KGCI: Real Estate on Air - Why Authentic Self-Expression Beats Generic Sales Manuals in Real Estate

Episode Date: August 18, 2026

Summary:This replay episode challenges the traditional reliance on rigid sales scripts and generic manuals. The speaker argues that an agent's most effective strategy is rooted in their unique personality and authentic self-expression rather than forced techniques. By leaning into personal strengths and human connection, agents can build more sustainable businesses and deeper client trust. The episode encourages listeners to stop looking for "magic" scripts and instead focus on developing a business model that reflects who they actually are.

I don't want to say a pet pee, but I think it's a downfall of a lot of times where people will, like, what is that magic thing that I can do? Everybody does a pie giveaway now. There's nothing wrong with that. How can you go one step further? If I have 100 people show up for pies and it's just, hey, good to see it. Is that more effective than having 10 people together where I get belly to belly time and I get to know, Chris, how are your kids doing, man? How's that next promotion? When's that coming up? How's your investment portfolio going where you start having those deeper conversations? 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

Saferight. Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of the Uncommon Real Estate podcast. I'm your host Chris Strattuck and I am here with a great friend of mine, Kyle Wallace. I am super pumped. We actually met in a investing mastermind and gotten to be buds since then. So remember, we're always talking about two things, our cash machine and our wealth machine. The cash machine is how to do more deals, how to make more money and do more deals where you're training your time for dollars. But then the goal is to take that money by income, by the ability to have wealth and let that wealth work for you. And remember, wealth is when your money works harder than you work. Wealth is when you go on vacation, your money doesn't go on vacation. When you

take a nap, your money doesn't take a nap. When you get sick, your money doesn't get sick. That is the epitome of financial freedom and that's what we're going for. So no matter what, you can make a million dollars a year, you can make $2 million a year. You can make $20 million a year. And if you have not built wealth where your money begins to compound on itself, you will never have freedom and you'll never get on the route race in life. So that is the goal here. And so today we're going to be talking with my friend Kyle, who had him and his wife have not only been winning the cash cycle side of money, but they're also buying assets and winning the wealth cycle as well. But we're going to talk more about how to really build the cash cycle because frankly, they build something that is

pretty darn leveraged and super profitable. You look at most teams and they just, do not, they don't make money until they really get to scale. And so they build something that is super profitable and also allows them to have a life. So why don't we dive into it? Kyle, tell us a little bit about yourself, brother. Chris, thanks for having me on, man. Appreciate it. Yeah, so my name's Kyle Wallace. My wife and I, we live in Franklin, Tennessee. And this is year number eight of real estate. Prior to real estate, I was a youth pastor. So that was fun. I'm really glad I'm no longer a youth pastor. However, those are some of the most enjoyable years of my life. And I grew up in a, I was a P.K. I was a pastor's kid. And so it was near and dear to my heart. However, business was always just something that just kind of tugged on my heart. And so eight years ago, decided to jump in at first into the real estate space and sales. And we had kind of been dabbling with properties and the whole, you know, you buy something on, we actually bought two short sales in California and went renovated and did all the things. So, like, Like just always kind of had that itch for real estate, but then decided eight years ago to pursue that full time.

And it's been an amazing, amazing journey, all the lessons along the way. And a lot of money to be made and a lot of people served and helped. That's awesome. That's super cool. So tell me this, going from youth pastor to real estate guy, what was the hardest part of that? I mean, as somebody that did it myself, I'm curious. I knew we talked about this. but what was the hardest part of that transition for you?

You know, I think it was for me, everybody's journey is completely different, you know, but for me, I had to wrestle internally with, was I kind of doing something that I felt was so noble and selfless and vocational ministry and helping people out and pastoring? And then going into a space where I had the opportunity to make great money. Was that kind of me selling out in a way? So now I look, you know, eight years later and I just think that that's such a foolish question that I was asking myself and just something I had to just kind of let myself grow out of because, gosh, the amount of people that were able to help now and the community that we're building, that's so important. So I remember whenever that happened, I was spending some time in prayer and I was like, all right, God, if I do this, then the ministry can't stop. And it was such a kind of a silly prayer, if you will.

Like, of course, it doesn't really matter what your vocation is or what your title is. You have an opportunity to help people out and love people well with everything you do. But what I've realized is in going into the real estate space, my platform and my ability to help people has increased exponentially because I've said yes to business and yes to kind of, I believe that this is truly what my wife and I are called to do. So it's been a journey and I think evolving in that process and allowing myself to say, okay, no, this is great. I can do this. This doesn't make me lesser of a person or, you know, a selfish individual to pursue business. Yeah, that's awesome.

So now the thing that's always interesting me, you know, I've done the massive team route with a ton of people and we've worked really hard to stay profitable. and you've done the small, massively leveraged, but you also have a lot of time freedom. And that's been something I've really respected about how you built your business, the fact that you've been able to be profitable and have time freedom. Can you just give us an outline of what you built,

how you, like, just how you built that and how you thought about it too, because I think it's important to understand how you think about business. Yeah, that's a great, great question. And one that I feel like is probably one of the coolest parts of this real estate journey for, for Casey and I, but we hired a coach, which I'm firm believer in coaching.

You know, it really kind of helped us get to that next level. And thankfully, my coach had gone through some seasons where he was in a very large real estate company, one of the largest in the nation, and kind of climbed the ladder. It was in, you know, top groups and all these things. And he said, you know, what he experienced there was just a little bit of, gosh, these people. And you'll identify what this and understand what I'm talking about here. But in the real estate space, it's really.

really push for certain metrics. The more units you sell, the more volume you sell, you get more stage time. You kind of get elevated in a way. People start listening to you. But when you get that ugly peek behind the curtain, like with anything, you start seeing that some people run these huge numbers and they're the first one knocking on their broker or their office administrator's door asking for that paycheck because they are putting up these monster numbers, but they are way to leverage financially in their business and their profit margins aren't what I would look at as successful or a life that I would want to live. And so it was kind of an eye-opener because I feel like in this natural progression of your real estate business, the books and different things

tell you, okay, you're a successful real estate agent. Now the next step is let's go and start a team. You hire an assistant and then you start a team. And I just had trouble with that. after talking with my coach and after looking at things, I thought, I feel like I'm trading a job that I have been successful at and built success to another job, which would essentially be to be a professional recruiter, if you will, build out systems and process, where you're inviting people. And there's nothing wrong with that. I just didn't feel like at that stage of my life, that that was something that I wanted to do to kind of switch.

I'm like, we got a good thing going for us. We're extremely relational. We don't pay for leads. We love people well. we built community well. How do we build on top of that and remain profitable and get our time back and create opportunities for other people? So in that, I'm very blessed to have been a part of a business mastermind. And I think this is hopefully a little nugget that maybe some listeners to this podcast would take away. I think that our industry is so saturated with

real estate masterminds. And I think it's really good to step outside of our industry and listen to other successful business owners and other industries, and ask how they structure their businesses. Because it really came out of a conversation with some other guys. I got a good friend of mine that's in the lumber industry. I have another one that had a massive landscape company and sold it off. Another one that does some screen printing and some merch for big music industries and different things.

And in asking them, I was kind of just wondering, what is your sales model? So I kind of started there, worked backwards from there. And I can kind of, you want me to kind of go. over our structure of what that looks like. I think that that's awesome. I know you built out a coaching business where you coach people to do what you do. And I'd love to talk about that towards the end. But before we do that, like, yeah, just teaches what it looks like.

Yeah, yeah. So I'm a firm believer that whenever you start getting to a certain amount of transactions, you know, you really do need assistance in terms of an executive assistant. You know, a lot of times when people are good at sales, they're not good at the details and get lost in some of those things. And calculating your dollar per hour, if you're making $200, $400 an hour, you shouldn't be doing $15, $20 an hour task. There's nothing wrong with that.

It's just it's a different skill set and you're not really utilizing your time and creating opportunities for others. So with that, we kind of first hired some assistance on and my wife, it's been a rock star. She works with me. She's kind of on the admin side and we hired an assistant. And then it was one of those things where how do I create almost an assistant role that's that I hate that's honestly downplaying it. How do I create an assistant within the real

estate side and the sales side to where it's, I'm highly leveraged, but at the same time, I'm creating opportunity, but maybe not the same way that a lot of teams are doing it. Usually teams will bring somebody on and they are almost starting a mini brokerage. And again, there's nothing wrong with this model. It just wasn't what I wanted to necessarily do, which is, you know, you have systems and process. If you bring somebody on, you kind of mentor them, you coach them up a little bit. And they have their own real estate. business that they're bringing in. And you might provide some leads here and there.

I wanted to take it to where I wanted to continue to build relationships. We had a robust sphere of influence and still do and love to love on people. How do I take the piece of going and showing homes and walking people through the process and highly leverage that piece to where I'm just continuing to create relationships and kind of manage from the outside? And so what I decided to view was it was a different personality type that I was looking for. I wasn't looking for the go-getter, the killer, the one that was going to generate business. I was going to look for someone who is nurturing, you know, pardon this, but my background

being pastoring was I needed somebody to pastor our people. I needed somebody to pastor our clients and walk them through that process. Somebody that really wanted to live that HGTV life where they're holding somebody's hand, they're showing homes, but they're not actually lead generating. I wanted to keep my wife and I in that capacity and really have that be our true 20%. So we leverage that piece out. And our structure is we pay a stipend. Our structures, we pay $2,000. thousand dollars a month and then there's a sliding scale that starts at 12 and a half percent works its way up to 25 percent of the transaction but again an agent isn't doing any type of lead generation they can get a 25 percent referral fee that i am glad to pay them if they bring in their own piece of

business but overall what we did was we worked backwards from if somebody with no experience in an industry was going and just taking care of people and we're doing all the training how do i get them to a hundred thousand dollars a year and i work backwards from there and develop the sliding scale. So these people are making up to $100,000 a year. Now, this goes back to the other piece that I think is unique about your business and I really like it. How are you guys getting your leads? Because from living, it was California, right? You lived in California and you moved just outside of Nashville. And I know you were for a church. So you were tied in a little bit there for for a short period of time. But it's not like you grew up there and had like a gazillion leads and you're not paying for leads.

So you guys have a really unique way of basically creating raving fans among your community. Like what does that look like? Yeah, it sounds really cliche, man. But I think that there's been these kind of defining moments where I have realized that the most successful I can be is rooted in me being my authentic self. So if I'm looking at other people and saying, well, how are they doing this and constantly trying to copy what they're doing? I'm never going to be successful. So what I realized is if I truly love to love people, mastering is a part of who I am.

And that's just really like walking with people through life and just being there, right, in those crucial moments, being able to give them hard truths and love and helping and assisting in any way I can, right? So if I really started to focus in on that, and my wife was built the same way, she was an R-N, serving people, loving people well, meeting their needs in the most crucial time of their life,

if we really focus in on that and just decided let's create community. Let's love people really well. Let's make sure that they know that we are professionals in the real estate space. I think our action spoke for themselves. We built a tremendous amount of wealth just in our own investment journey even prior to real estate. So when we carry that over and serve people well, we begin to be asked a lot of questions. What can I do to my house to get the most bang for the buck? So we're like, how can we focus in on those things and just serving people well and meeting a need? We stopped trying to sell houses and we just started trying to create relationships where we met people's need in real estate. And out of that, it's just grown and been really exciting to see that growth there.

Yeah. And, you know, I just did something the other night and part of it was something that you, I got the idea from something that you were talking about where you said you rented on a golf simulator and just brought in. cigars and just had some people, just a fun little event there. One of my buddies has probably the largest home bar I've ever seen in my life. And he loves talking about different bourbons and whiskeys and just where they originated, just all the other stuff. So I just asked him, I was like, hey, you mind if I bring over like six or eight guys and, you know, we just do a tasting. And you just, you know, share some of the stuff, you know. And so we just had that the other night. And it was so fun. And I just love that stuff. I think it's great. Great idea. Yeah, I think there's a lot of, we're a very client event based, and that came out of our coaching.

And again, this is one of my, I don't want to say a pet pee, but I think it's a downfall of a lot of times where people will, like, what is that magic thing that I can do? And so there's things like, and I'm not downplaying this, this is a great tool, but the pie giveaway. Everybody does a pie giveaway now. Everybody does that in their business where come get a pie for Thanksgiving. And again, there's nothing wrong with that. How can you go one step further? Is it just accumulating all of these pies that you go buy out of Costco and then just having people show up? Or would you be better served by doing something a little bit more in depth where you have a little bit more belly to belly time? If I have 100 people show up for pies and it's just, hey, good to see you. Go ahead and grab a pie.

Great to see you. We'll see you next time. And that's the extent of my conversation. Is that more effective than having 10 people together where I get belly to belly time and I get to know, Chris, how are your kids doing? man, how are things going? How's that next promotion? When's that coming up? How's your investment portfolio going where you start having those deeper conversations? So I feel like there's more with less and that's what we've been trying to focus on. There's at some point you get to a stage where the bigger the event is, the less time you have to go deep with people and the deep relationships

of the one that lasts a lifetime. Almost every dinner that Catherine and I have had, whether it's like one couple or multiple couples, we've seen a referral come out of that dinner. And we're not even efficient for it. We're just hanging out with friends. And I guess it's a law of reciprocity. You serve your friends well and they want to take care of you. So I love it, man. I think it's Yeah. So let's transition a little bit. So you just started a coaching business and, you know, not to do like a webinar for the coaching business, but what is it that you're teaching? If you were to talk through like session one of coaching with somebody, what, what is something like that look like so that we can kind of say, okay, this is, this is some of the gold that you're

given to the folks that are working with you. Yeah, I think one of the things that I feel like I'm good at and why I really wanted to focus on coaching is, well, let me take just two small steps back here. I think that everybody can look into your life at one point or another and see that there was probably some sort of defining moment where you connected with somebody a teacher, a coach, and they spoke into your life, and you can go back to these, these little moments in time. And so whenever I started peeling that back a little bit, I figured, what is that? It's when somebody was excellent at their craft, and they also genuinely cared. They looked at you and they said, I see something in you that you don't even see in yourself, and they called

somebody up instead of calling them out. And so that's been the biggest thing for me in coaching, how do I call somebody up and not call them out? How do I not associate their shortcomings with shame, but instead like opportunities to grow to so they can reach their full potential? And so that kind of segues into, that's what I try to really focus on. There's a lot of fantastic coaches out there, but everybody's business is completely different. And so my focal point is something that I'm passionate about. I got four kids and I have a wife. And the minute that I start focusing so much on growing a robust business and trying to chase a stage and do all these things. And then I look up one day and I've lost connection with my wife. She feels like she's on an island. Or I've looked at my kids

and five years have passed and they look different and they sound different and their interests are different. And I don't know how to connect with my kids. I failed miserably no matter how much money is in a bank account. So what I try to do is take that 30,000 foot view of somebody's life. And I think somebody, sometimes you got a fever and you can mask it with Tylenol, but really that fever is the result of something festering with some sort of infection. And so not that I'm a doctor by any means, but that's what I try to do, you know, take a step back and what you really need in your business. You're killing it. Out of your time with your family. So kind of that holistic approach to to coaching in somebody's life.

And yeah, that's what we were really sure to dig deep into. That's awesome. Although anytime somebody says, I've got a fever in our little world, you know what they're doing. It's more cowbell. More cowbell. As soon as he just said that, I was like, I wouldn't jump in, but he's being serious right now.

Oh, you, man, you just jump in anytime. There's no, there's no bad time for Caldell. Yeah. So, and for anybody to listen, if you don't know that, Freaking Google more Cal Bell. There you go. That's right. It'll be a good thing for you.

Better than any coaching or business advice you'll ever do. That's right. So with that said, tell us just one story about somebody that's, I know, I know it's new wish, but I know you've been helping in the game of helping people for a long time because that's just part of your DNA. Tell us, you know, about somebody that came in and what you saw, like a tweak you made in their business or life and what a result. has been just because, yeah, I think oftentimes people, you know, like growth is caught more than

it's taught. And so, yeah, let's just hear a case study of somebody. And what did it look like? And maybe we can take that to our own lives. Yeah. So I think the very first client that I started coaching, we've had the most, you know, water under the bridge there with with that client. And so it's a, it's a great story. So I went and spoke at a mega agent, regional situation on a panel. And with that, I was able to connect with them. They came up to me after the conference. We're looking for coaching. So we started that journey. And it was two gals that have a team in the Georgia area. And they are incredible. But it was one of those things where, hey, we're starting to generate more business. And I don't necessarily want to go to the team model, but we're just looking for something

that's out there without growing this crazy team because we actually enjoy being belly to belly with clients and how do we leverage it out? We're highly relational. So that's like the ideal client for many, people that are highly relational and maybe want to see if there's a step between them being individual agent and then being this mega team where they're no longer in production or very little production. So the great part about them is they are both incredible moms and incredible community leaders. And so we've taken them through a journey of we, they started plugging into our system and to

the processes and I helped them kind of build that out with compensation plan. Now I'm coaching one of their agents on their team. And again, like just the whole thing, the opportunities that they created along the way. And then now we're carving out with, okay, so you have all this business coming in. How are you maintaining your level as a mom that there's no mom guilt? Mom guilt is a very real thing. If you're a guy and you're married to an incredible woman, you know that mom guilt's a very real thing. If you're a lady out there, you have kids, but you also have that itch to thrive in business.

You understand that laying in bed at night, oh gosh, did I avoid that conversation with my kids? I was too busy on my phone. Mom guilt's a big thing. So we try to build a moat around how much time do you want to spend on the business? And what are the pain points that are going to allow you to say, okay, I let go. I'm going to leverage yourself.

I'm going to create opportunities for other people. And so the success in that has been they've more than doubled their business. I just got a text for them the last week that they just reached over a million dollars in GCI for the year for the first time in their business. And they just hired another agent under the team to plug into the model. They're creating opportunities. They're helping people out. And they have a beautiful brand and beautiful lives that they're living.

So my response to them was, guys, isn't it crazy that this has been a goal that you were crushed you didn't hit last year. You hit it this year. But really the real goal than this is, how much more time do you have with your family? How much stronger of a leader are you to other people? How many more opportunities have you been able to create for others on your team and look at the life that you're able to live? It's just incredible to kind of see that and share people on from the sidelines.

That is, that's incredible. I love it, man. And I'll tell you, one of the things when I was in Gary's, Gary Keller's group, that I remember I'm saying that really stuck out to me. He said, if you do more business, because you're working harder and you're cheating is like the goal is to get better and the way you get better is to do more business with the same or less amount of time and i was like yes that is so powerful it's just so powerful yeah that is it for almost verbatim what i said to them in a follow-up text i said

this is what mastery looks like you've built far more with less it's a beautiful thing so good all right So we're here at the top of the hour. If somebody wants to get in touch with you, if somebody's interested in, you know, what you're talking about, if they want to be able to work less, make more money, I mean,

it sounds like the dream, right? Which is what I know you've been able to do yourself and help others do. How do people get in touch with you? Yeah, passion about people building seven figure businesses on less time. I think it's very possible to do that. You can get in touch with me.

My website is Priest and Kingco.com. Priest and King,co.com. You can book a consultation there. You can follow me on Instagram at Kyle Wallace. It's just all one word. My email, Kyle at Breastonkingco.com. I just love helping people out. So we're going to be launching in 2025, some group coaching type of thing.

And everybody can afford maybe one-on-one coaching. So decided to kind of go a little bit deeper there and help people out in that way. But even if it's something where coaching's not in the spot for somebody right now, if you just need some encouragement or kind of somebody to ask some questions to you or just want to shoot the breeze, would love to connect with people. That's awesome. Brother, this is a great time. And yeah, I hope as you're listening, you think through, I mean, there are seasons in

our life where we've got to run hard. There are seasons that we've got to just sprint and push yourself to the max. But we've also got to learn to live in a way that's sustainable for the ultimate goals that we want in our lives. And so I know this is the entire is great at. And please reach out. to Kyle. He's a great dude and he lives when he talks. So yeah, make it happen. Brother, this is awesome. Thanks for joining us. Anybody listening? If you enjoyed this,

well, regardless, please just give us a review, an honest review. Even if it's a, you know, a low review, we just want to, we want to see what you're thinking. But hopefully you guys have received as much encouragement as I have from my friend Kyle here. And until next time, go kill it, live uncommon. 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 chriscratic.com.