that we had been using for years and basically leveraged those into follow up boss through action plans and some automations and then also added some customers.