Start With A Win - SWAT to CEO: Adam Contos shares Real Estate Secrets and Leadership Tips on Randy Byrd’s podcast

Starting point is 00:00:00 How do you scale your business? Well, the answer is you build a team typically. And next thing you know, you've got a scaled business that's also probably diversified in the event of any changes in the marketplace. COVID changed the mentality of how we work. What is my goal in business? What should that look like in order to create great success?

Starting point is 00:00:18 Welcome to Start With A Win, where we unpack franchising, leadership, and business growth. Let's go. What kind of questions does a great real estate coach ask you? Today, I'm on the Randy Bird podcast with Coach Randy Bird. It's Adam Kantos coming to you from Area 15 Ventures and Start With A Win headquarters. Let's get right into this podcast. Randy asked me some great questions about myself, the industry, how I got to where I am,

Starting point is 00:00:45 as well as some leadership advice and talking about a great book. Let's get right into it. Thanks for having me on your podcast, Randy. Welcome to the show. Like a boss. I'm really, really excited to have our guest today, Adam Kontos. He and I go way back and he didn't know it. But Adam, welcome to the show today. Thank you for being here today. Thanks, Randy. It's great to see you. Great to see you. And I know we connected a couple of weeks ago and I immediately was drawn to you and your story and I'd love to have you on the podcast. So thanks for doing that with us. We really appreciate it. And what we love about this, and I put in here, former CEO of Remax,

Starting point is 00:01:26 serial entrepreneur and business advocate, straight from your Instagram. Couldn't have said it better, honestly. And when we chatted, Adam, we talked about a couple topics that I think would be really, really good for the audience today. And for the most part, there's a lot of moving parts going on in the industry right now. But I want to highlight you for a minute, if that's okay. And I'd like you to brag. I'm asking you, I'm begging you to brag on yourself a little bit. I know you to be a humble human being, but you know, I want to take you through

Starting point is 00:01:53 some of that and the listeners through some of the experiences that you've been through. And, and we met back in, I believe it was 2004. And I was with a co-banker for very short few months. And then I went to Remax, loved that brand and got to meet you and Dave Linegar and some of the others through that Remax journey. And that was 20 years ago. Man. Years ago. And so you've been in the business for a while, but if you could, why don't you take the listeners through a little journey of what your background is as far as it relates to real estate. And then you became the CEO of Remax, one of the behemoths in the real estate space. And we'd love to share that and get that from you.

Starting point is 00:02:35 Sure. So I mean, my, you know, Remax is my second career. My first career, I was in law enforcement. I was, I worked undercover a couple of years selling narcotics every day. So I looked the part and everything like that. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I was a great drug dealer. In fact, Randy, this plays into real estate because that How do you go out and meet people that you don't know, earn their trust and confidence, and then do a life-changing deal with them? Wow. And that's really what working narcotics was. So I actually went to the DEA Narcotics Investigator School, and I learned sales that way. They would just drop us on a street corner and say, go find somebody and meet them.

Starting point is 00:03:22 And we would go do that and try and buy drugs. But I grew up in law enforcement. Yeah. Yeah. It was a good time. But, um, the, uh, I grew up in law enforcement. I ended up becoming a SWAT team commander, which has a lot of strategy, you know, the chess board type environment, which really is what business is about also is it's a chessboard. And I started a couple of businesses. I started an online business in the late 90s when the internet was a baby. And it was a little difficult to sell things during that time, but it was a lot of fun. It was a great learning experience for me. And then I started a consulting business doing security and safety consulting. I was a counterterrorism instructor and Homeland Security instructor.

Starting point is 00:04:10 So I actually created a real estate agent safety program called SAFER, Safety Awareness for Every Realtor. SAFER, I remember that. Yeah. Yeah. And that- That was your baby. You created that? Yeah, that was mine. I built that 100%. Wow. And worked with REMAX and some of the other brands and Women's Council Realtors and NAR and things and things like that on it. It was a lot of fun actually had realtors come up to me and say, you saved my life, which was really cool to hear that. So, um, yeah, I mean, it touches you right in the heart, man. Yeah, totally. I didn't know that somebody was standing there that wouldn't be standing there if they hadn't taken my class and employed the different techniques that I taught them. But so I started working at Remax after that. Dave Linegar became my mentor. So I was blessed to have met him.

Starting point is 00:04:57 What a my mentor. I started at Remax. I started as a business consultant working directly with brokerages and agents and worked my way up in the business, uh, took over different territories, took over franchising, uh, marketing, HR, IT, uh, got into the, um, the C-suite and the board of directors looked at me eventually, cause we're a public company and said, Hey, um, you're a college dropout. You don't have a college degree and we're a public company. And I said, okay. And Dave goes, yeah, I don't have a college degree either. And they said, yeah, but you started the company. So you get an exception on that one. So I went and I got my MBA from university of Denver, Daniels college of business.

Starting point is 00:05:42 So that's actually a strange thing. I'm a professor there now. I teach that same course. So I went and did that and got into the C-suite, chief operating officer, co-CEO and CEO of Remax. And about 20 months ago, I left Remax. I retired from there on my terms to go partner with Dave to buy some businesses and continue to work with different entrepreneurs around the world and in real estate, as well as other franchising type environments. So that's where I'm at today. It's amazing. So how did that transition work for you in the franchise? Because Remax is a franchise model, so there's a lot of skill set that you had in the franchising envelope.

Starting point is 00:06:30 Right. What excites you about franchise opportunities now? Because I know there's an opportunity there. And what's that look like from a 30,000-foot elevation view? So right now, the franchise companies that we're working with are all food-related. So we've got a couple of sandwich companies. One's called Port of Subs. It's 135, 140 units in seven Western states. We're actually taking that nationwide right now. And then the other one is Daddy's Chicken Shack, which is a fried

Starting point is 00:06:56 chicken sandwich concept. And we have about 13 territories that are being developed around the U.S. right now. And it's growing pretty well as well. And it was interesting because I never thought I'd get into food. I didn't know anything about restaurants. I was like, what's the transition there? Are you a cook? You love it? Or is it more of a business opportunity, you know, light bulb? Well, a third of franchising, so there are 800,000 franchises in the U.S., 800,000 franchise units, franchise locations in the country. And 30%, roughly 32% of them are food related. So when you think about that, um, you know, if you throw a dart at the

Starting point is 00:07:33 dartboard, you're going to hit a food franchise when you're talking about franchising. So we got into that knowing franchising and franchising is a very specific model. It's not an industry. It's a, it's a business format and that, um, we knew very well. I mean, I I'm on the board of the, uh, international franchise association and I speak franchising. I mean, it's franchise disclosure documents, it's understanding same store sales and you know, you get down into small business aspects of it. And it's what realtors are dealing with every day and running their own small business. That's what we do in franchising is we help people grow those things. It doesn't matter what industry you're in.

Starting point is 00:08:15 It could be haircutting or making sandwiches or selling real estate. There's a foundation to how to run a business and how to make that profitable every day. And that's, you know, obviously what you coach is getting people to that point. Uh, but ultimately it comes down to understanding how business models work. I love that. What do you think's the greatest opportunity in the franchising world right now? I mean, obviously the food side of it is 30% of the business that's, you know, 240,000 plus units or whatever the number is. I think that there's, COVID's changed a lot of things, in my opinion. COVID's changed a lot of belief systems, a lot of what they thought was normal. You know, we, even in the real estate space, we went away from the offices, which,

Starting point is 00:09:02 you know, led to almost an evolution of the industry. And then now we're going back to that. We're going back to basics in many regards. I think franchising for me is a leverage opportunity. That's the way I see it. Is that really your take on the franchise opportunity? Or is it scale through territory and growth? What does that look like? Well, the foundation of franchising is having a tested business system. So it doesn't

Starting point is 00:09:31 matter if that is being a real estate agent. And being a real estate agent is a tested business system. We know how that's done. And we know if you do these things, you get those things. That's how it works. Same thing with running a brokerage. That's why brokerages are so heavily involved in franchise because fundamentally the framework of how to run a brokerage is not vastly different from one to another in the franchise space. A brokerage is a lot of times a brokerage is a brokerage. And that's why agents can unplug and then plug into another one so easily is because the framework is very similar. But when you look at franchising and you ask yourself, okay, where are the opportunities in franchising? We have asset heavy franchises and we have asset light franchises. Asset heavy franchises are more something with brick and mortar. So you've got a in-person brokerage or in-person restaurant or

Starting point is 00:10:21 something of that nature, hair salon. Asset light, a lot of times, are more service-oriented. And you could see the crossover where real estate could fall under either of those. But realistically, there are a lot that are very asset light, and they call it like chucking a truck type thing. Yeah, like HVAC contractor, plumbers, and- Exactly. Constructing trades, is that- Yeah, yeah, exactly. 100%, Randy. But you also have other forms of asset light franchises

Starting point is 00:10:53 that might be like a massage therapist or home healthcare or somebody who does lashes or who knows what it is. But ultimately what we're finding is there are really two sectors that are growing massively right now in franchising that are really being pushed hard. And obviously one of them is a small restaurant. So you see those, you see small restaurants in a franchise brand popping up all over the place right now, especially as we're building mixed use facilities,

Starting point is 00:11:19 you know, and where you've got both housing as well as retail and things of that nature and new shopping centers. So when you see those or a remodeled shopping center, a lot of times you see franchise brands pop up and a lot of them have to do with food or self-care. So you take a look at those two, those are both food and self-care are both growing substantially right now in the self-care space. It's anywhere from, you know, diet, drugs, and different, you know, different types of assistance. You know? Exactly.

Starting point is 00:11:51 Yeah. Or, you know, like hormone treatments or IV bars. Weight loss. There's just a never-ending amount of that. You know, Adam, to me, COVID changed everything. COVID changed the mentality of how we work and how we look at our jobs, also how we look at our lives. There's a lot of people stepping back from the corporate structure, going into being their own boss and their own entrepreneur. And I think we're seeing all these different trends change. This is just my perception of this.

Starting point is 00:12:26 But I think the malls are struggling because the retail space is really a challenged space. So all of a sudden, you have all these mom and pops and entrepreneurs and people that could start having these spaces. And then layering into the franchise opportunity just makes complete sense, right? You find a model that works. I just immediately think of Mrs. Fields cookies and all these opportunities that were just probably born out of a passion for baking, a passion for this, and then being able to scale that when they find a model that works. Yep. 100%. And what you find is a lot of people will get into those and they'll open one. And basically

Starting point is 00:13:05 by opening one, they bought a paycheck. So they've replaced their income somehow with a heavier investment. And they're like, how do I get rich doing this? We all want to know that. And when you think about it, even in the real estate space, you look at, okay, you're a real estate agent and you're doing well. How do you scale your business? Well, the answer is you build a team typically. So you get other people doing the work for you so that they're compensated fairly, but also you're the one who's taking on the risk because you own the business itself. You own the overall umbrella entity there. So like for Mrs. Fields or our sub sandwiches or whatever it might be, you say, okay, what happens if I open another one? And then I opened another one and then I opened another one. And what we find in franchising,

Starting point is 00:13:49 as well as you find this in real estate also, in franchising, it's, okay, I get another location built and I get the doors open and people are trained and it's at a run rate right now, I'm going and starting another one. So they start overlapping these growth entities, just like when in real estate, as the market starts to come back, you're going to know what your capacity is for how many buyers and sellers you can work with. And then when you reach that capacity, you know, OK, I need to bring out a team member when I start getting close to that so I can train them up so they operate the way that I want them to operate, but I'm scaling my revenue in doing so. Because now they're responsible for going out and filling in that gap that, okay, I took a step back to hire somebody. Now I need to get them to leap forward in order to

Starting point is 00:14:35 create more revenue. And then you keep engaging in that cycle. And next thing you know, you've got a scaled business that's also probably diversified in the event of any changes in the marketplace. Yeah, and you're moving out of one quadrant into the next when you look into that entrepreneur leverage component of it, right? Exactly. My favorite couple words on the planet is leverage and finding ways to take your business and scale it. I'm just a personal growth junkie when it comes to books on that. I'm reading how to buy back your time right now. And they talk about that specifically and finding out what your buyback rate is, right? That stuff just completely intrigues me.

Starting point is 00:15:15 You're making a million dollars a year, your buyback $500 an hour, you know, mathematically, then leveraging anything that doesn't come near that. And all of a sudden, when you, even when you talk to agents who are making 100 grand a year and you start doing the math, it's like, well, you're still in the $50 an hour range and you're doing eight and 10 and $12 and sometimes even $5 an hour work now

Starting point is 00:15:36 with the advent of VAs and all the abilities that we have out there. I love that space. The fact that you and Dave Linegar are focusing on franchising, it's just, to me, it's just an aha, To me, it's like I like watching smart people and what smart people are doing. And I definitely put you and Dave in a territory. And, you know, if you think about 10 stores, that's where the leverage is. In fact, it's, it's interesting, Randy. Um, I had somebody from the real estate space who owned multiple franchises come to us and say, Hey, you guys are selling territories. I want to buy some of those from you because I know what franchising does and I know what you guys do in franchising. So, um, it's, it's actually, uh,

Starting point is 00:16:34 been catching on quite a bit. And I think 2024 is going to be a great year for, um, you know, regional franchise growth. Uh, so you'll see a lot more single stores popping up, but those are probably falling under a regional umbrella. I love that. I want to transition, but before I do, how can people get ahold of you in that particular space if they want to, just so I don't forget later. Well, we have, we have a website here, area one, five ventures.com. So area 15 ventures.com, or you can find me on any of the social media networks at Adam Contos, CEO. You just type that into the Google bar and I'll pop up and you'll be able to contact me through any of my social media platforms. I love it. I love it. Well, let's transition a little bit to

Starting point is 00:17:15 real estate. You and I met a long, long time ago when I was looking at a Remax franchise myself. Yep. And I remember that conversation. I wouldn't expect you to at all, but I remember being impacted by you and your passion for it and the way that you were really laying this out to understand the benefits of not only just a Remax opportunity, but franchise opportunities and growth opportunities. And that's what always was valuable to me. It's on my marriage side, but the co-founder of Carl's Juniors is my grandfather through marriage. So Carl Karcher and Phil Smith founded that. If you look at all their hot dog carts around the world, in the pictures of every Carl's

Starting point is 00:17:57 Juniors on the planet is a picture of them. And my aunt is in his arms. And so my very first job was at Carl's Juniors. I got zero special treatment. Matter of fact, I don't think I even knew it at that point. I just knew that I was going that direction is one of my first jobs when I was 16 or something. But from very early age, I've been an entrepreneur. I just didn't know any better. It doesn't excite me to think about an hourly wage. It just, you know, I'm just not wired that way. And I've said it a lot of times I'd rather have a hot dog stand. And I'm saying that from Carl's Jr. story now. But I'd rather have a hot dog stand in front

Starting point is 00:18:32 of Home Depot that I can make the best hot dog stand, make the best food, and then get it to another Home Depot and get 300 food carts than work at the post office for 400 grand a year. It's just me, right? It's that entrepreneur's that entrepreneur fire that burns in the belly. And when I look at your career, you've been extremely successful up through the CEO ranks of Remax, and you're still teaching. You're still on your social media. You're still teaching. You're still adding value. Does that get out of your blood? Is that just something that is, you know, going to be there until you leave the radio someday? Or what's that look like? That's a great question, Randy. And I mean, this is, I look at you and I'm like,

Starting point is 00:19:10 Coach Randy, you know the answer to this, but you want to know my answer. I do. You know, as well as I do, leaders learn and learners lead. And what we're doing is we're fulfilling a special part of our heart by continuing to help other people learn what we've learned. Now, leaders are givers. And I got advice long ago from my mentor, Dave Linegar, when I said, what is my goal in business? What should that look like in order to create great success? He says, you have to help other people. I said, well, how do create great success? He says, you have to help

Starting point is 00:19:45 other people. I said, well, how do you do that? He says, you have to be a sponge. I said, so I need to go out and just soak things up. He goes, no, a sponge does more than just soak things up. When you see a sponge work, it soaks things up and then it gives things back. So you need to be out soaking things up so that you can give them back. And you need to intentionally do that every single day. And that's one of the habits of the very top leaders in this world. And one of the habits of the very top entrepreneurs in this world is they're willing to give without question. So what is giving without question? Unconditionally, that is love. That is love for the people that you serve. We have fear, which is taking in and keeping,

Starting point is 00:20:28 and we have love, which is giving unconditionally. Which happens to be lack and abundance as well. Yes. Yes. Bingo. Exactly. I mean, they all run parallel on those two tracks. There you go.

Starting point is 00:20:43 You know, it's that, you know, it it's abundance and love or it's fear and it's, it's taking, you know, it's minimalistic in, in things like that. And it's during these tough times that we get to hold up a mirror and say, all right, where am I at? Because during the tough times, if you default to, I give up, I just want a nine to five job, I'm throwing in the towel, things like that. I don't know that you had that entrepreneur piece in your heart to begin with. You were, you're dabbling in it, but are you all in? Because I can tell you one thing about being an entrepreneur and making payroll and, you know, going out and eating what you kill and things of that nature, whatever cliches we want to put on this, ultimately you got to be willing to take it during the tough times and the good

Starting point is 00:21:29 times. The tough times are when you figure out your survival skills, the good times, and when you figure out your growth skills. So, and, and they do have overlap. Like right now, you know, everybody's like, this is really tough right now. I'm like, go out and grow right now, intentionally grow because then you're focused on growth instead of surviving. And we have a different way of looking at that. So ultimately, it comes down to how do I give as much value as possible to people right now as I ever have? And that's really one of the questions we're facing right now in the real estate space where people are going, oh, okay, what should a buyer's agent make? How should they be paid?

Starting point is 00:22:08 And it's on the top of everybody's mind. Am I going to be able to survive as a buyer's agent? We're doing sub 4 million deals at a run rate right now as of November or something like that. So how are we going to survive with a million and a half people selling 4 million houses? Well, it's time to dig deep, time to get creative, get really aggressive and get really good at your leadership and your influence out there in the marketplace in order to survive this. And you only accomplish that by giving unconditionally instead of going and hiding everything you have because you're afraid, you know, how long am I going to make it at this point? It's go out and give,

Starting point is 00:22:50 and that's when you get. Hey, it's Adam again. This podcast went really long, but it was really good. So we made this a two-part episode. We'll catch you next time for part two. you

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Start With A Win - SWAT to CEO: Adam Contos shares Real Estate Secrets and Leadership Tips on Randy Byrd’s podcast

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