Welcome to the team builder show where the most successful team leaders share, how to build scale organize and ultimately maximize your sales team results. What would you do if you lost 50 of your sales team? Maybe even more, i would argue one of two things: you'd either say screw this whole team thing doesn't work for me or you would lean in and become really good at recruiting and retention. That's what these two have done, so i am really pumped to have lisa, chanati and tom tool in the house on our podcast, because guess what spirit of honesty here they both lost 50 of their sales team at one time and learned a lot of lessons from It so lisa, let's start with you first for the people that have never met you before, give us some context. Who are you how long you been in the business? Where is your company and then even break down the size of the business sure um, so lisa chatty we're from massachusetts and southern new hampshire just outside of boston, um, three offices? Now so one in boston, one in the burbs and then one up in new hampshire um, been in the business really full time since 2016 kind of part time 2010 to 2015.

this year, we'll sell 980 985 homes. Does that just drive you insane? Yes, it does. I can speak for her on that. Yes, yes, it's been because i've, why are you just buying 15 houses and getting to a thousand? Because i thought i was gon na get to a thousand and then some fell apart at the last minute and i know um, but we are gon na - do about half a billion dollars in sales and over 10 million dollars in revenues this year.

Thank you and team size is about 100 sales agents and sitting at somewhere between 20 and 24 support staff to support the sales team awesome. So today, lisa's going to break down her recruiting right how she's able to consistently recruit the right kind of people right and do it at scale and then we're going to unpack a whole bunch of other stuff. But let's go to tommy tools. So tom same thing, where you from give us a little breakdown in the business, how long you been in the business etc sure so i've been selling real estate 20 years, which is a little crazy to say our team's been around since about 2012.

this year, we're Going to sell 466 home somewhere around there, 165 million in volume a little over 4 million in revenue, we've got 32 active agents. Now we've got more coming, which is part of why we're here talking about this podcast and we've got 12 sales people or excuse me, 12 staff, members that include inside sales, video marketing support staff, all that sort of stuff. So with both of you um. You know this show is really designed for team leaders and those that are aspiring to to build a business to to be one of the 54 000 people in the us that actually are running a team, whether it's a small business, a small team or they want To become their own independent brokerage as an example um, so you both obviously learned a lot of lessons when you lose half your sales team.

So so can you lead us before we get into retention before we talk about recruiting and retention? What happened? So i i mean this, i think it's a little fresher for me than lisa um. You know what happened was, and this is where a lot of teams i feel get jammed up, because i was heavy into production. I was selling 90 homes a year by myself, which is bananas. I mean that's, it's a lot and hold on hold on.

Oh there we go. That's bananas. I would have said something else if we were talking off the podcast yoda. So i was, i was meeting with people in their living rooms constantly and i was really good at it and that was kind of my identity, which i think was a hard reason why it took me so long to move on from that and when you're doing That and you don't have someone that's managing the sales team or managing it the right way where standards are being enforced, where all the stuff you say, you're going to do actually happens, because i know a lot of team leaders out.

There me included. We bent on standards and that created a lot of problems and then, when you try to enforce them or things change, it just doesn't go well, because it's unmet expectations from the people that are there. So for me it was making the decision of hey. I'm going.

All in on building the team um i'm not going to sell any more homes which i've literally, i think we just closed the last one like a day before we did this, so i'm really pumped about that and that and then also making the decision of hey. I'm going to go all in on empowering our agents, making sure they're the star and they're the people that are getting all the recognition and that kind of goes in line with the retention side. But when you're selling 90 homes a year, you can't be great at two things at once, so i had a lot of room to improve as a leader. So do you think that unpacking that a lot of the people left you - and at least you know you guys, are friends, so you can jump in here too.

Do you think a lot of them left because they just weren't getting the love? I think that's why they always leave, because they don't leave the company. They leave the leader right right, they're, not choosing to leave the thing that we've built they're choosing to leave us. Yes, it is personal, it is personal. Yes sure i mean that's definitely a component.

I'm not i mean this is a show about honesty, right and a lot of teams blow up. They blame a lot of other things and right with that in mind, i think it was not just not not the love, but also you know. I i bent on the standards, and i does that mean it means hey. You want to keep on leads here's what you need to do and then on either you're not recruiting and bringing in people.

So you can enforce the standards, you're kind of beholden to people that are hey. You know what tom i'm closing enough sales, so i'm not going to do these, but i know i think you, i think you need me and yeah the real and that that had something to do with it too, because i wasn't doing what's right for the team Which is bringing in new people, because growth allows for a lot of opportunities for folks and that that was another thing. I was kind of short-sighted and i thought it was more important for me to go list homes which, if i transfer that skill, which is what we do every week now on wednesdays at 11 o'clock to the entire team. You know that's something that people aren't going to get in 99 of places they go.

You know what's interesting about that when you were saying you know like the veterans can bend because they know you need them. It's it's the beauty of like the nfl, the nba, major league baseball and a lot of other businesses that are constantly hiring new people, forcing the best to maintain their standard or get better right or they become obsolete. Why do you think that isn't done in real estate? I mean it's done with with some teams, but why do you think, generally speaking, that isn't done in real estate? Fear, absolutely, i think it's always fear-based, i think, as an industry in the leadership level. I think we don't spend enough time on recruiting in order to be able to hold up the standards it's 100 commission based, so we and 30 to 60 days out right.

We don't know four months from now what we have for revenues, but we know what our bills are yep right right, so well, one could argue now at this point you guys have a pretty good understanding of of what your revenue is going to be, but for The most part and people are starting out - they have no idea right well, and i think that that becomes the one of the other points that i was going to make to. Why do things fall apart? I know for me, i didn't get into real estate to have a team to run a business to be a leader yeah, and nobody taught me like so tom talked about bending on standards and stuff and we kind of hit on not loving on people. But i think another part of it is you tom said he he practiced and he had all these amazing skills sitting in a living room and having conversations in the scripting that goes into getting a seller to sign on. We don't practice leadership, scripting right right, but a lot of the conversations that i have with my staff with my agents.

It's all scripting at the end of the day. Nobody we don't talk about it enough yeah. We don't role play how to run an effective company meeting office, meeting performance review, putting people on a pip we actually we actually do but like, but most real estate teams, don't most most companies do so you're. Bringing that to real estate is what it sounds like.

I think we have to start to keep growing right yeah. I literally did this with our sales manager yesterday before we left because he's running the trainings this week, and this is and i'm like it's okay, if you make some mistakes like that's really important too, and what we did was. I said all right walk me through give me five bullet points. What you're gon na talk about the questions you're going to ask, and then we kind of work on it together and it's no different than a listing presentation.

It's no different than an expired script. I mean all the stuff that a lot you know i got a lot of from you early on and now we're working together for a long time. It's a lot different, so i couldn't agree with that more so why did uh? You actually had a higher number of agents. Leave yep tell us about that.

Um. So you know ironic, we talk tom and i are really good friends right. So we talk about this stuff all the time, and you know i i had a i had a moment. Last week, um because i continue to make the same mistakes over and over right, and this is confessional by the way i love this i'll, give the details.

She leaves out. Don't worry, okay, good all right, it was not pretty um, but it for me. My biggest mistakes always come down to communication right and i think understanding who i am as a person how i communicate, but also understanding that those who choose to follow us don't necessarily hear things the same way right and i can get really busy wearing still. We've got a big company, but i still wear 20 hats a day, and so, if i can say three words, i often don't stop to say 10.

um and so that's led. I can go back every single time. That's been. The biggest thing is the way that i communicate or understanding how people need to feel heard.

Yes, right and tough conversations have to be had so the most recent one. It was just one staff member, but it's stung right. It some tough conversations needed to happen, but understanding to tom's point holding those standards. How do you have the conversation around maintaining standards while making somebody still feel supported, still making them feel loved and making them feel heard? Yes and that's where i drop the ball time after time, so what's the i don't know, have you ever seen this? This is not just a promotion for insight, but you know it's it's disk right, yep like this.

This is in order of me right, like i'm constantly reminding myself like, i have a tendency to be like be bright, be fast and be gone. I think that's all right, which is which is a lot of leaders. The challenge is, if you have a ton of these people that work for you that are like i just want to be involved. Tell me more like: what's the plan i just want to be, or this person is just like hold me right.

I have a tendency to surround myself with a lot of these people. They don't even like to talk to me they're just like. Let us just go crunch the numbers and we'll talk to you later. Tell you all the things you did wrong right so so part of leadership is understanding who you're communicating with.

Do you think about how you have to communicate in different modalities? Oh 100 and you know again our relationship tom and i share a lot back and forth and kind of digging into uh stuff. With retention. Tom has been helping me tremendously with it and i think we kind of play off of each other and taking that and understanding love languages are just as important as disc profiles right and so that's been one of the big things that we've implemented this year. Yeah.

So how did you we're going to get into retention and we're going to talk recruiting and it sounds like we might be going bounce bouncing back and forth between the two um, but the one thing i want to acknowledge for the two of you, like i've known You both for a long time right and i actually think about like the first time we really connected in chicago when introduced you to josh, rubin and jill big, like a suit in the party like an idiot. I was like so i'm like, and your journey, which is just this insane kind of like dj and lindsey like they went from 84 to 3 000 transactions in six years right and we talked about the the building blocks and the components, and you both have done An insanely great job and yet we're here to talk about the mistakes and then how you how you rectify them. So i just i want to tell you in advance. I appreciate both of your humility, the honesty because everybody notice what i'm pointing to first, we all make these mistakes.

The question is: do you learn the lesson and move forward? And you two do so we're talking about the problem? Let's talk about the solution, so talk to me. If i wanted to recruit more people today - and i know you wrote down some notes so talk to us like tactically, what do i need to recruit way more people than i'm coming to you on retention? You can interrupt as many times as you want with her sure and vice versa, so talk to us. So for me, one of the biggest things was understanding. Recruiting is just it's lead, gen, just like buyer or seller, lead, gen, right and building out the funnel okay.

I know what that means, but for the person listening, what does that mean? So for us for both of us, it's looking at it and saying, there's seven different pillars: lead lead pillars right. So, like expireds, open house, geographic farm, zillow, realtor.com you're, saying the same thing applies to recruiting 100 and it's fascinating, because we talk about how each of these pillars actually has a very similar correlation to right. Like the agent leaving a team, is the expired right. They've had a salty experience and we need to turn them back.

The right way, yes versus the roster calls or the cold calls right or the circle dialing is the yeah after we recruit an agent from a brokerage and we call every other agent in the brokerage. That's our circle: dialing yep um we've got google pay-per-click, which is just like google pay-per-click anywhere else, yeah um going to real estate. Schools is just like hosting a buyer or seller seminar right. So it's putting all of those different pillars in place and understanding that we need a healthy balance and more than five pillars going at every single time, so that as they come in the top, it's just like buyers and sellers right.

The funnel starts really wide on the top. We know they're not all going to make it out to the bottom, but then we've got to have a nurture plan in place so that we keep them engaged and keep them committed to us as we work them down. The funnel from either not being licensed or not being ready to think about a move until they pop out little agents at the bottom. I can i'm trying to think of the team plus event when this was the talking point when everybody kind of got like those that were recruiting at scale looked at it just like farming.

Past clients expired. I think it was the virtual one because you had me coming right after everything blew up with us, yeah and you're like hey. I need you to do this and i said okay and - and it was i, i said something that when i realized it was lead generation like for leads it all clicked and yeah, and i i could and like this is a zoom call, but you could see People like eyes kind of light up on that right. It was pretty exciting because we, like you think about this, and and i did a a call for uh jason pantana's clients about this.

My first question was: who's got a recruiting budget and they looked at me like i had 10 heads, and i said okay, how much time do you spend on recruiting? And this is the same thing you would. You have told me right and we've heard from some other people - you included it well so realtors get that, but they spend so much time trying to chase the deal. But if you have more people that can do deals, then you can bring in more business to your company. It's more opportunities for everybody and and that's what a growth mindset really is.

Is that people that aren't going to be suited for a team, they're kind of afraid, like oh there's, more team members coming on? Well guess what, when there's more people and more revenues coming in? That means we get more leads. We get more staff, we get more resources and it's going to be a heck of a lot easier selling real estate here right, more market share, yeah more market share yeah exactly exactly more brand proof, social proof, okay. So so the big distinction is, if you want to recruit at scale, you need to look at just like your marketing and if you're myopic in your marketing, you need to not be, and if you're myopic and you're recruiting you need to not be absolutely and then Each one of them has a different cadence, a different mindset, a different sort of mentality. If you will like calling somebody that recently left a team versus circle, dialing versus you know, uh, do you guys do any um? Do you buy the list for like massachusetts or new hampshire and call them? Yes, absolutely okay, which is kind of it's kind of cold right and everybody's kind of working that so that's interesting.

It's almost like a for sale by owner, but not really. It's kind of cold, but everybody's working it right. That's what i was thinking. Okay, so so one is.

You have multiple pillars but break it down even more d. How big is your recruiting department, uh, two full-time staff members and then each of our sales managers for the office also have recruiting kpis. It is the single most important thing to drive production, to drive revenues to drive everything. So i mean our marketing person has kpis around recruiting ads and recruiting lead gen.

Our videographer has kpis around how much content is created just for the purposes of video. Our data analyst has dashboards that are tracking, just the recruiting stuff right. It's every single person has kpis tied to recruiting, give us an example of those three in their kpis um. So for the recruiters, it's styles calls it's conversations, appointments and sign-ons right for the sales managers.

It's. How many are we getting into the office for trainings? After the first conversation has been had, how many are we re-engaging and keeping on um for our marketing person? It's literally looking at how many impressions are we getting across all the different platforms which ones are producing more? Is it youtube? Is it facebook? Is it instagram? Um and what are the click-through rates to so we also have um a website, that's just about recruiting right, so how much of the lead gen is going back to the website. How long is the consumer? It's just like buyer and seller legion? Exactly how much do they buy or how much do they bounce right? What percentage start to fill out the form and cancel yeah? Do you do retargeting on all those people? Absolutely right? It's all the same rules apply yeah. You know what was one of the things tom kind of hit on it, but one of the things that i think was super impactful for me was when i realized: what's the value of an agent and company dollar for a year versus how much is one transaction Right so tom said most of us don't have line items in our in our p l or in our budgets as we go into business planning for recruiting, but we all have it for how much money are we going to spend on google pay-per-click this year right Right to chase a 10 000 commission check, but i know that the company dollar of an agent over the first 12 months is 150 000.

And why don't? It was so fascinating to me to realize that i was spending thousands tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of dollars to chase 10 000 paychecks right. But i wasn't spending the same amount to chase 150, 000 paychecks and yet like so so. If every friend of mine that sells a sass product or my buddy who's, the infomercial king, they would all say: what's your acquisition cost right and if i could spend two to make 10 i'll spend two all day long and i guarantee you're, probably not spending two To make the 150, but you are in the onboarding costs and all that stuff, but the actual marketing it's a no-brainer right, so correct so making that switch. So how many people will your team of three and i want you to break down the team of three? A little more in detail um how many people will they recruit in 2021 and then what's the goal for 2022, so the two recruiters will um plus the sales managers.

I put them all into three: sorry, okay, so there's three sales managers, the director of sales and the two recruiters. So their goals going into 2022 are 12 on boards every single month, so three a week um and then, where did they fall for 2021? That's a great question and i don't have the data in front of me: um she's really mad about that right. Now, her facial she's, like yeah. I saw that he said her teeth.

I don't know the numbers too immediately. Okay, so i could it yeah yeah yeah yeah! No, don't do this. This is the be honest, so um so so 12 on boards a month and there will be churns right like that. Just happens absolutely.

How did you get to the 12? A month like like was there like, did you say i want to do this? Many transactions, my existing team plus new team, knowing how long it takes for them to close like? Was there a big math equation to this, or was it like? Well, i got all these people working on. I could get at least 12 people a month. I mean a little bit of both right, like that's full honesty, yeah right. It's understanding where we want to go for 2022, how many people it's gon na, take to get there and then to your point, i think it's it's super important to remember that there's always churn on two levels.

Right one is what led us both to losing 50 of our teams right, they have an expiration date. That's brutal business honestly, just being honest, hold on the entire industry switches companies all the time, like everyone watching knows what i'm talking about now, there's a percentage of people that are just like the rare kobe bryant's, 20 years at the lakers right, like 20 years at Re max right, but there's a lot of people that have been at nine brokerages in your 20 years. The other thing you're not hitting on too is we're. Bringing on a lot of new agents.

87 of those people are out of the business in five years. So it's not just moving to other companies, it's also the ones that can't cut it. I mean that's, that's another factor yeah and you know no matter how much we talk about here's, what the industry's like here's, what the expectations are? They don't always hear it right and then there's going to be the ones that have a life thing that comes up. Um kovid was huge for us.

We lost a lot through kovid, just because homeschooling kids and doing all the things that they had to do right. Life right life, life in a pandemic, even more so yep, so so 12 a month means you know you're, adding plus 120. Where do you think you'll finish in terms of active agents or net effective agents by the end of the year? The hope is that we're able to end up retaining about 175, okay by the end of 2022 right understanding, some are going to leave just naturally, some are we're going to onboard and they're just not going to make it and it's a it's a sliding scale and Looking at that right, i think one of the other important things for people to understand is that 12 a month comes over the course of literally 12 months, so the production from the ones in november and december aren't going to impact 2022 right and their churn actually Isn't going to hit 2022 either correct, so net effective uh for us means like they're doing transactions just for the record for the people that are listening um. I i think about your 2022 recruiting goals more in the vein of the impact it's going to have in 2023.

Correct! That's, 100! Correct! 2023! You, you add net 75 sales. People 2023 should just be bonkers. Yes, so how do you manage um mentally emotionally people wise? Bringing on 75 net people and knowing that you're not going to get that massive lift you're going to get a serious lift in production, but some of that's going to come from the maturity of your existing teammates. You know what i mean like we all.

We get! The waves of like tier one agents, tier two agents here, three agents and how they all move the needle. How do you manage that? That's a good question, so i i actually have an answer for this, because i think this is where the retention side comes in a bit, because, if you're, not training them to do all the things that every agent wants to do, which is like take listings right, Be dominant have their own brand and that's that's the way. We've pivoted our training, so we've actually broken them up. In that we got all these options.

You need to come to one training a week, but here's all the other opportunities and it lets them further. Their business and get further because a lot of teams, they just say like here's, the buyer leads see you later right and the hardest skill. In my view, that means there's no future for me to live into other than like we've seen this i'm on a team. They sell 53 houses in their first year and they're, like i'm a rock star, i'm going to become a coach, i'm going to write a book, i'm going to lead seminars and i'm going to start my own brokerage and then they die right yep.

So you have some way to keep them yeah. Well i mean i, you know, i think, keep like you said. I think i used to write. Everyone is going to leave at some point because things happen and if they stay that's awesome and we want to make sure it's like a really great time when we get to work together and i think that's a little different than other people look at it.

I agree because they say they kind of treat it as like in and out. I just need bodies here and that's that's not us. So i'm going to say: hey, look: here's how you go list a home and here's how to go list a home and walk out the door 72 of the time with a signed contract and talk to 14 people and schedule an appointment so literally everything i learned From working with you and our coaches and my 20 years, like i'm, just we give literally everything away like people say: oh we're gon na, don't you shouldn't say that on a video or you shouldn't put that out there i just said screw it. I'm gon na say everything because most people aren't going to do it anyway right, but the ones that do and are attracted to me they're going to they're attracted to me, because i was this dominant listing agent and i i did all these things.

So why not give them everything and then that's going to elongate their time with the organization so uh, one of my clients, george, who you guys will meet you know tomorrow. If you haven't connected with them, he has like 120 sales people on his team dominant. You have 3 000 transactions, he created stepping stones, like we've talked about in the past, like for you come into my team and you're doing this, and once you get to here, you graduate to this, and then you can graduate to this, and sometimes that this is A listing agent, sometimes that's the higher end price point. Sometimes you don't mean, like so they've created that sort of scale.

So people can start here and say i want to be over there. Are you talking about? Have you done the same thing and, if so break it down, i was hoping it was that systemized to be very honest with you, um we've, we've done a couple things. We have um some things where there's like some uh incentives like when you hit a certain level of production, you can make more money by doing the same amount of business or certain lead pillars, and that's all tiered, based on like how hard they are to work Or where the lead comes from um, we have a profit share program at our team, which i think is really important, because a lot of people think well great, i'm just still making x percent yeah uh. But if they do all and look it's, it's not easy to qualify for.

You have to do all the right things that we ask people to do all the time. Can you give us an example sure, so you got to hit all your kpis in our crm. So you have to every month we measure the crm and you've got to have like a 90 percent response, give us an example yeah, but inside the inside the crm, vitals right yeah. Very it's! What's your response rate, we look for 90 plus percent on all response rates: okay, smart trips, yeah alerts, also, 90 plus percent.

You have to exemplify our values of our team. So, basically, if you're an a-hole and you're causing a lot of problems - probably i mean cultural fit is really important. I think that's anyone listening to this. If they're, not a cultural fit, just you get, you can't hire them we're going back on that.

I'm recruiting yeah, but i think that's um, there's that and then it's averaging two sales a month and hitting over eight million dollars in sales for the year. So if i do all that, i get a profit share, yep and and remember earlier, when you said sometimes i bend the standards. What do you do with the person that sold 38 and their kpis were at 80.? They don't there's no profit share, i'm leaving. Okay, i'm gon na, you know we choose the people we get to keep and i think that's where retention comes in.

Knowing what i know now. I would say a year later, roughly um and maybe even a little more than that and we can. We can bring an agent all the time at this point like and, and i choose to keep people that are in line with our values are we're. You know we're supporting them.

It's got to go both ways: they're they're good for the company and the company's good for them. It's got to be mutual. So, if someone's going to leave over that, that's okay because they saw it they signed it. One of our values is integrity, which is doing what you say you will when you say you will.

I don't see a lot of integrity and saying: can you bend the standard for me because i missed by two percent, because then what are you going to say to the other 35 40 sales people in the room? That's where you can't bend and that's when you're going to have even more attrition if people start to see that. Thank you so much for listening to this make sure you follow me on all the social channels and obviously, if you have questions you now know you can dm them on instagram facebook, twitter, probably on your tinder channel right tom, just kidding, snapchat tick, tock! No, i'm just busting your chops, all right love, you guys! Thank you! So much thanks for watching, we'll see you soon. You.