Start With A Win - Episode 2 of 3 Live at RE/MAX BOC 2019 With Elizabeth Mendenhall

Episode Date: August 28, 2019

Elizabeth Mendenhall served as the 2018 National Association of Realtors President and she is the owner of RE/MAX brokerages in Columbia and Jefferson City, Missouri. Elizabeth also attributes her team’s success to the culture of volunteerism and building trust, which were essential elements for her team to carry on as she spent the vast majority of last year traveling for her NAR commitments. She described her recommendations to brokers struggling with their cultures or staff members, including involving staff in decision making and delineating roles and responsibilities. Anything you can do to get staff to buy into your culture and vision for the brokerage will be helpful. She also has some interesting thoughts about the future of the real estate industry, particularly when it comes to advances in technology.Links:Elizabeth Mendenhall: http://www.elizabethmendenhall.com/Connect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/ https://www.facebook.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://twitter.com/REMAXAdamContos https://www.instagram.com/REMAXadamcontos/ 

Atop of the 12th floor of the RE-MAX World Headquarters, you're listening to Start With a Win with CEO Adam Kantos. All right, live from the RE-MAX Broker-Owner Conference in Chicago, Illinois, it's Start With a Win. Adam Kantos here with Producer Mark. How are you doing, buddy? I am fantabulous. All right.

It hasn't really changed since 20 minutes ago when I asked you the last time. No, I'm just doing better because look at all these awesome people coming in to hang out and see our show. Yeah, yeah. So we've got three unbelievable guests that we're talking to today. And on this episode, an incredible leader who has made such a huge impact on the real estate industry. We have the CEO for Remax Boone Realty, Elizabeth Mendenhall.

How are you doing? Hey, hi. How are you? I'm so glad to have you here. Thank you. I'm glad to be here. So you're a busy person. You know that? We all are busy people. It's just how we choose to spend our time. Why don't you tell me what you've been up to the last year?

Well, last year I was the president of the National Association of Realtors. So that was my night job. My day job was leading a brokerage in Columbia, Missouri. We have an office in Jefferson City also. How in the world did you balance that? I didn't. The things they don't tell you when you become president of NAR, right? That's right. The best thing is what it really forced me to do was work really, really close with my amazing staff. And I don't know that I was as good a delegator as I was going in, but I know I'm so much better going out. So that's kind of a cool byproduct of volunteering. So, I mean, this is a really good question set here or direction that we can take this because there's so many business leaders, business owners out there, either

agents, brokers, team leaders, or, you know, let's say you even have another type of company. And we're talking about delegation and trust here, right? Yeah. So you had this moment where they said, hey, congratulations, you're the president of National Association of Realtors. You've got 1.4 million people who want you to talk to them on a regular basis. And you run a real estate brokerage. What's a defining factor here when it comes to you sitting down with your staff going, okay, let's have a talk? You know, I mean, I have to say it started years and years and years ago in our company because we have established a culture of

volunteerism probably amongst our local Association I've been about a third of the local presidents have been from our office they knew and they appreciated the importance of volunteering and giving back to the industry so then to do it at the highest level they kind kind of got it. But my staff, I had to sit down and go, no, no, no, no, no. Let's really get it. I'm going to be gone 275-ish days. And so how are we going to do this? And the cool thing is they stepped up like I've never seen. My broker manager recruiting like I've never seen her do. My office manager who oversees the contracts. I mean, you know, just, hey, we got this. And I am like so proud and it

makes me tear up to know and just be with them because they 100% just supported everything and made the office better, better than I envisioned. And that was a lesson for me. You've created this culture in the, in the office of, of helping, but then you, you had to take this big step personally in your heart and go, okay, I'm going to trust and, and let them showcase their talents. Sure. Did you find that any of them kind of rose above? Absolutely. All of them did. And I think, I think that's also because our agents are just, you know, they want our staff to succeed. They want them to do well. So they help them help them do well. One of my favorite books is called The Speed of Trust. And it's I love it. I always refer back to it. Because if you don't have trust, it slows everything down. Everybody questions everybody. Everybody's kind of putting extra procedures in place that don't need to be there.

You know, everyone's taking an extra time, making extra emails. But when you have trust, you just assume it gets done and therefore it moves so much faster. And I think that happens in every world. It happened in my office. It also helped me with the National Association of Realtors. So tell me, your office, you had how many staff, roughly? So we had, and this is a story of positives and negatives at the same time. So I have three offices. One's in Columbia, Missouri, and there's about 10. I have a second office in Jefferson City where we have a separate office manager. And I had bought an office in Tulsa in 2013. And that was five hours away from where I was.

And there were two staff, and I guess there's four staff in Jefferson City. The downside of this is that while my Columbia office completely thrived, it was really hard to manage my office five hours away in Tulsa because it wasn't where my bed was. It wasn't where my laundry was when I was coming home that's not where I was coming home to and so that was probably my biggest struggle over the five-year period and in fact I just sold it to two amazing Brookowners down there who they've grown the culture but the good thing was that I was able to kind of keep it going to where it was something that I could sell.

And, you know, so it was kind of a win-win. Did you find that you, I mean, because obviously you didn't live there. Yeah. Did you end up paying less attention to that office? Of course. Okay. Of course. But at the same time, then, you realize if you're in it every day and you're not there every day,

it's never going to survive. You have to trust someone there to manage it, to oversee it, and to really be the figureheaded leader there. And so again, it was kind of learning how to balance all that. That's a huge key point for everybody here. I mean, I always say leadership must be present to win. And I mean, you have to build leadership. And at some point, you build enough leadership within the people that you have in your office where you can take a step back and you can test what you've built, right? Yeah, and I think that word you just used was test.

You have to test it, because if you don't, then you're never going to continue to grow, because there's only so much you can do. Let's talk about conscious effort here. So what we're talking about for everybody, for all the listeners, is specific conscious effort of building leadership, establishing culture, things like that. It's something that has to be

on. And when we're talking to Sandy Hancock, she has specific systems and list of priorities and things like that. This is something that as a business owner, this is one of those key priorities, correct? Completely. And I know Sandy, she is amazing. I'm in awe of her systems and everything that she does in her office. She's so systematic. I am not to that place yet, but I know my staff is. Where I'm probably more systematic is about the touchy-feely piece of knowing that these are individuals who are our customers and they work for us. They can choose to go anywhere they want. So what do we do every day to build that customer service

so that they know that we're there supporting them? What advice do you have for brokers that are feeling like, hey, I'm struggling a little bit with my staff or whatever, or here's one for you. You've got the people who don't want to take any of the burden of risk on their shoulders, so they can't make a decision for themselves. I mean, we've all seen that where they can't function without walking in your office going, hey, Elizabeth, they need to change the water in the water cooler. Should I call them and do that? To the extent that you've got people who are almost paralyzed by making a decision. What do you have to tell to people in order to get that development going or remove that, you know, that burden of their leadership so it creates a system? So I've tried with our staff to do everything we can to involve them in the decision making and the overall goals of the office.

So we'll sit down once a year and we'll go through the events that we're going to have and the education that we're going to have. And I'll assign that out to each member of staff. So whether it's even the graphics person or it's our director of hospitality who's answering the phones or it's our accountant, they oversee one of the events that they like in the office so that they own it. So that they know that this is part of what's going to be happening. And then the other thing that I have found is you got to bring them to events like this. You got to bring them to the broker owner. You got to bring them to R4. You got to get them out there in the field so that they're seeing and understanding the place where they can be and the place where they can grow. And I think that makes them, you know, they see so much of a bigger

picture in how they can assist the agents that when you have to order spoons for the kitchen, they're okay making that decision because they know it's about a much bigger vision. So this is interesting because you're talking about the power of association. You need them to be influenced by other leaders because, I mean, they almost, I hate to say it, but it's the reality. It's like a parent-child relationship where they're almost blind to the leadership that's right in front of their face sometimes. Totally, yeah. And you need to expose them to other leaders. So when you're not bringing your office manager outside of the office, when you're not bringing your other leaders somewhere where they're influenced by other leadership, you're missing out on potential there, aren't you?

Well, I'm missing out on their brain understanding and connecting like the Power of the Remax Network. I'm going to pick up different things here than they're going to pick up. And they're going to go by a vendor booth and go, oh my gosh, we can do this back home and get super excited about it. So if I purchase the product and they just go, okay, whatever, yay, I don't know about it. But if they're actually here like talking to people, talking to resources or, you know, in classes with top agents and they're hearing how top agents do their business, then they can come back and they can assist my agents so much better.

I love it. I mean, they're carrying that leadership initiative to you instead of you going and pushing it on them. Well, and I think it also helps for retention and staff because everybody wants to grow. Everyone wants to learn. I mean, knowledge is one of kind of our key fundamentals at our offices. You know, be curious, be knowledgeable, you know, have energy and keep going. And in order to do that, they have to get excited too. Otherwise, they start to go look for other places to find it. Wow.

Some gold there. So I'm going to change channels on us here real quick. We're getting a lot of great information on these podcasts today. I have a question for you. How do you see the future of real estate? Being your president of the National Association of Realtors, that's a pretty big position there. And thank you for your service to the industry in that. How do you see the future of real estate in the changing market and technology growth, things like that? I think there's just so much going on. I hate it when someone says, well, it's still just about customer service. It's still just about relationships.

It's always going to be about that because that's how it has been. But there were billions of dollars that were invested into financial technology. I mean, billions of dollars trying to speed the movement of money. And if you think about what we do, we transfer the largest asset that someone has, which is their largest amount of money. So that was already getting started. And now to add on top of that, now we're seeing billions invested into what is its own term, property tech. And so with that, it is all about speeding up the transaction and how the transaction evolves. We've seen that all of this money so far, I think, invested into search and how we search for homes and how we look at homes. But now what we're seeing is all the money and it's being invested from contract to close

and how we speed up contract to close, how that moves electronically, how it moves faster. And then who is valuable in that transaction from contract to close? And I think that's where we really have to have our eyes open and really know where we fit in and what value proposition we provide. And also how we are trying to be disintermediated in that piece. So where do you think, I mean, your guess is on the disintermediation where people are trying to get in that contract to close. Give me some examples of that. I think people are too hyped up on travel agents and places like that because those

were really one-sided transactions. We are definitely a two-sided transaction. So we're more in the realm of attorneys in the place of, you know, as long as someone else is on the other side and they are represented, I think someone on the opposite side is going to want representation as well. And so far that has definitely been, you know, a human piece of that there you know they still haven't invented technology where you're sitting at that kitchen table buyer looks over you know seller looks over the husband they have that little glance and it's like oh wait yay hold on you know stop that but I do

think that you know as far as us as an, I'm worried that we are fragmented. We're fragmented amongst ourselves because we're so independent. We're not willing to join together to join platforms which could start to rival, you know, the Amazons and the Facebooks and the Googles of the world that we know are interested in technology. But at the same time, there's so many of us involved in the transaction. We have that power. We just have to unify so you think people are building their own little kingdoms and you know trying to protect their backyard instead of working together to build a community i worry about that yeah absolutely

you know now the good thing is is because there's so many of us we can innovate on a dime laurie janik she used to be the legal counsel for the national association of realtorsors. And she made a comment. She said, realtors will change at anything. They can change as quick as possible if they know that it's going to benefit them and their consumer better. And I think that's true. And I think that is part of our power. When that magic piece rolls around, we're ready. We're ready for it. I like it. I think the real estate industry is fascinating in that you look at the realtors out there. Because when you look at human beings just as a singular individual piece, everybody has three favorite words, and that's me, myself, and I. So we have 1.4 million me, myself, and I's in the space.

And taking teams and what have you out of it where there's groups of people together. But ultimately, that's the benefit, but it's also the downfall to what we have. And you know it. I mean, even just from a brokerage standpoint, my agents aren't always willing to go, yay, when you bring them a new product, it's like, yay, 100%.

They're like a little bit skeptical. And okay, do I want to? Do I want to pay for it? Do I not want to pay for it? Do I have a better system? I think we're kind of susceptible to security and risk that's out there. I worry that that's going to hit us one day. And all of a sudden, our whole industry gets challenged on what, you know, one realtor,

one mistake, one social security number that blows up. And now all of a sudden, all of us are immediately trying to find some type of resolution to a security issue. That is a fascinating observation. You've got all these people kind of looking out for their business and then not realizing the domino effect that could occur here. So this has been a fascinating conversation. It's always good talking to you. Yeah, you too.

I'm going to talk to the head of RE-MAX. That's awesome. Well, I'm going to talk to the head of National Association of Realtors. There we go. So I have a great question for you here, Elizabeth, a question we ask all of our guests on the show here, especially here this week. We talk about starting with a win. You have been involved in amazing business.

I mean, you're an amazing business leader, amazing woman, and we're so grateful to have you here. But can you tell the audience, how do you, as a human being, start with a win? I love start with a win because if you start with a win and you win the day and then you win the month, then you win the year. So for me, it's just waking up. It's taking, you know, five extra minutes of laying in my bed, wherever that bed may be for that day. And just really kind of trying to, you know, meditate just a little bit, take some deep breaths, think about what's going to happen for that day, realize that there's also going to be an end to the day no matter what. And so you've

got to make it be the best day that you can absolutely have that day and that adds up over the course of the year that's so inspiring that is awesome and we appreciate you so much elizabeth ceo for boone remax boone realty and the immediate past president national association of realtors and you still are you the sky's the limit for you you're still going and we're watching you you're amazing as a human being and as a leader. So thank you for all you do. Well, thank you for all you do for our network, and thank you for helping me and my agents have a wonderful experience with REAP Max.

Thank you so much, and thanks for being on Start With A Win. Thank you. Hey, thank you so much for listening to Start With A Win. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Don't forget to go onto iTunes and subscribe, write a review, or rate the show. It helps us get the word out and reach more people. You can follow Adam on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. And remember, start with a win.