Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Jordan Terrell, Founder of Community & Team Leader of Jordan Terrell Group

Episode Date: June 13, 2023

With a decade-long experience in the non-profit sector, Jordan Terrell discovered his true passion for helping others and honed his skills in high-level scaling and management. Instrumental in expanding a non-profit organization from a modest 800 members to an astounding 30,000, Jordan’s unparalleled expertise became the foundation for his groundbreaking entrance into the real estate industry.At 25, Jordan began investing in real estate for his personal portfolio, marking the beginning of a remarkable journey. Obtaining his real estate license in 2017, Jordan recognized the need for innovative systems and processes to excel in the business. His relentless drive and determination led to extraordinary success; within his first six months as an individual agent, Jordan exceeded his own expectations by closing an impressive $12 million in sales.In his first full year, Jordan’s momentum continued to surge, with over $40 million in closed volume. Fast forward to today, he leads the Jordan Terrell Group, a flourishing enterprise boasting 30 licensed agents and 14 dedicated full-time staff members.But Jordan’s vision extends beyond his own accomplishments. With a mission to revolutionize the way real estate teams and solo agents operate their businesses, he is now developing a cutting-edge real estate platform. By partnering together, solo agents and teams can leverage the robust systems, processes, lead generation, administration, and internal transaction coordination staff that Jordan has meticulously built over the years.Jordan Terrell’s innovative approach empowers agents to focus on what truly matters: sales and recruiting. As he continues to challenge the status quo, Jordan Terrell solidifies his position as a pioneering force in real estate. From Jordan’s vast experiences, his true passion is to help others scale their businesses and have more fun while doing it.Learn more: https://jordanterrellgroup.comColorado Real Estate Leaders https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/colorado-real-estate-leaders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-jordan-terrell-founder-of-community-team-leader-of-jordan-terrell-group

Welcome to the Colorado Real Estate Leaders Podcast, brought to you by Trailstone Insurance Group, bringing you interviews with Colorado's best real estate and mortgage professionals, empowering you to understand the current trends in the housing market so you can make the American dream your reality. Enjoy today's episode. Well, it's a great day in Colorado, and welcome to the Colorado Real Estate Leaders podcast. Today we have with us, Jordan Terrell, who's the founder of community, and team leader of Jordan Terrell Group. Jordan, welcome to the program.

It's great to be here. Thank you. You're welcome. Hey, just love to learn what you're doing because I think it's always interesting for us all to get perspectives from different life experiences, business experiences. So I'm excited to see what you've got going on. But get us started with a little bit of your story and background. And how did you get into the real estate and mortgage industry in the first place?

Yeah, yeah. Well, I moved out to Colorado, first off, a little over 17 years ago, and I got out here. Originally, I was working in the nonprofit vocational ministry space. In fact, I worked at a church for a considerable amount of time, and that's what I was doing. I was in that space, that world, and just kind of surrounded it in the leadership space. And I, yeah, so I worked at a church for a really, at the time, it was a small church that ended up growing into one of the biggest churches in the country over about a decade period of time. And so that's what I did prior to real estate. And I never really had any ambition of being a business owner or entrepreneur.

Although while I was in those spaces, I was doing a lot of building and leading and developing of others. And eventually I started investing in real estate. I had a conversation with somebody that led me to reading a book. It sounded interesting to me. So I started investing in real estate. And over like a five-year period of time, I started making more money from my real estate investments than I was from my primary job. And so I found myself in a position where I was like, man, there's something about this that I really, like and I started kind of wrestling with what do I want to do next. Yeah, that's cool. It's kind of like

you dip your foot in the water yourself and then you're like, hey, this is pretty cool. Let me see if I can help other people do the same thing. Exactly. Yeah. So that's where it all started. But I mean, that the previous career and what I was doing before has has really led to some things that I'm doing now. And I didn't really know that I was building my business acumen and my leadership acumen at the time, I just was doing what I was doing. But it was really setting me up for success in numerous ways. It's neat how those kind of things aren't a 90 degree turn or a pivot. They're kind of building upon each other and amplifying. It's like you're taking this business and life experience and taking elements of it to go to the next thing. So you don't

feel like, wow, that was a waste of time. But I was moving forward and kind of taking what I've learned and developed. So that's a really neat thing to point out. Yeah, I think, I talk to young people all the time, and I'm like, they're talking about these different jobs that they have and they're frustrated by them or they don't like them. And I'm like, man, there's so much to learn literally every job that you have. And so you kind of take it and look at it as an opportunity to grow in certain ways. I mean, I worked. One of my first jobs was working. I worked retail.

And then I worked sales. And then I worked for construction company, hang in drywall. And then I worked for an IT company, building out, setting up computers for like all. All these things set me up for something later. And I had no idea that they were all really just giant slingshots into the future. But I think in your 20s, there's just so much opportunity to learn. And you have plenty of time to grow from there. Yeah, and having all those different roles.

And you mentioned the church. You probably learned how to surf well. And I've been looking at your team. It looks fantastic. You've built a great team model there. Talk to us about that as I know that that's been really important for you. Yeah. So I think when I got into real estate, initially I was just trying to figure out how to make money to pay my bills.

I initially thought that I was going to focus on real estate investing. But then I quickly learned that you needed money to invest. And so started looking at the real estate landscape and just really looking for the, what's the fastest path to making a good income? and how can I just stabilize financially and just take care of my family? And, you know, kind of wrestling with the space and just trying to figure out what I was going to do. But I took an approach. I'm going to start a business.

I'm not just getting my license. I'm going to build something. And having built a lot of things in the past, my approach was that I'm not going to treat this just like a lot of real estate agents. They get their license and they hope that business comes to. them, I took an approach of I'm going to build something that attracts business. And so I, I mean, long before I sold a house, I was building a website. I was, I hired a coach. I hired a marketing company to do branding for me, to write copy for me, to, I mean,

I was doing all these things. I had an assistant before I even sold the house. So I was, I was thousands of dollars into, you know, like tens of. of thousands of dollars into investment before my business even started. And so once I finally sold my first house, I knew that if I built it correctly, it would just kind of snowball. And the analogy I've said before in other formats to other people is that if you're going to start a coffee shop, you would probably go to SBA, get a loan, 600K, you'd go find a space, you'd order some tables and chairs, you get some marketing done, you'd buy a coffee making machine, you'd hire some staff,

and then you would do all this work long before you even had a customer served a cup of coffee. And that grand opening day, your hope is to get some clients in there or some opportunities of people in there and the hope is that it's so good that they actually come back. And this is all before you've made a dime. And so why would real estate agents think that they would do it any different? And so my approach was I'm going to build something. and the team aspect of it was really just an organic overflow of I actually built something and it worked and I had too much business and so I needed other agents to help me.

That's awesome. So that kind of tells you that if you've got more and more people and team growing, the environment and culture have to be halfway decent or else they'd be coming in one door and out the other. So talk a little bit about culture. Yeah, culture's massively important. I think that because of, I mean, this is where the past kind of is coming full circle is that it's never really been about money for me. It's been about helping people. And I can say that because into my mid-30s, I was making $55,000 a year.

That was my salary. You know, and I was perfectly fine. My bills were paid. My family ate good food and took warm showers. So my goal was at that time was, I didn't have to worry about money. I got a little salary and I helped people. That was my job. And so once you build a business and when people come in the door, my job is still the same

is to help people and to help them grow, help them build their businesses, help them in their personal lives and whatnot. And so what makes a culture sticky is when everybody actually cares about the person next to them. And so when people feel cared for, when people feel that you're more interested in their success than you are your own, they're going to, you know, they might have frustrations. They might get, have moments where there's tension, but people honor you with their feet. They communicate their frustrations with their mouths, but they honor you with their mouths, but they honor you with their feet. And they're typically going to be loyal to the people that actually care about them long term. I mean, we fight with the people that we love the most. But we honor them with our feet.

That's huge. He's kind of like walk the talk. I mean, we know all that or it's kind of like, you know, knowledge is power. Well, you got to implement that knowledge. And so, you know, you could say all the kind of things that you want to to say, rah, ra, we our team does this. But, you know, here's what I'm doing. When you can kind of lead from the front and kind of go, here's what we're going to do and here's me doing it. You know, like the boss that's willing to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty, now the team is like, okay, cool, I can do that because I'm seeing him do it. Right.

And ultimately, like, I think the typical team, real estate team model is you have a person that's like, man, I want to make a lot of money. And if I can get 10 agents selling, you know, 20 homes each per year, that's 300,000 GCI and I'm going to put them on a 50-50 split. So 20 agents times 150,000. That's $3 million in my pocket. And what they forget is that you actually have to spend that money to take care of them. And on top of that, it's not that easy.

But the motives are all about money versus their motives being about helping people. So yes, we have structure. Yes, we have splits. Yes, we have a certain path. But really, you know, we have a culture around everything's earned, nothing's given. But there really isn't a cap on the path, meaning a typical team. It's like, here's the structure, here's the split. If you want to make more money or you want to have more success, you have to go, you have to leave.

Like, there is no other path. And so we've tried to create pathways for people to continue to grow their career. even if it means that I help them start their own team. And so that's a conversation that I have up front. I'm like, hey, you can be here and sell 10, 12, 15 homes a year and make really good money. But if you're ambitious and you want to make lots and lots of money, then at some point, you're not going to be able to do that within the structure or the confines of this team. And so at that point, you can either start your own team and you can pay for it or you can

start a team and I'll pay for it and will be business partners. and at that point we just have another branch. And so, you know, I jokingly say you'll probably end up without any hair like me because it's a lot of work, but I can help you build a team faster if you let me partner with you. So I don't want to limit where people go. Like if the outcome in 10 years is that there's 10 successful teams that I own zero percentage of, and there's a bunch of people thriving in Denver, and the only thing, and no one has ever heard of me,

but I know down deep in my heart that I, like, invested in some people and it's helping a lot of people, and it's doing good stuff. I'm going to sleep really good at night, whether I got the upside or not. I love that. I love that. So one thing that I think that I saw on your site is you have an independent agent model. So does that also open up different opportunities where your, client's benefit because we we know what you just said that the independent model gives freedom

to your agents and that's wonderful to kind of build their own business under your your umbrella. What benefits does that pass along to the client and what are they experiencing that they're really loving? Well, I mean, I think, I mean, I think obviously the client is incredibly important to this process. And I think it became clear to me at like an aha moment probably a year ago when I realized that my ideal client isn't a buyer or seller, it's an agent. Like, that's my business. I serve agents.

I coach, lead, train, equip, provide leverage resources that make agents' lives better. I think that in the real estate business, you have two types of agents. You have one that's really successful. And I often joke that you're either screwed if you're successful and you're screwed if you're not. You're screwed if you're successful because you make tons of money and you don't have room to even breathe. You just work nonstop. Or you're not successful because 5% of the agents sell 95% of the home.

So really, it couldn't be more true. Like if you were to take the entire MLS, all the agents in our market, 50% of them didn't sell home last year. The next 45% didn't sell enough to pay their bills. The final 5% can't breathe. And so, yeah, they're making tons of money. They drive nice cars, live in nice houses, take nice vacations, but they work the entire vacation. You know, and so how do you help the client? You help the agent.

Yeah. Ooh, that's really good. So, like, I'm trying to solve problems for them. And I can, I can, I can create leverage for the agents so that they spend less time doing the things that aren't helping them. I mean, they're helping them, but they're not, they're slowing them down. They're not efficient. And name another business where you have a salesperson that works by themselves, 100% by themselves. Like, they are, they run their business.

They are the marketer. They're the social media person. They're the paperwork person. The only other business I can think of is like a handyman. But yet you're making like doctor like money. So it doesn't make sense. If I'm a medical salesperson, I'm selling the medical device, right? I'm talking to the doctor.

I'm making sure the doctor's happy. I'm taking the doctor out to dinner. I'm doing whatever I got to do to make sure that the doctor has exactly what medical devices they need. but guess what happens past that? Well, there's a whole processing team that's processing that order. There's a whole finance department, admin department, distributing department. There's so many other people involved.

I'm just a salesperson. And real estate agents are just salespeople. And they need to stop thinking they are the entire business. That's a great perspective. So what is the, what do you feel if you were to talk to a new agent that you're explaining your team and your culture? or what's a good fit? If an agent is going, hey, I think I can fit in that. What are they looking like?

What are their qualities and characteristics? That would be a great fit for your team. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a process of like really determining like what do people want. Like, what do they want for themselves? What do they want their week to look like their schedule to look like? I don't really think it's possible to build a successful real estate business without working some hours on the front end. I always tell our new agents you're the least efficient you'll ever be ever be in this business. And so everything's going to take longer.

But eventually you'll get more efficient. You'll get better. You'll know how to take leadership roles with your clients and lead them versus pleasing them. Like clients don't want pleased. No one wants me to tell them what they want to hear. They want me to tell them what they need to hear. And so that takes some grit, some guts, you know, to, be able to look at a client and go, hey, I'm sorry, this is what you think is going to happen,

but here's actually what will happen and here's where we need to go. Because that's what I want a doctor to do for me. I don't want a doctor to say, yeah, everything's fine. Yep, that looks horrible, but I'm sure it's going to work out. Like, no, I want the doctor to say, hey, here's the hard truth of what's going on. And here's what changes you need to make. People want leadership when they hire services. So when I'm talking to a brand new agent, I'm asking the question of, what do you want to ultimately be? And that's going to determine what path we need to take. Do you need to be on a team? Do you want to be a solo agent with leverage? And so that's why I built the community company is community is a company that serves agents in the form of coaching,

content, training, leverage, services, all the back-end stuff that makes them more efficient. And so ultimately, if you're an agent, then you don't have any source of business, meaning you don't have the relationships or the skill set to go get those relationships fast, then that's where a team comes in handy because we can feed you that business. 67% of all of our transactions on the team side comes from the company that we generate the business, where if you're a solo agent and you can go figure out how to find 12, 15 clients a year, you don't need a team. But that's hard. The client acquisition is a really hard part of this business. Is everyone on this call right now knows 12 real estate agents, at least, if not 50. And another three that have their magnets on the fridge that they've never met. Yeah, exactly.

So how do you get the business? And that's ultimately, it's a big process. And that's why 5% sell 95% of the business. Wow. I tell you, Jordan, it's really neat. to see what you built, that foundation, that community, the teaching, the training, and personal developments so that your agent succeed. And I think that's amazing. So if someone is interested in learning more and connecting with you, what's the best way that they can do that?

It's a great question. You know, you can find me really simply just by finding me on Instagram. It's just my name. Or you can email me at Jordan at Jordan Terrell Group. That would probably be the easiest way. But it, On my Instagram, I have my entire link tree of all the ways to communicate with me and contact me. And I have a lot of content out there that I put out already. Perfect. Well, thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure chatting with you today.

Yeah, thank you so much. Thank you for listening to the Colorado Real Estate Leaders podcast, brought to you by Trailstone Insurance Group. To learn more about the topics mentioned on today's show or listen to past episodes, visit www.com. Thank you.