KGCI: Real Estate on Air - Why Fast Decisions Beat Perfect Plans in Real Estate

Episode Date: October 21, 2025

Morning Primer is your weekday boost from Mindset & Motivation Monday—quick, focused, and made for agents by KGCI Real Estate On Air. Give yourself a daily mindset reset for the daily direction you need to show up sharp and ready to win.Start your morning ahead of the market and ahead of your competition every day with KGCI Real Estate On Air. Summary:Top agent Kenny Truong reveals his number one competitive advantage: speed of implementation. In this powerful mindset-focused episode, he makes a compelling case for why taking immediate, imperfect action is far more effective than waiting for a perfect plan. For any real estate agent struggling with analysis paralysis or procrastination, this is a must-listen. Kenny provides the framework and motivation to stop planning and start doing, emphasizing that momentum is the key to out-hustling the competition in any market. Ready for more? Subscribe now and tap into our Always Free Real Estate On Air Mobile App for iPhone and Android, where you’ll find our complete archive and 24/7 stream of proven real estate business-building strategies and tactics. 

Built by KGCI, Real Estate on air, power by the mindset and motivation Monday. Here's your morning primer. Seven figure success starts when you start thinking like a CEO. Welcome to the John Kitchens coach podcast experience. This is your host, John Kitchens. You're ready to think bigger and transform your business into a path to lasting freedom. What is happening to everybody, man? Thank you guys.

Tune in to another episode of Expert Mentors Live Expert Mentors, 288. Welcome back, man. Good to have you. I've really been looking forward to this conversation. And I was thinking back the last time that we connected here on X-Rent mentors. And I was like, man, that was a damn good conversation. And then I was like, it didn't seem that long ago when we just looked it up. You're like, yeah, two and a half years ago.

I was like, yeah. It's crazy, man. How have you been? How were things rocking? We've been good. We've been hang on in this crazy market. Yeah. And for folks listening in,

out in the East Bay Area, out in California, really primarily, what, the Oakland area. Yeah, I'm personally in Oakland. Our sales team spans like an hour and a half radius each way. Gotcha. How, you know, you were talking about some of the things that you were really proud of last year. And I think that that might be a really good way to kind of kick things off. Obviously, we know the coasts usually, you know, set the trend for what comes into. the middle of the middle of the U.S.

And I think it'd be kind of important for everybody to understand, you know, how you navigate it 2024 and really setting the way into 2025. And definitely some of the things that we want to touch on as we're talking about leading through change and staying ahead of trends and in kind of where we're seeing things going. But man, I would love for you to just kind of unpack and share the things that you were really proud of last year. Yeah, we, I mean, our sales team last year, I mean, our sales. sales volume last year dropped about 3% in volume for a prior year, which isn't too bad considering

what's happening in the market. And prior that we dropped like 15%. We took that big hit the first year. I think when the market was selling like 30. And then we also last year had 90% retention of our top 50 agents. We started with around like 205 team members and we ended the year around 190. So we were able to do, I would say, do a lot of people left and came, especially, you know, a lot of people are like not reading their licenses but we were able to do same production with

way less people especially coming off off a year so we're proud of you know having our top agents do more business what did you focus on for that to be for that to be true we stopped trying to I know we brand on 100 something agents but we that was a slower year for us we didn't we didn't do that many events we didn't do social events just to bring in people we didn't do panels we didn't do make sure it's just recruit for sake of recruiting and we kind of we were able to hammer down on just team exclusive events more dinners and more lunches for our our top agents putting here in more workshops and training my sales director put together like an intensity workshop was a pretty hardcore five six week boot camp where it's just activity base

we enrolled a lot of agents into like a recommit lighter version of boot camp so we kind of We made a lot of efforts to have agents to narrow down, really fine-tuned their calendar, and making sure they're truly productive and not just busy every day. So just less, it seems like a lot still, but we usually lay out their calendar for the year, but we shrunk a lot of stuff we did. So we did more, but a higher, just high quality work, I think. Gotcha. Really pouring into your current team members and giving them lots of attention to lots of love.

Yeah. Yeah, I would say that that probably really significant in the retention side of things with your agents. And, you know, the ripple effect of that is higher production, being able to spend more time with them. Yeah. And then the only personal relationship is like I have a, we have four people on a leadership team. And we're, I would say we all have different close friend circles. Like I go, I play video games with one group of my agents. I go biking with a different group.

I do dinner to another. I hang out like like just different, building different relationships in different ways. And then my sales director, they also invite people over to his house. They go out for lunches and stuff. So just different kind of breaking down our roster and informing different relationships and different markets with our agents. We kind of got the term like re-recruiting. You're constantly retaining and re-recruiting your agents to make sure it's a place they want to be.

You know, they're happier. They like being here more. So then we shouldn't, if they're comfortable being. here, then the production goes up higher. Yeah. They feel acknowledged. How do you, so how do you, you know, juggle so many people? Is it more, you know, by committee, hey, we're throwing this out there.

Who wants to join us? Is it more of you personally being intentional and personally reaching out to them in staying, you know, really trying to engage the conversation? We, well, we have group coaching calls with my director of sales. He does it three times a week, 8, 39. And they're pretty well attended. Around like 40, 50 people from our, mostly our team, probably 90% of our team come out. They talk about their dates and about intentions for the week.

Talk about the wins. They get pretty vulnerable in the personal lives. So then that connection builds. We also have a couple different online lead platform partners. And many of the agents partner are up on deals. Example, we're a Zillow seller connection partner. And then if you want to be in the program and you get a connection, you're required to work with a junior agent on it.

We're constantly helping agents form relationships in the marketplace. So I live in Oakland. We have offices as far as Stockton, which is an hour and a half east of us. And we had office. We recently closed down our Sacramento office after three years. But we had an office Sacramento that's an hour and a half north of us. So when agents are working with buyers are migrating over the Bay Area, they're usually partnering up on the deals instead of just referring out. So that creates more strong relationships within their company.

Dude, I love that. So shutting down in office three years in, I mean, it was it just a more of a logical math decision? Yeah, the office was too big. We went gung-hoe and recruited. So last year, we brought 110 agents, which again was one of the oldest years we've had prior was 10040, 160 and the prior year was 240. So a lot of these offices opening during the pandemic was a huge rush bringing hundreds agents. But then the market count doing. will no doubt at least the velocities of it. So certain markets, we weren't able to recruit as heavily as we did. And a lot of times it didn't really make sense to keep them because they were like

profitable but not worth the risk. If I lost a couple of producers in the office and the office could easily be not profitable. So at two our locations, we actually, we shut down a couple locations recently, Sacramento being one of them. We just had the agents now just use region spaces. And then if you guys are with EXP, you know that Regis is a free value. add by the company. But there's also, Regis also has a sister company called Spaces. And they're more like urban major metro markets. They're both owned by IWG. Spaces looks really cool. It's like we work,

or industrias is it's kind of sexy, sleek, new or modern. And our agents just go use the different spaces locations and then our daily city location, which is next to South San Francisco. They're using the spaces South Francisco. So we track all activity on their team. We look at a lot of data of before we make big decisions, including if we were like bringing on new programs or cutting out programs, we cut out a lot of stuff last year too. We tried, we had a lot of stuff. We cut out all stuff. Like this week, I'm demoing three new products.

We're always looking at, see if we're missing out there. But office, like office spaces, we are looking at the Bluetooth key activity. 40% of our agents don't even use the office once a week. So we do not need, we did not need like nine offices for 200 agents. My goal, like a couple years ago, to get the 600 agents. We're on the way there. we had because of 400 team members two januaries ago right what i mean has that goal changed does it hold hold steady kind of where we're at do we love the 200 i mean if we grow i'm estimating

that we're going to get down to 150 by this year okay is that just true just natural attrition yeah just just just attrition just normal attrition in the market way less than the agents are coming in the business a lot of agents are not renewed or licenses it's kind of sad to like like just in the last month for agents we find out they'd leave the company because e-spe emails that say they're not no longer licensed so or didn't pay their dues or something so then they got dropped so we we work with a lot of new agents on our team just because we are a newer team our average tenure might be around like three years on our team gotcha so we i mean we saw that as an opportunity to focus on to see if we can increase that did increase the tenure

yeah increase the increase the increase the increase the overtime And we, we, like we said, we had 90% retention of top 50 agents. So the agents who start here, continue to develop their businesses. It's really fun watching the evolution, too, because this is my sixth year on this team. I've been, I've been doing real estate for 17 years. But bringing in a lot of these, like, newer, younger junior agents, but now they're starting to, like, get their listings and get luxury listings. So we're like, we're, you know, our messaging and branding and the market has changed quite a bit. Because, again, we're pretty, my average age is probably 29.

taking you back a few years for a bunch of like 25 euros running around i'm 40 so i run the team of younger younger folks but now you're seeing them evolve and get better listings is really cool see now we're like competing against like a lot of bigger agents in my market so i like in the brands game better which is when you have more production and higher listings prices and you're in the track more people that want to be a part of that is you gotcha you got to keep elevating yourself in your world and your brand so other agents want to be a part of it. Yeah, I absolutely love that. You know, you're telling that story.

I worked with Jack and Michael Perry. They're in Utah. Yeah, they do amazing work. And they're young, just like you, right? And, you know, team dynamic. I think the average agent of the agent is in their later 20s. And, you know, Jack's, you know, Jack's older. And so, you know, him going in and pouring into the agents every day.

But it's- I love you dinner. I'm a great guy too. They really get a good shot going on. Yeah, they do. And it's interesting because of what you're saying is they're seeing the same thing as well. And pretty similar of how, you know, how you built Michael, you know, really, you know, a lot of Instagram, everything and just kind of how you built your business. And so it's really interesting to see kind of the evolution as they, the more they stay with you, the more they grow.

and the more that they're able to elevate their business. Yeah, like, great thing is our number, our number two agent right now is five years of experience. He's been with me for, sorry, six years experience. He's been with me for five years. And our number one agent got licensed two and a half years ago. So I've heard a company for unit and volume. He just works hard, open out every single weekend. Hustle, social media, won like riding a star award.

I think won like a real estate trendmaker award. So like on our team last year in California, writing star is kind of the rookie of the year award Right back to the California Association of Realtors. We had two of the 10 spots of the 10 in California. And in three years ago, because two years ago we didn't have any one win, but three years ago, we had three out of ten spots.

There were 10 team members. And two of the three did like 25 deals their first year in real estate. So like we, we, instead of saying, oh, we're great, we, you know, yield some more homes here. Like, here's examples of agents who have started with us, brand new, zero experience in business and able to build a business really quickly

in the first, second year business. So by using those avatars, we may able to try more people like them. And is it the agents that just come in and follow the process? Don't, you know, like push too hard against it. Just do what you say. They come in and they just execute. They show up to like the training and coaching. They take, they take,

feedback and constructing Chrism really well and they work they ask a lot they ask questions I wouldn't say they ask a lot of questions because one thing one my pet peeve is running into agents like that asks way too many questions the things that doesn't help them do any more business today yeah like why why do you need to know everything about the CRM before you just go pick and make your calls or why do you need to know every part of its contract um before you're even going to I mean there's so many different contracts so like it's there's like there's There's a time and place for everything, and too many agents are stuck like thinking, overthinking everything.

So the agents who just take action and learn as they go very quickly and ask the right questions at the right time, I see you do really well. And it's the ones that show up the most. It's really hard to not be successful. You just show up to every meeting you should, every training, every, pick up your phone, like just really basic work. But they do it very constantly. Kenny, you guys made the emphasis to go deeper with the team last year.

I'm really curious how you guys communicate. What is the communication structure? You know, what's the average time, you know, where they go to ask questions, resources, you know, what's the response? We have the coaching calls three times a week. We have open kind of broker room from 12 to 1 every day. Karina Demeter is our executive assistant director, kind of plays like a broker liaison. She gets updates for the contract, field doctoring, therapist, psychiatrist, for the agents.

She's a little bit all that. And then we use Slack at a pretty high level. There's different general, just like general chat where you ask questions and then a lot of people help answer that. And then we have like channels for open houses, showroom requests, buyer needs. Does anyone have off market? Here's my coming soon listing. So we have like 30, 40 different channels. and then every office location we have has their own channel.

Every lead platform, online leads department has their own stuff. Market department has their own stuff. So our, because our Slack probably has around 200 active users a month because Slack does all the billing and all don't stop billing you. If someone's down in for two weeks, they're gracious enough to not bill us. So my bill is, I can tell it's around like 200 people active using it. So they'll get their answers. And I learned a trick from Dillon at Eastby in Hawaii.

at Dallas last week that we're trying to implement what we're working implementing is like before you ask any of any of us a question uh leadership check with chat gpc first yeah some guy asked me how do you connect your zip forms to doxy signs or kind of like i google it's like send the link i google this literally f right there like and then i write some agents like those are the things i'm asked i mentioned earlier like they're asking questions that are not necessary like agent you got to be resourceful and be able to figure things out on your own but you're asking me how to connect a zip form to your doc sign like i you're gonna have a hard time later with anything else yeah i i love that that is such a that's such a great point being able to uh teach them to be resourceful and i mean a training library with hundreds and hundreds of videos we personally use

mighty network uh but using it looks really cool that's why we picked it over like kujabi and train yo but there's every training we had contracts and every session and every coaching call and every team meeting is on that platform it's kind of overwhelming now now it was a training module but now it's more of a library because there's so much stuff on it we're trying to build out a new training program like 10 video 10 things in low courses it's kind of like east the university but we're looking at working on doing that through agently right now an app that we use yeah dude that's so good man i love that and so you built your business off of instagram and have really been a student of social media at a high high level um you know early early on into the social media side of

things where do you see kind of the emphasis with social media with marketing with branding everything in general moving forward where is the main emphasis that that that you're paying attention to that you're executing on and having having the agents execute on as well so i follow a lot of accounts a lot of people i don't know on instagram it's it's becoming more challenging to uh have a voice so like the talking ahead stuff it's kind of gone like it's not really the thing people watch anymore or the high holly polish stuff and those on instagram like home property walkthroughs or cool content a lot of really great videographers it's like we we get hit up all time but these young new just out college videographer that we just want

will do content for free to build their book of business but anyone almost pretty much anyone can get really good content if you just hire right people so that's hard to compete now because you'll be a new agent with really great content and then the other side like where we've seen work really well is just raw authentic content that's that's not polished not how they produce it could be just be you um sitting your car seeing on sitting wherever like i i i've done over a thousand miles on my this year bikes so i'm always on like i'm on my bike recording content with no shirt on home then that's just my normal thing i do so people want to see just raw unedited and they want to hear your opinion they don't they don't need to i need like i don't think they want to hear top five

things to do when you get in contract they want to hear you know my client got screwed over on this deal because they did they watch out for these things it's also i guess the hope matters a lot too but telling stories and telling your opinion i think it's huge people want to hear what you have to say and they like the long-horn stuff but at the same time not everyone's not pay attention to your all your stuff but if they're interested in even the other relationship or working with you they're going to pay more attention to it so go for it like the likes are less important you see people collaborate more to put more raw unique content out there and then it's really good i'm going to call a cookie cutter but it's like a property tour or something that's more real estate standard then you got to do that

pretty high you should be doing it at a pretty high level with professionals gotcha so when you get into the to the actual it's a point i'm trying to make yeah yeah so when you get into the actual product itself of of the home or that needs to be high quality but as far as no talking head professional call i mean it just needs to be you raw in the moment your authentic self and tell a story and share your opinion yeah we're seeing more a man i got it from min what's a mortgage i think a lot of people follow him like he came to speak at my office like last year and a year before he said you know consumers looking for a BFF they're not looking for a really high level educator because then they might get they might hear something from you but then end up working with someone locally

that because they just getting the information for you but they want to work with someone they could feel like they can't develop a relationship what I love that and like don't just try to like you could be but don't just only try to be the expert and the like the local, the specialist, like they want to know that you're a human being and you,

maybe you need to crack some jokes on there or be vulnerable or just put a different spin on it. Like for where it's not, sounds as rehearsed or scripted. Yeah. Dude, I love that.

And I mean, it is. It's genuine, authentic, right? They want to be able to connect. And I love how you put it. They want a BFF. And that's,

that's so spot on. They do. And, and, you know, they can have that connection with you. It's, it does make things a whole,

a whole lot easier for sure. Yeah. No, that's that's wild. You know another thing, man, that I really I've noticed and admire about you. You're in all the rooms and you execute fast. You get a good idea. It is, it is on its way. You are executing. Would you mind kind of sharing kind of your whole mindset around that, your whole kind of belief system and then kind of your process to execute at a high level? I think that's where agents are struggling right now. Yeah, agents would take action the fastest will do better. Gary V. I've heard him a while, but just imagine a single week.

You and I both had 100 decisions to make. And then you take forever and you make hundreds of stretch, but okay, 100 decisions to make in a week. And then you take your time, you make 30 good decisions and 10 bad decisions. So it took you forever. And then if I go and make 50 bad decisions and also 50 good decisions, I've essentially, oh, let's say 60. I made 60 good decisions.

They made 40 bad decisions. Yeah, I've made more bad decisions to you, but I also double the input of good decisions. So, like, you're constantly driving, you know, driving business. You're taking action and learning along the way. So that's one thing. I feel like I do really well in all aspects of my life. I just go stew it and figure out the details later. Do you have, do you have like a kind of a filter?

system of process to make decisions? Yeah, for my company, we do. If we're looking at new products, we typically, I get all my leadership team on the call before we do something. Or if I'm just looking at something is really pre-lim very early, I'll say, hey, look at this. We should take a look at it in like Q3. An example is like Monday, we use Monday.com to run their entire back into our company.

We're looking at Monday for a good six months before. I say, hey, this is the Q3 project. So throughout Q1, Q3, we didn't look at it. until it was like there. So when we look at stuff, we always like set time. How the way I've learned, because I used to stress people out all time when I had so many ideas grabbing

from these conferences and meetings. Like everything was a priority. But now I was like, okay, take a look at this or this is not a rush. Let's look at this, so on and such. And then anytime I'm good, a new idea, I put it on a slide channel, a private slash channel with my marketing team.

Hey, look at this template of this graph or this idea and can you implement it? And then they'll come back to me like a week or two later with what the things. I say yes, no, give some feedback. back and they keep moving along. It's so that's the cadence now now before like I just put everything on a notepad and send to my team and but now like I don't we don't even we need to we don't even put

anything on like a checklist or a time date and who's responsible which is getting kind of messy because we have we have had a lot of new ideas just as fun so we might go back to actually getting organized but right now the Slack channels and full conversations about each topic has the face. And I tell you one of the best processes. I got it from the digital marketer crew, Ryan Dice and specifically from Ryan Dice. But it was his growth tool. It was their spreadsheet to where anybody can go in and add what it is and why it's

important. And then what growth lever is it pulling? So is it pulling traffic? Is it helping with conversion? Is it helping with fulfillment? is it helping with retention? And what idea is it? But then what's really cool is putting it on a grading scale, right,

to where you got to grade it on a scale of one to 10 for implementation, right? Can we implement this fast? Is this going to take a year? What is it going to take? What's the confidence that we can get this implement it? Like we're world class at this or like, dude, we have no clue. And then the ease of it. Like we can get it done in an hour.

We can get it done in a month. We can get it done in six months. And you just graded on that scale and you let the numbers shift out. And so like when you guys made, you know, the decision like, hey, let's tighten up and let's focus on retention. Then you can look at that sheet and go, okay, well, what are all of our best ideas for retention? What grades the highest out of retention? Hey, do we want to, do we want to focus on these?

So I thought that was a great way to have a system to where you, because I mean, you're in so many rooms, you're seeing so many ideas, which is your job, right, as CEO head of the company, to have all of these ideas, but creating a good process to where you're not, like you said, overwhelming, you know, the organization. Yeah, all the right levers and things we've done, like all the stuff I mentioned earlier. And then, like, now we're, this year we are looking to grow a little more because to compensate for the attrition. Some things we launched recently is now that we have, okay, a clear understanding of what has

work but then we know how much they'll work they're not going to give us extra um or because then we'd be doing for a while like this week we we had our team meeting a annual team meeting in person is super fun like a hundred like a hundred like a hundred people come out uh but we had these like bingo card things so the idea is not even fully implemented we have the bingo card we got people in the columns and groups teams of seven and then we're trying to get to the blackout entire bingo card it's still make sure you got all your head shots done your updated profile pending escrow here attend something. I don't even know what's on there. Like I don't know all the details of my company a lot of times.

But we know that. We don't even know what the prize is yet. I think it might be a ticket to ESPCon for all seven people or a ticket to a different event. But we're trying to get them in, because we've been asked a couple times, like, hey, can we get, we want to work on teams again. I know we're one big team and we're more like one company, but they want to kind of like have more bonding and collaboration.

So now we're having these groups of seven do that. And everything we're planning out right now on all the details to do it first Friday. In Oakland, first Friday, it's people, when people come out in the city of Oakland, they, you know, the street boots and drinks and stuff like that. So we're trying to do first Friday in office where we'll serve both non-alcoholic and some alcoholic beverages and get vendors out there. And it's just like literally just a mixture just for sake of mixing. And then another thing we're going to do when that opens up the space and gets people

seeing it, like twice this week, different companies, one is a, I don't even know it. Like a lender is holding an event, a mixing, a mixture event for like 7,500 people. I was like, yeah, like, and then I'm actually volunteering my space. We, I actually want to get more future business partners in my market to come use my office. I have a really great event space in my Oakland office, like a $9.00 for a warehouse. I want more vendors to come use my office space and I'll offer for free because it's going to get people into my door and they can see the space and inquire about like our team. So we're trying different things out. out and even we we cut down the panels and the events that company held a couple years ago our

agents ramped up their events there's tons of like buyer workshops like there's a bear booze and home buying no bear dogs the home buying workshop this this saturday at my office so then the door knock the neighborhood and this cute flyer so agents are doing all kinds of things to get um you know they're they're creating itself to use our spaces to bring in business and then i saw this post by some my friends in Scottsdale they did like a women's state thing and I was like oh that's really cool so I sent to my partner alliance and then he sent it to our Stockton office which is like there's a lot of girl power in office and now they're organizing some big event next week at that office and then bring in like local agents I think and then next month we're flying the speaker

to that office so all this is like it didn't last two weeks these are all completely new ideas so that's I think having a company company at a size and scale we can play with some idea a lot of ideas because every time we have an idea it's we I'm just intending every event be like 20 people so we have 200 agents like I don't need to do the event and expect even right like a quarter to turn out so we can try a little things and it works well than another another agent and my office might want to do it that idea might lead to another idea and so on yeah you you encourage that and it's just the culture that you guys have created and no I I think it's I think it's amazing and I think it's the thing kind of you know we're kind of around trends and

heading into the future and in what we're seeing I think it is more more collaboration going deeper deeper on relationships is oh yeah we randomly that that women idea got sparked because I didn't realize this one month I thought the women's state that's my fault and then it was like okay no every year we we've done it or this year we almost forgot to like why don't we also like three full-time video editors our team in the Philippines So we're asking the agents to go to, we have two studios, go to the studio or shoot from home and to cut a video about who is a very influential woman in your life. And then so when they have that, they can send their editors and screws it up.

So that's that's authentic content is on brand with our company being being very vulnerable and open. It's also a brand with a month. And people want to work with people who care. So that's a new thing we're launching, we launched this. week too. Yeah, I love that. Where are you kind of anticipating and seeing, I know you're looking at a bunch of different things and bunch of different platforms and tools. Where do you see kind of the direction where the consumer, buyers and sellers, where are they gravitating to? Where are you

kind of put an emphasis on AI platforms? Like what, where are the tools and kind of the focus that you're looking at into the future? Well, too, they're definitely more tools. Like, we, we, we, without reference that we we picked up a demo we picked up a tool for AI but we didn't use it to the level we're supposed to and that that's our fault but after like six months we decided to cancel it but there's another tool this week where we're actually demoing tomorrow called house whisper but i know like follow about says it too so a lot of tools are kind of analyzing the calls and giving you feedback on it so that's the whole uh platform that's going to continue to develop And then on the other side, unfortunately and fortunately, depending on which team you're at,

Rline leads is going to become a bigger part of market. More companies are spending more money. Like the big lenders, whether it's like UWM or Rocket Mortgage or other like was Zillow, HomeLoy, Movote, Realtor, Co-Star, Homes.com, they're also spending more and more money to attract that consumer and bypass the agents because agents don't do this job market himself and then selling those lease back to us I can see that continued grow so as a team leader you know you need to be constantly they're not the enemy I mean they might be taking some of your business but you need to figure out ways to partner with those like this month um in the last month I've landed two big

partnerships with two big companies that spends millions and millions of dollars on on like TV and radio advertising so lucky not to get those type accounts. And those accounts are usually are very hard to get. And then you typically need a pretty large sales seems to support that potential flow of business. How do you position, you know, when you go into negotiate on those partnerships to make it a win-win, how do you look at, you know, that to where it's, it's a win for them and

a win for you guys? Like, really running a big account like that. They typically want a, they're speaking in different language. You need to ideally have experience working with a lot of leads where you're buying the lease from these platforms or you're like a little flex partner that you need to know that you're going to convert and not just conversion rate you know what you're tracking your team's pickup rate answer answer rate they're scripting they're booking they're offering they're operating that you run in like a business uh and let's kind of free flow so when they know that you can so by having a lot of sales

already and having like an online lease department and team more companies are willing to do that because what But the common thing between a lot of these companies that do these big online lease platforms, they actually want to work with less people. They want to work with less people because then they had, well, it saves them time. They have their reps that want to meet with a team leader. They want the team leader to be about manage the people, like the whatever number of people they have versus the sales rep for these companies trying to have connections with 10, 15, 20 different people in the market.

So the bigger you are and what organized you are, the higher chance you have to win some of these bigger accounts. Gotcha. What would you say to, you know, agents right now, maybe smaller markets or how do you have them, you know, focused on managing and developing relationships with their database, people they know, how are you like, you know, coaching and leading them through to not let, because I think you're spot on when it comes to the online lead generation. It's going to be so hard to compete. but how do you how do you focus them to pick up you just call your clients i mean you call them

have a cadence whether you want to do like a different alphabet of the day you want to like put past our anniversary dates or birthdays like pick like it's like a lot of stuff we're doing it's not that innovative it's as we do it at a high level it's the stuff that you don't see on these tv shows you know where our agents are our agents are literally just picking up calls my top agents i just mentioned our top two for the year and i see them they're in the office they're making calls. It's that's that's all that's most of their day is really making calls. What are you seeing, you know, to help with that engagement to, you know, I've seen a lot of agents having, you know, making a lot of dials, having fewer and fewer conversations.

What are you doing to help it the engagement to where people want to answer the phone? Be a, be a value at a lot of times is pitching your off, like informing them of off market opportunities or checking, hey, it's not much. that may not be ready for you, but I just want to let you know about this one. Or there's anything substantial in the market change, like rates have dropped 6%. That's already six weeks in the row. That might be more for chat or just huge trends happening in a certain area. Every conversation is a little different.

Or, you know, if you have a, if it's not like coldly, then you have some type of rapport with them, you know, tracking notes. And when I used to be, I'd still do like a dozen deals a year. Like four years ago, I did 60 deals before I did 88 deals. before I would just time block to meet with different partners in the office and call our clients, but we also had notes like, hey, last time they said they're traveling to Greece for a week. So next time I call, reference Greece, like their kids in soccer. Next time I call, I have the notes there. Check in.

Like, their kids and soccer. So you got to build some type of conversations. Because if you call consistently your database, whether it is an existing Pratt's past client or someone you're trying to bid report, what could be a newer lead. But you always want to, for me, I set up the next call. Hey, you're, you said you signed a lease this March right now. You want to sign the lease for next year. It's okay if I checked back within with you prior then.

The next August, I mean, March, maybe call them in December before they even get their feet wet. Call them, hey, I know you said you're looking in March. So I want to check in and have plans change. So like it's a lot of times the Kardashians that you said this. That's what I'm calling about that to continue. And then that way when you're calling, it's never, it's never, hey, I'm just checking in. like hey you said you're you have a cadence of following up you told them last time that you're going to call them too and there anytime you said appointment of someone tells you when they want to

talk to you cut that time in half we found because you don't want something else meeting them in between because then they're you realize your clients don't have a contract with you a lot of times in the this buy broker thing is different but these potential clients you have don't have relationship with you they don't owe you anything you had a good call before months ago like why you're not going to get to. They can go to a house party, a network new event, meet someone new, that their cousin introduced them. And then now you've had a conversation. So it's your fault and you don't like constantly, you know, stay top of mind because it's your job, follow up, not the client's job to remember you.

Yeah. I love that. And you dropped a little nugget in there. And I want to, I want to emphasize it because I think this is so important. Either it's recruiting agents, working with motivated sellers, buyers, anybody. is that every call, you're always thinking about the next, the next move. Right. Always the next thing.

Every meeting, every appointment, every, everything you do, every client you have in your CRM should have always have a next activity. It doesn't have to be accurate. You just know, like, I need a call this person in April. And then you want to call in March, fine. You don't February or May, but like, give, make sure. That way you're building your business and you have a list of things. You constantly have a list of. list of things that you gave yourself to do in the future.

Yeah. I mean, that right there, right? If more people would do that, obviously getting the notes into the system, into some type of system, doesn't matter what you have, some type of CRM, some type of follow-up process, get the dang note for the last thing that they left you with that you know is important to them at the moment. And that just eases the conversation when you reach back out to them again. I really, really, really love that.

And we're recruiting agents for a team or like events are big. So every time there's a big event you think could bring value someone. You invite them to it. Don't invite them every single event because no, they're being burned out. They don't have that much time. Like a bigger event, like our annual team meeting was super fun. I think we had nine, we invited someone invited like nine different strangers or people I don't know there. And then like I think three or four signed on with us in the last month.

Yeah. No, it. It is. It's so good. Yeah, I think you, you know, you really nailed it. What I, what I heard, you know, celebrating over the past year, just a lot of back to the basics and going deeper in on relationships and the fundamentals. And then really an emphasis on, you know, those that are that are committed into the future. What's beyond this year? What's, I mean, what are, what are you anticipating, you know, three. four, five, you know, years down the road. I mean, I think, you know, three years from now could look completely different than it does today. But like, what are you guys long-term vision that you're excited about with the company?

I don't plan more than two years ahead because everything is always, and I've been doing this a long time, everything is always constantly unpredictable. But we're really trying to supercharge our agents right now using AI, like where you're trying to get agents to use more chat gbt by inputting their clients objections into it and asking how should i write this we're taking their like hoa docs and disclosures into it having it all generate uh template the

emails based on previous prompts so we're we're trying to have agents do extra work where like most of us do not want to spend extra five hours on every single potential buyer can we just don't have that time to do stuff but how do you have a workflow where you constantly using this this um chat you BT and stuff to make you work to make you work look like you spent way more time than you did because previously five hours worked and maybe can become pressed into like 20 minutes like a new tool that I really love that's been sending me a lot of time is example is something like Glenn's pitching for e-p is fixture.a-a-i that I this tool is like magic I just signed for two-year-old and I'm really really really impressed if fixture will sit your inbox and they'll write pre-draft emails for you. So anything that's worth responding, it's smart enough to work responding to. It'll probably overwrite like there's, I'll write some extra emails that don't need it, but it'll constantly respond to emails, sit in your draft outbox, give you two options, and usually one of the options is correct. And then you just kind of delete some words

and all that. So things for you. And then now you don't get, I like, I get about 3,000 emails a month on average. I use this thing called email report I really like is free. I only respond six to seven emails a day. So that's how I gauge how busy I am. Like I prefer to NB below. So like, oh, like six emails out, 100 end. It's pretty good. That means I'm not too bogged down. And then now this fixture also like organizes your emails, labels automatically, FYI, market meeting updates, marketing.

I didn't even when I time in marketing sales. I get like 100, yeah, like I get an email today. Yes. Marketing. But now I organized this. So now like I'm like last weekend, I went through a whole week like way less stress. And on Saturday, I got a couple hours to read all marketing emails. I really enjoyed my marketing.

emails like yeah too the hot-dell morning brew stuff like just i like tech news so now's how all that so most most days like right now i probably have like five unread emails so fixer will write emails for you smart enough book your calendar all that so it's it's ideally it saves you an hour of time and i like i beta test for two weeks i'm only get my teams using it so you can use that if you use chat gpte uh we're trying to i'm trying to figure out how to this week figure out lots of questions to ask the agent and then have them answer the questions to chatypd and help them write a nice bio because right on zillow like four or five of my team members this week all got leads i got two this week so i'm too sorry like three or four of my agents this week got leads from zillow without

without the flex fee they've got the profile like direct link so now like we need to and the we need to like get better bios and then we last month we shot like 10 videos the you could You can put a big video on your Zillow page, like a trailer kind of thing. So we're trying to get all our agents to have a trailer video. But that's a big project to film 200 videos. So we have ideas about beta tests of a small group before we wrote out. So that project could literally take me your complete 200 videos. And in the bios, I just saw it yesterday.

It's like, okay, that might not be done next month. It's not a priority project. Because what my agents said, oh, I got to lead. I look at it. she had an immediate typo in her first word. She had three typos and grammar in her first sentence. Like, this is terrible. I told her, hey, you need fix this.

I was not like, how do I fix this at scale? So I was running a small problem in agents. Like, how did we then roll it out there? Yeah. Kenny, I love your take on this. So, you know, we're talking about arming agents, being able to utilize with the, you know, with AI in all the tools and things that we have. How are you kind of starting to see as the consumer, buyers and sellers,

get a little bit smarter utilizing or already there getting smart using chat GPT and their home buying and home selling search how are you how are you thinking about that personally and i don't have a lot of feedback on that because i don't work with a lot of buyers so i don't know what the um experiences like but i would say if anyone's doing a high level it's probably us here in the bay area and we're in the bay area so can valley is an hour away it's our school So I feel like the smarter, higher-end shoppers are probably looking up neighborhood trends and stuff with that data. This is related. I was in Dallas last week at the E-Speed leader, the top E-S-E meeting.

Tom Ferry spoke for 90 minutes. And he said, Grunk, gronk is the AI built into Twitter or X, is the only AI bot that's tied in with today's information. Because it's real time because Grunk, Twitter is real time, right? chat gpte used to be oh you get old information or you can be fine if nobody's writing it by like no one wrote you know what's oakland's average price this week i like but but maybe someone tweeted it randomly on on whatever so grong is probably the leading edge on that um another way i've seen agents use it like one of my agents um i didn't know like one of my agents had a 50-minute buyer call I'm actually on that deal too, a 50-minute buyer call with a new buyer, and he used Apple's voice memo.

I never, the voice memo was like, oh, I forgot if you could do that. Voice memo, he's going to take that voicemail, the whole recording, and then he's going to put it into a chat chubby, and it was too long to break it down, he's going to do it half and then have to give a summary, and then ask him and send me it. So then I don't have to be in this call for five minutes to get all the highlights. And he also doesn't go back in some 50 minutes and type all the notes and stuff. So those are some of the ways to power up the experience. And if you send it the client, this is what you, this is what we talked about. That's really impressive.

And the agents that organized, that chance of me wanting to work with that person increases by a lot. Yeah. Yeah, I really love it. I, you know, utilize just, you know, do a lot of my calls on Zoom. And so just use the Zoom summary. And what I found is it just allows me to be more present in the conversation because I know, that it's going to summarize everything we're talking about. So I'm not getting distracted, taking notes, doing things.

I'm able to really be present in the conversation. And so I can see where that would be really beneficial to the experience. And you're giving the, yeah, I mean, think about what you're the buyer, your agent sending you a summary of your call. And now you get to send a summary to your mom in the different area because a third of the home type of down payment system. This is what we recap. So essentially now you're getting the consumer, your client, the top AI,

yeah it's and then there's part of their life now and it's like oh this kind of cool maybe they're use the feature so like you're yeah you're just building you're creating a you're using AI to create a better experience for everyone so it's not replacing someone because i'm not reading depends on if it's a new building maybe i have i have to but i'm not going to read 300 pages of h0 for a couple of things so but now you kind of can even so you're doing excessive stuff at a higher level because it's done for you. So now you can fill up your, I don't know, your playbook.

Okay, every time I get a new client, I'm going to do these five, six things that no one else is going to do. And normally take this amount of hours and I've sent to it. So that just increases your chance of code like, yeah, of you being hired. And then also your, your, your client can tell you, tell their friends how impressive you are. Do you have you, my agent uses chat deep tea and send me all this cool stuff? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. No, it, it is. It's interesting. And I love how you said, yeah, if you think about it to help you do more excessive things and be able to summarize and go a lot faster. But to the consumer team of the leading edge to because if you're adopting it, it's like back to like replacing who doesn't use it. Well, if you're if you're with a company, what I'll say a traditional company, just a traditional company. Maybe your sales manager is 30 years in game, hasn't sold real estate for 20 years.

is not on social media is not using AI, they're not going to suggest that the company use it. So then people like on my team will constantly be ahead of most of other companies in the market. Because what we found is like a lot of these sales managers and broker owners, they don't want to open up a can of worms. Like we'll tell you, I can't tell you social media. I can't tell you use AI.

I don't know what it is. What I tell you use it and then you start asking me questions and I don't know, then it seems like I'm not that smart. and then now I'm screwed because then now they're going to try to find someone smarter to work for. So it's definitely opposite of abundance. It's an opposite of abundance mindset. They don't want people to be ahead.

And then that's why I'm lucky to have the time and the ability to go to these new rooms and constantly learn. And I'll learn something and not even be sure what it is. And I'll just say, hey, this is something I looked at. Like this fixture app, I'm promoting it. I think it's great. I've only used it for two weeks. I haven't suggested to my team yet because I'm still beta testing it.

So like as a leader, if you want your team to do more and become better agents, you also need to get approved. And that's a challenge with a lot of teams, because most people don't have the time to do it. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, spot on. And most of the time because the team lead is buried deep in production because they have to be able to do that. And their models off. And yeah, they're just not able to execute. you in dive deep and learn and continue to you know for like my role i mean i all my

title is just as visionary my like i i love my job i love leading a team not because i love leading the team i like i love like learning stuff and being experiment with different things and it applies to my team and see what it works so we're like it's it's it's like my own uh lab like science yeah yeah you're definitely in the lab yeah for sure it's so good kitty brother i i appreciate you jumping in here really you know embodying what the whole expert mentor series has been about in um i think uh next month will be seven years of of six years of six years of expert mentors live so i'm uh you're probably one most consistent people that the game yeah well i think that's how i got nominated for it when when when when Kyle and Dan went to went to Jay about hey we need to do

do something like this kinder goes oh and only one person I know that will that will run with it and so no I like I like a sweatsh period a lot in Missville I know that's a Mark warbird right he's also one of the most consistent people like in the world I think he I think he works out like 4 am every day every day every day every day every day every day yeah he is it is a great reminder every time I put this on. So, Kenny, I appreciate you, man. And I know you're definitely always leading the way. Like I said, you know, you're in the rooms.

It's something I admire about you and being able to have a process to execute in the right way and, you know, implementation and move fast. And, you know, guys out there, if you haven't connected with Kenny, get on Instagram and Kenny Fast on Instagram and, you know, pay attention, man. And I think there's a lot that you, that you're teaching by leading by example that all of us here can continue to learn from. Cool. Well, thank you having on. Yeah, brother. I'll see you again. Thank you. That's a wrap for today. I hope you got something valuable from this episode.

If you did, hit follow and visit john kitchens.coach for more ways we can work together. See you on the next episode.