KGCI: Real Estate on Air - How to Scale Deals and Compress Decades Into Years Through Coaching

Episode Date: May 2, 2026

Summary:In this episode, Chris Craddock interviews Kelly Cook, a former college football coach turned high-performing real estate leader, on the critical steps required to scale a business from 15 to 50 deals annually. The conversation focuses on leveraging administrative help, such as transaction coordinators, to move past production ceilings. Cook details his "Miracle Morning" routine and the "earn your shower" philosophy, emphasizing that professional success is a byproduct of winning the morning and maintaining rigorous personal discipline.

Everybody that sold 10 houses thinks that they're qualified to sell to be a coach. That's not true. But here's the other side. Tiger Woods is golf coach is not better than Tiger Woods. Michael Jordan's basketball coach is not better than Michael Jordan. You don't have to be like selling more, but you do have to understand the game at a high level. Welcome to Uncommon Real Estate, where it's all about finding creative solutions for real estate agents and investors. In exclusive mastermind conversations with some of the brightest minds in real estate,

you'll learn how to earn an extra six figures a year. Don't follow the herd. Be uncommon. Here are your hosts, multi-millionaire real estate agent and investor, Chris Craddock and Jeff Safright. All right. Welcome to another episode of Uncommon Real Estate.

And I want to give a shout out to my buddy, Kelly Cook here, who is going to help us understand what it was like going from college football player a college football coach to the real estate world and I'm building a large team. Anybody that has hung out with me or been part of part of our crew here in the past understands that pretty much half my analogies or sports analogies. So I because I just think that sports and real life just collide in so many ways.

And yeah, I always love talking to people that have achieved at a high level in any area of their life. And yeah, let's let's dive in. Kelly, tell us about yourself where you're coming from, where you're at now. where you're headed. I love them, man. I don't know if we have the time for that, but yeah, no, I appreciate it, Chris. I'm excited to be on your show here, and hopefully we can drop a few nuggets for some people out there. But yeah, I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, and I ended up playing football, sports, playing baseball, basketball, tennis, all that stuff. And then in high school,

it came pretty good at football. And so I had a chance to play University of Nebraska, which at the time was even cooler than now, because we were actually really, really good back We've been struggling lately, but no, it's got a chance to play that and learned a lot through a lot of lessons I can talk about that, how it relates to where we're out today. But from there, I got the opportunity. I played a little quarterback and receiver there, so I had the opportunity to coach on the offense side of the football as a graduate assistant coach at Nebraska after I was done playing, which then parlayed into a coaching gig at Ole Miss in the SEC conference the following year.

and eventually got into real estate. That's where that's the general path of what I took. And then, of course, now real estate team, fast forward to today, real estate team that is doing great. We're growing every year, man. We've been doing this 15 years. I had a team for probably at this point about nine of it. And we are on pace to hopefully on a sales volume come close maybe to 100, 100 million this year itself. So that would be amazing.

That's what we're right here today. So getting to that $100 million. Tell me this, what are some of the things as anybody that breaks that $100 million mark in real estate? I feel like that's like that, that mark that kind of takes you from that level where you know that you've created something that is pretty big because that is a hard, hard number to break. And regardless of anything else, it means that you have some good people working for you.

You have a good organization. And honestly, one of the jokes that I always make was I remember when I would watch people up on stage when I was first starting and I would listen to everything and I'm like, dang, my business is so far from that. It's just there's so many messes everywhere. And then all of a sudden I got to be one of those people on stage and started hanging out with them and having lunch afterwards. And you find out that everybody on stage, they talk about their business like this like race car. But then when you talk to them at dinner afterwards, that you realize it's a race car with like kind of a quasi-rusted out engine that they're trying to fake everything all the time,

even the big ones. So tell me this, how has going from what you do with sports to teaching and training, like coaching people at a high level in football and sports to teach you and training people in real estate, what are some of the comparisons that you see as far as excellence there versus excellence here? Yeah, a lot, actually. I tell you, I think, in fact, I'll just tell you right now, one of our prerequisites, I can't say 100 percent, that'd probably be a lie. But one of our prerequisites, to join our team is we asked the question, did you play a team sport in high school or even junior high for that matter, right? Did you play a team sport? Because then you understand the value that a team can bring if it's a good value and everyone's rowing the boat in the same direction. So that's one

of the things that we ask. And if someone says, yep, they may get it, right? They get it right. Then it's easy to make a sports analogy to them about that kind of stuff. But there's a lot of, of, I will say this. It took me a while to understand that business and sports, it's in some degree. I took a while to figure that out, for example, coaching. Never had a coach for the five years in business or whatever, something like that, no coach at all. And then one day someone goes, hey, and I was the one is that I can't pay the money a month,

whatever for that right now. I'll do it someday. And then someone said to me one time, it challenged me and said, look, you played sports your whole life. Did you always have a good coach? or not always, but I had a coach, okay, well, the good ones to make you better. Yeah, for sure. So, an agent, to help me be a better leader as well and to coach my agents as well to help

them succeed because you have to have success through others to get to that point. Like you said, Chris, trying to get that $100 million mark is issued or even anything at 50 or 25, but you've got to have help along the way to get you there. You can't scale without it. Yeah, 100%. 100%. When I first got into real estate, everybody kept talking about hiring a coach. Do you have to have a coach? It is foolish to not have a coach. And you may say, well, I don't have any money. Well, here's the deal. If you don't have any money,

you're probably going to get money a lot slower if you don't have somebody helping you. And here's why. If in this business, right, to be even mildly successful, it is colored by numbers, right, color by numbers. But here's the problem. A lot of us have this picture, but we don't know which numbers to correlate with which colors. So we're guessing. And so you get somebody else that can help you and tell you, okay, four equals red, color here, two equals blue. Get somebody that understands that. And here's the thing. All coaches are not created equally. Everybody that's sold 10 houses thinks that they're qualified to sell to be a coach. That's not true. But here's the other side, Tiger Woods is golf coach is not better than Tiger Woods. Michael Jordan's

basketball coach is not better than Michael Jordan. You don't have to be like selling more, but you do have to understand the game at a high level. My coach has never sold any of, I've got a number of coaches. None of them have sold, actually one of them, sells more than I sell. We're going to sell like probably three and a half to four million in GCI this year. And I have one that sells more than I sell. But the rest of them don't. But they know how to call me on my crap. They don't let me get rid of, get away with stuff. They made me think better. So that's the thing that the coaches are going to do. And they're going to help you get this. They're going to help you compress the things that you will take

decades to learn into years. That is why you hire a coach. Compress those decades into years. So that's the deal there. So anyway, Kelly, you have any other thoughts on coaching and just the power of that, what you've seen or even anything from your football days, from real estate, anything like that, the power of coaching? Man, you just know that it's going to compress it. Everybody right now is on a point A trying to get to a point B. And then at different point B is different for everybody, right? We're all unique. But that coaching is going to, like you say, compressing,

and get you there much faster. There's a business plan from a coaching organization that's Tom Berry. We all probably heard of Tom Berry. But a long time ago, I've downloaded his business plan, which you all should be doing every year. It's coming up in October. But on the back of his business plan, he has this quote that every year I've seen it there. It says, if you are willing to do what no one else will do for the next five to nine

years, you can live like no one else for the rest of your life. And that's so true. And I tell people who's maybe looking to join our team or even your team, Chris, or any team, I just say, look, we're a vehicle to help you get there faster. So I think if you come on our team, we should be able to get you there in maybe two to five years instead of five to nine years. But that's coaching and that's having a system, having a game plan to help get you there. That's huge. The compression part of that's huge. You get there fast. Yeah. And Dave Ramsey says it a little bit different, but the same thing. And I quote him all the time. Live like no one else now so you can live like no one else later. That's the whole thing. But the

problem is everybody wants short term gains, short term benefits and they're not willing to put in the price. They're not willing to pay the price to be the person that they want to be. And and that's the whole key here. You got to understand like the money that comes from success is a byproduct. You get to a point where it doesn't make that much of a difference if you make an extra 100 bucks or 200 bucks or a thousand bucks or anything like that like the money does it but it is a scoreboard it shows it's a byproduct of being excellent and that's that's the whole key there that you got to understand is it will show up it'll show up in your bottom line when you when you learn to be excellent with your business and learn all that stuff it's Earl Nightingale which if you guys have never ever listened to Earl Nightingale

I think it's called the strangest secret or something like that one of the just amazing. He talks about success, like the financial benefit. It's like the warmth from a fire. You've got to build the fire so that it comes with heat. You can't get the heat without building a good fire. And the same thing with building a good business and a good organization. So with that said, Kelly, tell me this. Give me some practical like one, two steps on, let's say somebody wants to go from one deal to 50 deals in a year. Or, well, I think, I think there's the marks. one to 15, 15 to 30, 30 to 50. Can you tell us some of the, I feel like those are where you start hitting ceilings, right, right after those marks? Can you tell us some of the things that you'll tell

like an agent to go from zero to 15 and then the next level and the next level? Can you give us a little bit of a heads up on how you would coach an agent in that place? Because I think, I think everybody tends to struggle with the same things in those chunkings. Yeah, I think you're right. And I think it all comes back down to leverage while you're still being consistent. It's the power of and, not or, to continue to do certain things very well while you leverage. And a lot of that's going to be done, guys. Gary B. talks about this a lot, right? It is your side hustle. Well, your side hustle doesn't have to be something different than real estate, but you have to do more on the quote-unquote non-business hours to help build systems

to help you get to that breakthrough. Because when you hit those stillings I can talk about, which, by the way, have an understanding and just know right now that you will. okay and that's okay but when you do you're going to take a step back and hopefully go two steps forward now if you're on a team hopefully a team has some sort of leverage for you right that's a big thing if you're an individual agent then you need to find that piece if you're let's say if you're individual agent when you get to that first break where you're at 15 or maybe 20 deals and it's getting tough to break past that then you need hire a transaction coordinator and you can do that from an independent standpoint right you can hire independent transaction coordinator that can

you can pay a fee to probably at your office or somewhere just to handle a hand know all the paperwork, right? The admin stuff, the operation stuff has to be put on the back burner in order for you to sell more and grow more. I remember, Chris, I remember my first guy, and I got that point in my business when I was early new, 30 deals or so, and I had a transaction quarter of a hire. I remember there was times she'd be like, okay, I need this document signed if you want your check. And in my mind, I'm like, well, the check's already there. So that's still a low priority. I'm going to go out here and sell and they generate. But I don't understand why that's that's uncommon. I'm a common real estate. That's uncommon because what I

found out is that agents, once they have a check there, they stop everything they're doing. They'll get a T a cross and I dotted and go out of their way that makes no additional money for them instead of sticking their schedule and their green time to be able to regenerate. It blows my mind, man. It blows my mind. But so yeah, transition coordinator. Then once you get to the next level that you go a long ways with a good chance of corner by the way, but then when you get to the next level, it may be another marketing assistant, right? Somebody's going to help you part time. I would start part time to help you do some marketing stuff to be able to help growth that next level, right, with some leverage, right? Because you can only lead generating so much. You need some marketing as well

out there too. So that's that's my process from a small standpoint. That's great. That's great. Yeah, you know, Runei saying that struggling as a new agent with only two. And what I would just say is this. Remember, every time that we level up, it's hard, right? You hit these places where you either break and shrink back, hit these breaking points to shrink back or you bust through. I think about working out, right? Like, if you're sore, it means you're in a place or you're getting better. If you're not sore, you're comfortable and your routine probably needs to change a little bit. Yeah, 100%. I think that's a big thing. I think a lot of people go, holy crap, I'm to this point. and why am I not doing anything more or getting any better?

Well, first of all, ask yourself, are you maximizing your own time, right? Every one of us can do a side hustle. I remember I spent time and time and time trying to figure out what my systems would be to map that out, thinking with the end in mind, and then you have time to build it. So up at 5 a.m., building systems, recording videos, all this stuff, so that someone else can take the reins and run that system. Because if you read the MRIA book, we all know about it. that in real estate, no matter what brokerage were at, the millionaire real estate book,

the biggest mistake people overlook is the fact that their first hire, a lot of times, if they make the right first hire correctly, which is supposed to be a transaction coordinator, administrative assistant, the next hire they make after that, everyone always goes to the buyer agents, always. And if you read that book, it talks about your second hire, not being a buyer's agent, being another administrative assistant of some sort that can do marketing, like we talked about, whether on their payroll or not, because why? Because you're the best sales agent. So you didn't maximize your time until you can no longer sell any more houses and me with any more clients. Then you leverage the leads and your sphere of influence your database out to someone else who's talented that can take on the sales side while still being supported by your admin staff.

Yeah, 100%. 100%. I love that. So the three, the two things that we've hit so far that you got to understand. So I want everybody to be able to have a win that they can take away. If you don't, have a coach, go get a coach. I don't care if you don't have money. I promise you, you're not going to get money if you don't do it. But again, by getting a coach, it proves that you're being coachable because right now we're coaching you saying, go get a coach, be coachable. So if you're not coachable anyway, if we tell you you you get a coach and you don't do what they tell you or have other reasons or excuses or all the other stuff, you're not going to make any money anyway. And then you're throwing away your money. So don't do it unless you're going to listen. So that's one. Number two, if you don't have somebody helping you transaction

coordinator, get a transaction coordinator, all these things. If you're a new agent, you can join a team, but make sure it's a great team. There's so many terrible teams out there to make sure it's a great team, great leadership. You'll also get coaching from a good team. So you can do that too. So that's for the newer agents. And you got to understand that'll get you from Peter Thiel calls it zero to one. That'll get you there, get you moving, get you in inertia, winning begets winning.

And then the next thing that I want to talk about. So Kelly, you said this the other day, which I really, really, really. loved. You said in the mornings, you've got to earn your shower. Can you, can you talk about that? Because I just, I really thought about that a lot. I really like that. I've got a really strong morning routine. And my morning routine changed my life. It helped me level up dramatically. But can you, can you talk to me about earning your shower? Absolutely, man. I love it, Chris. I think everybody who has a successful haul has a lot of qualities. But one of them is winning the morning, right? And you and I chat about this a little bit. I think we all have something great, the general routine down. But there's

There's little unique things in that routine that make us all unique in what we like to do or how we have the most success to get our juices going in the morning. One of those things that I love is working out. And I think everyone has to do that. I know another agent who's actually pretty successful right now, but they're burned out. And I was talking about, what's your morning routine like? And he said, I do this. I'm at the office by 530 and blah, blah, blah, and try to hit the spires and this and that.

I go, great. When are you working out? I don't have time for that. I'm grinding. I go, okay. but hold on you got a grunt, but you have to have a balance of some of these different things. So the Miracle Morning Book, with how Elrod is amazing and talks about the savers, S-A-V-E-R-S as an acronym of things you should do for your team.

One of them is the E is exercise. And what he says is you need to earn your shower. So you don't earn the right when you wake up in the morning to go into the shower and wake up that way. No, sir. No, no, no, no. You wake up by brushing your teeth first with your non-dominant hand to get that side of your brain going. That's what you did. You skipped over that when we were talking before.

You said it really fast. So I want everybody to get that. How that changes your morning, how it wakes you up. Can you say that again just so that everybody. Because I think this is, it's so small, but we win in the inches, right? So can you tell us about that? Just say that one more time so people get it. Absolutely.

So when you wake up, you don't hit snooze or maybe give yourself one, right? And then you're like, oh, what I do? Do I get up? What do I do? I'm confused. I'm discombobulated, right? You walk to the bathroom. And if you're really good, you already have the toothpaste out next to the toothbrush,

ready to roll. And then you start brushing your teeth while you're half asleep in the dark or light. It doesn't matter with your non-dominate hand as that starts waking up your opposite side of your brain. So I love that, too. It gives you somewhere when you wake up, where exactly where you're going to go. and that's what you do. And then from there, you have the savers.

You have affirmations, visualization. You have meditation or prayer, right? Like, I'm a Christian guy, so I like to pray and I read two chapters in my Bible every single morning with my reading part, which is the R. But you have to earn your shower. So you have to exercise. And he talks about, I don't care if it's 15 minutes of just doing some pushups and sit-ups and maybe some jumping jacks in your house, your bedroom.

Everyone can do that. Get a little bit of your heart rate up. It's a little sweat going. and then that's when you get to earn your shower in the morning. That's awesome. Guys, everybody, please get this success leaves clues. And so often we can act like, no, no, no, I don't need to do this. I don't need to do this.

But look at everybody who's my, somebody's going to send me somebody someday. I haven't gotten one yet. But at some point where they're not a morning person and they're wildly successful, but I'll tell you, I've not found that person yet. And I'll, yeah, all I'm saying is success leaves clues across the board. all the people that I respect over and over and over again and say, man, like they are a great beacon that I want to run towards. They win their morning. So boom. Yeah, Chris, I'll say this. I heard. I actually was it was Cody Gibson years ago. He was talking.

And he goes, and he goes, I challenge anyone in this room to need me one person that is very successful that wakes up consistently after 6 a.m. in the morning. And it's funny because I never thought about it. No one ever challenged me with that question before whatsoever. And I started thinking about it and thinking about it. I couldn't. And no one else in the entire room could. And that's six and that's not only five or five, it's six. And he's dead right. That's incredible. Yeah. Yeah. That's the whole thing. And Gary Keller talks about that in the one thing. What is it? You've got to find out what are the things that if I do this, everything else will, what is the, what is the phrase that everything else

will essentially fall in the place? It's irrelevant. What is it? Yeah. Yeah, the phrase is that what's the one I do and by doing so make how man it makes everything else irrelevant or it doesn't matter but yeah I can't I don't know but yeah at the end of the day that that is that that's the kind of idea so if you win that morning then you're going to win the day and and this is what I say over and over and over again because oftentimes we get to the end of the year we say dang I was short on my goals well I'm just going to try harder next year but but we don't realize and that's where like some of these books some of my favorite books, and I'll say a few of these books, scrum, 12-week-a-year, like clockwork,

all of these books talk about compressing into shorter goals rather than longer goals so that you can see where they are. But if we go to win the morning, if you win your morning, you're going to win your day. If you win your day, you're going to win your week. If you win your weeks, you're going to win your months. If you win your months, you're going to win your years. And then you can look back and say, I won.

And actually, a friend of mine was just talking about Nick Sabin again, and he was just talking about these, if we win every play, we're going to win the series. If we win the series, we're going to win the quarter. If we win the quarter, we're going to win the games. If we win every quarter, we're going to win every game. If we win every game, we're going to win the championship. And that's that whole thing. You break it down, break it down, break it down. And then you know that you can win. But so often we have these big goals, but we don't break it down to winning these smaller, smaller pieces. Yeah, I would say one thing on that, too, there's a research proven.

And Gino Wickman, a couple of his books, talks about this, talks about the human brain can always stay motivated for a given time of 90 days out at maximum. So like when we business plan, we make sure we don't skip over the quarter. A lot of people go from month and then win the month to win the year. Quarter is huge because especially if someone gets behind the first quarter, let's say, and their goal is like, oh man, man, now the goal gets real big. It's like a big huge mountain to climb instead of a heel. And then it's just to lose track, I can't overcome that because my other goal is so big now at this point. But if you break it down for the quarter and say, okay, you want to make, try to make $80,000 a year or whatever,

and you're 20 a quarter. Well, if you're mid-February and you're behind, okay, what can we do to turn this speedboat around now at this point so that you can hit 20 by end of March instead of, well, you're getting behind now. You've got to get 100 by end of the year or 80 by end of the year. That's a big important thing too. All right. So we've given a bunch of small things to do to get wins. now we're here. We've got three minutes left in what we're doing today. How about this? Give us one thing every single person listening can do to get one more transaction. And the reason we're saying one more, because we're talking about breaking down to small, Peter Teal, founder of PayPal, wrote a book called zero to one, which is really great that talks about that, that next one, that first one like that,

that you get momentum and winning always begets winning. An inertia kicks in. And man, it's so much easier an airplane, the hardest the engine works is to get off the ground, and then you hear them dial it back and it's still going as fast. So what is it that you can give us today that if we started doing this, we'll get us our next transaction. Can you like break it down so granular? Okay, you ready for this? You ready?

Ready, baby. Okay, here we go. Here we go. All right. Now, stay with me. It's not going to be what you think it is in the beginning. If you have a listing, then you need to sit and open house this weekend. If you don't, you need to find somebody in your brokerage or not, get the

permission and sit that house open. Now, we have a whole plan. We're going to go through the open house but I'm not going to talk about right now necessarily. But here's the unique factor. When the open house is over, let's say your house you're sitting open is a two-story house with a two-car garage. Okay. When the open house is over, you have your lead behind pieces ready to go that you print it out through wherever you're how you get your flyers okay you're going to go knock on the closest 30 doors after not before after the open house and if you're sitting a two-story two-bet two car garage a house you're going to go to every single house on the block let's just keep a simple here that is a single story home you're knock on the door and you're going to when they answer you're

to say you're going to choose yourself and take a couple steps back of course right and you're to say, hey, I'm selling, you probably saw my signs out here. I was an open house from one to four today, had great traffic. Yet, we had a guy or gal, family, whatever, come in, who is looking in this neighborhood for a single story home. The house I'm sitting on Main Street, that's a two-story home, but you have a single story home? Have you ever thought of selling? He's willing to pay market value or more. And that has been great for us because nobody does this after the open house. They always do it before. That's interesting. Okay. So afterwards, you say,

hey, we're looking for something that's different than this one we have. You knock on the doors and ask it. Wow, that's great. That's great. And one of the things I've learned with open houses is a lot of times, this was something that opened my mind dramatically was almost every time I've gone to a listing presentation, has that person talked about going to another open house saying, oh yeah, I saw that one because I went to an open house. Have you, have you noticed that or is it just me? No, not just you. I noticed that, yes. Okay. Yeah, yeah. It's crazy. Like they've been to other open houses and what does that teach us? We can be like so dense, right? But if that teaches us is if they're

going to sell their house sometime in the next year, they're going to be in the open house calling themselves a nosy neighbor just checking it out. And for years, I just wrote those people off. And then I realize these are listing presentations waiting to happen, the quote, nosy neighbors. And yeah, I got a lot of listings out of that too. So boom, two things, open houses, get those done. That is, that's incredible. Kelly, this is, this is excellent. Hey man, one, one last quick question here. Do you like referrals? I love referrals. Also, if someone wanted to send you some referrals, where are you located and how can people get in touch with you? Yeah, hey, I appreciate it. I am located in Scottsdale, Arizona.

We serve us pretty much the entire Phoenix, Arizona area. Our team does. So if you have anybody looking to buy a second house or a great place for a winter house or a retiree, we love to help them out. So I appreciate it. And thank you for putting up with the darkness here. We're taking off at the airport here in a second. So my family here is headed the airport.

So I apologize. All good. All good. All right. And what did you say? What's the best way to get in touch with you? 480-227-2028. is my cell and my email is Kelly at Kellycookhomes.com.

And one of the things that I have loved and served me very well when I was getting started was people that I would listen to on podcasts oftentimes said that they're okay. If somebody wanted to pick their brain or learn from them or something like that, that they'd be okay with it. Would you be all right if somebody wanted to reach out? Just say, man, Kelly sounds like he's got to step together. I'd love to just hear from him. Would you be all right if people reach out?

heck yeah man absolutely you get by giving the go giver book is amazing absolutely be happy to guys boom all right well hey if you've not joined our facebook group uncommon real estate please join i literally want to just like you're saying i want to give as much as possible so any questions anybody has posted in there i'll interact with those questions any topics or anybody that you'd like to see on in future episodes, please feel free to message me in there or say something that you'd like to see in there. We'll get it done. And I'll tell you what, Kelly is a stud. Great guy. Definitely reach out to him. And I'm so glad we can join hanging with you guys. Kelly, thanks so much, brother. Enjoy your trip. Hey, Chris. Thanks so much, man. It's a pleasure. I appreciate it. All right. See guys.

Please give us a big review on the podcast and download Uncommon Real Estate podcast. All right. See you guys. Bye-bye. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Uncommon Real Estate. Subscribe to the podcast to stay up to date with the latest mastermind conversations from Chris, Jeff, and other Uncommon Real Estate industry leaders. If you love this podcast, please write us a review. And to fast track your real estate career, go to Chris Craddock.com.