KGCI: Real Estate on Air - Scared to make calls The KPIs that will actually matter in 2025

Episode Date: June 11, 2025

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. Welcome to another episode of the Uncommon Real Estate podcast. This is Chris Craddock. your host here with you today. I am co-hostless. I do not have Jeff with me. We're going to do a solo episode, no guest, talking about how to double, triple, quadruple our income, our production, and our income for 2022. So this is the end of 2021. We're a little bit past where we'd want to be to do business planning because we are in real estate in a 90-day cycle. So anything I do today,

really will not feel until about 90 days later. With that said, how do we set ourselves up for success? We really won't even feel it until maybe the beginning of February, which means we're into the, at least in the last few years, February is the spring market. Okay. So here we go. So we need to look at what we did this year. So if we want to plan for next year, we need to look at what we did this year. First question we have to ask ourselves is how many deals did we do? So break down how many deals you did? We're going to do about 600 transactions for my team, both on and off market. And then what you do next is you need to go and look at every single deal and ask yourself,

where did those deals come from? Why are we asking that question? Because I think you'll find that a lot of deals that you do come from places that you're not expecting. or you think you're going to do more business from places that you're just not doing that much business from. So for our team, we know that literally half of our deals, 48.2% last year, I don't know exactly what it'll be this year, but 48.2% of our deals came from sphere of influence, SOI. We know that is the cheapest, the cheapest business that we can get. Why is it the cheapest? Because these are people that already know can trust us. These are people that we do.

don't have to go out and acquire. Everybody will tell you all across the board, if you talk to any business owner, the cost of keeping a client is much better than the cost is so much cheaper than the cost of acquiring a client. And so for us, the sphere of influence, it may not be keeping a client because it may be a new client, just somebody that you've known for a long time, that's a new client, but they're already in your world, right? So people that are in your world, it's easier to keep them in there rather than going to a new world for new to get new clients. So that's a huge thing there. Now, the next piece, and this is a piece that we didn't break down until a few years ago,

but what we realize is your sphere of influence needs to be broken down into two different quadrants where they come from. One is past clients and one is your SOI, your sphere of influence. And you break down the two of them so that you can see the different. Now here's why. I used to just lump them all together, but you realize that people that know and trust you that have done a transaction with you in the past, you are in a different world. Because if you're taking any sort of notes, if you're writing anything down, if anything you take away from this, this is the one thing that I want you to hear. The thing that people value most is their reputation. So if somebody is going to reflect, for you business. They could know you, they could like you, they could trust you. But if they've never done business with you, there's still a bit of a question mark. Oh, man, this is my friend. How are they in a professional setting? How are they in this situation? There's a question mark.

And when they put their name on you, then that is, that's a big deal. So right now I'm wearing, I'm wearing my Young Life t-shirt. I was on staff with Young Life. The thing that I knew with Young life is that if we had an event where any teenager invited their friends when I was on staff with Young Life and any teenager ever invited their friends to something and it wasn't good, man, they're never going to invite anybody ever again because of the fact that that is their they use their reputation. And that is the most valuable currency we all have in this world is what is your word worth? What is your reputation worth? And we got to understand that once somebody has worked with you and had a good experience, then their reputation,

they can say, bar none, no, I've worked with this person. I have no question marks. And as much as you may say, this person has known me forever, this person loves me, all of the other stuff, if they've never worked with you, there's always going to be some sort of a question mark there. So just understand that. So back to what we were talking about. We need to look at how many deals we did this year. We need to break them up into where did those deals come from. And when we're breaking them up, we see sphere of influence is probably going to be at least 50% of your business. But then when you look at your sphere of influence, break it up between past clients who actually have done a transaction with you, understand you, and sphere of influence people that know

like and trust you so that you can see where do these come from. And my guess will be that you're going to get a much bigger pop from your past clients. And again, ROI, ROTI, return on investment, return on time invested. you realize spending more time with past clients will give you a bigger pop than just spending a lot of time with the sphere of influence. Next, what are the other areas? Online leads, farming, postcards, pay per click. There's some text blasts that are still legal, voicemail drops. What are some of the other ways that you are marketing to bring people in? And if you're a smaller team, usually most of the time, it's almost all based around sphere of

influence and referral. But as you grow, you're going to need to, even though I know Brian Bafini and some of these other folks will say you can build a massive team just through sphere of influence and referral, I'll tell you, it's just very rare that I've seen massive businesses come just from SOI and referral. So you're going to be looking at ways to increase your database, open houses, door knocking, cold calling, circle prospecting, all of these different things. You've got to write them down and then rate them. And then here's the next piece. Once you have created your list, these are the different places my business has come from. You'll realize you've got one deal here, five deals here. Then you can look at it and say, okay, naturally, I'm effective here. And

the key for any business owner in every single one of you guys that are in real estate, even if you're on a team, you are the CEO of your company, Cratic Family Enterprises, whether I work for somebody else or whether I work for myself, whether I'm on a team or whether I am the team. I am crowded family enterprises. You are your family enterprises LLC. You got to understand that. And so what you've got to do with everything is look at where you're getting business. And then the key is where can I put this lever in where just a little bit of effort brings a lot more result. So if you're looking at something and you say, okay, I spent 10 hours a week and I got one deal a month from something and something else, let's say that's cold calling. And then something else, you're saying, I spend 10 hours a week and I got three doors a month or three deals a month through door knocking.

Whatever it is, you're looking at the time spent versus the return on that investment. If you're getting a better return on these other investments, then that's where you need to spend more time on that particular investment. Oh my gosh, Jeff Seybright, he's here with us. Come on. So right now we're going through business planning for next year. And so what we started with was looking at how many deals you did this year, where all those deals came from, and then breaking it back down to the next piece, which is how much time you spent to get each one of those. deals. And that, what that does is allows us to see how do you scale. And the key piece here is you look at your amount of closings or where you get paid. And then you go back one step and you say, what are your KPIs, key performance indicators? And your KPIs will be how many closings did you have?

How many buyer broker agreements do you have? How many listing agreements did you have? And then one back from that is how many appointments did you have. And so those are the KPIs that. we're looking at, pendings, closings, appointments, Byerberger agreement, sign. And then you look at your critical drivers. So your critical drivers are what dictates your KPIs. And the critical drivers are how many phone calls did I make? How many texts did I send? How many social media message did I send? How many doors did I knock on? What are the things that created the results that I'm looking at? because KPIs are lag indicators, which means there's stuff that happened in the past that's going on now. Critical drivers are things where if I do these things, I know in the future that's predictive indicators,

I know in the future these things will happen. So Joe, with some of that stuff going on, what are the things that as you look at your business? Because you jumped in and had success really quick from the very beginning, what are the things that you see and then we're going to get into some stuff some homework here in just a second but what are some of the things that you've seen in your business when I do X Y happens versus we've all been there where you put in some like effort and you don't get a good result where where are the places where you tend to get the best result for your time I'm going to say two I'm going to say one that people love and then I'm going to say one that people hate all right so

The first one is social media. When I am, and to be completely frank, I'm on and off of my social media game. And some of that is due to time, but other of that is due to the fact that I'm still overcoming my own ego to a degree in the sense of every once in one. I'm like, I don't want to be that guy that's on a social media and he's just about real estate. I want my friends to be able to see me. And so I, anyways, long story short, when I am posting. regularly about real estate and the things that I'm doing in real estate, the successes, the closes, the under contracts, the inspections, etc. When I'm posting about what I'm seeing in the

market, some of these different things, the more that I'm posting on social media, there's this almost, is it centripetal? What's the, where it's like, where people are attracted to me, where they begin to draw themselves to me in regards to their real estate needs. And so, So that's one. The more that, and it's not posting five times a day about real estate, but when I'm on that rhythm and that routine, the more business I tend to get from that. And that's the easy business. That's the business we love is when I call you up. I'm like, hey, Chris, my wife and I were thinking about selling our house.

And man, it's like, ah, you know, so much has already been accomplished in that phone call. So that's one. And that's an area where I want to be consistent for an entire year and not just consistent for three or four weeks. then I'm off my game for three or four weeks. So that's the one. I think that's the one that everybody will like. Get on a rhythm, get on a routine, and make sure you post regularly. It doesn't mean five times a day, but maybe three to five times a week.

And I know we talked about often, Bell does it great with her under contract, home inspection, close celebration. Very few in the business do social media better than Bell does. I think you can go to Instagram. It's at Buy with Bell. Check her out there. She's awesome with that. Number two, the one that everyone's going to hate is the phones. Get on the phones. Make your calls. There's this weird thing that happens that when I get on the

phone and I make my calls, business is created. So I like everybody else. And it's funny, I have to get myself amped. I have to get myself in the zone. But every time it never fails. I will say this. It never fails that when I spend my time on the phones, generating for a week that I don't produce business. I can't remember the last time that I actually did what I was supposed to do when it came to getting on the phones that I did not produce business. And so I think those are the two things for myself as far as leveling up. And when it comes to performance indicators, when I do X, Y happens. And see, the best part about what you just said right there was there's two pieces. One is you're being self-aware, we're knowing, I don't

I have to jazz myself up. I have to get ready for this. But the reality is you can, you be able to directly trace back some stuff. So social media, you can directly trace this back and say, okay, this person came because of some posts in social media and they responded to me. And that's where this deal came from. I can directly post. I made these calls. And this is where it came from. So then we're no longer moving based on emotion. And that is, I'll tell you, that's the difference between high level and low level business people. And it's okay. We all started a low level and then we have to level up. But just understand new levels, new devils. And so here's the new devils that we've got is,

in order to level up, we're going to have to take the time to track where our time got the best results. And if we don't spend that time, and please, it's not lost on me. Look at this. I'm just going to share with you guys some stuff. Boom. Boom. All right. Pieces of paper with tons of little, here's another one. Boom. Just all these things that need to be done that are not like, it's not pretty right here. I've just have these like strap papers where I'm like, okay, this is important, this important. As I'm going through my day, like writing these things down. And but as I level up, I'm not just writing these things down, but then I'm starting to later evaluate them and put in things that, need to happen. And for those that are just listening on the podcast, what I did was showed, showed all of these scrap papers, these papers that are all sticky note papers where the day goes by and I'm like, oh, crap, I got to call this person. I got to deal with this. I got to handle this. And I write it down. I'll tell you, as I level up, I realize that all of these things,

when I write them down, they're all created equally, but they're not. Some of these things will give me a much higher return on what I'm doing. You know, some of these things will give me a lower return. So then I have to look at them, spend some time and say, okay, this is important. This has to be done. This is important. These things can be pushed. These things can be pushed. And that's part of that leveling up is you're better at using your time. You can't use your time better if you haven't taken the time to record that. And then I'm just going to share with you. One of the things that we've decided to do this year, and I'm probably going to do a big push for some folks to look at this, assuming things continue to go well. But we

just spent a lot of money on Sisu. The reason we spent the money on Sisu is so that we can track a little bit better with just one of our agents alone when he went through and caught up on everything to be caught up on Sisu, he got six listings out of that because he just caught up on everything. But he also realized that he lost a number of listings and a number of deals because he wasn't caught up on his numbers. But the best part about it is now we can track and say, Bing, bang, boom, these are where the business came from. So that is the really key there. But we're salespeople.

We hate this stuff. We love just let's move. Let's come butts on fire. And we're running like so fast. That's what we like to do, make deals happen. But if we don't stop, slow down, think about where the deals come from, spend time working on that we'll never level up. And we're always running on emotions saying,

I feel like these are where these deals came from. I feel like this is where these deals came from. And as long as we're just going on our feeling, we'll never be able to level up because you don't see high-level executives that go based on feeling. They go on data and feeling. It's both.

But without lack of data, we just got an incomplete picture. And I'll tell you, I know, I don't know everybody listening, but I do know everybody listening. Because I know the business you're in, and I know the type of people, people we are and very few of us. There's a couple unicorns out there, but almost everybody hates

the admin stuff that it takes to be able to look and see where did these things come from and stay caught up on our admin side. So it's not dollar productive, but it's definitely dollar destructive if we don't do it right. So Jeff, what do you think about it? You know how much I love admin work. I'm probably one more organized of agents when it comes to administration. My problem is I spend too much time in admin and not enough time in sales. But no, in all seriousness, everybody that's been in the KW world or anybody that's a Gary Keller fan is very familiar with the one thing with J. Pappasant. And I love the idea of the one thing. The problem with the one thing, in my opinion, is that we never quite get to the one thing.

And I read the book probably two, three years ago. I don't know exactly when it was, but I'm always trying to figure out what the one thing is. And to be honest, over the last month or two, what I've really realized the one thing for me, that domino that's going to make everything else easier or what's the word, easier or irrelevant, whatever the necessary. Yeah, unnecessary. That's right. It is for me, it's organization.

It is admin, is looking at these things, right? Because we spin our wheels. We do this. We lose so much time. And I look at it, right, oftentimes. And if I know what my key performance indicators are, if I know what my KPIs are, if I know where I'm most productive, then I can zero in and go straight to those things, get those things done, and then move on. But oftentimes we spend three, four, five hours a day doing 30 minutes

worth of work because we are, we're distracting ourselves because we're, I'll admit it for myself. I get caught up on my phone. I get caught up on Facebook. I get into a, I'm just so thankful that a person wants to talk to me. So I'll talk to him for an hour when really that should have been a 10 minute phone call. It's like the more you know your numbers, the less you actually have to work, if that's your goal. You can either work less or you can be more productive. So if you're saying, like, I want to earn seven figure income, know your key performances. And then now you can spend all that time actually working in productive hours. Or if you're saying, man, I love the fact that I can make, I can sell 25 homes a year and just do that. Well, if you know what you're keeping. You

performance indicators are, you can wrap those things up in two hours every morning. And you can move into the rest of your appointments and whatever else that you want to do. At least for me, that's something that I'm really trying to narrow down on. And one way that I'm doing that is, and then I want to get back to what I think is possibly a life hack for the phones, is I'm trying to, I want to have an end of the day meeting with myself, where I want to review what I did, what went well, what didn't do well. But then I also want to schedule my next day because one of the things that I absolutely believe and I was taught a long time ago is that your next day starts when your previous day ends. So my day doesn't start when I wake up

on what is today? Today's Thursday. My Friday doesn't start Friday morning when I wake up. My Friday starts Thursday night when I end the night. So with that review meeting, going to bed at a decent time because if I go to bed at two o'clock, I'm wasting my Friday. If I go to bed at midnight watching mindless Netflix or whatever movies or shows or whatever, I'm not wasting Thursday. I'm wasting Friday. And I'm trying to really try to institute this daily meeting with myself every night so that I can end my day and start the next day appropriately. That's one of the, that's one of my goals, I guess you can say. That's one of the things that I'm trying to do. and that's hopefully my one thing to get more organized.

I don't know if you want to comment on that, but I have what I think might be a life fact for for jumping on the phone, something that I've actually found to be helpful for me. Let me throw one thing out and then let's jump on that and then we can take it home. So here's one other thing too, knowing your numbers, this is one of the keys to knowing your numbers. And this is the way that you can, again, this is why we're doing C-Sus so that we can know our numbers.

One of the agents on our team, Teddy, he's massively competitive. And so when he didn't know his numbers, it was a lot easier for him to just let things slide. But when he saw his numbers, he started competing with himself. And I don't know about you. I think most people that are in sales

tend to be massively competitive. I know Jeff's not. Jeff doesn't like competition. He shies away. It gets all scared. But the rest of us, it's crazy because even me, my truck, like I'll be running late. And I'll slam on the gas, go wherever.

And it goes down to 15 miles. gallon and then I'll be driving somewhere else and I'll have time and I turn on the miles per gallon thing and I just like it's stupid competition and I'm just always trying to make that click up above 16 miles a gallon in my truck again like it doesn't matter to me but it's just this stupid I'm just always looking for little competitions in my life and one of the things that I think the Sisu thing has helped us with a lot now I'm first I was an infomercial for super coffee now it's Tisu. I don't get paid from any of this stuff. It's stuff that I'm liking. But one of the things that one of the things I like about it is the fact that you can see your numbers and as competitive

people, you can say, oh, man, on appointments to convert to closed deals, I'm at 38%. And so then just like the truck and the gas mileage, you can start competing with yourself. I want to get to 39%. I got to get about 40%. But that whole competition for competitive people, it's that drive. Because some of it is we want to be the best like of everybody else. You're competing against everybody else. But what's even more than that is we like to compete. And it's like golf lowering your handicap. I want to be the best I can be. And I want to push myself. I know I can get above 50%. How do I do that? And you start your reticular activating system kicks off and you start pushing yourself to say, I need to close more than 50%. Right now I'm only at 38%. And so for competitive people, when you know your numbers, And that was the headline of today's show is, right? Like 2022, we need to look at all these things.

We need to track these things. And then when we actually look at our conversion rates, competitive people are going to push themselves to be better. But if you don't know it, you're just guessing, which happens to like the best of us, where we're like, I think my conversion rate is 60%. But you don't really know because you haven't tracked. Then you'll never know that it's actually 38%. And you could get it to 60% if you really focused hard. And if you got it to 60%, all of a sudden, you make an extra 100 grand, 200 grand,

500 grand, whatever it is, all in that. So anyway, Jeff, why don't you, I know you had something else you want to throw out there. And I will just say for people that don't like the word compete, I don't understand it because, as we all know, I'm obsessed with competition. If you don't like it, if you don't like the word compete or competition, just supplement it with improvement. Everybody should want to improve. And it is a way to improve.

But for the phones, one of the things that's helped me, because everyone's, while I get, I don't know what it is. Something overcomes me and I'm like, I don't want to call. I don't want to make calls. It's scary. It's frightening. People are going to be mean to me. People are going to hang up on me.

People are going to whatever. I've done it. I don't even know how many thousands of phone calls I've made at this point. But every once in a while I'll still have a day. I'll still have a time where it's just like I don't want to do it. And one of the things I've done. And I thought about doing this myself for others. But Ricky Caruth gets on YouTube and he actually, he'll make live phone calls.

So you can watch him make. live phone calls. And for whatever reason, all I need is five to 10 minutes of listening to Ricky Cruz make phone calls. I'm like, oh, yeah, it's not that bad. I forgot. It's like you create this monster under your bed that you're so afraid of. And then you're like, oh, yeah, it's just, it's just my teddy bear that's under my bed or whatever it is. And it's going to Google or YouTube, Ricky Cruz, live calling, get on, listen to it, make some calls. You'll realize that it's not that bad. It is, it's not the monster underneath your bed. Or maybe it is because it's not really there. I want to figure out what the legalities are, because

I always, I just wonder how he gets to do that. But I would love to do that for for others as well. Just get on, make phone calls. Let you know, hey, we all get hung up on. People are always mean to us. But hey, guess what? There's always other people that are really nice to us. And honestly, more often than not, people are nice than they're mean.

But we always remember the 5 to 10% that are mean versus the 90, 95% that are either neutral or positive. But yeah, jump on, listen to them and then make your phone calls. Because, again, for me, I'll listen to music, pump myself up. I will listen to somebody else make some live calls. And then I'll jump on and get to it. So Jeff, in Virginia, you only need one-way consent. And if you are the one way, you can consent to it. In Maryland, you need two-way consent to record.

So maybe we do that one time we get Jeff on and make some calls. And everybody can, it's how we get better. There's all the other stuff. So I like that. Let's make that happen here in one of these upcoming episodes. I like that. Hey, you know what? It would be even better since we've been talking about,

We have a competition and see who can set the most appointments on a one on one off. All right. I love it. I love it. Hey, as we're past the top of the hour, want to say this from here on to out, I want to ask this favor of you guys. If this adds any value to you, anybody listening live on Facebook or on Zoom or I know the majority of people listen on the podcast afterwards, if this is given any value,

please tell some other people in your office, tell some people you're talking to, some of your buddies in real estate. Just tell them about this podcast because it really would be great. Also, heck, we're in the D.C., Virginia, Maryland area. So that is one way that you could also say thanks is if you have any referrals, I want to send this way, that would be great. Please send them. One of the other things, too, is I know Jeff has offered this.

I want to throw this out there as well. 100%. If anybody will give us, because we grow our audience through reviews, If anybody will give us a review on Google for the Redux group and a review on wherever you listen to a podcast, a five-star review on this as well, Jeff and I, either one of us will hop on a call and do a coaching session. I do have a couple of coaching clients. Most of my stuff is group coaching one to many. I do have a couple coaching clients. So I love helping people.

And I've seen people really succeed a lot through some of the stuff that just minor tweaks. so we'd be willing to hop on a coaching call and help. All we ask is that you give us a five-star review. Let us know, reach out either on Instagram at Crad Rock, C-R-A-D-D-R-C-K, or Jeff will give you his info so that you can reach out to him as well. So Jeff, do you want to take us home and also share how people can get in touch with you? Yeah, absolutely. You can get a hold of me on Instagram at Jeff Safe, Safe, Right.

That's Safe, S-A-F-E-R-T-E at Jeff Safe Right. You can also find me on Facebook. Same thing, Jeff Safe, right, or you can actually text me. This is my personal cell phone number. I'm not giving you like a Google Voice screened number or anything else. It's 703-899-7-270. Once again, it's 703-899-7-270. We'd love to chat, love to just connect, hear about your business, hear how we can help each other grow,

maybe mastermind a little bit in that way as well. So this does conclude another episode of your Uncommon, punchbox with the host Chris Craddick, myself Jeff, Saferight. We will be back same time, same place next Tuesday and Thursday. Until then, continue crushing it. Have a great weekend. We'll see you soon. Bye. Thank you for tuning into this episode of Uncommon Real Estate. Subscribe to the podcast to stay up today 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 chriscratic.com.