Showing posts with label B-School Coaching Calls. Show all posts
Showing posts with label B-School Coaching Calls. Show all posts
Kick Start Your New Year’s Resolutions With The 1 Year Planner
Transcript:
Before diving in, I’d like to remind you about the October Intensive session. We covered the idea planner. This exercise is something you should do personally and everyone on your team -- staff and agents -- should do as well. If you have one person or a hundred people on your team, take them through an hour or two planning meeting. I believe this one page is a true gift! What you write on this page is what will transpire over the next year.
The first step of this is to brainstorm through the main areas of your life, including your health, relationship, finances, faith, business, personal development, and any other areas you think are important to you. Write goals to set for yourself. Maybe identify 25 and narrow it down to 10 that are the most crucial. Take your team through this exercise, too. For each of these goals, write out why it’s important and add emotion. Draw lines to separate the first quarter. Feel free to get a head start on your New Year’s resolutions in December!
This is a cool exercise. I wanted to point it out since not all of you attended the session. Basically, you create a real-time document to reference all the time. Approximately, I suggest three of these should be professional while six should be personal. This process allows you to measure your goals and track your progress.
It’s important to write these things down. It’s the perfect time of year to do this with your team. They will look at your different after presenting these resources to them. Walk them through your planner sheets.
Personally, I have three business and seven personal one-year planners. I have one for my real estate and coaching companies in addition net worth, giving, faith, marriage, father, health, and “epic family adventure” goals. What are yours?
The Secret to Expanding Your Key Profit Drivers
Transcript:
This was an exercise we went through at the October Intensive. This is all my team is working on next year: The power of optimization. Looking at our existing lead sources, and focusing a little bit on some different lead sources. Digital farming is going to be big for us, just using the power of Facebook and YouTube to get traffic with direct offers. We're working with Vyral Marketing on most of this.
On the buyer side, we get so many yard sign calls and internet registration, but neither of them are actually leads. That's why I mentioned the click funnels. We are working on converting those into actual leads. What can we do to take someone who doesn't want to talk to someone to get the price of a home and don't want to have someone call them after they register on the site. How can we give them the experience, the education, and the content to have them truly raise their hand and want to be contacted by us. That's the next push on the buyer side.
On the listing side, it's a lot of digital farming focus and then we are looking at in person and on the phone in terms of our sales conversion. What we do works really well, but getting even better at what we do is the idea. Our actual sales conversions, getting more clients. Getting more money, we're doing some things there to offer more services to increase our commission on the listing side.
Helping our agent's get more transaction fees. I was a little bit farther down the path with my team in terms of transaction fees. If I had to do it over again, every fee would be collected every time, but that's not how we have it set up. We're switching over to that starting on the first of the year. That will be a doubling of fees into our business, which will give us more money to add more value to our clients and serve the whole virtual cycle we talked about at the event.
This year, transaction fees after agents, has been $148,000 to the company, which helps pay for some marketing chunks and a few people. It's significant income. Just giving our agents a more concrete value proposition on the listing side to help them get better listing commissions. And then just adding more value. This goes to the referral system that we talked about. We are putting together that structured sphere of influence, the business mastermind. Add more value, follow up, give more, and ultimately get more. That is all we are focusing on next year.
Design Your Sales Process to Meet All of Your Clients' Needs
Transcript:
A large part of determining your sales process is pinpointing the purchase needs of your customers. There are seven categories that I like to look at, and I start with Information.
You'll need to know what your buyers need. Understanding is another aspect, and this is because you must help to interpret the facts. You can determine how much information or understanding your customer needs by filling in the box ranked 'high' to 'low'. In my opinion, buyers probably don't have as much of a need for information as sellers.
There are other things like reassurance, advice, and assistance that buyers may need more of, but I'd always say that sellers will need a high level of information. Assistance is something that buyers and sellers will both need a lot of. You just want an understanding of your customers' needs. These are pretty basic things, but having this conversation in your mind is very helpful to serving them at a high level.
Think carefully about how your customers go about making their purchase decisions. Visualize them. Feel what they feel. Then for each need category, briefly but specifically describe what your customers need, and over what time frames they need it in, in order to reach the right purchase decision for them. I know that we don't do enough of this at my office. We've sold hundreds of homes, and we're not thinking about what a first time buyer feels.
I'll break down the customer needs individually:
- Information: The facts. Providing information about the service, how to get it, what it does - anything the customer wants to know.
- Understanding: Interpretation of the facts. Customers want to know what conclusions to draw. They want to understand what it means for them.
- Needs clarification: Many customers don't understand their needs and desires and are grateful for help in clarifying their needs.
- Advice: Customers want advice from a source that is objective and impartial or biased in their favor.
- Assistance: Sometimes customers need more than information and advice - they need someone to help assist them with the process.
- Reassurance: Customers want to feel like they are making the right purchase decision. Providing them with reassurance, based on their needs, ensures a win-win situation.
- Transaction processing: This is the sales transaction itself. Money in exchange for services. Preparing and executing paperwork for purchasing a home is a good example.
After analyzing this information you can then go back and find out what is messed up about your buyer sales process. This is not difficult stuff, you just have to slow down and think about it.
Once you have some ideas, write them down on the improvement sheet. In that same space, create a list of questions to ask your buyer prospects and seller prospects. Once you can figure these things out, you can provide top-tier customer service to all of your clients.
Achieve The 4 Essential Freedoms of an Entrepreneur
Transcript:
I use this scorecard personally. It's not easy to be an entrepreneur. We take risks. It's a lonely world at times. We left consistent corporate jobs to do this work. However, this is the opportunity you have that others don't. The ability for you to craft your life in a way to build out your business in your way, where you can have:
- Freedom of time. You want to spend your working life doing what you really enjoy doing, and you also want the freedom to spend time not working too, so you can have a full life and pursue your other interests. That's one score on the scorecard.
- Freedom of money. You don't want a ceiling on how much money you can make for doing a great job, for coming up with valuable new solutions or inventions. And if your efforts generate money, you don't want anyone dictating how much of that money you can keep. We take big risks, but we have big rewards.
- Freedom of relationships. The whole reason to build this thing out like a business, where you don't have to be dragged into every drama your clients have, that's the motivation I had to get out of production and leveraging myself. There are certain people you love working with, inside and outside of your business, and you want to spend more and more of your time surrounded just by these people you click with.
- Freedom of purpose. Your business is not just a job or a career. It's a vehicle to all sorts of things that relate to your fundamental values and ideals in life. This allows you to have a tremendous sense of purpose for being on this planet.
That's just the scorecard I use, and I use this in a lot of decisions. If something's not going to give me more freedom, I'm not going to pursue it. As long as I can do all of that and not have less time and less money, I'm building my business out in a way where I'm not going to have to sacrifice any of those freedoms.
9 Key Leadership Principles and the Secret to Constant Growth
Transcript:
Today, I want to go through the 9 Emyth Principles.
1. Your Business is Inside You.
Overwhelm is the result of relating to our businesses as being bigger than we are, resulting in exhaustion and resignation to the status quo. The reason many business owners stay where they are is because its exhausting to fight the business. Once you realize you're bigger than your business, this tweak in how you relate to it makes all the difference.
2. Realness is Required.
We must get real with what we don't like about ourselves and our businesses so we can ignite our passion to change it; we can't change what we don't acknowledge and then accept as our current reality. Many of you bring yourselves into your business and it's not easy for you to look at how that might be impacting your business. If you have had five admin hires over the last year that all suck, is there something you could do better?
3. Change is Inside-Out.
We must hold ourselves accountable for very result, every effect of our action or inaction, helpful or harmful and hold our strengths and weaknesses as the root cause of it all. You are 100% in control of your destiny. Even when the market turns.
4. Meaning is not in Your Head.
A meaning-, rather than money-driven business is easy to feel, whether it's the client experience or employees feeling like they are a cog in some machine. When I started my team, it was definitely a transaction treadmill - I was willing to own up to it because I got myself out of it. I wasn't the best with clients. Your business has to have some bigger meaning.
5. Ownership is Not Equity.
Owners who become leaders by owning their choices establish credibility with their people. Everyone understands why the business and exists and what part they're playing in achieving its goals and reaching its vision.
6. Got Meta?
Looking for the root cause, rather than just the symptoms, of a business problem. Discovering the best system solutions for scaliing your business and creating predictable results.
7. Discomfort is Part of the Job.
True leaders seek out the uncomfortable truths and find the real reasons why they or their business is stagnating, the best leaders find comfort in reality whether it feels good or not.
8. Create Value, Not Work.
We must resist the temptation to get lost in the work that is easiest for you; we must lead by example in all 3 roles, you are always training everyone around you.
9. Systems are a means.
The combination of replicability (systems) and the human spirit (people) produces a result that is great than either one could produce on their own, the client experience is the only true measure of business success.
Make a Commitment to Your Health With This Energy Checklist
Transcript:
Alright, so in your Google Drive, high performance, session 3 is the Energy Checklist. Many of you have seen this before. If you’ve been doing things consistently on here, go ahead and put a check near them. There may be things you know you should be doing, but haven’t gotten after quite yet. If this if your first time seeing this and your focus on health isn’t quite where it should be, maybe take three of these items. For you that are a little more focused on health, there are certain ones you should be doing and maybe push yourself to do some more. Let’s go over rest and exercise first.
Rest + Exercise
Simply walking outside every day for at least 30 minutes is a stress and exercise benefit. Sleeping 8-9 hours per night. If you miss the target, nap or meditate during the day. Once you miss that sleep, it takes a compound effect on you. Cardio workouts are two sixty minute cardio workouts per week, two 20-40 minute intense, strength-based workouts per week, and meditation. On that exercise lists, what are the one or two things you are going to go after.
Diet + Nutrition
Eating more greens, organic plant-based foods. Try kale, spinach, salad. Even if you’re not allergic, gluten is an irritant. Take some kind of vitamin or supplement. Health shakes for breakfasts or snacks. Avoid sugary drinks, alcohol and caffeine. Limit white starches and heavily processed carbs. White bread, croissants, chips, muffins, all the things that taste good. If you’re active, you’ve got to drink a gallon and a half of water a day.
Daily Energizing
Every 50 minutes or every hour, you should be doing some sort of arm cross, knee-high, 20 deep breaths while balancing in place. If you haven’t been to high performance academy, the boardroom is going October 8th-11th and it’s an event worth going to, they take you through some of these exercises. Speaking and gesturing with passion is one of my worst ones. Stay standing more often. Hug and engage others more physically often, but be careful there. Try to make people smile and laugh more often. Focus on being more present. Keep a gratitude journal, and send an appreciative note.
So, print this energy checklist out, and circle the 3-6 you are going to focus on in the next 30 days. Make a commitment to yourself to actually do the work.
How to Have Massive Sales Growth Using This Simple Tool
Transcript:
I just want to show you what we've done for our weekly meetings. Kyle Kirchhoff is pretty much running these meetings on his own. He just wanted one place where he could look every week to see what was going on, and that is the Sales Activity Tracker.
All on one screen he can see their hours, dials, offers submitted, offers accepted, referrals, open house leads, and more. We've added a 'projected sales' column, which helps us to figure out how many sales we might get in the next seven days. He then reports the expected volume to me, along with a few other notes about the agents and their progress.
As the owner, I'm not at these meetings but I can look at these spreadsheets and get a pretty decent idea of what's going on. This is basically just cut and paste from what the agents fill out on their own every week. This is just a weekly summary, and I'll move it so that you can have access to it.
We got this idea from Derrick's seller training, and that was a long fifteen-week process to get us to this simple spreadsheet. You have everything you need in order to do this in my Dropbox, so I don't recommend doing that entire training session. You can find all the resources in here. I'll put this in the buyer system.
We modified our tracker a bit, so you can add what is important to you. We added open house leads, social posts, A+ buyers, and sales projections and volume projections.
I'm showing you my actual success tracker that my buyer agents fill out every Monday evening. I've tweaked mine a bit, and you should do the same to yours if you do something special in your business. You can add SOI's of if an agent got coffee with a lead. It's up to you. The main point is that you're regularly tracking the things that are important to you.
It's boring and monotonous, but consistent activity leads to consistent results.
Increase Agent Retention With A 10 Year Career Track
Transcript:
This has been a critical tool for us in recruiting. This is our career track, which is in the August Team Advance document. You come in as a buyer specialist and you graduate as a senior buyer specialist, after which you are eligible to become a listing partner and then a senior listing partner, and after all of that you can become an expansion partner.
It doesn't mean that you can't spend 6 months on the team as a buyer specialist and jump into an expansion partner role, or that we can't just hire an expansion partner outright, we just use this as a trigger.
As a buyer specialist you must reach 24 sides and $5.4 million in volume in the first 12 months after a 90 day ramp up. You can also achieve a designation as a Certified Buyer Specialist if you perform well and demonstrate cultural alignment. You also receive a $1,000 bonus if you reach $1 million in sales in a month.
As you work up the ladder, you get all of these things, plus a branded website when you become a Senior Buyer Specialist, and we pay your MLS and Realtor dues.
When you become a listing partner you get a gas & cell phone allowance and a 27-inch iMac. Our senior listing partners get a car allowance, and when you're an expansion partner you get a company car and an expense account.
This is pretty cool to talk to someone about a 10-year career arc. This is a game changer even if you're a solo agent. Even though you're doing all of these things already, when you interview someone you need to let them know that you want them to replace you as a senior buyer specialist. You can use this no matter where you are in your growth process.
Jim made a comment about what the expansion partner offer looks like when you get it created. We're playing with the numbers now and it's basically just someone that's going to handle buyers and sellers. Initally we wanted this person to build a team, but now we're going to support them from the expansion hub. We're going with the KW model where we're keeping admins and lead-gen people in the expansion hub. This partner will go out and sell like 7 homes a month, and they'll pay for a showing agent our of their own income.
A lot of these guys doing expansion, most of them aren't extremely profitable while doing it. I can put out five expansion partners in our core market, which is the initial push. This will teach us lessons on how to leverage our brand in our core market.
We want to serve 10,000 families in a year, and if nothing else, it's something to get excited about. If we fail, then no harm done. We'll still be ahead of where we were yesterday.
Focus on the Big Picture with Team Planning Sessions
Transcript:
I want to get into Team Planning Sessions, because this is the time of year where you absolutely should be planning next year.
We’re in mid-October, so we are selling into next year in about a month. We usually write 30-45 day contracts, so we only have about a month left to reach our goal of $100 million closed, $110 million written.
You have to have some sort of offsite sessions. There are some in Google Drive you can look at including my 2013 and 2014 materials for my offsite. I think most of you have seen the 2015 materials; I’ll bring them up here in a second.
Even if it’s a bare bones team, you have to do something at least twice a year to keep that vision in front of them. So if you’re at $20 million today and you want to go to $100 million or $200 million, you have to show them that you’re thinking about the path and their opportunity along the way.
The way we structure these is we do a half day where I’m presenting to the team, followed by a half day of team building. If you have a small team, you could spend 2 hours on each. Either way, you’ve got to make it exciting for your team to be a part of what you’re building, no matter how small or big it is.
If you’re still in the production, you still know the grind of production, but help them get away from the grind and focus on bigger picture issues. I used to bring up a lot of issues during my off-sites, where my team could anonymously ask questions and “Stump Lars.” I don’t mind answering those questions, but we keep the entire event positive now. You mostly want to talk about opportunity for the future.
Team planning sessions allow agents and staff to participate in the direction of the team and for them to know some of the challenges you’re having and get their help in addressing them.
You have the opportunity to break the ice and bring out a different side of people, make them feel important and appreciated. We did an off-site a couple years ago where we went around the table and everyone shared something that was likely no one on the team knew about them. It was awesome and very emotional. You want to be able to break the ice with your team, and not keep everything business all the time.
I have done everything - for the most part - that you all will do. The people that don’t overthink this and just set a date will be successful with your team. You can swipe anything from these slides - it contains a lot of info on:
- Dream & Vision
- Purpose & Mission
- Core Values & Culture
- BHAG (“Big Hairy Audacious Goal”)
- The Five C’s For Success
- Growing Up
- My Personal Vision For Growth
It’s okay if you share this exact ascension for your personal vision for growth. I’ve had other people do that and it’s worked really well because there’s a huge opportunity. This is exactly what I presented to my team, that my last shift here is to Ownership and I’m taking less and less responsibility in the team.
You want to be able to show everyone where your company is going, why it’s exciting for them, and where the opportunity lies. We did this ‘Looking Back’ topic and covered Prides and Growth. It’s an emotional experience because people want to open up and be part of something big, so let them do that.
How Do We Create Change Within Ourselves?
Transcript:
I want to cover a high-performance session on influence because this was our last session that Brendon Burchard did at the High Performance Academy. As I look, I've created something cool within the real estate industry. If you looked at 1,000 teams where the leaders were out of the production side, I'd probably in the top 10% of those teams in terms of really owning a self-guided company.
As my business gets larger and larger, going from 400 sides to 1,200 sides in Charlotte, it's really changed my beliefs. I think a lot of you are getting up to 30 or 40 transactions, and you're living a pretty good life and you want to stop there. For me, I could have stopped where I was and had a business that threw off a good amount of cash, but I would have been selling myself short. The Four C's that I've talked about (commitment, courage, capability, confidence) have challenged me to step up as a leader, so I'm doing everything that I can to become a leader.
So back to the question: how do we create change within ourselves? Can we truly teach ourselves to become leaders. Many of us know best business practices and truths but far fewer actually embody them in their business. Change is a process that happens over time and is difficult. Resistance is common but remember that long last change doesn't happen overnight. The whole point of Real Estate B School is to get you through those tough times of change. Many of you have probably had some bad hires, and it can be disheartening, but what you learn from that is just to keep recruiting.
Quick fixes often backfire and waste your time, energy and resources. I've made a lot of poor decisions with offloading lead conversion, as well as team management.
The thing about change is that you will never be finished with the process. It's an absolute journey.
I'll end with a quote from Michael Gerber:
"The difference between great people and everyone else is that great people create their lives actively, and everyone else is created by their lives, passively waiting to see where life takes them next. The difference between the two is living fully and just existing."
Strategically Invest Your Time to Avoid Chasing "Squirrels"
Transcript:
According to Dan Kennedy, productivity is the "deliberate, strategic investment of your time, talent, intelligence, energy, resources, and opportunities in a manner calculated to move you measurably closer to meaningful goals."
At the intensive, we will go over the goal-setting process and the 10 focus areas for the coming year. That's going to give you meaningful goals that you're working toward. Productivity is investing your time, talent, intelligence, energy, resources, and opportunities into moving those 10 categories forward. I like to do five personal, five professional. I've always been good at achieving goals, but that way of organizing it has been a game changer for me.
You must create new business every day. This has to be the basis for your entire business every day. I know it's a challenge for most of you to bridge both worlds, in terms of building the systems, recruiting agents, training the agents, working with the new admin who doesn't really have real estate experience. I know, because I did it all. There's that period of time where you're just doing all of these different things, and it feels like it's a little bit sideways, but you've got to focus on bringing in new business every day.
You've got to have your agents realize their sphere, they're building business. They're holding open houses, they're working your old leads, and they're getting handoffs from you. You have to give them a path that keeps them accountable for selling a minimum of two, but ideally three, homes a month. There are some markets where the sales are harder to come by, so maybe one and a half sales a month is a better goal. Still, it's important to have a goal for them to hit.
Ask yourself, no matter what, "Is this the best use of my time right now?" If you don't have a dollar per hour worked out for yourself, if you don't know that an hour of your work is worth $250 because I want to net $500,000--$500,000 divided by 2,000 hours is $250 an hour, you have to have that number in mind. The bigger and bolder you are with that exercise, the more productive you will be. It was easy for me.
The only issue is timing of cash flow, because if you have one admin and two buyer's agents but you still find yourself working on any $50 an hour activity or taking out any buyers whatsoever or even listing appointments, if you're not netting $500,000 in a year, that means you're working on a whole bunch of stuff that's worth less than $250 an hour. You're only netting $100,000, that means you're working some $250 stuff but also on a lot of $12 to $15 an hours stuff as well. Ask yourself this question. Maybe type it up and print that document and hang it up in front of your computer: Is this the best use of my time right now? If you ask that question, you'll start making better decisions with your time. I promise you that.
You must avoid chasing squirrels! This is an obvious one. Sometimes I can't help myself because there are things that just tend to be squirrel-like, and you can spend a bunch of time chasing things that just don't matter in your business. With marketing specifically, it's easy to say, hey, I want to try this, without any real basis to know that it really works. Like Smart Zip. I've not tried it, but I've only heard that it does not work. I had a client recently got on the phone with them and I found out they spent $3,000 or $4,000 a month on Smart Zip. They just got sold on it.
They never asked for a proven track record on that. It's all marketing. Just make sure if you're implementing a tool that I don't use, you're implementing it for a solid business reason, not just satisfying something in you. I can get excited about a new CRM, but it's just not always necessary. For you to get to 600 sides. So who knows? For me to go from 600 sides to 10,000 sides in potentially 50 different markets, we have to think about some different technology, but I've not even started that search if we'll even change. So really, really, go deep. I think there was a post about someone wanting to add Zillow traffic, and how do you know when to add more.
You just start with a little and wait until that has paid off before you go to buy. Clients are spending four or five grand a month on Zillow and they're selling fewer homes than I am, and it's totally market-driven. I might have more listings and reviews, but my conversion rate is almost 10% on Zillow. You should be able to convert the same percentage of leads, just go deep on all of these things. It's the same thing with technology. We run Google Apps, dialogue tech, Top Producer, and Boomtown, and that's pretty much it. We keep it pretty simple, and we're not looking for a platform to integrate all of it because I don't think that the benefits outweigh the distraction.
Impact Your Business with Quarterly Multiplier Projects
Transcript:
I want to show you a tool here that you should use. Most of you that have been to an intensive workshop have seen this. It’s simply an impact filter from Strategic Coach, just organized. This is a way for you to organize the three to five projects you are working on that will impact your business the most. We focus on 5 every 6 months in our coaching group. In the Boardroom, we focus on 5 every quarter. It’s up to you how many you want to take on.
Some of these big systems, to truly build them out properly, will take a few months. Let’s take a look at this tool. For example, expired listing systems. What do you want to accomplish? Build out a direct mail system to expireds so I can get consistent listing leads. What is the difference it could make? In some markets, this could bring in 3-4 sales a month, but 1-2 months in the market we are in right now. What do the results look like? The best outcome if you take action, the worst outcome if you don’t take action. Success criteria, what has to be true when the project is finished, and then 3 action items that you can take to move this project forward.
So you’re going through that approach on 5 projects. I know I run the risk on some of this stuff being common sense and not common practice. If you are 6-12 months into this program, you may get the feeling that you like being around this mindset. If you’re not, I built this program to be different than other programs because it is an action-oriented program.
I’m getting together with you, coming up with a 90-day plan, and working with your implementation coach to build this out and take action. If you’ve stalled and need help going through this, get with Stacie. She has implemented pretty much every system I’ve had in my business in her business, and Tyler and Stacie have both leveraged themselves out of the grind of real estate transactions. Now they are looking to scale it, dial in the operations, recruiting, and training side to scale their businesses even more. You’ve got an awesome resource there.
How The Lars Group Will Expand Our Presence in 2016
Transcript:
So, why scale up The Lars Group?
There's going to be more opportunity in the way of new areas for customer acquisition, we can also expand the vision of The Lars Group by surrounding ourselves with growth-oriented people, and we can deepen our bench in order to achieve the vision that has been laid out.
This all starts by building a firm foundation. I've gone through this before but it consists of a value proposition, missed opportunity, sharing TLG's DNA, and having a road map for success.
Now let's talk about the expansion model. There's the expansion agent, which is me. The expansion partner runs the local expansion team. The expansion team is the entity that's kind of on their own, and it should consist of at least 3-4 buyer agents and 1 listing agent. The expansion hub is the core business, and the expansion director is in our case is Kyle Kurchhoff.
When this first push towards expansion started happening, a lot of teams were going outside of their local markets, and that never really made sense to me. We're going to expand locally where there are economies of scale, predictability, ability to react, and improved lead generation, which are all really exciting things.
If you look at the map of greater Charlotte, we've probably got 18-20 sq. miles that we serve, but we want offices that are at least 30 miles apart with this new expansion. There are still markets that we don't serve, and Lake Norman is one of them. We've got five active listings there, and the entire area has 1,000 active listings.
The average price point is also $200K more than our price point. We've got the same thing going on in Fort Mill, Rock Hill, Lake Wylie, Concord, Gaston County, Union County, and Waxhaw. The fact that there were so many listings that we weren't getting a piece of is a major reason why we're expanding locally.
The cool thing about this is that when I look at the expansion team structure. I'm helping other people build teams with the same tools that I use on my team. My goal is to get these teams up to 100 sides between one admin, 4 buyer specialists, and one listing agent.
Then I shifted a little bit toward a discussion about leadership. In order for us to make this shift with these satellite offices, we need to create strong leaders. So, here is a quote from Vince Lombardi: "Leaders are made, they are not born. They are made by hard effort, which is the price which all of us must pay to achieve any goal that is worthwhile."
What Are the Four C’s of High Performance?
Transcript:
I’m going to go through this one more time. This is high-performance coaching with Brendon Burchard, founder of High Performance Academy, I’ve gone through the certification twice, and I live out most every one of his principles in terms of his 6 pillars of high performance: purpose, presence, physiology, psychology, persuasion and productivity. A really solid framework.
Common sense isn’t always common practice is his number one thing. I’ve taken my team through their high performance masters course. I want to start out this session by going through a framework that I got from Dan Sullivan, which feeds into the courage part here.
The first C is Commitment. First, you have to take a leap of faith and really commit to what you want to achieve-- commit before you have every “t” crossed and every “i” dotted. There’s no doubt that it’s scary.
Then comes the Courage phase, which is where most people lose it. I made a commitment to sell 10,000 homes a year, do you think I have the capability to do that? I do not have the capability to do that. But I’ve gotten really good at this process and this loop where I can break through the courage phase and it doesn’t really bother me. Most people admire courage in others but don’t like the experience themselves. In fact, this crucial step feels awful.
You’ve committed yourself without having any proof that what you’re going after is going to pay off. So me building a team or network of agents to serve 10,000 families in a year. I don’t know how to do it certainly. I took some big steps by listening to Gary Keller and how he is helping his agents do it. I have to get through that stage quickly.
Next is Capability. Think back to one of your breakthroughs. For me, it was starting a coaching company. Wasn’t it the combination of making a commitment and going through a period requiring a lot of courage that created both the new capability and the new confidence?
Finally, Confidence. The new level of confidence you experience after a breakthrough is what gives you the ability to commit to an even bigger breakthrough and an even greater sense of confidence. And the process repeats itself.
So for my real estate company, the fact that I built a team that’s top 25 in KW and Re/MAX combined, that gives me a lot of confidence to say “Let’s triple our business in Charlotte, and go worldwide with this thing, doing 10,000 deals a year.”
The same thing goes for coaching. Why can’t real estate B-School impact 1,000 people in a single year, even with free content? Why can’t we build our list to 100,000 agents instead of the 10 or 12 thousand we have on our list now?
How to Navigate the Buyer Offer Summary Sheet
Transcript:
I put together this Buyer Offer Summary Sheet, and I'll go through it real quick. We use DocuSign, and our agents get to the end of the transaction and say "OK, great I'll go write up the offer." They forget that they negotiated the different commission, they forget that they have transaction fees, so I put together this offer summary sheet, which my agents keep with them, and it also give you a bit of a leverage.
To fill this out, you put the buyer name, property address, initial offer price, due diligence fee, initial earnest money, additional earnest money, due diligence date, and closing date. Down here it says commission deficiency.
So if it's a $200k home and you don't charge what's being co-broked. Say there is a 2.5% listing co-broke and you are at 3%, which we normally charge, there is a deficiency of a half percent and on a $200k property, that's $1000.
Below that, you have the transaction fee of $695 and any additional closing costs they want to ask for. Be very deliberate about that process. If you're charging a different rate than what is co-broke, make sure you explain in the beginning and get permission to ask the seller to pay for it.
Here again, you are getting it included in the closing costs, which is the mechanism by which you are able to ask for those. Say you have a commission deficiency of $1,000, plus the $695, and maybe they as for $3,000 in additional closing costs. That brings the total to $4,695.
I thought that was a cool tool. It's helped us keep things dialed in. That's pretty much all I have on that. You've got to take action on this stuff. It's not complicated, but you've got to take action. These are the exact same tools we use and we will sell over 200 buyers this year, and this is the process that we follow.
How to Brand Individual Agents on Your Team
Transcript:
I like to answer questions I get about how I run my business so that you can use my knowledge to grow yours. Chad asks:
"I understand you help your agents work their sphere by providing them with a personal KCM account and doing automated posts. Are these personal posts coming from The Lars Group, or is it branded as your actual buyer's agent individually?"This is a great question - the answer to which I wish I would have realized sooner. An agent on my team, Jon Wian, founded High Performing Agents Academy and will be helping us with this group. He started on my team with no general brokerage experience, but will sell over 100 homes this year.
We build branded standalone websites for our agents. We've also come together with Keeping Current Matters to set up an agent blog with really good content. It's not hyper-local or anything, but the blog is branded to a particular agent, it has great stats and graphics, and all the leads go directly to the agent. Also, the emails that are sent out daily are easily posted to the agent's personal Facebook account.
We track the amount of activity they do with note cards, Go For Nos, how many people they asked whether they're looking to buy or sell, how many social posts they did, and a host of other things. I'm not shying away from helping our agents build their brand inside our team. The truth is, it's the accountability that actually makes the results.
I used to pride myself on the fact that at least 85% of our business is team generated, and now that has dropped down to 75% on 475 transactions. This is a 10% delta, but it's about 45 additional transactions because we're focusing on it now. They show up on day one with 50 SOI, and we have them build our their SOI on a regular basis.
The logos are all Lars Group logos, so this is an example of how I give my agents the same tools I use in my business to help them. All of my agents have a BoomTown site as well. If you search it, you'll see that Jon has the same site and tools that I have. This allows me to hold him - and other agents with the same tools - accountable to grow their business. I've found this to work very well!
Create Raving Fans with a Past Client Survey and a Special Gift
Transcript [Stacie Peterson]:
One great way to keep in touch with past clients is with surveys. This is in the Google Drive, it's a Starbucks Survey.
Basically, you send this out to your past clients after closing, and we mail it with a $10 Starbucks Gift Card. It says thank you for your purchase, we value your input, and on a scale from 1-10 how likely are you to refer your friends and family? Would you use our services again? And tell us about your overall experience.
It's awesome to get these back. We actually number them on the back side with a pencil so we know who turned them in and who did not, then we read them at our team meetings and keep them in a booklet in the area where we meet with clients.
I read these at my team meeting without letting them know who it's about, and don't let them know who I'm reading about, then the team guesses. This makes things kind of fun.
By sending the Starbucks card with the survey, it rewards the client for filling out the survey. If you get the survey back, it might not be a bad idea to call them and ask them to take a few minutes to give you the same review on your Zillow site. That's how you can take this one step further and go online with it.
Exit Your Business with the Real Estate Business Navigator
Transcript:
We're following the Real Estate Business Navigator, and wherever you are in this ascension model, there are specific things you'll have to do to get to the next level. In B-School I'll be showing exactly what this looks like. I've broken down what each phase of this ascension looks like, and I'll go through it quickly here.
During the Start phase, you are barely going to be making a living. You're excited but a bit naive, and you don't know what you don't know. Cash flow is probably a challenge because there isn't much. You have no idea where your next deal is coming from, and you have to hustle to build momentum. You'll need to focus on things that work for you, and the key to escaping this phase is growing your skills and having the determination to grow.
During the Ramp phase, there will be lots of balls in the air and you'll be feeling good. At this point, you'll be extremely busy, and your time may not be your own. You'll be doing anywhere from 2-6 transactions per month and you'll probably need to hire an administrative assistant. The truth is that most agents do not move past this stage, and that's because it can get very hectic and frightening at times.
The Scale phase is where you put systems in place. You'll feel overwhelmed and you'll feel like your failing at a lot of things. Your admin staff will be stretched thin, and you'll still be the major producer on your team. The good thing here is that the vision will be taking on a life of its own.
Then you'll be in the Lead phase where things start to step up. Delegation is critical in this step and you have to focus on dollar-producing activities. You have to maintain your service levels. You're still selling homes, but the Exit is in sight so you have to stay focused. This is when you have to communicate your vision accurately to your team. Installing tracking and accountability systems will be critical. You'll begin to see yourself as a CEO instead of a producer.
The Exit phase is where you realize you aren't that important to your business. Your vision must be part of your team's DNA. You must have a Key Operations lead step in line and you must have a very clear organizational strategy. You'll be controlling margins and costs at this point because you're out of the business.
The Own phase is all about your mindset. This is what I'm focusing on this year. I don't have many day to day responsibility, so I'm stepping into an ownership role. Most team owners won't take this step because it's a mindset issue more than anything. It helps to have faith that many other companies run without their owners in the business (Apple, Walmart).
Sales leadership role must be created to avoid dysfunction. All day to day leadership functions will have to be delegated, and you should also have a weekly senior leadership meeting. This meeting will ensure growth within your company. You have to keep growing or your business will die.
How to Systematically Increase and Track Your Net Worth
Transcript:
The question is, "Do you use a special type of form or process to track your net worth? What metrics do you use?"
For my coaching clients, I have created a Net Worth Calculator in your Google Drive. This is a very simple calculator.
Assets
Manually enter the date and your assets (house, vehicles, jewelry, cash or cash equivalents, etc.) into the Net Worth Calculator. It also includes Investments such as retirement accounts, stocks, bonds, and more.
For my company, I'm conservative with the numbers. I could leave my real estate company in a pretty short amount of time, and there's some value there. I put one year's cash flow for that business. You'll have to make some estimate for the value of your business. These numbers will yield your total assets.
Liabilities
The other side of the calculator is a little more interesting. We carry a mortgage on our house and no other debt, and the goal is to pay off that mortgage. If you have any other loan balances you need to list them all, and the goal is to get rid of all your liabilities.
I carry some credit cards, but only revolving just to get points. It's not even a bright idea to do that, but I just pay it off automatically from my bank account. That's even a low balance.
Once you calculate your assets, less liabilities, you have your estimated net worth.
Make it Your Own
My coaching clients can make a copy of this document and make it their own. You can clear all the formatting and add dates with quarterly goals.
People don't talk about the importance of systematically tracking your net worth. So my goal is to have over $10 million net worth by the time I'm 50 years old. That doesn't include the value of my businesses; it's liquid net worth.
I want to eliminate all liabilities, that's my near-term goal.
If you are scared of what this looks like, you should confront it head on. You have to be real with this stuff even if it's negative. You must consciously make a decision to increase your net worth; it has to be a goal.
I have goals quarterly to save - to take money from my bank accounts and get it off the table.
Leveraging Systems and Tools to Find, Cultivate, and Convert Leads
Transcript:
The third point of leverage is People and Systems. There is a buyer system and a listing system, so there are a few tools you must employ on each of those.
I'll cover the buyer system real quick, and lead generation has not been an issue for us because we use Boomtown pay-per-click and Craigslist, as well as Zillow. Lead conversion is all about scripts and dialogues and the activity of actually making the calls.
According to the I Love Marketing podcast with Joe Polish and Dean Jackson, 15% of online leads transact in 90 days from the time they registered, and the other 85% are 90+ days.
Lead management is critically important for real estate, and I've been working with Frank Klesitz at Vyral Marketing to create an email drip campaign that is content-based to help us convert more of those buyers. Then there is also buyer presentation, buyer loyalty agreement, and buyer client servicing, but none of this should be a surprise if you're running these systems.
In terms of the seller system, we've already covered lead generation and lead conversion. Having a listing process is a great idea if you want to improve your listing success rate. I recommend establishing some authority with a pre-listing packet.
I think we beat this one down pretty good in a Facebook thread in relation to listing materials. It doesn't matter what you send, just send some things regularly. We send a cover letter, a Max Payoff Guide, a 151-step Marketing plan, a resume, and a pricing guide.
When it comes to seller client servicing, we have another Facebook thread on this one. Daniel Beer was talking about how important it was to communicate with clients before you've signed them.
Monthly market reviews are also important every 30 days. We've been good at this lately because we pull up our listing inventory balance sheet and reverse sort to 'active' and sort by days on market so we know which homes have been sitting for how long. Homes sitting for 45 days turn yellow, and homes over 90 days turn red. We will then call them and beat them over the head in order to get a price reduction.
All that really matters when you're selling a home is the price. It could be the condition, but it is most likely the price.
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