Speaker 1 (00:00):
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 (00:15):
Kenny, great to see you. It's been a long time since I've seen you. Yeah, glad to be in this conversation with you.

Speaker 3 (00:19):
Thanks for inviting me. Super excited.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
Yeah, man. I want to start where I started with literally everyone who's been in your chair over the past three days. What is a must have characteristic of a high performing team?

Speaker 3 (00:30):
I think drive, have to want it.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
How would you describe your own leadership style?

Speaker 3 (00:36):
I'm very, very direct, less compassionate, less empathy, more personally for me, but I have a really great leadership team that supplements each other. So we have a leadership team in four, but I'm usually just a person that's really straightforward, learning different things, giving people feedback, especially on marketing. Like, hey, their marketing sucks. I always tell 'em, move this, that, and looking at the numbers or it's room for improvement. So every time I give judgment or something, I always follow up with things I'm thinking about or critique or feedback. Hey, this is how we can prove it. I don't really, people get to me. I'm pretty blunt. I don't really hold things personally. It's really easy. People just to develop their skill to work a lot. I me.

Speaker 2 (01:19):
Yeah, totally fair. When on your, specifically your team journey, did you become self-aware about the types of people you needed to bring around you to have a well-rounded team?

Speaker 3 (01:30):
Well, so without going too much detail, I had a team in third year and I gave that up my fourth year, starting my fifth year in real estate. I had no team and then mentored a lot of agents. That wasn't until the fifth or sixth year when I got brought on to handle all the online leads team that was handed a team of misfits, I guess just random people who want to do online leads. So it's kind of fun learning how to work lines on people. I didn't really study leadership books or anything until maybe around that time learning how to deal with personalities, diving a little more into this. That was not easy leadership either because I worked for the company and leads, so I didn't have a lot of say. So it was a lot of advice, but then that kind of got me learning the people I do want to surround myself, what didn't want to work, didn't want to work directly, and what my supporting agents would be on certain deals.

Speaker 2 (02:26):
Yeah, fair. So were you referring to when you were leading an inside sales team? Yeah. Yeah. Cool. What about that experience has been helpful to you today? What are some of the things that you picked up during that stage? Cause I think it's an interesting way to come into this.

Speaker 3 (02:41):
Yeah, it was learning how to babysit is not the right. We're just learning how to handle people's personality, really listening to their wants and needs and seeing how much I'm willing to budge on certain things. That team was definitely not as successful as they could be. At one point we had run from 10 to 50 agents. We were spending about 50 grand on Zillow a month. Then we started taking more territory than the handle. East Bay then brought a team leader in Francisco that had a way different style in someone in San Jose. So there was leadership tears. Again, I was pretty young too that year I was probably not even 30 years old yet. I think that's pretty young and as a solo producer, do what I want, go fast, break things now you got to cater to people's complaints and stuff like that. So it was definitely challenging, but to go through that helped a lot in just understanding people a little better, studying more personalities and stuff like that.

Speaker 2 (03:36):
Yeah. So fast agent team, fast, what is it about Fast? And I'm sorry, in the back of your shirt is BU but fast? Yeah,

Speaker 3 (03:49):
Yeah, it's easy to think of. It's, remember if there was a quote I gave it probably 10 years ago, I was, let me make sure I got it right. I was like fast and good, beat slow and great. So the way you see is if you're kind of like Uber, right? Uber and Lyft, people want, this is years ago, so that was primitive early uber year, but people want to press a button, want things done. I get something done that even leadership training your team, if something can be done, if someone can do the job at 80%, then you'll probably work with them. So we doubt I'd rather just do a lot of deals and I'm less of a relationship agent. I don't really keep in touch with my past clients. It's pretty bad. But I recruit almost 600 agents to my team, so I just want to do a lot of deals and get things done.

Speaker 3 (04:37):
You think about you needed to go down the street for dinner or whatnot again, well, you probably wouldn't hire a limbo. It's kind I excessive, right? But agents as they should, they want to give the top of line service and all that, but I don't really have time for that. I want to do a really good job and do as much as I can. So that's kind of how I relate. I'd rather be like an Uber or Lyft to a consumer where you're going to get exactly what you want. There's five star rating and then this is it. Yeah, really good. And then I started my business in the REO days. I started right when market crashed. I haven't actually been in the cycle, the prices that bombed out when I started. So back then it was like short sales, having people with their needs, people losing their homes. Most of my clients were investors found me online, they wanted me write offers. So building my book of business early on until that kind of f six years I running a team. I didn't really actually have that many connections with my people. So I built my business on loss of processes, structure and marketing.

Speaker 2 (05:31):
Cool. Talk about, you just mentioned how many agents you've recruited over the years. Talk a little bit about your recruiting philosophy. Is it an all the time thing or do you have time blocks for it on a regular basis? Is it something that you're thinking about all the time? Talk a little bit about. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (05:48):
So I've recruited personally over a hundred agents in my team in the last three, well this September right now, since January two 20, we've actually added about five 60 agents to the team. I looked at numbers this morning before my talk. It has been almost all organic. We tried the school stuff and the career website stuff, they did not work. Those people on the websites are looking for our stuff and people in school just don't have paid 200 bucks for our classes. Not a lot of commitment. The way we recruited organically, we've done a lot of through social media, so if they find some social media, they're similar avatars to the agent that we're looking for. Most of my personal recruiting has been through Instagram. I journal, I go to over 20 conferences a year. It's right now, I still, five or six morning ago I go meet people six from 'em behind the scenes, really great speakers on screen.

Speaker 3 (06:34):
I'm journaling it, I'm adding captions now. People get free. They're getting a free experience from a follow-up box from mines without coming here and taking time out of the day. So become a thought leader in that and most of the smart things are set by other people, so people want to follow that and they bring a lot of information into our Slack channels. We have ongoing cause. But more recently, in recent years at Realty, our team, we host a ton of events in the last couple of years. This year we took a pause to it. People are not in a good mood with the market being lower and a lot of people have exited. So last year we did a lot of cultural events like panels. I'm doing chronological order example. We had black History Month, we did all black panel, then we had all black women panel and then Hispanic one.

Speaker 3 (07:20):
We did Latina women in real estate panel. Then the dad's panel, we had Pride panel. We even did a pride party. We had Halloween parties, sick of the Miles. So very culturally we were able to bring a lot of people in and then once we're in, we kind of add 'em to our Slack channel, which tons of information on there all the time, hundreds of agents are using actively and then also inviting our coaching calls. Monday, Wednesday, Friday morning that Elias, my business partner, director of sales is doing some Monday motivation. Wednesday is role plays, market updates through the week. Friday's a little more open session. They're constantly trying to add people in an environment and most of the people were over 80 13% of our business is online leads. Not a lot, not sure. We 1,010 deals, so 85% of our business organic and most of it's done through social media. So people kind of find you online. And so our agents doing social media is helping them create business opportunities, but it's also attracting other agents to the company that wants to build a business like that. I post 50 times a day because this conferences other people speaking. So because of that we kind of build a meeting very much stat and we're attracting more similar people that want to build a business that way. We're building our business

Speaker 2 (08:36):
So much good stuff in there and first of all, that's my MO is to hear smart things other people say and share it. Love it. So I'm clear that Slack channel is open to agents that aren't on your team yet and that training stuff is open to agents who aren't on your team yet. It's just an open invite. Hang around for two years before you join the team.

Speaker 3 (08:53):
Yeah. Slack is cheap. It's like $6 a user and Slack is smart, whereas two weeks, if someone's not on it, they're deactivated, but they can come on anytime. Again, it doesn't charge us. Our Slack is the brain of our company. I post in there probably like 10 times a day at least. We have a channel general chat for random stuff. There's a channel for social media tech tools. Anytime I see this AI stuff, social media tips, training graphs, strategy, I posted it in there. We have a training events channel. It's just a lot of local events. Lots and lots of online training. I don't care. The training is from Sotheby or Compass or Tom Ferry or whoever. A lot of stuff is from Ford too, which is a place bank, anything. So we bring it in and the agents have access to that. We have a channel for market updates.

Speaker 3 (09:37):
That's my favorite channel. So stuff from Housing Wire, M-S-N-B-C, Inman, bam, whatever. Lot of is probably like 80% is more catered towards the Bay area, but reference huge. So we have that in there. We have a channel for showing requests, so we don't have showing agents on the team, but agents can put in fulfill like, Hey, I need help with this. Typically they're paying like 50 bucks a door. They get their showings all covered by an agent on the team. We have a training for open house opportunities. People need help with open their houses and people grab those right away. Those things fly. They can work and off market listings coming soon. We run our Dilo flex team internally. We have a channel just for referrals from our ISA team. People grab those. So Slack is our thing. A lot of agents who leave my team always, always ask, can we stay on Slack?

Speaker 2 (10:26):
So good. You've built a powerful asset. This is one of the things I picked up from Seth Godin as a marketing concept years ago. You know that it's really good marketing when people miss it, when it's gone. So you stop sending that monthly newsletter, no one's going to be like, Hey, where's that monthly newsletter? I love that you've built something that is so valuable to people that even when they're, yeah, whenever their best step is to go somewhere else, that that's a piece they want to stay in touch with.

Speaker 3 (10:53):
Regarding newsletter, we actually have a weekly news service. We've been doing it for over a year now called Fast News. It's a rundown. Things happening in our company. Some pull out from Slacks. We highlight Agent of the Week. We've been that for a couple years now. At some point now we want to call detention. They did something special. And then we have a fast event newsletter with all the stuff that's happening in our offices. We have seven retail offices, so there's lots of physical in-person events happening, and then we have a Keep It Moving coaching newsletter. Our director sales takes always Monday, Wednesday, Friday coaching calls and we cut out snippets. He has the full calls on his page, but we actually cut out snippets of YouTube shorts for that and our pages look sick. If you go to the hashtag team, fastest one page Fast real estate is a different page and Elias Sudo has his own, all the graphics are sick with the screenshots, the YouTube style stuff, and then we brought that into the marketing. So we're remarking a lot of the stuff we use in the company and that's a huge draw for agents to come.

Speaker 2 (11:46):
Yeah, super smart. Do you have a team inside the team that does a lot of that work?

Speaker 3 (11:51):
Yeah, we have a full marketing team. Think four or five people. All my leadership people have their own bas directly report to them, but we have a marketing. Those projects get completed every single week and now we're dipping the AI for first, not first a sign, but last week's newsletter. First sign was all AI generated, it was all Star Wars theme, the pictures, the little blocks we took all the headshots and recreated it just looked sick. I was known for doing newsletters a couple years ago for a good six years where I took pop culture and created lot things. So they kind of bringing that thing back and I'm in the process. The first draft didn't really look that good to me, but the VAs went really literal. I was like, okay, look at my own newsletter and make something like that for agents. So they made this really cool whole SpongeBob Bob newsletter, so I was like, okay, we're on the right track, but I haven't given them input yet, but we're going to bring back a value add to the community.

Speaker 2 (12:44):
Yeah, so fun. What is a tip that you would have for an agent operating solo who may be better off joining a team? How do you guide that person from a conversational, even a question perspective?

Speaker 3 (12:58):
Look at all things you want to do then there's definitely a value added scale. I talked to some top agents. Let's say someone's making 200 grand a year, even 300 grand a year, pretty solid. Well, you go hire a marketing assistant and train, then you got to pay another 10, 15 grand and you got to take the time to train them and then you need to hire a showing agent. Then you want to coach and you would need open house help start really looking. We also have four full-time video editors in the Philippine. Oh, nice. We have a studio like this where we handle that. But then not all things you hire look at that. Do you really want to handle all that or do you want to plug in the team and pay a small fee and have all that accessible to you?

Speaker 2 (13:36):
Nice. A year from now Pubcon 2024, what do you want to look back on at this time and say, I'm really glad that I focused on that or that my team focused on that or that we invested in that. What's, I mean market conditions and that stuff aside, what are you looking forward to building, adding on, improving over the next

Speaker 3 (13:56):
Year? So we started implementing a couple months ago. I want more of, we put a lot of people in accountability groups now. The example actually shared earlier where we have this intensity bootcamp, this four week program, we had 35 agents in there that volunteered to be in there and in that time we knocked on over 8,000 doors. We had 226 appointments set, 15 escrows. We sent out 300 one-on-one videos people. So I want the whole company that's really strong on the foundational stuff where they're grinding it out and then layered what, being able to talk about what they've done or examples of that. They're creating social media about the, Hey, I'm out door knocking today. Hey, I'm having this open house today. This is what's happening. So on because I didn't focus too much during this chat, but our team is, our number one priority has been social media. I really want a lot of different influencers on the team creating business. 80% of your business that way.

Speaker 2 (14:44):
Super interesting. I can see a whole new recruiting path where you can, because in a team context, I assume you have all the onboarding, training, support, coaching that you could take someone that's very adept at that and has some other related skills and turn them into a new agent.

Speaker 3 (15:01):
Yeah, we have a 30 day workshop. I would say probably 70, no, maybe 80% of agents have less than three year experience on our team.

Speaker 2 (15:12):
And what is your target in terms of a ramp time? What are some of your targets or benchmarks for them when you're talking to them like, Hey, it's going to take about this long to do that

Speaker 3 (15:23):
A year ago, I need to check. We actually have our sets take a look at a year ago you, our average day to getting contract was about 60 something days. Market conditions is a little bit hard now. So I'd like to get that in another three months for our first contract.

Speaker 2 (15:36):
Yeah. Awesome. Kenny, this has been great. I love what you're up to. You live fast, you feel fast to me talking with you. Yeah, yeah. Before I let you go, fun question for you. What is one of your most frivolous purchases or what's a cheapskate habit that you've held onto even though you probably don't need to?

Speaker 3 (15:55):
Cheapskate habit or frivolous purchases.

Speaker 2 (15:59):
Yeah. One or

Speaker 3 (16:00):
The other. I bought a new toothbrush. I'm really into tech. I don't buy a lot of random stuff, but when I buy stuff, I usually buy the most expensive one. I am really into tech products or recently I bought the or OB io 10 toothbrush. It's like $400. But I love using it. It makes me happier time. I use it because my nine ones start giving out a battery life. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (16:20):
What makes a toothbrush at $400 toothbrush? What was the feature where you were like, alright, I'm in.

Speaker 3 (16:26):
It feels shirty as a, this is stupid. The last one had this 3D tracking thing in it. I don't know, but I like it. I had a Philip Sonic hair with a regular style style brush. It doesn't feel as good to me. So this circle one I travel a lot too, so having enjoyment toy feels cool. I didn't read that many reviews on it. I knew this one was better than the last one. I really liked the last one. I spent so much time reading battery, I forgot what it was. So I was like, okay, this is the purchase. Also don't like to spend a lot of time. I'll research a product, but I don't one day and I'm done. Okay. If I see the same product on a couple of different sites, I'll just buy it. I buy. That's how I buy most of my stuff. I don't really dive too deep.

Speaker 2 (17:03):
Awesome. Love it. Thank you so much for doing this, Kenny. Yeah. Continued success in the year ahead.

Speaker 1 (17:08):
Thanks for checking out this episode of Team Os. For email exclusive insights every week, sign up@realestateteamos.com.