KGCI: Real Estate on Air - Reverse Engineer Your Real Estate Goals

Episode Date: May 29, 2025

I'm so excited to see you again. Today, we're diving into goal setting and how to reverse engineer that. So what does that mean to you in your life? How do you do it? Let's just fucking jump right in. Yeah, let's do it. So I'm super excited to talk about this. It's something our team in particular has put a huge emphasis on in the last probably 18 months. And it was just a huge light bulb moment for my business partner and I when we kind of sat down and started looking at at things because everyone tracks their closings, right? Who doesn't track closings and commissions earned? But a lot of people aren't tracking how they get there. And so we really have been having fun with the data and the statistics to kind of back into that. So you can really set yourself

up for success. And I think that's where we're going today. And you just said some magic words, data and stats. Like we're so here for that. Okay. So used to maybe not you, but most people, you know, track the closings and commissions like you said. So can you walk it through, pretend like maybe I'm one of your agents. Can we go through it? Yeah, absolutely. So in quarter, end to quarter three, early quarter four each year, we kind of tee up the next year and what that's going to look like. And so first thing, you kind of say, how many, how many closings do you want to do as a realtor? And then how many of those are going to be buyers, how many those are going to be sellers? And you kind of start backing into it from there. So let's say, you know,

let's say you're going to do 50 closings and 25 of each. We're then going to say, where are those going to come from, right? So you're looking at your lead sources. And the more years that you do this, the better it gets because the better data you have specific to you. So for example, my showing ratio last year was significantly better than one of my colleagues. But my listing appointments closed was way worse. So my goal planning, how many list appointments I needed to go on to sell that number of

houses was different than hers. So it's custom to each person as you kind of start to get. year over years, you kind of see your personal conversion. And then you can also learn from each other. Okay, why am I showing twice as many houses as you are to get a contract? And that's something else that's kind of fun out of it. So we go step by step through that process and then break it down as far as to what month are you going to be doing these closings?

If you say you're going to do, gosh, what's 50 divided by 12? Four and a half. If you say you're going to do four every month, that's good math. That's V. Yeah, right? I was like, oh, crap, where am I going to go with this? If you say you're going to do four every month. month that's hey you got to call BS again because we all kind of ride the real estate roller coaster.

We're in a seasonal business. So we're really setting like stretch goals, but realistic goals based on what you've done before, what other people have done. And then once you kind of get that business plan ironed out, then you can start saying, you know, okay, if, if 10 of those are going to come from open houses and you can see kind of what your open house ratio is from the past. Do you need to be doing three every weekend? Do you need to be doing one a month? And then you actually start putting your emphasis where it needs to go because I think what we used to do is we used to kind of just take anything and everything, any lead source that reached out to us that was selling us leads or you know, oh, this person does postcards and that's working for them. Let's try that.

This person does that. And then you're not really good at anything because you're doing everything. So we get really focused on where we want the business to come from. So then every day when you start to work or prospect, you know, you know where you're going ideally. A lot in there. Okay. Yes. So so much. And I want to go like fully dice, this all every part of it okay same falls deep we're going balls deep so from the beginning you mentioned I mean obviously a new especially new agents or agents that I've never tracked which so many agents do not track do not track the numbers so they don't have a frame of reference I have no idea you know how many conversations I had in

order to have my 50 closings this year whatever it is what do you suggest to that agent do you give them your numbers to start out and then then I want to go further into every single conversion. Like you said, a show and then comparing. Yeah, just let's start there. Yeah. Yeah, let's do that. So we totally kind of are indeed this, rip off and duplicated it from from a Tom Ferry conference that we attended. He has a lot of good like averages for like industry wide. So I don't think averages are great because everyone is so different and you know,

you can get a rock star and a terrible converter in that, but it's a place to start. And so he said, you know, if you're setting buyer consultation meetings, you know, 30% of those will turn into an actual buyer closing. So that was like something to start as a frame of reference. You also could probably just Google it, you know, but I wouldn't give them my numbers necessarily because I think a new agent actually probably is going to have to do a lot more showings to close a buyer than I will because they haven't learned how to set expectations. They haven't put all the processes in place or gotten to the level of, you know, just kind of finesse with your script. Yeah.

And I'm not even as great as a lot of other people, you know. So everyone's different, but I would say definitely err on the side, on the conservative side, because then worst case scenario, you're going to do better than you want it to do. So in that scenario, you know, I guess talk to other people, reach out to me. I'm happy to share kind of our team's numbers. It also depends where your business is coming from, right? So, you know, we've got five agents on our team. And there's some things that look really similar.

between each of us, but there's some things that are really different. For example, you know, our best listing appointment closer almost has a very, very large SOI book of business. So the people she's meeting with, she really knows, whereas someone else on our team that had a much lower listing ratio was going on internet lead listing appointments where those sellers were talking to multiple people. And so I think it goes back to like your experience and the source as well because internet conversion is obviously going to have a different ratio than like your friend from church giving you a call. And maybe that's a good point to take us.

Because I think you probably could tell Allie and I want to go really deep on this. Because I feel like this is something that is so impactful to so many agents. And a lot of times on podcast, they'll be like reverse engineer your goals and then just keep moving. You know, and then you're like, well, shit, man, how do I do that? So let's just pretend hypothetically. And we keep doing the new agent. But maybe it's, I'm not new. I'm like, this is year two. My first year I didn't fucking,

I pulled shit out of my ass. I did 12. It was amazing. But I don't know. Now I'm ready to get serious. So I'm going to double it or maybe we stick with your 50. That's fine. The 50 closings in year two, 25 and 25. So do we start with what is your marketing strategy? And what is that from what you've seen on your team? What are you guys using for your marketing strategy to do less? Because you said, don't do it all, do less. Yep. And maybe we start there. Yeah, one quick thing to add to is like you mentioned, Kristen, it depends on which lead

strategy you're going after because if it's cold call. I actually read a book. Oh, my God, what book? I think it was ninja selling where they have the chart out there for like just general conversion rates, you know, like I have it pulled up here because I put it into my real estate Bible. Mailers is 2000 to 1. That's the typical conversion rate from mailers is 2000 to 1.

the lowest converting cold internet leads 1600 to one going all the way down door knocking personal contact advertisement with your like advertising calls with your info sign calls 20 to one open houses 15 to 1 past buyers 9 to 1 past sellers 4 to 1 referrals are almost 2 out of every 3 and that's like the best that you can get is obviously referrals but for sure it just yeah but anyway yes going back to this question yeah i mean it'll get better every year. So we're probably going on just year three of kind of this really robust process. And each year it's gotten, you know, it's gotten closer to what it actually needs to be. And as the market changes and things shift, like it's not going to be perfect, but it's much

better than saying, I'm going to sell 50 houses this year. And then, you know, December 31st comes. You look at, you know, your closings. You're like, okay, I sold 20. I wonder why. You know, it's a lot more intentional than that. So this is a little bit off course, but I kind of, I kind of made up this thing just called like an advocacy meter. So whenever you meet like a total stranger, they're a complete skeptic, right? Like they've got, they know 16 realtors. They probably have two in their family. They've had a crap experience with one. They've watched TV for some. Others, you know, skeptics. They don't know anything about you to like total advocates for your business, like people that are running around saying, hey, you need to call Kristen Beam if you're going

to sell a house, right? People fall all different places on that meter when you meet them. So the internet leads are going to be complete skeptics. And oh, by the way, they're, interviewing 10 other agents and probably trying to get the best rate. And then your best friend from church, it's going to be a great advocate. Like never sold a house with you, but like you're her best friend, you're right or ride or die. You're in. Right. So depending kind of where the source falls on that meter and there's everything in between, right? The conversion's going to be different. So going back to kind of the practical sense, you know, this whole process starts with reflecting on the year past. If you're not a brand new agent, again, if you're a brand new agent, you need to make some

assumptions, but it's reflecting on the year past. So starting with where did that business come from and for you looking at that. So for me, at the beginning, it was like nine or ten different places, you know, which actually allowed us to make some good business decisions because we said, okay, you know, we're paying into this model to close four homes out of our 130 on the year. That doesn't make a lot of sense for us to be managing a whole business relationship, following all their processes for four closings, right? So we're able just to wipe that away and then create space for, the ones that we're actually closing 35 deals a year, right? So now when I get a lead or something like that, I can say I always claim this one. I stop what I'm doing and claim this one because

I know it's a producer. And now I'm not even getting the other one. Does that make sense? Am I tracking? Dude, yes, totally makes sense. And I love that idea too because a lot of times when you even try to do this with a brand new agent, it's in reality, you just need to go out and try stuff because you don't know what works for you. You don't know what you like. What's an authentic fit? So just go try a bunch of things and then do what you did. Reflect. Like this has only got me four closings. This got me 35.

Hell yeah. So, okay, perfect. I'm with you. And okay, so we've reflected. And let's do this actually instead of me pretending. Let's do this as if we're Kristen. So, you know, what were the ones? What did you toss away?

What did you keep? Yeah. We used to be like Ramsey partners, for example, in the Ramsey network. That was like a referral partner of ours. Love Dave Ramsey. all his stuff, but it just wasn't making a lot of sense the way that we were converting them to how we were closing them. So that's a partnership that we as a business decided to kind of end. And then personally, like my top three places that I was getting business was from agent referrals,

which was a big surprise at the time. I didn't think I knew that many agents in other places. Then client referrals and past clients, which you kind of hope and expect. And then kind of a tie between two internet sources. So we use OpCity, which is the back end of Realtor.com. and then my agent finder just another kind of internet source. And so for me, that gave a lot of clarity because at the time we had probably eight other internet sources that we were closing between one and five deals a year. But, you know, every time your phone goes off or whatever and you're in the middle of something, you're like, ah, I should take that, but I don't, you know, do I need to?

And so now I know if my phone goes off for Op City or my agent finder, I stop what I'm doing and I take them because they convert and I deleted everything else off my phone. phone off my phone. So I kind of deleted a lot of the noise so I could make space for the noise that I needed to pay 20 80 20 all the way. Yes. For sure. But until you crunch the numbers, you have no idea. Everything looks equal. Everything looks like business. Especially where have you heard of that study that was done with the cold calling specifically. I don't know if it was just for real estate, but I think it was just cold callers like sales, those that tracked, those that didn't. and those that did not track thought that they had the same amount of calls as those that did track.

And obviously those that did track made way more fucking sales than those that didn't track, but they thought they did the same because like one conversation went heavy. That those that tracked, they tallied it as obviously one combo onto the next. But then those that didn't track, they, the feel they're they're just based off based off feelings, you know, like there's not numbers, not black and white. It's oh, that conversation hurt. That one felt like five big calls and then at the end of the day, they, oh, over inflate like way inflated the amount of conversations they thought they were having.

We are so good at that as realtors like in all aspects. Like we make things such a bigger deal in our heads. Like I'll, you know, we'll think for an hour about how you're dreading having a certain conversation and then the phone call takes two minutes. You're like, well, that was stupid. You know, I actually, I have a friend that he has marbles on his desk and he has two jars. So his contacts, he can't get up from his for the day from prospecting until his marbles move from one jar to the other. And it's just a really easy way for him to like tangibly see in front of him like

from here to here, from here to here every single day. And so you can't cheat yourself and be like, oh, I was on the phone for 35 minutes with one person. So I must have done 35 minutes of calls. It's no, you didn't. You talked to one person. That is so smart. I like, yeah. Take the marbles. Yeah. Well, take the marbles. I'll shout out to you, man. Yeah. Right. Okay. So going back, so we have, you have done your reflection. We have your top three lead sources. Do you, are you perfectly split between buyers and sellers? No. What is, what is yours?

Yeah. So I'm about, I mean, I'm pretty close relatively, but I'm about 55, 45, 45. Actually, do have more buyers than sellers. And that's been pretty consistent for me the last few years, probably market driven, right? Like we're in a very low listing market, most of us. So that's part of it. But, you know, a lot of people will say, hey, you know, I want to be a 75 listing agent. and a 25 buyer agent.

And you're like, okay, that's cool. Last year, you did 25 listing agent and 75 buyers agent. So how is that going to happen for you in one year, right? And so that's where going back to setting the goals and kind of backing into it makes a lot of sense. Or if, you know, all of your, if all of the lead sources you have working for you or buyer leads coming in, but you're setting goals to close sellers, like you have a disconnect. And so that's really this whole exercise, which you spend so much time on up front so that then you can actually kind of create your reality.

And I think, I mean, realtors are so guilty of that, right, of saying, hey, I'm just going to go do this with no plan or way to get there. And then they wonder why they, you know, didn't do what they wanted to do. Okay. So we're back. We have, you have your lead sources. You have your buyer-seller breakdown. Now are we, and we have our number, which we're just going to stick with 50, right? Yeah.

Great. So now what? What do I need to do to break that? I have my goal. I have my lead sources. I have whatever and break it down further. Yeah. So a couple of things, you know, come next. So things that we track, obviously are listing appointments, initial buyer consultation meetings, showings, offers your writing. Those are kind of our main like leading indicators. So you can usually kind of see, okay, I have to write two offers to get one contract

in our market or something like that. And then we're looking at that every week and we're reporting that kind of in our team meeting. We've got a big spreadsheet. I actually put that in the in the nugget. If anyone wants to steal from it. So you're very visually seeing, okay, you know, we're almost two months into the year and you've written two offers, but you think you're going to close 25, 25 deals. Like you get gut checks along the way. So those are the big, the big things we're tracking, but then on a more personal level, kind of depending what your lead sources are, we're also making like daily or weekly key activities. So if, you know, if part of your business is going to come from, agent referrals, for example, you know, what are you doing to stay in front of your agents?

Am I just connecting with people on social once a week? Do I have more of a, you know, I'm planning to put together kind of a more value add touch point to like my realtor friends throughout the year. That's not something I had on my radar at all. You know, we have that for our clients or past clients to stay in front of them. But until I realized, you know, we're a big portion of my business coming from agents, I didn't have that on my radar at all, right? So it's kind of influencing then like the projects that you need to implement as well.

Something else for me, just, you know, just networks that you're in, whether it's friend group or church group or whatever, if you're getting business there, like just are you going regularly, right? That might be a weekly activity to go to church. So it's not even like working stuff. It's just being intentional about where you're spending your time. And, you know, it varies by everyone based on where your business is coming from. I was listening to your podcast with the girl that did the Facebook group thing.

She gets all her leads from like Facebook groups. Yeah. She's like mom, mom toddler, whatever stuff in Facebook groups, which is super cool. I'm probably not going to go down that avenue because I've got my things. Right. I know to stay in my lane now. But like she does not need to be working on an agent touch point plan. You know what I mean?

It's not that wouldn't be relevant to her. This is so I love this. Okay. I'm on tab three, which is the leading measure. And so this is just like a highlight one sheet where you can see every single week, right? On the left hand side, this is every single week for the whole year. So it's like super, super clear whether they're getting, you know, listing appointments, buyer consultation, showing client appointments, five-star reviews, closing, telling that every

single week. What else is on like the rest of these tabs? Can you elaborate on the golden nugget? And wait, before you read that tab, can you, what, What is the hot, hot, hot? So those are your next two contracts? Like where are your next two contracts coming from? So we'll literally name like the listing or the buyer that we're working with.

Basically it's the whole idea of if you had a gun to your head, right? Like where are you going to go? What are you putting your emphasis into, right? So I think a lot of us think we have a big pipeline and for a lot of us we do. But the emphasis kind of gets convoluted. If you've got 20 people in your pipeline, who are you actually pursuing and working expires. If you have someone ready to go that's writing offers and stuff, you should be, you know, looking at expires for them, looking at FISBOs, but you can't realistically do that for 20 people.

So we name kind of where our emphasis is going every single week. And we fill this sheet out in our team meeting every week. So it serves as a couple things for us. One, it's funny, it's in the golden nugget because we call it our gold star sheet. There's a lot of work you don't get credit for in real estate. If I sent you guys our real sheet that wasn't just a template, you would see we wrote like 10 offers last week and got two contracts as a team. The market's just challenging here, but you get kind of your gold star like from the team. Hey, you were out, you were hustling, you wrote your offers. It's also a little bit of accountability and friendly competition.

So I don't want to walk into those meetings and say like zeros across the board. Right. If I wasn't on vacation, I didn't have a baby. What were you doing? You know what I mean? And so it's just kind of a healthy way for us to all be like, hey, you're rocking it or we got to step it up. Okay. And one more thing, Alie, before we leave this, because this, this tab is like really fucking cool.

I think for the so in alley listed all of the things that you guys are tracking you just explained what the hot hot was for those two focus points across the top and then just in case listeners are like looking at this just to confirm to Kristen under agent one where it says zero of 55 it's to bring it all the way back 55 is the total number of listing appointments that they need to do in order to hit their 38 total closings you got it so I actually just pulled it up as well because I don't have everything memorized. But you'll see, like, we have five agents there. And those are our real numbers, actually, for those five agents. I didn't, I didn't change them from last year. So you can see we all kind of have different, we had different goals. Each person have different ratios. So that's kind of

what I was talking about, you know, it was based on your success and your performance from, from the year prior. And then moving on to the next tab, the business plans. Yeah. So can, can you explain, for those that want to download this, where should they click? Where should they not enter information as to not mess us up. Yeah, good, good point. So I would actually start on this tab. So this business plan tab, we probably do three or four versions before we're like, yep, it's final. And that's why we start it like at the end of Q's because after you're kind of winding down and you want all this to be done like final by January 1st or else you're already behind. Right. So the basically everything in white you can type in. Everything in gray is like an auto calculation. So from gosh, what is it,

rose four to 16. Those are your least. lead sources. So we were talking about, you know, where to start. So you're going to start with what your actuals were from this current year, because we're, you know, in Q3, Q4, hypothetically. You're going to put all your actuals in there. And then that's going to help determine your 20, 23 goals. So as we're going through this first part of the exercise, as team leads, we're coaching each other and our agents through this to be realistic, but also really intentional. So maybe be getting rid of not putting any effort into things that were one, one, one, one, one. And really kind of honing in on like your top three again to stay,

stay really focused. So we get this part really nailed and dialed in before we move on. I love this. I love this page. I think this is so helpful. Yeah, if this is an activity, I want to go do this now where and I know, Ali and I have both gone back and gone through, hey, where of our leads come from. This is all built out and formulated and makes it like very plug and play. Yeah. Okay. I don't think I have questions on this. Sorry, what were you going to say? I just going to say, I track a lot of this throughout the year.

Like, I've got a spreadsheet every time I get a contract or closing. Like I put in the commission, the closing date, where it came from. But I don't really look at it or evaluate trends until we go to do this exercise, right? So I'm always surprised Q3-Cruful, like, oh, I had four closings from that one client. Sweet, like, I probably should take them out to dinner or something, you know. Because throughout the year, it's really, you get busy. And you're like, thanks so much and this is great. And you know, you overinflate some things in your head, like thinking some things were better than they were.

And you think some things were worse than they were. And so like numbers don't lie. I'm a big Excel freak as you know, Shelby. So when you go back to here, it's kind of a nice fun way to reset each year and a way to get really intentional with your time. If you hate doing, if you hate door knocking and your door knocking and you got two closings out of the year from door knocking, stop door knocking. There's so many other ways to go get business, right? Now, if you got like 45 from it, you're a door knocking expert and you're never allowed to quit. I'm just kidding.

But it lets you kind of have control over your efforts without feeling like a chicken with your head cut off. Every time you get another marketing email or a sponsored ad on Instagram saying you need to do this or you can make money doing that, you can say, nope, I don't do Facebook groups, right? I just don't, right? Not in this, not in this season because I know what's working and where I'm going to double down. 100%. How often do you go back to this and pivot, you know, like looking at or how often do you tell, agents to go back to this and readjust. They didn't meet their goals or maybe they crushed it. They're going above. Yeah. How often? Yeah. Formally like quarterly. So anything less than quarterly,

I wouldn't actually change the goals. But I look at this, I mean, at least monthly. Honestly, I look at it more than that just to kind of see where we're tracking. I'm going to jump ahead to the bottom of the sheet. But we we project exactly what months those closings are going to come in at. Right. So I told you guys, I'm expecting. I'm doing August. I'm not going to take like a real maternity leave. I'm a realtor. We don't really do that. But I'm going to work a lot less come August, September, you know, until I'm ready to to rev up again. So I purposely am like front loading some of my efforts and then have some on the back end. That's like a personal example of naming that all out. If I say I'm going to close seven homes in May, which would be a big month for

me, I'm probably not going to do it again in June because we all ride that real estate rollercoaster a little bit where if you're putting all your efforts into your current contracts, you're probably not being the best prospector you could be. So we're kind of trying to predict some of that stuff in advance. So you're not setting yourself up for failure. I'm not saying I'm going to close 12 homes in January. Like January is historically my lowest month. Like I'm just not going to set myself up for that because I know I'll have to, you know, fail my goals or change in later. So being that you're setting yourself up now like front, front loading, a lot of these conversations, the transactions, how what are you working on now to start that transition what are you going to not be doing

after you have your baby and you're you know spending time with your with away from the business who is going to be taking your place what are you getting what it's what's on the chopping block yeah you know I think there's always more you can be doing in real estate and sales of any kind it's one of my favorite things about the gig and also one of the hardest things because you never clock in and clock out. You know, so you can always make another phone call. You can always send a property to someone that's not really looking, but they move for the right thing. That kind of stuff is going to stop for me, come, you know, that maternity leave time that I'm, that I'm mentioning, you know, if people I've been working with up until that point are then ready to go, ready to

list their house or they find the home they like, those are the people I'm going to be making room for by taking off some of those other activities that are extras for me, if that makes sense. Do you see yourself doing more referrals, like outbound, just outbound referrals? Yeah. You know, we've got, we've got a fantastic team. We've got five full time agents on the team. So we already kind of work a little cohesively in a sense that, you know, if I'm, we do have a one-on-one kind of lead relationship with all of our clients. People don't just get ping ponged around between the five of us. But at any given time, if I can't do a showing, you know, I'm out of town or something. Like my team jumps in, And, you know, if I just got a contract and I go into labor, like, my team will jump in the

next day and be at the inspection. Like, we've got a really seamless structure that we are very fortunate to have. I think that would that conversation would look a little bit different if I was like a solo agent. I would definitely be seeing, you know, where I could refer that business to. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I'm trying to imagine my, I'm actually like, I guess someone doing something similar

where I am moving. So try to wrap up loose ends. and therefore just become like completely just a referral agent. The majority of my business is just outbound referrals. But yeah, it's always who can I just, you know, just having that transition be smoother. I fell in love with the process of prospecting. I love it. I think I'm pretty good at it.

And now I just want someone else to follow through. For sure. Do you know Juan Carlos? I don't even know his last name. He owns like Goldbar and his friends with Ricky Caruth. I don't even how to say his name. We should get him on the podcast. You nailed it.

Juan was in the 30 under 30 group with me. Look him up. He is the master of what I think you're saying. And he's such a down-to-earth guy. He would like take your phone call anytime. But he basically built a roaring business in New York City and took himself entirely out of it with no interruption to his whole company. And he now lives in Florida.

You know, he's got some model that he's just building all these other businesses and his New York businesses, it hasn't sacrificed. So I'm not the expert at that, but I think he might be if you want to call him. Definitely. Thank you. Kristen, I know your system's nerd, always loving that sort of stuff. So what are you loving now in your business systems wise? Or what are you working on or, you know, that piece? I think we talked a little bit about Zapier last time you and I met. But that is something we've explored even more and just building like we use Asana for a lot of project management stuff. So we have, I mean, we have a template for anything and everything you could think of. You know, when we get a review online, there's a template to create a social media

post, thank the client. There's a 10, there's 10 steps to everything that we do. And something that's been really exciting and really rewarding as our team has continued to grow and we've got a greater support staff is just kind of removing myself and my business partner as bottlenecks to a lot of that because I think we've had a lot of good systems over the years, but we've been right in the middle of them. So something as simple as, you know, leads coming in. It used to be us, you know, stopping what we were doing in the middle of a podcast, texting our agents and saying, who can take this, you know, and hoping someone answers because we claimed the lead and a lot of lead sources aren't team friendly, but the Let You Do team. So anyways, we found ways to

systematize a lot of that, which has been really rewarding, not just for me, but for our agents, We can get more opportunities in front of clients. It's 2024. There's a better way to do just about everything. So it's happening into some of that. How did you systematize that piece for that specific example? The lead source. Yeah.

Yeah. So depending on the lead source, like some will have the infrastructure that, you know, you can ring five phones or whatever, but a lot of them don't. So we've actually used Zapier to create like an automatic forward. So like one in particular, I'm thinking of we get a text in an email to our business line when a lead is available to be claimed. So the zap forwards that email to all of our agents. And it just says first come first serve, someone take it. And so whoever claims it basically just has to shoot a text to our group and says that was me, but they can log in and make contact

with the client before I ever go track who got the lead. So just a little bridge and like coding, I guess. No, that's awesome. User friendly coding thing. I was going to say anything that we find ourselves annoyed by or this shouldn't be that hard. We write down and then we try and go solve it. Yeah. And that's always that's just just clearing up that mental headache and or the burden of having to drive somewhere and open up the door, you know, after you just get birth, you know, is just not the high time. So I want to ask about your field assistant. What how are they paid? and what are the tasks that they do? Yeah.

So we, she's actually newer to our team and she's also our office manager. So we've played with this role a few different ways. And I still show most of my own property. I find that my clients generally want my personal opinion before they actually move forward on things, but personal preference there. So our office manager is actually full time and she is paid hourly. But her work looks very different every day. So it might be cleaning the office.

It might be preparing for my next couple of days of listing appointments or buyer consultations. It might be running to pick up lock boxes or she could definitely do a showing. She's licensed. So her job is really flexible and she just has to be really good at prioritizing that work. So it comes to setting expectations on our end and then knowing kind of where to plug in play. How have you set those expectations? And being that she is newer to your crew or maybe newer in general, how long do you expect to hopefully have her as a field assistant?

Yeah. Hopefully for a really long time. We are passionate about not hiring support roles to become future agents. Probably an unpopular opinion, but I think it's two very different skill sets. And if you want to be an agent, you shouldn't mess around learning the support stuff. first you should learn how to be a new agent first and get really good at that and then become a better agent. So that's actually a big red flag to us when we're interviewing. If someone says, you know, I'm looking for this role as a stepping stone or because I want to be an agent,

but I'm afraid of commission. That's a big red flag to us. I think there's a different, there's a different type of person and skill set that really, really enjoys the support role, that enjoys supporting others, that enjoys clocking in, clocking out, having a steady paycheck. And luckily, the person that is in our as in our family now definitely fills all of that so of course that could change at any time but i don't even remember your question i'm going down my tangent of hiring no this is this is perfect yeah that perfectly answers it because that's where i was kind of like going toward a lot of a lot of agents get licensed and they're great agents and some agents get licensed and realize this is you know i would rather help support someone else because this is not for me

i can't do this all my own so how did you find what kind of questions are you asking for during that interview process, where did you even, how did you find her? Yeah, we got really lucky, I'll say, but something you just mentioned something that we look for when interviewing is someone's self-awareness. So you mentioned that, you know, you mentioned that some people like get into something like, oh, this isn't for me. I think some people know it's not for them long before they admit that. You know, we have a really high like failure rate for becoming an agent in the industry. And I think people often know, hey, this isn't really my thing. And then they try and make it work. And then They're kind of resentful at the job. They're not very good at the job. And they could be so much better, you know, just doing something else. And there's so many things you can do in real estate that aren't, you know, selling houses. You guys probably know better than me. You've done a lot of those avenues. But I actually interview kind of backwards. So my very first call with anyone that applies, it's 10 minutes or less. And we talk about compensation. We talk about how we don't offer insurance. We talk about, you know, you're responsible for bringing your own car. There's a lot of driving involved in this particular role.

We talk about start date. We talk about all the things that a lot of people save for when the offer is extended. And I've just found that if any of those things are a deal breaker for you or a deal breaker for us, like we can say, great, nice to meet you, move on in five minutes as opposed to three interviews. So that's something we like to do. We actually started asking people to apply by sending us this past time we said send us the 10 reasons that you're best suited for this role. Anyone that just sent me their resume immediately was declined. So we've just found little ways to like weed people out to trust our gut.

We're not hiring experts, but we've got a really, really good team and we're really proud of them. Those are always super good tests to have like something small, like something in the middle of like the giant job is like, hey, some small test. Text me the word potato. Yeah. You know, are you free of reading, you know? Or if they say that they're like super detail oriented and then they give you like a resume with spelling mistakes or it looks crooked or anything like that, just automatically no. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's so true. It's like it's like the first grade test that read everything before you do anything. And the end of the test is don't do a thing, you know, which sounds, which sounds kind of mean, but our work is really important. Regardless of what role you fill in our team. At the end of the day, like we're talking about people's like biggest investments. We're talking about big stuff, contractual deadlines, like really important things. And so we need someone that's detail oriented. We need someone to say, hey, you didn't outline this, this, and that. You know, I need to. You know, I need to. You know, I need to. You know, I need to. You know, I need to. You know, I need to. You know, someone be able to speak up to me. So those are just some ways, you know, you can tell me

you're detail oriented all day, but this is a way that you can show me. And we also get a snipp of like people's written communication, which is like a little screening in and of itself, if they're changing emails with us because we email a ton with our clients. So, you know, having good grammar and punctuation and just good, I don't know, poised. Hi, Shelby, exclamation point makes a big difference in an email than send me this, right? So it's all just like little stuff we're picking up on along the way. Right. 100%. Damn it. You see me. Yeah. Yeah. email you're just trying to get to know you and see if you'll fit in and be able to do a good job for us and these are all little ways we've been able to do it going back a little bit to zapier you mentioned

you have a 10-step process for whenever you get a referral or did i did i miss hear that what is the process yeah i think i'm like a testimonial like a five-star review on google or something oh okay totally you are you are you interested in that or we probably have something for referral too I just don't know. That's what I was thinking of. Yeah. I was like yeah. I mean, it's literally like replying to the client, you know, on whatever platform it was, you know, creating a post for social media to give the agent a shout out, making sure we tell the team. So everyone can kind of celebrate a little success for, you know, Agent Shelby got a five-star review or whatever. What else is on there? Oh, we add it to a master spreadsheet of ourselves because Google and Facebook randomly delete

our reviews. So it's nice to just have a master's sheet ourselves. So we can, you know, as we're updating credentials and stuff, we can say we have overstate. 300 five-star reviews or whatever it is. We put it on our website. I don't know. It's nothing revolutionary, but it's all stuff that I'd randomly wake up and all the night and be like, oh, did I, you know, did I reply to that on Zillow or just really dumb stuff?

So we've taken all the, like, thinking out of the things that we've done 100 times. And that's something we really geeked out about last time we spoke, Kristen, is like, and by the way, Ali's the same way. Checklist, crazy person. And like systems in the way of it's not brain surgery. It's not rocket science. It's what do I need to do every single time in a checklist. Yes.

Yeah. It just creates so much freedom like in your brain, right? If your brain's thinking about it, did I reply to that Google review? It's not, it's not its best self for, you know, your client or for your big business growth plan, whatever that looks like. So it's like that whole freedom's in the discipline thing, you know? Totally. It's if you just do the same thing over and over, like you take away the thinking from it. And I just want to make a little side note about how you mentioned Google will randomly.

delete stuff and this is just okay thank you let's talk just two seconds about Facebook Ali knows what's coming I got my Facebook disabled like months ago and in my I'm like I can get it back I can get it back and I'm like I looked into it and I don't really like reading details or contracts or doing something like that so then I try to get Drake to do my husband and then I try to get my VA to do it and then I tried to hire someone off fiber and it came back to me because you know the things ultimately always come back they feel like but anyway that's another conversation I I do Drake and Cheska amazing. This is no shade. But anyway, so I went there and then my shit's fucking disabled.

Sorry for my French. And the thing that is really annoying about that, it's like we rely on these systems. We rely on Google reviews. We rely on Facebook and on Instagram and a lot of us have built businesses around them through whether it's you know, outreach through social media, you build up your following, you're staying in touch and all that stuff. But y'all know what? If you collect that data, these freaking meta, the wizards, they can just shut it off. And if you're like me, I'm disabled for life. Like I went, I went forever so much. I'm disabled entirely and yesterday and I finally accepted it. What did you do? Did you deserve them? Well, what happened was I had someone who was trying to log in. You know how sometimes it'll be like a login attempt

from Seattle or wherever and I was like, that's not me. Try to change password. Hit a bunch of buttons. I'm sure it's my I pushed the wrong buttons too many times. It's a very shelby thing to do. God forbid you tried to not let the scammer in your account. Right. Thank you. Thank you. I will take that although ultimately it is definitely my fault in some way. But anyway, like I have photos from freaking high school, like my little homecoming that I will they're gone now. My friends, it's a whole thing. So Ali currently is my only friend on Facebook with my new account. Okay. So if I get a random request from me that's one friend, it's not. Yeah. And listeners, it's not a spam. If I friend you guys, it is the new me, 2024 with just Ali and Kristen as my friends.

I do think you can't just totally boycott Facebook and Yelp and Google because they've taken a review down. You do have to play the game a little bit, but also maybe have your own, also maybe have your own records somewhere because, I mean, we put so much of our emphasis and faith into all these different platforms. And as soon as you get good on TikTok, it's not a thing anymore. And as soon as you get good on whatever, I mean, you just have no idea. So yeah, do both and when she when Shelby sent me that request yesterday.

I was like Shelby look you got spammed again. I'm gonna block it. She goes, no, it's me. So I took a screenshot. I took a screenshot for future reference just so everyone knows. Shelly only has one friend that one friend is me. That's happening. People are doing like duplicate accounts and they're spammy.

It's so weird. You can't trust you can't trust anything. And then there's AI and then you know. A lot of it is because of third party apps. Like a lot of third party apps, even though they seem very, very helpful, they're just not approved by meta. They're not approved by Instagram. So and then, you know, with a click of a button, you don't know or you don't know what your virtual assistant is using to help out their business to then help you out.

And they don't know the rules. So, you know, because if you're not going to be reading about your own Facebook, they're surely not. And then you're going to have your Facebook deactivated, like Instagram deactivated. there goes everything. If you're getting like if all of your lead generating eggs are in one basket which is Instagram or Facebook and you lose it, that is tough. So don't be weary of these third party apps. Yeah. I read a long, I heard a long time ago. The number one lie in the world is I have read and agreed to these terms and conditions. It's like I've never read. I've never read it.

No one has. If they said yes, I'm like, you're a psychopath. It's funny. Oh, I don't even know how we got here, but I like it. It was a fun day. Yeah. I think at this point, I think we give it. And we would like to know what the future holds for you, Kristen. Oh, I should have prepared for this because I think you asked me last time.

We need an updated version of what the future holds. She's still baby. It's still pregnant. Yeah. No, I mean, we're going to do more of the same. I think we're working harder. harder in the industry for for less to say really easily like we're it's harder to get transactions and commissions are going down but I think it creates a lot of good opportunity because it gets

rid of a lot of the people that wanted it to be easy or that don't have good systems in place because if you're not doing that many transactions it's not worthwhile and then your quality suffers so I think there's huge opportunity for people like of our size that are not dominating their market necessarily, but are doing really well. So I don't know how long that's going to be where that, you know, where that potentially shifts. But in a weird way, I think it's really exciting that a lot of agents aren't renewing and stuff because for a long time, I have felt like this industry is treated very largely as a hobby. And it's not a hobby. It's a profession. It's a big deal. What we're doing for people, we should be trusted advisors. And so, I don't know,

just overall, I'm really excited like for the opportunity for our team. That means probably adding a couple of agents this year for people that share in that passion that have really high ethics that really value process to then turn around and give a better client experience at just a higher caliber of service so I think that's really exciting but tangibly we're not going anywhere we're going to do more of the same this year and that's what helps with like the the 10,000 hours the 10,000 iterations you know, for you to can become even more of a master of what you're already really good at. Is there anything that we that we, we didn't cover before we had to our wrap up questions. Not really relevant, but just something

that's been on my mind. We as a group read the book boundaries together, just all of our agents. Have you guys read boundaries? No, I haven't read the cliff notes. The cliff notes. Okay. So it's actually like a biblical based book about like relationships and stuff, but we thought it'd be really relevant for realtoring because, you know, there's very little boundaries between clients and agents and, you know, especially in how fast the market is and, you know, it's hard to like time block and set your schedule. So we've had a lot of good conversations around that as a group lately, but the thing that keeps coming back to me is know what can break, know what your exceptions are to your boundaries because at the end of the day, we're in like a customer service business

and like ultimately you need to know, you can't just say I don't work Saturdays and Sundays or whatever that is. That's not realistic. So I don't know. For me, it's been kind of freeing to actually figure out, okay, I've set a lot of these boundaries. I've got a pretty good structure in place. It's fun to know for if we're writing offers, like I'll get up from the dinner table, you know, like an offer, I'll answer my phone for a dinner table, but I won't do that just to schedule some showings. So finding like the things that break what I said I was going to do and giving myself permission to do that has been something just top of mind lately that may help another agent out. Dude, I love that you brought that up because there's something really freeing about

taking those, like you said, the boundaries in making them like rules for your life. Non-negotiables. Yeah, yeah. And it was one that I heard recently where it's someone's personal rule was like I never say yes on the spot. I just don't do it because I always used to do it. And then I would end up at these events. I didn't want to go to.

I would always have this year. And so now my personal rule for life is I do not say yes. And all I say is I will get back to, you know, it's a rule of personal rule of mine. And I'll let you know within 24 hours. time like you have the time to figure out if it's really and so just like being able to like know your own personal rule whether it's showing the dinner or their you know offers or it just helps alleviate some of that weight and anxiety and stress that comes with our day to day so I love for sure yeah or feeling guilt or resentment like when you do something different right you know

give yourself the freedom to do you know what the rule is versus the exceptions I should probably add more like I should probably add more like life rules to I so I have a I have a note on my app on my phone it's a whole note that says Allie's life rules I will never bend on these life rules they are they are so strict you know I are you about to share them with this yes because the list is not long but the reason why I mentioned before is I should add more life rules to this my one and only rule on there right now is to never fly frontier or spirit. This is literally I have been fucked over so many times.

I'm like, God, I cannot no more. That's my only life rule. So maybe I should have a little think before I say yes. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Okay. The way you teed that up, like I would have not guessed that's where that was going. She's the girl who's not brought to you by Frontier.

Right. She's also the girl who said text me potato in the, so she's kind of like she's out there. But anyway. Yeah. In the job post. Yeah. No, I mean, I don't, I've never gone spirit, but I don't like front here. I don't blame you.

Yeah. But I would have an exception to that rule. If someone was going to pay for me to go somewhere super cool, like you would never get there. No, I still wouldn't. You pay for it all you want. I do not want. I will not. I'd rather walk.

Okay. Perfect. And if you want to hang out with me and Ali, we are Allie, the agent and the Shelby show on the Graham. As always, we want your feedback. And guys, this, this tool is particularly, the golden nugget is particularly amazing. So go to the agent goldmine.com and get her golden nugget. Don't miss it.

Okay. Listeners, that is all we have for today. Kristen, thank you so much for coming on the show. And listeners, this is for you. Be a bro and share this show. Bye.