Speaker 1 (00:00):
I think the agent's job is illogical. You've got to be a contract writer, you've got to be an inspector, you've got to be a touring guide. You've got to be good with people. All these things you got to be great at to be the top agent.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
Those are the words of today's guest and what he was getting at is this idea that no one can be good at a hundred different things. Is that

Speaker 1 (00:17):
Realistic? No. Does that make any sense to anyone in any other industry?

Speaker 2 (00:21):
And it sets up the heart of our conversation today, which is about agent leverage surrounding agents with people and tools and resources to help them stay in income producing activities or dollar productive activities. More often. This not only attracts better agents to your organization when you can do it well, it also provides operational efficiency and sets you up for economies of scale so that you can provide leverage and leads profitably. Our guest here on episode two Inside Whistle Realty is chief operating Officer Chris Vander vk, who not only is a super sharp person, he was also very generous in sharing strategies and tactics for providing agent leverage profitably. For example, he breaks down how and why they're developing an agent advisory board internally in great detail. He also shares the development of their ACE team or agent concierge experience to provide even more leverage for agents. Chris explains their shift from a cap model to a no cap model retaining top agents in the process he shares how they allow the most productive agents to claw back some of the split. He also breaks down some of their favorite lead sources. That and so much more as we go inside Whistle Realty here in episode two with COO, Chris Vander balk on real estate team os.

Speaker 3 (01:36):
No matter where your business is today or where you want to take it, you'll get there faster and more profitably with an operating system. Welcome to Team Os, your guide to starting, growing and optimizing real estate team. Here's your host, Ethan Butte.

Speaker 2 (01:50):
Chris, I'm so excited for this conversation. I appreciate you so much. You unwittingly triggered the foundational ideas that led to this inside the team approach that we're taking. So anyway, welcome.

Speaker 1 (02:01):
Thanks, I'm excited. I think we talked back at what was that unlock and I think you're a great curator, so it's exciting to kind of go through how we built this.

Speaker 2 (02:10):
Yeah, thank you. I love that language by the way. I know you also how I built this. I think about this in a, sometimes it's aspirational more than anything. It's the how I built this of real estate teams. Yeah,

Speaker 1 (02:19):
It feels like that from watching George and Billy and their team down to this solo agent episodes. It's very much reminiscent of that, I'd say. Cool.

Speaker 2 (02:28):
Well, we always start with the same question, which is what is a must have characteristic of the high performing team?

Speaker 1 (02:34):
Oh gosh. I think being critical thinking to get the right idea, critical of your own ideas critical. Did you execute right? I would say hyper criticism with positivity is I would say is our culture.

Speaker 2 (02:49):
When I hear critical, I think obviously critical thinking as you said, but then there's also this layer of what are we paying attention to? What are we keeping an eye on? So for you, when things are going really, really well, what do you think is going well and what are you looking at to know that things are going well or things are going poorly? Because part of criticism or being critical in thought is knowing even what to pay attention to.

Speaker 1 (03:16):
That's a really good question. Without trying to sound toxic because you'll hear from the rest of our people, I don't think we have a bad culture. But Kyle, one of his sayings that early on when we started working together, he does say is like, I want you to tell me 50 things bad before you tell me one thing. Good. I don't know that I've ever articulated to that any way, but I have just not being comfortable, not being satiated with it. So critical for us is even when we're doing good, how do you know you're doing good? There's always support metrics, culture. People are positive about it, the numbers are going the right way, the metrics, the people are feeling the right way. Those are the soft little touch points we look for. But ultimately something we say a lot. I was thinking on the way in here is like, guys, we suck so bad, we just laugh about it and internally and it's cool to sit at a team meeting with eight, nine other admin that are decision makers and go, yeah, that's really bad. We should fix that. And so we're just critical about not being in love or romanticizing our success or what's going and just like, okay, that's good, but all of our agents aren't using it or all the consumers don't even know this is available for them or we haven't even iterated on this in a while. We're just kind of resting on it. So that's kind of what I mean by critical is it is going well in a lot of ways, but there's so much improvement opportunity. It's kind of endless.

Speaker 2 (04:34):
Yeah, I appreciate too the idea of give me 50 negatives, even if it's only 10, it's playing against a little bit of the yes person default and a lot of the great awesome fricking amazing. You killed it. There's so much back padding that can feel empty that when we're actually going to get something done, we need to be like, let's be critical about this.

Speaker 1 (04:57):
Yeah, I agree. But we've also learned that we got to just in the same way, it's like, hey, we got to acknowledge positive things. We got to

Speaker 4 (05:06):
Implement

Speaker 1 (05:06):
Real systematic structure if we're going to operate this way. But that's our natural way of thinking. We've got to be more intentional about the positive reinforcements, the good shout outs, living by our core values, things like that. Otherwise you get I think a toxic culture really quickly.

Speaker 2 (05:19):
Yeah. Okay. Give me a definition, walk me into it first though. Give me a definition of the COO role as it is today here in the back half of 2024, but what was your path into it? And you've been in it for several years, so talk a little bit about walk us up to today and at that point then maybe give us a definition of what is this role?

Speaker 1 (05:40):
Yeah, it's a strong question. It definitely evolved today. What does it look like is a lot less hands-on working through things, which is cool. And I've had to learn to be eyes on hands off. And I had a coach that taught me that saying, I was like, that's a good ideal. How do you get to that? And I'd say over the last year, year and a half, I've really learned that. And ultimately it was just me learning. I kind of relate it to my first dog that I had who's really well-trained, everyone loves my dog, but I was like, I had to learn how to work with this dog more than the dog, how to learn how to work with me. And I think the same way in my COO role, I already had the right people, but I had to learn how to step back and let them rise up, how to challenge them, how to expand them.

Speaker 1 (06:23):
And ultimately then they're driving. I'm supporting, which is what it looks like today. Most of our projects or initiatives are, I'm a breadcrumb, everyone you'll probably hear, say I leave a lot of bread crumbs, I have ideas and I'll kind of manipulate those thoughts into people a little bit and then I'll see them make it like, okay, I did not have that idea. That's a lot better than what I thought it was going to be. But it didn't start that way. It started out with a long to-do list of, I'd say at any time, 40 to 50 major initiatives that I was frantically rattling through in my head. And then you're just one person you can't achieve and if you try to get everything achieved, you're going to exhaust people or spin them too many different directions, you'll lose people, which I always knew. So I kept it a private little issues list.

Speaker 1 (07:06):
We have a public one that we all agree on, but I'd Chris' private world. And so over the last I'd say year and a half, I've learned to get rid of that and start to, okay, well what department should this flow to? They can't be protected from this and if they don't think it's a priority, I need to listen. And we got a dialogue and either I haven't influenced them enough to see what I'm seeing or I'm not seeing what they're seeing. And so I think it's been atrication of that development of owning everything. But before that, when I first took the role, ultimately I came in with Zillow offers for a role acquisitions manager, and it wasn't a COO role. I got to that we became one of the best acquisitions percentage teams for Zillow offers at the time. That didn't end so well overall as a relationship, but we had really good success there.

Speaker 1 (07:51):
So when we got the call at Zillow and us, we're not working together on Zillow offers anymore. I think we had 15, 16, 17 employees, something like that. I don't remember what it was anymore. And everybody, we just kind of, Kyle came in tough day for him. You got to tell the whole room of people, Hey, this is over. And I don't think in real estate that's ever something anyone expects to do of a team. You don't have that much lack of control that you just have to fail swoop that many people. So I went to Kyle the next day and was like, so I kind of been secretly building a department inside the company throughout. I've convinced three other people that they have this third tier of money that we can earn in. Its traditional ISA department, which is where I came from originally in real estate.

Speaker 1 (08:36):
I was like, I think I can come back tomorrow and make money with these three people. Let me show up tomorrow and I will get a couple of us to show up and the rest will sort itself out. And that's kind of what happened. And he's like, he's a gamer man. He was like, yeah, okay, cool. See you tomorrow. And so we did. We showed up back tomorrow and we were on BoomTown at the time and we started being traditional ISAs for the company cleaning up that led to this, what are we doing here? This is a mess. So that fast forward into yo, the CR m's not going to work for us, we got to go to something more dynamic. I knew about follow-up bus, shameless plug for that. That was our pivot into that quickly turned around database management force and overall lead flow management took it away from agents, had a backend kind of control.

Speaker 1 (09:17):
And I guess it got to a point where it was like, okay, there's other departments besides inside sales that need to be adjusted for inside sales to work maximally from operations to outside sales. We got to have some control shifts and I don't have the decision making power. So I ultimately presented him at a letter of resignation and then at the top I was mostly kidding, but I do want a formal ask for this position. I want the authority to do what I need to do. So we went out for drinks and dinner and talked about it and what did I want? What did he want? And fast forward, we ended up signing up for EOS, which was probably one of the best decisions Kyle made because for me coming into my role, I've never been A COO. I've had good insight, good instincts, some good experience, not a lot being a young guy.

Speaker 1 (10:01):
So EOS allowed me to basically take Sean McVay as an offensive coordinator and this is the playbook. I don't have to create it. Sean is a good coach. Can we just plug this program in and you'll follow me through it? And that's ultimately what my team did with me and I didn't have to be the one that set the meeting cadence, the accountability structure for projects, a lot of that. It was all kind of packaged in a box, so allowed me to focus on my strengths of leading people versus systematizing all these different nuances of being a great executive. And so it started there and now has ended up at me really I think being a lot more hands off.

Speaker 2 (10:32):
Yeah, it's good. First of all, I love the way that this started, which is I know how we can make some more money tomorrow. I have an ear for that.

Speaker 4 (10:40):
Yeah,

Speaker 2 (10:40):
I'm willing to have that conversation. Talk about EOS, is that, when did you formally commit to it? How long was that kind of in the background? What was the motivation? Did you self implement or did you hire a facilitator? Just break that down a little bit for folks who aren't as familiar or maybe dabbled but never committed, which is obviously not going to be successful with a system.

Speaker 1 (11:04):
Yeah, I wish I could recall exactly it was Kyle's idea ultimately, I'm guessing from his EO forum. I think he's in a kind of entrepreneur forum. I think he heard about it and knew about it. And Kyle's really good at aggregate and a lot of ideas. He is got a lot of fingers out there into different communities. And so I think ultimately he brought the idea up. I looked at it a little bit and it just, it made sense. It made sense. I just thought it was like, oh, the pressure. I can't even describe the pressure relief of, I know I'll be successful at this. I just have a lot of conviction in myself. But to know there's something already proven. So Kyle had heard from other people not self implementing as the way to go. He interviewed three or four different people. He ultimately selected our implementer.

Speaker 1 (11:48):
We had our first session and Kyle and I had privately at the time discussed me being in the role, but we really didn't tell anybody and I don't think that was super intentional. Some things just kind of work out. I think we were just both, let's feel this EOS thing out. So day one we met with the integrator or the implementer, and so we had to do a chart. That was one of the first exercise to get, obviously you get your masterclass overview, what's traction, what does this look like, what are all the systems we're going to go through day one, but it was a full two day breakout of let's get soft launch of what ES is. And one of the first exercises in the A chart is deciding key roles of the A chart like your head of operations, your head of sales, you have an integrator, a visionary.

Speaker 1 (12:26):
And so we had to name people. And so it was a democratic process for the integrator, which ultimately was named by I think everyone in the group except maybe one person at the table, like 12 of us at the time. Very wide leadership for the size of the company we had early on is basically Kyle and then a lot of people reporting to Kyle. But everyone named me, which was a really humbling, cool experience and it aligned with what Kyle and I had talked about privately. And from there it was on, we had an implementer from EOS doing, I would say our first three, two and a half, three years. Don't quote me exactly, but somewhere in there, just in the last year and a half we came to be okay, I saw some fundamental flaws of project scoping and ultimately we were at a point where we had enough traction without it, but we were moving too quickly through discussing key big problems.

Speaker 1 (13:18):
And so ultimately where the implementer was really strong is in the early days, keeping us on track to accomplish a lot. As we got traction together, it was very obvious of, okay, we need to go a little bit deeper to solve real problems and maybe this person is pushing us along too fast. And we all kind of had that sense. We made mentions of it. And so eventually I said, Kyle and he agreed like, let's have you run this. I'm going to run it. And so I ran a little bit differently. And what we saw from that is yeah, we went deeper on a lot of conversations. We didn't go as wide and that was scary at first. You've been going wide, wide, wide and going on one or two subjects the whole time was like, are we getting anything done? And then fast forward to where we're at today, we just shipped our agent advisory board from concept badge design for socials and everything external to infrastructure. How do we run it, how do we promote it? How do we incentivize other people to want this? We did all that in three and a half weeks, which for us, stuff like that took us three months because rocks were three months. So I'd say that's the involvement for us, but we could not have gotten to this point without an implementer, I'd say at least with me as the initial integrator.

Speaker 2 (14:24):
Yeah, really good. I hear that a lot too is some people take off and fly on their own. Other people just have someone come in for that quarterly meeting and other people keep close advisement and structure all along. There's a lot in there. I really appreciate that. Talk a little bit about that agent advisory board. What was the spark for the idea? What were you trying to get done with it? Because it sounds like it's something that's daunting at the moment.

Speaker 1 (14:49):
It is. It's very new. We interviewed, I want to say 14 different agents out of our, I think we're at one 15 right now. Don't quote me. We have about a 35% churn any given time. We very standardized. We try to keep people coming in and keep 'em coming out. And so interviewing those people, it was really eyeopening for us, but why did we do it? Ultimately, Kyle's not in production, hasn't been, he'll do a deal here and there, but he's a wealth of knowledge. I sat down with Kyle end of last year and kind of talking about the direction of where I'm going here and where the company's going and just one thing I take for granted probably is Kyle and I run very autonomously. We don't meet a ton. We're very in sync. One of our first things we did with our implementer was this alignment test and it's blind.

Speaker 1 (15:40):
You both kind of fill it and he's moderating it. And I think we scored like 9.7 out of 10 on alignment on every single thing. It's like what keeps you up at night? What worries you? And I think it gave him a piece that, oh, Chris gets me as a fiduciary. He knows what I need. Now it's my decision to execute against that. And I do. But I think that gives him a lot of peace. So when we talk about his other aspirations and expanding our overall, our network of what we're trying to do, how do we free up Kyle's time? And right now, Kyle's our strongest deal doctor, our director of sales, Rachel is brilliant, but she doesn't have a lot of transactional knowledge. It's not something I, you'll see a trend with a lot of our leaders. I don't think people have a certain box they have to be checking in order to be in a certain role.

Speaker 1 (16:23):
I think people are dynamic and they can learn anything. And I look for characteristics and traits more than experience ultimately. So Rachel does, that's one of her bigger flaws is she doesn't have a lot of transactional knowledge, but she's a brilliant real estate coach. So if she's our senior leader of sales but doesn't know transactional stuff, we do have a weakness. We have to admit that down to Katie, our trainer, not a ton of transactional knowledge, but a brilliant educator, really empathic, strong connection with newer agents and even our senior agents. But transactional frequency, not a lot. Kyle's not in production. Shannon has out of all of her leadership, probably the most transactional experience as her director of operations. And then me, I'm not in production, I haven't been for years. So how good are we really to our agent group at some point? Are we qualified as these new NAR changes, are we close enough to the pulse of what's happening?

Speaker 1 (17:14):
And the answer is we look around, let's be for real. We're not, we don't know. And at some point we risk being absolutely tone deaf to our audience. And so I think it's important we come to this point of we reject it. I should add that we reject it. Well, I'll speak to me. I didn't want a lot of agent feedback early and Kyle did. That was probably one of our few conflicts that we had. I was like get a lot of agent feedback, get a lot of, and I was like, I kind of want to stay siloed. I know what we need to do first and agents aren't going to like some of these changes we have to make at first, but if they see it through, I'm confident they're going to like this is agent facing, consumer facing. We're going to build good things for the people that want to be here.

Speaker 1 (17:52):
Some people are going to be enriched into the old ways and yeah, sure they're going to find a way to, they overly benefited and it's not equitable for everyone. So yeah, they might have a little rub. So I didn't want a lot of feedback really as we evolved. It's like, okay, now we're at this point of we can't grow without being in tune. We don't know everything. Let's accept that. And so what we looked for in these as this Asian advisory board is we want a deal doctoring to be facilitated five days a week. It's currently held one day a week and it's only by Kyle. Kyle wants to do other things. He's at this point of can't exit fully even if he wanted to because he is very dependent upon for that deal doctoring nuance. So how do we achieve releasing him? That's a conversation I had from him late last year of just give you more freedom.

Speaker 1 (18:35):
How do we give our agents better deal structure and deal doctoring, not through Rachel, not through me, not through Jen. So that's group. How do we make sure that deals we want to roll out are actually going to benefit them, especially around we're a very compliant group. There's not a lot of individuality to our processes and ways of doing things that we're not a brokerage. People think that because of how big we are, but we are very swim one direction type of company. Sure there's sprouts and things you can do off that. So if we're going to be that hard and fast on our policies of how we want you to operate and what the whistle way is, I have to have your input a little bit and if you have the right people, it's going to become a lot of it. And so we wanted to get the right people and that was through nuance of deals. Do they have whistles back? Do they have the agents back? Can they dialogue with someone and actually not escalate them and understand where they're coming from so we can have eyes and ears on the floor. And so yeah, it was a two day process, 30 minute, very rigid interviews, not a lot of dialogue. Very board style from the military, if you will. And yeah, I think we got our best five, six people.

Speaker 2 (19:35):
Cool. What's their motivation or incentive and what does participation look like? Just snapshot high level.

Speaker 1 (19:41):
So that's what they give get back is Kyle handoffs from a sphere. We badge them both for all of our presentations, internal and slack, Gmail signatures, all that agent advisory board, very badge so that anything they're dialoguing with your consumers or anything external facing, it's very symbolic that obviously it's a good ego play for them. It's a lot of our agents or any agents, they want to be recognized for their merits. And so we did that. Oh, also highly expectations driven team. So we locked them into platinum status for the year, which means effectively the most rewards and the least amount of responsibilities that you have to adhere to, whether that be prospecting time, showing up for the meetings, we know you're going to show up. So let's not play this game of measuring what you're doing, just stay locked in. And then this is the annual thing. So we're doing it for our first for five months right now, and then we have a holiday Christmas party, then our award ceremony family comes to that. So we're really excited to announce our 2025 applicants in Canada and actually elects at the Christmas party this year. So we'll do another round of interviews late November, early December for our official full year. So these guys will have a little bit of a trial run and we'll figure some things out. We'll change some things, add more value and ship it.

Speaker 2 (20:51):
Cool. Love it. I didn't expect to ask that question, but when we were chatting yesterday, I was like, oh, I want to know more about that.

Speaker 1 (20:58):
That's cool. We're really excited about it right now. It's for many reasons, like I said, the ability to just be fast. I think that's something that,

Speaker 2 (21:08):
And like the legit in this case, pure voice of the customer,

Speaker 1 (21:12):
Which

Speaker 2 (21:12):
To your point, you did a nice job describing it. We just don't have that anymore. We're in touch with it, but we don't have the literal voice constantly. And this is going to close that gap. Talk a little bit about, I mean I'm going to ask something very, very large and then you take it wherever you want, but it's in my mind, the goal is to run a profitable organization that's growing in general and sometimes you are trading off profitability for growth. Ideally you have both at the same time.

Speaker 2 (21:40):
There are a number of key levers, but one of them that I think about in particular for the team model is, well, I think of two actually. One is kind of where are we generating our opportunities? And then the other one is kind of what is the split fee service structure for agents and how nuanced does it so that we can have brand new people join us and be productive and we can have very experienced people either stay with us or even come join us and then stay with us. So that's very, very large. But I'd love for you to speak either to lead sources and how we make sure we're generating and closing opportunities in a way that is net benefit for the organization and for the agents or how are you structuring splits fee services to make it valuable for the agent to be here from a service side and cost effective for you is the provider of these ranges of services, for example. That's beautiful media space that we're in that agents can use. So anyway, two big directions. You get to pick which one you want to go in.

Speaker 1 (22:43):
I'm going to try to naturally, if you know me, I'll try to answer both at the same time. If I can,

Speaker 2 (22:47):
I'll bring it back to together.

Speaker 1 (22:49):
Yeah, no, honestly, before you said the word value, that's already where I was going to. So something we say internally is we have to make this so valuable. People can't leave, period. That's the simplicity of it. And so what I fundamentally believe is that, and I've said this for about two years now to our internal staff and over the last year we've shared that more the agents is agents are going, and this is before the NAR stuff, agents are going to do more transactions. And I used to say in 2024, now I'll say 2025 for the same amount of money, it's inevitable commission compression consolidation competition. It's happening. And I didn't always know the NAR thing was going to do commission compression, but you already saw it happening. And so data does that. Technology does that. It gives consumer more access, it resets the table.

Speaker 1 (23:38):
So if that's going to happen, and I know the avatar of the agent gets in the industry regardless of our best agent or a new Keller Williams agent, brand new off the street, they want as much time as possible. They want to make as much money as possible and they want to have as little accountability as possible. That is the avatar that we hire for this. And so if I look at that, how do I provide that and focus on the margins separately, we have to be an organization that gives leverage Gary Keller's book that's still not going to ever be old or outdated listings. Leverage leads the whole thing. Leverage is a big part. Leads, we've always focused as brokerages, team mergers teams, whatever, we got to give leads, but you also have leverage and they're equal. And I think a lot of Gary Keller's book, millionaire Roses Day, it's not a lot of books are good from the late nineties are still highly relevant in the technological world we live in today.

Speaker 1 (24:33):
So I say, how do we provide leverage instead of leads over time? What if we switched? And so we've done that. We built an ACE team agent concierge experience where we write offers for agents. We run CRM stuff, they call in post appointment, we fill out their disposition form, gives us better data, less bothering agents to do stuff we need 'em to do for us. So how do we just do it for you? We'll call you right after the appointment. We'll take the full intake. And our question always is, okay, what can we do more? Can we match deals internally by calling, we have all the access with our ISAs. What if the is a department look differently? What if it's just actually matchmaking internal deals and scheduling showings like Zillow does for our agents rather than asking 'em to go prospect? So how do we have time back?

Speaker 1 (25:13):
How do we offer value? And then the margin split profitability conversation second. That's how we operate with our agents ultimately. Now internally, what do we focus on is margin. Margin is something I think people underappreciate the power of even I'll use as a listing agent, you'll go to a client, you'll say, yeah, it's a 6% listing fee and they just want to jump right to five. And most agents are like, five is good, five is great. Why not 5.75? Most people don't even realize that quarter percent of margin, what it does to their actual gross profit throughout the year and how that ultimately affects the bottom line. So we're really careful with our margin management, but also we understand lifetime value of our customer, which is our agent. I heard George talk about retention a lot in his episode and I've been lucky enough to have a good, or not George, but Billy, a good relationship with Billy.

Speaker 1 (26:07):
And that's something that always stuck out to me as we talked about through going from a CAP model which was ultimately inspired by them three, four years ago to a no cap model and how do we still achieve retention? But we can't give everything to agents on value if we have caps because at some point I tell our agents this very open, it's like, sure, Adrian, if you had a cap at 35 or 45, whatever it's going to be, once you make that, you're really good agent. I have no reason to invest a dollar into you. I'm a venture capitalist. I should not invest a dollar into you logically we should agree, I should not invest in you, Ethan, it wouldn't make sense. But if we share in all dollars, some are on a higher split, I created the lead. Some are on a lower split to me because you created the lead. But if we mutually share in the dollars, I always have the pressure to keep adding value to increase your top line.

Speaker 1 (26:54):
And I like that. That's a good pressure to have. It's better than I have to. I really like Ethan. I have to cut 'em off because I should go recruit new agents and get them up to 40,000 and look at a headcount per 40,000. I have my middle group that pays me 30,000, my lower group that pays me 15,000 a year because they're not performing. That's my financials. And coming from brokerage financials, I say it worked, but it keeps you having to always add width versus quality. And that's not good for the consumer. So how do we keep our best people not cutting off our team leads only working there. So we introduced a self gen split adjustment that's used to be by volume. We learned quickly that's problematic based back to margins. So we just five months ago, four months ago, it was like, okay, we either got to get rid of this program or we got to turn it to something else.

Speaker 1 (27:42):
And ultimately we decided changing it to GCI and going with the buyer broker agreements. That really is beneficial timing for us. And so as agents get up to annually, I'm sorry, lifetime GCI tiers, they claw back 5% at each tier up to 80 20 split for self gen for us. And then if you do in a single year, you get up to what used to be 20 million in volume, I think it's 600,000 GCI right now you get 95 5 on self gen split the rest of the year. And so we create this bounty system on an annual basis and a lifetime value of maximizing the 80 20 split and it allows them to claw back. I don't know a lot of people that offer anything like that while also keeping them focused on, because one thing we lost in the old model is our best agents, once they got their cap, they wouldn't work team gen leads anymore.

Speaker 1 (28:29):
And so our partners like Zillow or our paid leads in house that we have our pay per-click, all those things were getting worked by our newest greenest agents. Well no business do you want that happening? If you're mechanics of your Porsche clients coming in and getting a brand new mechanic, I don't think that customer would like that. So if we're going to have a brand that people know and consumers know, we can't give it to our greenest agents all the time. So we work to create a commission structure that kept Adrian and Carly who you'll meet through this series, how do we get them on our best lead sources

Speaker 4 (29:00):
And

Speaker 1 (29:00):
Still want to work them? And ultimately the self gen split program without caps is how we achieved that.

Speaker 2 (29:06):
Cool. How hard was moving off caps?

Speaker 1 (29:11):
I would say,

Speaker 2 (29:12):
Because I am sure it was hard.

Speaker 1 (29:13):
I think it was harder for Kyle than me, and I'm sure he'll tell that story, but he had a coach at one point that convinced him to go to caps and he's an econ guy, he's a brilliant math guy. People probably don't know. They see him as a social media guy, but Kyle was really mathematically savvy. And so it wasn't a lot of convincing as much as Kyle loves the people. That was our argument early on. It was like, okay, Kyle, these are the two things. We got to stop investing so much into people we get nothing back out of because the financial structure doesn't make sense. Or we switch it and we do it in the name of what I just explained of we're going to offer the value you're wanting to offer, but you can't tow the line in between or else we're going to lose money at some point if we scale.

Speaker 1 (29:54):
The math doesn't make sense. And so I was like, we just have to run into it. And so Kyle's been through similar situations previous his brokerage, and so we both knew the number one goal we had was no walkout, no agents leaving. And we accomplished that. We grandfathered all of our previous people in and we said, okay, this isn't the due for these people to pay. They helped us get to this point. We're still a top team at the time in regards to what we were trying to accomplish. And so it was like, let's create this legacy group. They're locked in. Will they probably work our flex leads? No. Will they probably work new emerging lead sources on team gen when they cap? No. If we believe this is a valuable business, we'll be able to recruit out of this problem and this group will become a minority percentage of who works here and we'll recruit out of it.

Speaker 1 (30:38):
That's what we did. So I would say not to downplay it, it was really easy because we didn't have to fight our key people. It was kind of like an NDA at the time because people don't want to feel like they got the short end into the stick because when they joined it's like, Hey, we're offer a lot of value to these new people that come in. Just shut up. Just don't talk about it and just let them vote if they stay and they keep participating here and they work these leads and they start making money, Adrian's at 600, he's on the new system, he's at 600 some thousand GCI. He's number one in our company by a lot. And then Carly, she's number three I think. Same thing. Same story. And they don't care about splits the same way we were dealing with before. So we proved that we have a mutually beneficial, highly accountable to us adding value model. And I think that's a good pressure to operate with.

Speaker 2 (31:30):
Yeah, that's really good. I mean that's the sweet spot. What's fair for everybody that we can continue growing together

Speaker 1 (31:36):
Equitable?

Speaker 2 (31:37):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Talk about lead sources. How do you vet them? I am sure people are probably reaching out to you and wait with this idea. How over time have you vetted the, I think of it in a way as diversified portfolio. You can either invest your own time and money, you can contract out that time through self gen, online lead gen. They're obviously a bunch of different partners you can engage. Some of them are pay us upfront per opportunity. Some are paper impression, some are pay it close. How do you vet which ones are working for us? Which ones aren't? Why, how

Speaker 1 (32:18):
So this is probably an interesting I guess answer for, but open houses, right? Traditionally on team model, those aren't our lead source, but in the model I just explained, we sell on the same side of the table with our agent. So yeah, sure. Do I get less margin on an open house lead with no upfront cost? How's that different than Flex? So for me, empowering my agents to do more business helps with retention, helps build their brand, which in proxy helps our brand. A Zillow customer, a realtor.com customer, OpCity customer, all those, they've proven they want to go through a technology platform to find it. And that's okay. We help those people at scale. They're some of our favorite lead sources. But from a focus is helping our agents with those open house leads is it solves a lot of problems simultaneously. And by phishing our commission structure, I can go and we recruited a director of marketing out of a different industry and one of his main scopes and he is only I think two and a half months in over time is how do we bolster self gen business for our agents?

Speaker 1 (33:09):
And we know the cost per lead of pay-per-click and Facebook, we got those numbers dialed in. There's still a non-committal lead that I have to take through my inside sales department, have two to three handoffs, get to my agent and hope that agent has a great experience with them and also they're making less money on it. So are they going to act differently? I would hope not. But also I know if they're working their business, they operate a little differently. So one of our favorite things to focus on is helping agents with their self gen, specifically open houses. We know the conversion's really high. We all know the stat for most consumers work, what is it, 71% or something like that? Work with the first agent they meet in person. So if we can get from raw lead to contact made, which is ultimately in our context that are 22 attempts to appointment, set to appointment, met all at the first thing, why do we complicate it up here with all those different lead sources?

Speaker 1 (34:02):
So we work them all ultimately, but that's our favorite to focus on and offer leverage for because I feel like you're really, IT shoots and ladder, you're skipping a lot of steps of the process with no cost upfront, similar to a portal. So I would say, and if you asked me in Chicago where I started my real estate career, I'd say that's the dumbest idea ever. But it really works well here in this market. And when I came in, the company was doing about 40% of business in open houses and I think it was pretty hard to ignore from the data for me. So how do we double down not to expand upon it for giving value to everybody else? We like PPC, we've worked with realty.com. That's probably my favorite lead source. Ultimately we get seller leads, high quantity from the and buyer leads.

Speaker 1 (34:42):
We ultimately bought the whole San Diego County into Riverside, south Riverside, Temecula area monthly. We've had it for two years, two plus years. And it's a really solid lead source for us from a team gen. Now over time, now that we have more of a traditional marketing department, more controls on the gears, as we've become more established, I think PPC always makes sense. One of our goals this year is to be about a third of our leads generated coming to organic landing pages or branded landing pages. Not so much organic because we're willing to contribute paid, but ultimately we want people landing and knowing Whistle Realty. Our value offers are usps and then our inside sales team working those leads into conversion versus realty.com or a forced registration, Facebook maybe. But ultimately we want people coming in because of our buy before you sell and our cash offer programs and other more productized offerings.

Speaker 1 (35:40):
And then obviously the bell of the ball flex. We love being a flex team. Ultimately it's great for senior performers, it's great for new agents. We give a lot of control on that. And we talked obviously offline yesterday, but you just can't argue with the math of eyeballs. Every Uber I take, I ask where people search for homes. Just I'm curious and I want to make sure I'm not blind by my own thoughts. And everybody says Zillow, no one says Voto. No one says Op City. No one says realtor.com. Surprisingly, it's Redfin or Zillow is literally all I hear. It's like 10 to one Zillow and no one says whistle realty.com. I've never heard it. So I'm just honest with that. It's like, yeah, we want to build more brand, but also if there's a strong consumer brand where our consumers already shopping, let them shop there and help them convert, make the margins work for you and the agents. And we do. And it's a scale play, but I would say my favorite source for growth, I would say for agent growth to revenue growth would be Xiaflex.

Speaker 2 (36:42):
Cool. Thank you for all that. That was a great breakdown. You covered a lot of ground in one smooth path. I told you

Speaker 1 (36:47):
I was trying to do both. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (36:48):
Well done. So you mentioned earlier that you had your own kind of to-do list or project list. It was 30, 40, 50 deep. When you're thinking about, we're in the back half of 2024, when you're looking at the year ahead, I know that you're following the EOS model, so there's a lot of structure to it. But what are a few things that are on your, I really want to raise this conversation or this has been backburnered as we've been setting our quarterly rocks, it's time to finally advance this one forward. What are you looking forward to over the next 12, 18 months in terms of, these are a few things that are next for us.

Speaker 1 (37:27):
Yeah, iteration of our ACE team. I'd say that's a really good idea.

Speaker 2 (37:33):
Remind me the acronym again.

Speaker 1 (37:34):
Yeah, agent concierge. And so that team does all the things we used to yell at our agents to do and just ask them gently to do it or says, I'll do it for you. Will you just talk to me so I can get this information from you?

Speaker 1 (37:47):
Not many operations in the world operate with bad data or no data on what's happening in the funnel. I couldn't name one. So we can't operate without that data of what happened in the appointment. Did we go, Zillow's badgering us for it. We don't let our agents do any of that data reporting directly to Zillow or for that matter, any other lead source including internal. It's just not going to work. I've accepted it. So getting that better and offering more value such as offer writing, creating custom listing and buyer presentations per client, integrating that with our marketing team. Really excited to offer more value. That has to be our pressure. The other is ISA support for our agents directly changing the face of our ISA department from a lead gen source for team gen leads into agents don't want to work leads, they want appointments.

Speaker 1 (38:34):
We all know it. Zillow approved it. They got proven right, right, right, right. Everybody followed from a lead referral model. So how do we just say, go sit in open house. We'll take care of the rest. Don't call the leads, please. We'll just do it. We'll do that. Oh, you want to buy leads? Cool. We'll work 'em. We'll put 'em right into our top line. Obviously there's a lot of complexity of our duplicate leads and who really owns it and if it already was in the system. And so there's a lot of nuanced things to figure out there, especially when there's legal contracts with each portal, things like that. But that's a big goal that we have is ultimately some of our top agents that they're making high six figure, I look at their account and I'm like, oh my gosh, they could use an assistant.

Speaker 1 (39:13):
Or they could actually, lemme expand on that a little bit. The ace thing, the whole reason that exists and same thing ISA, I think the agent's job is illogical on its face. What it's always been of like you've got to be a contract writer, you've got to be an inspector, you've got to be a touring guide, you've got to be good with people. You all these things got to be great at to be the top agent like a Kyle Whistle, Chris Lynn doll, like George, you got to have all these characteristics. Is that realistic? No. Does that make any sense to anyone in any other industry? And so the notion that they fail at most of those, they get a lot of bad raps for, but it's kind of a hilarious expectation to me. And they got to be a good business leader. So most agents, let's go back to MRA. You say, Hey, you got to get an assistant. It's your first hire. It's like everyone knows that. I think I'm pretty good at hiring people. I failed way more than I've succeeded with hiring people fast to fire.

Speaker 2 (40:08):
I've heard that so many times from very early stage teams. Again, that agent who's looking to have essentially a 2, 3, 4 person operation, hire someone they leave, hire someone, they leave, hire someone, they leave

Speaker 1 (40:19):
Hard, distracted my best producer by encouraging them, why would I do that? And so I had a director of sales at the time about two and a half years ago, and she was really adamant, I have a staffing agency for VAs. And she's like, we just need to place one for every agent. And I was like, I don't hate the idea, but I hate the idea. I like what it provides for them, but we can't dismiss the distraction that we're creating. We don't say, go hire your own tc.

Speaker 4 (40:46):
We

Speaker 1 (40:46):
Say we're going to build a badass TC department internally. And you have to use it.

Speaker 4 (40:50):
We

Speaker 1 (40:50):
Say, Hey, we are going to build a badass listing management team and system. You have to use it. That's always existed here. Most successful teams, that operation is non-negotiable. Why don't you have to use our insights? Why are we allowing you to call your own leads and not call them 22 times slash text email and have a good marketing brand voice campaign that enriches them and wants them to reach out? Why do we allow you to screw that up? Instead, we bully you and you punitively create structure that if you don't do that, you're our worst agent. But what if you're really good in appointment with customer? What if you're phenomenal there and you suck everywhere else? Should we not create a mold that allows you to be successful? Why do I want all these different roles from you? And so we're starting to prioritize between that ISA thing until about ACE 2.0 and ultimately adding value around the agent is decoupling the agent from having 30 jobs. There's supposed to be five stars at, and I want you to be really good with the customer with our new agent advisory, but I don't care if you're the strongest deal doctor or the strongest every deal, just bring it to, we have once a day, come for an hour, come listen in if you don't have a deal. And if you do have a deal, ask the question, how do I get the best terms from my client? What should I do? And eventually you'll grow into that.

Speaker 4 (41:57):
But

Speaker 1 (41:57):
I don't need you to start that way. Customer experience matters, I think more than anything. Now, do I want incompetent people that don't know that? No, I'm not saying that. But do you have to be our best negotiator in the company to be successful? No. So how do we add more leverage at every spot where it's not the most important role of an agent to us? And how do we pick the best people, put 'em through our training to at least get two or three characteristics that are really important to us and have them exemplify those really well. And then we'll add stuff over on time as they're here.

Speaker 2 (42:26):
Really good. I've enjoyed this so much. I got a bunch more questions, but we'll have those in a non-recorded setting. I feel like before I let you go though, I would love to know from you, when you're investing time in resting, relaxing, and recharging, what are you doing or when you're investing time in learning, growing and developing, what are you doing? I

Speaker 1 (42:48):
I've learned in the last couple of years that fun is actually as important as learning and developing. And so I'll go with the fun answer. I spend a lot of time fishing, going out on the boat with my wife and catching some halibut or corvina and just trying to, I'm always on pressurized, I'm always thinking about working when I'm having fun. So I try to spend a little less time programmed into content or stuff like that and just completely unplug and just relax.

Speaker 2 (43:14):
Love it. Is that halibut for dinner or is that halibut catch and release

Speaker 1 (43:19):
For dinner. Okay. I'm cleaning and cooking and eating it.

Speaker 2 (43:21):
Cool. Good for you. Appreciate it so much. Continued success in the year ahead. I love what you all are up to and I really appreciate you spending this time with me. Thanks

Speaker 1 (43:29):
For having me.

Speaker 3 (43:30):
Thanks for checking out this episode of Team Os. For email exclusive insights every week, sign up@realestateteamos.com.