Top 5 Lessons from Interviewing Thousands of Agents with Jim Knowlton

So, I've probably done hundreds, if not thousands, of these phone calls. And there's a whole bunch of things that come up kind of over and over again. And when you asked me to make that list up, it wasn't a super hard one. So, that's what I shared with you, I guess, a week or so ago. So, what you're saying is we're all making the same mistakes. It's amazingly common, the things that we talk about. So, I got to say that, you know, it's what people bring to real estate is their entrepreneurial skills other places. So, since we all kind of do the same thing when we come here, we try to do it here. And it has a certain amount of production that ties to it. So, that's kind of how I see it anyway. So, what you're saying is that just because I'm in this price point level market or this price point level market or this geographical location, it doesn't really matter. The common themes run throughout the country.

Completely. It's funny. My wife has a, my wife is, works as part of the team primarily doing listing appointments for us. But she has a high-end buyer for us. You know, I probably have never sold anything over $700,000 or $800,000. And we have an $8,000 to $1,000,000 buyer coming in a referral from another client. And we're reading $800,000, which in New Hampshire is a boatload of money, $900,000 descriptions and single picture listings for these houses that I would, I mean, we literally listed a $60,000 trailer on a piece of land on Friday. And it had 20 pictures in it, but here's a, here's a $900,000 house with one picture and imagine what you could do. I mean, just crazy. Yeah. That's insane. Especially if your buyer pool is that small in an area of like, yeah, you would think you'd. We're not selling a lot of million, you know, again, we border Boston.

So, up and for years, Boston has been classified as a suburb of, or Manchester, as far north of New Hampshire as Manchester has been classified as a suburb of Boston. Right. So, we do okay on those, those boundary towns because we don't have income tax here. So, if you can live on this side of the boundary, it's pretty good. But anyway, so, yeah. But we, when you get up in my neck of the woods, which is central northern, you're not going to see a lot of those. Gotcha. All right. So, let's jump into our Top 5 list, shall we? Sure. What's, what's your first one? Number one is agents. And I would say a lot of times brokers not knowing what their job is. What, what would you say an agent's job is? Well, so, when we talk about it with our agents, ours, our agents' jobs are client retention and getting new clients.

And that's it. Yeah. So, if I'm on a, if I'm on a webinar or a seminar or doing something for workmen, you know, I'll say to people, well, tell me what your job is in real estate. And, and people will say it's people. People will say it's finding houses. People will say just about everything. But there's only one, you know, there, there's three key roles of any real estate position. It's, it's prospecting. It's showing properties and writing offers. Okay. Well, the problem is everybody's got the second two. Okay. But they forget number one, because if you're, if you're a car salesman, people walk in the door, advertising, marketing, whatever it is. You're a, you're a motorcycle salesman, a boat salesman. You know, I have done, I've never done cars, but I have done motorcycles and boats. I mean, I didn't have to find my people.

It was the, it was the efforts of the ownership that brought my people in. Totally different here, which is if we don't prospect, we don't make it. Yeah, absolutely. And so, it's that old, you know, it's that old saying, if you don't list, you don't last. The reason is, is when you list, you put a sign in the ground that gives you advertising. You turn into, you know, somebody that now has put a message out to the world. I mean, you can have a great buyer business, but if you have a buyer business that's secret, you're not going to have a very good business. So, so the number one thing that we don't do in the business, and this causes so many other problems, which is I was talking to a lady today on a welcome call. And she said to me, yeah, I don't like to work with retail people. And I said, why not? And she said, because they just aren't a fit for me. And I said, well, that's typically a symptom of not prospecting enough.

Because if you, if you want to do three or four houses in a month and you prospect enough to have three chance Browns, where you're going to have good people that are intelligent, that listen, going to ask wise questions, going to kind of do what you're directing them to do based on your experience. Well, you'd love to do three chance Browns, but you, you don't want three of me. That's going to argue with you and tell you all the things you're doing wrong. So if I prospect to the right point, I have the right people. And therefore I'm going to have a much better experience. So not knowing their job causes, causes a lot more problems than not just having people it's working with the wrong people, which is exceptionally painful. Right. And I, you know, one of the things that we're experiencing now, especially with as hot a market as it is, I mean, we're having to take prospecting to a whole new level, which is, Hey, if I could get you way more money than you think you could get on your house, would you think about moving?

I mean, it's just, it's totally different than to the, you know, routine 26, 31 point systems, stuff like that, that we, that we teach. This is like, you know, out on a street corner with a sign, like we'll work for listings or something, you know, it's just crazy. Well, it's true on the other side too. Let's talk about the buyer side of that. So we're enticing sellers by saying we're going to do, we're going to, we're going to do subject to suitable housing. We're going to give you, you know, six months in the house for free. I mean, we're coming up with all sorts of ways to get them to do it, but on the buy side, you know, we used to have a saying at work, man, that, you know, we said we have our a clients, which are people that are ready, willing, and able, and they're going to be under contract in 30 to 45 days. Well, on my team and with my coaching clients, what I'm telling them is you have a clients and then you have a ready clients and an a ready client in my primary market conquered the capital of New Hampshire, you're going to be spending between 15 and $35,000 over list price in the first two days with very simple, if any inspections.

And if you're not willing to play in that game between two 35 and three 50, let's say, excuse me, you're not competitive. And we need to not go look at stuff because, um, we, we were actually up in Maine and one of the agents called us on Friday night. I think it wasn't somebody that Deb had started with and said, Hey, we're going to put in a full price offer with 6,000 back. I know the seller, I probably sold him 30 houses. I said, you're not, you know, it's not looking. So we had this long conversation, made perfect sense. Yup. I get it. You know, they put in the offer the way they did with the, with the team member. And he said, I, I'm sorry, I can't do anything. And I said, I completely get it. So they, they weren't, they weren't an a ready buyer. They were an a buyer. Right. So, yeah, so, so qualifying and understanding the, the, the need of the client is more important than it's ever been on both sides because you're not going to get a second chance.

Exactly. So number one is not knowing your job, knowing our job is prospecting, right? Correct. All right. So number two, failing to plan equals planning to fail. So let's talk about planning, shall we? People love it. Don't they just sit down and pull together some numbers, talk about what may happen. Well, so we're recording this in October. October is the time when all the brokers put together their business planning stuff. We're about to launch ours today. Then we're going to have business planning towards the end of the month for 2021. And for most people, it's maybe a good inventory. It's a good check, right? It's a, oh, this is what I want to do next year.

But then, like every other New Year's resolution in the world, by February, it's gone. Right. So how do you make a plan stick? And so is that wishful belt that you bought around February too, you know? Right, exactly. You're currently wearing the wishful belt. Yes. So interesting. It sounded like we put this together. And I will say on the record that we didn't. But leading up to this, I decided that we needed to give you some help on some of this. So what I did is, if they go to workmansuccess.com backslash, whichever way that is, CBGym. Okay. Workmansuccess.com backslash CBGym. In there, they can register and receive our full business planning packet. Okay. So how we do that is, and it's free, there's no cost or obligation.

But what we have is the business plan, even from since I've known you three or four years, started out being just the business plan. Then we had the income goal spreadsheet. We had the strategic plan. We had all these other things that were add-ons. Well, last year, we actually updated the document and put them all together. Okay. So that's now a comprehensive document from one, three, and six month, one, three, and five year strategic plan. What is our core values? What are our actual numbers? What's our SWOT? What's, so it's everything. The reason it's so important is, and it's funny because things kind of go in cycles with me, is the, I've done two calls this week with people who have recently bought major franchises, major real estate franchises as brokers that have no idea how brokers make money.

I said to a lady today, that's a fantastic idea, but I really think you should put a prospectus behind it because I don't see any way it's going to make money. And she's like, well, explain to me. And I said, well, you know, we have these metrics for what a brokerage agent makes. We have these metrics for what a team member makes. We have this. And I said, you know, it just doesn't make sense. We got to go back and look at this. And she's brand new to us. So we haven't, you know, she just came to us with this. So it's amazing to me how you can invest all of this money. I mean, I know what my franchise costs. And I mean, they make you go through that process. But there's other franchises that are very expensive that just say, give me your money. Here's all the stuff we're going to give. Same is true of agents. You don't have an income goal spreadsheet. If you don't know your weighted averages in your market, if you don't know how many transactions you need to do a month in order to make your numbers, if you don't know how many calls you have to make to get those appointments, you're basically, you know, you're just waiting for the wind to blow that you need it to.

And that's just, again, that's not prospecting. And that's not a purposeful business. That's probably an entrepreneurial business. Right. So when we're training our new agents, you know, when I'm talking to our trainers, the people who are actually our coaches for our new licensees, they're going through Workman's Ramp Program. Yeah, my entire focus when it comes to training agents is habit creation. Because if you want to take it from that entrepreneurial to that purposeful, it's those little daily disciplines that are repeated over time that lead to success. And, you know, I think my agents probably get tired of hearing me say little daily disciplines repeated over time equals success.

But the truth of the matter is, when we've got these new licensees in our training program, we've got them coming in to do classes, we've got them coming in to have accountability sessions with their mentor, things like that. But when they graduate from that program, we don't. And so our whole goal is with that business planning worksheet because they have to come to a debrief with me before they're allowed to go out into the real world. But when they do that, we hammer that business plan workbook. And it is all about now that you don't have this accountability meeting every week, are you going to get up and go to work? Are you going to get up and sit on the couch and watch the view and then go meet somebody for lunch and then come back and maybe take a little nap before the kids get off the bus? And next thing you know, you've worked for 30 minutes today.

Well, first of all, I don't know if you've, you know, cracked into my wise cameras or what, since you described my day today already. That was pretty good. Yeah, you know, it amazes me the number of people that have sizable businesses that have absolutely no idea where their money is coming from. They have no idea whether they're going to do it next year. They don't know what they made last month or so far this year. And that, you know, we were talking, actually, I was on the phone with Burl before I got on with you, and we were talking about some training we're doing. And one of the things we're talking about is that the reason for a business plan, the reason for key business numbers is that we can compare the two of them. Because we're in the ninth, tenth month, I guess, now, just barely. We have probably two productive months left. We'll carry some of December stuff if it's quick, right?

But effectively, if I look back on my key business numbers for my coaching clients, I can now get a nine-month average. I can divide that out, and then I can actually predict the last three months. And I should be pretty close, but I should have known at six months, at nine months, against my business plan, if I have strategic plan items going on. You know, a really cool thing, Chance, is when we see people that are very proactive with their strategic plan, they typically do things at half the time. So you say, in one month, I want to have my top 50 and four contact SOI plan up and running, right? Well, when you write it down at one month, you're probably going to have it done in two months. We've had two people, two coaches at workmen that said they wanted to open a satellite office within three years. Both of them did it in less than 18 months.

Once we put it to paper, we have the power of that commitment to ourselves, and it causes amazing things. So failing to plan does equal planning to fail because, again, if you don't need it, if you don't know it takes 36 transactions to break even, then you're going to find that out when you do 34. Right. Exactly. Awesome. Okay. So we've had not knowing your job, failure to plan is planning to fail. Number three? Overlooking the path to success, people who know, like, and trust me. So it's really funny, I can't tell you how many people who told me their training program, unlike yours, is the phone book, is the, you know, like you said, the sandwich board on the side of the street. But if you look at the seven levels of communication, if you look at the top 50 plan that we preach at Workman, you know, it's really about identifying a very small group of people, getting into relationship with them.

I didn't say anything about asking them for anything, it's getting into relationship with them, and then staying in touch and doing what you say forever. And then once a year, we rebalance that list. And the goal of the program is with 50 people getting one meaningful contact a month, the goal is 86 sides referred, 50 closed. Now, I don't know the numbers nationally, but I can tell you for all the people that I do welcome calls with, it is probably less than 10 or 15% of the people that are over 50 units in production. Sure. So, it would seem like, it would seem like this one very small program could make a huge impact on 85% of the agents, yet even when given it with two different action schedules, a very simple dialogue to use, the vast majority of people will not change those small habits, like you said, because typically it's fear of rejection is what really does it.

It's hard. You know what's funny? If you challenge people to do it once, once a day, after about three calls, they realize people like them too, and the next thing you know, they're off to the races. It's just getting them out of that comfort zone for the first few times. So, we've been trying to do that. God help us if the first guy goes off the deep end, though, and lets you out, because you're never going to go back again. So, we've been trying to do that here this year by having call nights, like old school, ordering some pizza, bring your own bottle of wine, whatever, and let's just sit down and call people together and debrief and talk about it. And the recurring theme through these, even in the heart of COVID, we did one in May, even during that time period, the recurring theme was, well, that was a lot easier than I thought it was going to be.

That wasn't nearly as scary as I thought. I'm like, now, can we just do that every single day, please? And the worst part is, we're asking them to call people that they already know and like. Right. And you'll get people that come in that will hustle, you know, very low. So, 40, 50 to 1, 12-month contacts, they might get something, but they will not call a person that likes them just as much, because they're so afraid they're going to say boo to them. Right? Right. And, you know, I think that it's far easier, and I will tell you, you know, I'll be the first to admit, I have recruiters in my business, because I am not good on the phone. I'm just not. I'll sit here and do this face-to-face with you. I'll sit at the table and talk with you all day long. But on the phone, I sound like a seventh grader asking a girl to the dance for the very first time.

It is not good. And so, it's the easiest thing in the world for me to say, okay, I'm not going to make that call today, because I need to do this. Way less meaningful nonsense. I need to update our Facebook group, or, you know, whatever that is. When the reality is, if I would just make that one call, I'd have plenty of time to do this other thing, too, except I would have led with revenue. So, Sarah Gouldy would say that's a great limiting belief you just kicked out there, that you can't do it, Chance, but we know that we can choose to either learn it, or we can choose to leverage it. And if I'm not going to learn it well, because it just isn't something comfortable, what I found is really good is giving people a perspective, right? Because we know that their fear is that someone they like is going to reject them. So, I'll often say to people, I'll say, hey, listen, can you agree, Chance, that most people not working in your brokerage or my brokerage, you know, they really aren't that good at their job?

Yes. They don't return phone calls. They don't kind of do the basics that they should. Would you agree with that? I would. And most of them are in it for the paycheck. They don't really try to represent their client. What they try to do is get it to closing so they can get a paycheck. Sure. So, what you're saying to me, Chance, is you'd rather have your friend, your family member, your whoever, go work with this person because you're afraid that they're going to say they don't like you. You know, the worst case scenario is they say we really have a policy we don't work with people we know, and that's fantastic because I have a short list of referral agents I know will do as good a job as I will. Exactly. That is the biggest one they'll get caught on is, and again, that's an objection. Any objection is meant to slow the process down. That's why it's an objection. But I just say, oh, that's fantastic. I have Heather in my office. She's as good as I am, and she's not family. We can be sure we're taking care of you, and I'll know what's going on.

Yeah. And I think when you reframe the, you know, I'm in one of the largest MLSs in the country. We have over 40,000 Realtors that are primary members of the Houston Association of Realtors. Now, I can tell you without question that at least half of those probably aren't very good, right? And that could be a training issue. It could just be that they're hobbyists, that they just don't pay attention, that they think it's going to look just like it is on HGTV and be easy money, and it's not. But, yeah, the way we always try to frame it is, do you want that person helping your friend? Or do you want to be the one helping your friend? Because you know what the heck you're doing. Yeah, I always laugh that part of the reason we have Ramp, which is an amazing program that we just rolled out last year, it's probably the most comprehensive in the industry right now.

And I don't say that because I'm a workman. I just say it because it's such a good program. You know, the fact is, most people don't know their job, they don't know what they're doing, and they just go do whatever's best for them. And that's not what we want for our friends and family. So, you know, again, we've got to understand that this is a limiting belief that we have. And the entire purpose of top 50 is to get in relationship. And what I mean by that is I would not call Chance and talk to him and then degrade the conversation by saying, oh, by the way, do you happen to know anybody interested in buying, selling, or investing in real estate? I would do family, occupation, recreation, and dreams. It's funny. I have in my coaching group a guy that's been with us almost as long as the company has been under this name, which is five or six years. He's probably our best person at actually going to people's houses and doing creative things.

However, he's got one of our lowest conversion rates because he has this old sales mentality. And I know every time he steps on the porch to leave, he says, oh, by the way, if you happen to know anybody, it takes the validity or the credibility away from the fact that I'm there to be your friend. It turns into a sales call. Yeah. And you know that if you just stand on that step as you're leaving long enough and don't make it a little bit uncomfortable, they're going to first say, hey, well, tell me about the weather. Oh, crazy, all these storms we've been having. And then the next thing you're going to say, if you're a little bit quiet, is they're going to say, tell me about work. And you're going to say, work is amazing. Last year, I got to help 57 families. My goal this year is to help 80. Yep. What does it mean? What does it mean to help a person? Lady on a call today. We found a family that was going to be foreclosed on. We could get their house sold. We sold it to an investor who was able to clean it up and then sold that house to a first-time buyer who was happy.

We helped two families meet their needs. And we just did it because we found somebody that needed help. That's it. It's that easy, right? Yeah. Hey, we should just do that, right? That sounds like a good plan. But, yeah, the funny thing is you brought up a good point, and it's something that I try to train sometimes when I'm talking to people who get it and are a little more advanced. This is not probably something I would train to a brand-new licensee. But sometimes your very best sales move is just to shut your damn yap. Just be quiet and let them fill the void. I think, you know, it's funny. I always think about the journey, especially good lead agents go on. And, you know, I think back to my journey. You know, in the beginning, I was so excited to be in real estate.

It's something I believed in. I was really good at it. I got to be the number one agent in my state, which is the equivalent of being a number one agent in a town anywhere else. But I had so much stuff happening, and then I started telling the story about my volume and what I did and how many people worked here. And I stopped talking about the things that truly got me interested, right? And so it had an effect on my business. I defined who I was by what I did for work, not how I helped others. And as I kind of stuck my toe back in real estate a little bit, as you said, I'm kind of busy between my two full-time jobs. But I do try to really focus on the fact that we make a difference in a lot of people's lives here in the office. We find people, because our team members do work full-time, they do really do a good job of having ABC boards and all that stuff. If we start with you, unless you cut us loose, we're going to find you a house, the one you want in the time it takes.

And I think that's a huge thing, because I think a lot of people, I think there's a lot of people, especially in this current market, that should buy with the rates what they are. And because they can't find somebody to truly represent them and tell them the right story, so they understand the process, they're just not going to get a house. And it's unfortunate. I wish I could buy another house right now, because the rates are so good that I would just love to get one more in the queue. But it's just crazy right now. In our brokerage, we have a saying, it's do four, not two. Do four people, not two people, create great experiences, that kind of thing. But it really comes from sort of this servant leadership perspective, right? This service before opportunity, this going out, and we're here to help people. And I don't think that agents, because we get caught up in the minutia of the day, right?

I've got to call this title company. I've got to go through this. I've got to do this, whatever. I don't think that we do a good job as an industry of just taking a step back for a second and saying, you know, what we do for a living is powerful. I mean, we are the protectors and the purveyors of the American dream of homeownership. And that is incredible responsibility. And that's what we need to be conveying more of. And do you remember when you and I started probably around the same time, and you would sit at the closing table, and the interest would be three times the purchase price or two times the purchase price? Absolutely. Now it is significantly less than the purchase price. And I mean, we thought that was fine when it was 6%, 7%. I'm not even going to tell the story. It was 21%. It just wasn't when I did this. But, you know, 6% or 7% I thought was a good deal.

You know, oh, you snuck down into 6% as opposed to 7.25%. You'd made it, right? Right. And now we're, what, 2.75%. How are you not helping every person you know secure their future? I mean, just look at the net worth of people who own a home, even just one, versus those who don't. I mean, it's a powerful mindset because you prepare differently. It's kind of like, it's kind of like your financial plan or your, your, your, your, your, your, your, just now I can think of it. It's kind of like your year of planning, which is if you do it, you have different reactions to the stimulus you get when you own a house. You have a different reaction to the fact that, yes, it might be a good idea to save two months of reserves. Yes, it might be a good idea to paint that door and it just gives you a different outcome. Absolutely. All right.

So that's three down, two to go. Number four is. You're going to love this one because we were talking about it before we started taping. And my number four is not focusing on money-making activities. What do you call it? Getting ready to get ready. That's what we call it. We call it distraction and chasing the shiny coin. Or whatever you want to call it. But I literally just published a video this morning on getting ready to get ready. So one of the funny, one of the funny things is, is I'm going through my welcome call, which is how I spent a good portion of my day. I get to this section and I say, if I told you that you need to be productive for about three hours a day in real estate and you can have a really good, good business, would you like to know what those three hours are?

Everybody's like, oh yeah, don't you tell me? Well, hour number one is spent doing three top 50 tasks every day. Okay, so when I'm a new agent, a slow agent, I'm going to do three face-to-face. When I'm busier, I'm going to do three different contacts, but I'm going to do them every day. One face-to-face, one note card or letter of value, and then one forward call. All of the information is going to be recorded in my CRM. And before I'm done, I'm going to schedule the next activity. I'm building a habit. The second thing I'm going to do for an hour every day is I'm going to do my ABC board. So let's just say it's the second week of the month. I have 30 people I have to call over the five days. I'm going to call six a day instead of all 30 of them on Friday, which I know I won't do. And then the last thing that I'm going to do every day is I'm going to do my daily success habits, which is a matrix of points for outbound contact.

Now, if you think about it, about 60% of your business should come from your top 50 SOI. And I'm spending 33% of my time actually working with that group. The second group, ABCs, are people who've expressed an interest to buy and sell with me between today and two years from now. I just need to maintain them correctly. And then daily success habits is bringing new people into our orbit. If I don't bring new people in, people are going to get divorced. They're going to move away and they're going to die. And my great business five years ago could be next to nothing today. Now, for those of us with brokerages or teams that are growing, I add a fourth hour, which is the same three items, top 50, ABC, and daily success habits, except in 20 minutes for talent instead of listings.

So 20 minutes for the top 50 agents that I have for my company, 20 minutes for the ABCs of people that have expressed interest, but I haven't cleared their objection, and 20 minutes a day to add new people to that database. If you're productive for these three hours, Chance, what happens is all the stuff you do after lunch is actually servicing these three things. And you can be much more creative and don't feel like you have to be in a box with your blinders on all the time. All right. So let's walk back through those three things. The first hour is where we're working the top 50. So we've already talked about top 50 in this, or sphere of influence or whatever the people most likely to refer business to you, whoever those people are, right? Right. So we, to me, that's the foundation if we're building a house, right?

So the second thing is going to your ABCs. Correct. So to me, more than anything, that's making sure that nobody falls through the cracks. Completely. You know, I hate it when one of my agents comes to me and says, you know, I've been working with these people and all of a sudden they went into this new home construction model this weekend and bought a house without me, or they visited an open house. And I was like, well, when was the last time that you talked to them? Oh, it's probably been about, you know, four, three, four weeks. And I'm like, okay. And we sit down and we have a conversation about classifying people as A, B, and C and how we follow up with them. But the whole idea of that is these people have raised their hand. They're ready. It may not be the right time. It may not, they may need to work on credit or whatever, but they're ready to do something.

And it's my job to make sure that they don't go do that with someone else. And that's that regular follow-up. Who we've already did, who already decided is not going to do as good a job as we are. Right. And then the third one is what I like to call avoiding the plateau. Because we see it happen all the time where a new agent comes in and they make, you know, let's say $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 their first year. And then the second year that goes up. And then third year, they hit that, I've made $100,000. And then over time, you start to see that income just kind of plateau. And frankly, it's because they're not talking to enough strangers. They're just not. They need to go out and meet people and grow the sphere so that that foundation gets bigger. Yeah. And again, it goes back to that discussion.

In the beginning, we have so much opportunity. We have so much enjoyment. What we thought was going to happen is often better than what we thought a lot of times. And it turns out to be that we get smart, right? I tell people all the time, I can't have my team members run their business the way I do. I mean, because I really put a very high bar on being productive. But I also have, you know, three or four other streams of income. And I know exactly what my number here is. And I want to make sure I make it. But it doesn't matter to me if I make one more dollar than that. That's right. And so what happens is we start getting, and especially at smaller times where you are going to have that divorce, that death, and that move away. You know, let's just say your top 50 goes from 50 down to 35. That's a big hit on your ratios.

And again, you know, we know that these things are going to happen. You know, in your area where you've got oil and gas, you've got all sorts of stuff. And when that market shifts, I've had coaching clients in your market that had the best buy years ever and the best sales years. And on the other side, those people were dying. And because they didn't have relationships, so people weren't coming in and going with them, they may have only had one side of the market. And when that market, you know, one of the things that I'm proudest about for my team is we've invested heavily in top 50 events, SYNC and Boomtown. We run all of them. And my people have probably in SYNC or Boomtown, hundreds of people that are ready. Like ready. Some of them are the, I don't want to be in competitive situations. Some of them are just not there yet. But the fact is when my team gets houses to sell, they are going to be in a really, really good place.

And I tell them, just meet your minimum goal today because I'm going to tell you like every market, I can't tell you when it's going to happen, but I'm going to tell you when it does. These relationships you've built are going to be so powerful. Absolutely. I mean, I would tell you if nothing has shown us that the power of relationships, it's this whole COVID thing this year is how much we really do need that kind of bond together. Because getting isolated or feeling, you know, being isolated has just been, it's been, I think it's just been terrible for people's mental health and emotional states and everything else. And in some cases your liver, but you know. Yeah, exactly. I, it's really funny. I have a team very well established. Actually, I think he's one of the longest real, real estate professionals in our group. And he's one of my coaching clients.

And I'm going to, I'm going to say not the best at what we do, meaning doesn't really bring in new systems and uses it doesn't, you know, doesn't really engage well, but they try to make small changes every day. And what's really funny is last year we missed a million dollars GCI by literally like $57,000 like we were there. And as of right now, we've booked 1.3 something, and it looks like it's going to be a $1.5 million year. And what I, what I said is we re we really need to look at this and understand what we did differently. Okay. Cause this is a very established, very well known in their community guy. And what I, what I noticed is the only thing we did differences for the six months of COVID every month, we sent out a different card. That was fun, had a little gift of value and just said, we're thinking of you.

We did when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. And this is them, not me. I want to say too, we did sunflower seeds. We did the ketchup, mustard and relish drop off. We did all of these things. You're talking almost a half million dollars for being nice to people. That's incredible. But that's the power of that top 50, the power of that relation, that foundation of your business is you just have to execute on it. So after 30 years, Chance, he said to me, I've had him, you might even been at the coach training. It was way, way back when we used them as a case study. I've, I've had this guy for five or six years. And he said to me on last week's call, as we're kind of digging out these final numbers for the year, he said to me, you know, when I, when I started this, he goes, I didn't think I could make a million dollars. When I started working with you, I didn't think we could make a million dollars.

He goes, now we're going to make a million five. And he says, what do I have to do to make 2 million? And the reason is, is once you've built the scale, you're just adding inputs into it. You know, when, when we get a new agent that says, I want to do half million dollars, it's absolutely possible, but it's absolutely easier to do 200, then do 400, then do 800, because the steps in the beginning are about learning new skills. The steps later are about executing and holding lines. Okay. So it's really kind of interesting to look at a guy that's been doing this for 30 years, you break his first boundary. And all of a sudden it's like, Hey, maybe I should listen to that top 50 stuff, or maybe I should, I've done this on just hard work and being a great agent. What would happen if I listened to the other stuff? Exactly. All right. So that brings us up to our last point.

Number five. Not recognizing when and where to add leverage to your business. All right. Walk us through what that looks like. So what we have found through our people is that most agents are going to stall out between about 25 and 35 transactions. If you get an agent, individual agent without support doing more than 35, they're like a super person. Okay. They just, in order to prospect, in order to do file maintenance, in order to do showings, in order to do follow-up, in order to do all this stuff, you kind of run out between 25 and 30. I would say 25 and 30. 25 and 35 is probably possible. Now, the first level of support is going to be some type of a transactional support. Now, interestingly, I had a lady today that had just added a transaction coordinator and they were $3.75 a person.

She did just under 40 transactions. So she had $14,000 on the table. And I said, at $14,000 on the table, you need somebody for four hours a day, not somebody just doing your transactions. Add somebody for your birthday cards. Add somebody for your house anniversary cards. Get this person doing the things you're not doing. Okay. The other thing I love to say is, go ahead. I just want to interrupt you on that for a second. I am a believer and people look at me cross-eyed sometimes when I say this, but I am a believer that whether you're doing two or three transactions or you're doing two or 300, an agent should never be doing transaction coordination. Our personalities, especially those of us that are going to go on to do bigger things, our personalities are not wired to do paperwork well.

Right. I mean, hey, in 2012, I did nearly 100 transactions by myself and it nearly killed me. I mean, genuinely nearly killed me. And that's why I decided to open a brokerage instead of continuing doing that because my wife was going to go, take the kids. I mean, I look back at pictures of 2012 and I was gray while the rest of the world was in color because I was that unhealthy. But the truth of the matter is, what I learned very, very quickly when we opened the brokerage and I actually had support was that, man, I wish I had done this years before. Man, I could have done, I could have sold more. I could have been happier. I could have, you know, all these things. And I hear these agents that are, you know, doing a million, $2 million in GCI and they're working less than when they were doing $200,000.

Yeah. You know, it's funny. I was forced in the very beginning. So I came, believe it or not, to the same office I'm in, which was a big general brokerage back then, dominant agent, assistant. You came to work floor time. I came to this office, that's where I started and I moved from here and I actually took a client with me with the permission of my broker. I came in and said, I had gotten a option one file while I was here on duty and I had gotten ready to do it and I decided to leave. And I walked in and said to my broker, hey, I've got this in transaction, I'm working on it now. I said, it's yours if you want to keep it. She goes, oh no, no, we're not going to touch any of that bank stuff. That's horrible. And I said, okay, I'll take it with me. Well, option one went on to be the number one subprime lender in the world. And they kept me busy for the next 10 years for the tune of 150 to 160 listings a year plus another 100 buy side.

So we did pretty well for a while. But anyway, when I left here and went to my next brokerage, it wasn't much longer that I realized I need somebody because it was such a paperwork heavy business that I did. And then at the peak of mine, I had three people. We were probably managing at any time 100 to 150 properties. We had another 100 in actual active sales or whatever. And I just knew that that wasn't me. That's not what I could do. I like to say, and no one ever gets this analogy. They like it, but they never get it. Have you ever driven down a road and seen a sign for a water, like a water filtration company and the guy's drinking water out of a cup and it's got a little black stuff in it. And it says, if you don't have a water filter, you are a water filter and it all ends up in his stomach. I can't believe no one's seen this, but it's really something clearly I'm the only one that's ever seen it.

Well, that's what it is when you're an agent. And if you don't have an assistant, you are an assistant. So the other thing that happens is we have built a pretty good business where Chance, we're doing 100 transactions a year and we realized that we could run some buyer business off, which is not the way the model should work. But let's just say that's how we're doing it because we're not going about this the right way. So what I do is I hire an assistant who's now or an agent who's now doing their side of it. What does that do? It doubles the workload on my Chance admin. So what I did is because Chance didn't have an assistant, he was an assistant. So I actually am going to drop Chance's production down even more by taking $12 to $15 an hour and doing it for someone else that hopefully I'm on at least the 50-50 net split with, which a lot of times we know we're not. Right, exactly.

And when I was at that point and I knew I needed help, I knew that I needed it, I had two big fears. The first fear was I don't feel like I have enough work to employ this person and keep them having something to do. And then the second fear was I don't have the time to take out of my business to train that person. Those things sound familiar to you? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Necessity is the mother of invention. And if you said to me, if I had grown like a regular normal agent, you know, from 20 to 30, 30 to 40, would I have ever done it? I don't know. But when you go from none to 50, you learn pretty quickly there's not a lot you can do. But, you know, the problem is we hire wrong. I was very fortunate to be with some really good people in the beginning of my career.

And, you know, some things you need to think about hiring is, first of all, you're not making a lifelong commitment. You're going into it with the best of intentions. You hope that things are going to work out a certain way. But the fact is, is that we're just going to try to see if it works. That's number one. Number two, there's almost no time if you hire correctly, which is slowly. You train correctly, which is slowly. And you give a person a good value fit. We hired based on value, not on skills. If I have a good value with a person that can learn, it's unlikely it's not going to work. And I will guarantee you that the cost of whatever this person is, which, again, like I said, is mostly between about $12 to $15 an hour. So I would say for most of these, for an individual agent or a small team, are going to be $23,000 to $33,000 positions. In most markets, that's going to be four or five transactions.

I will guarantee you birthday cards, house anniversary cards, doing eight or 10 events, being more involved in the community, doing some better social media postings. I will guarantee you that gets you double that all day long. Which, oh, by the way, now that you actually have somebody doing all that for you, you're probably going to get four or five more transactions just because you're actually doing the stuff you're supposed to have been doing all along. So yeah, how about that? Self-fulfilling prophecy there. If you have your assistant sitting on there watching whose dog is sick on Facebook, watching whose kid just got engaged, doing birthdays, doing house adversaries, picking up on a little something that looks cool that day, 10 is the minimum. I mean, it really is. Right, right. Awesome. Other forms of leverage?

TC, admin? Absolutely. Showing assistants, all those. Yeah. So transaction coordinators I love, especially in the early stages, so I can focus on that. But you're going to find, again, when you break that 25 to 35, you probably have a position there. Very, very lean teams that want to keep it really skinny. So maybe I've got a buyer's agent, an assistant, and a showing assistant. A showing assistant is a way to capture more of the commission for the lead agent and keep a tighter handle on the actual management of specific clients, maybe high-end clients, maybe very specific buyers, that kind of thing. Runners are another big leverage. How many people are out there pulling their own lockboxes, putting their own signs out? Photographers, again, I got to tell you, I don't know how iPhone made such good cameras, but I have some pretty horrid houses, and they look pretty decent when I snap pictures with them.

But in the right things that we were talking about before, higher-end houses, absolutely. I was shocked to learn, Chance, that in COVID, when COVID started at Workman, we added a group coaching call to our individuals. So we typically do two individuals. We started doing an off-week group. And the thing that was most amazing to me is out of my 10 coaching clients that I never heard the word Matterport in the previous three to five years, that next call, I had 10 people who own Matterport cameras and took them out of the closet. Absolutely. So the funny thing is, I'm an instructor, right? So I teach for the Texas Association of Realtors, for REBAC, for HAR. And for a decade, we've been trying to get agents to use video. And it only took a global pandemic to actually get people to come in and say, oh, yeah, this isn't as bad as I thought it was going to be, just like when calling and prospecting.

Well, and here's the thing. If you do it correctly, right, the entire purpose of having a listing, and so that we talked about, is that we can leverage it for one and a half buyers. We're going to represent our client to the end. We're going to get the best price in terms for them. But the fact is, is we know that the metric is one and a half buyers per listing. Now, the fallback target and dream goal is one, 1.52. So when I'm amazing, I can get two. Well, how does that happen? It happens because the day before the listing goes live, I do an anchor and reporter open house on it for content. So basically, you're my reporter. I sit here back at the desk. You go, hey, look at this beautiful couch with an hand on it. This kitchen, pretty cool, huh? Look at all this stuff. Self-closing doors. We go through it and we just do it as an anchor interviewer and we just go through the house.

That is then posted live with the actual listing and can be used for the first two or three days with COVID showings where everyone would prefer to jump them together on a Saturday and Sunday, leave town, and then come back and ozone their house before they go in it, right? Then I also have content. Then I also have content, both the virtual tour and the tour that Chance did. I have content which can be used other places. That's how I go from 1.5 to 2 is just doing it. And one of the coolest things about COVID, and there's been a lot of not cool things, but one of the coolest things about COVID is it taught us all the things that those cutting-edge brokerages were going to kill us on. We already knew how to do. We were just too lazy to do it. And whatever we were doing before and whatever we're doing now, we have to do together for the future. That's just the way it is. That's it. I mean, I was talking about this today at lunch with a title person and we were kind of talking about what sticks after COVID's gone and we get back to quote unquote normal.

And to me, I think that this final adoption of video and of online tech and Zoom and things like that, I think it's created efficiencies in our business that we just were there and we just didn't exploit. I think it creates a better experience for our clients. I was telling them at lunch, I don't know that unless the client required it because maybe they weren't tech savvy or they just needed somebody to come sit down with them. I don't know that I would do a listing appointment or a buyer consultation in person anymore because I can do them so much better on Zoom. Yeah, I remember there was an agent in Vermont who was with me on some stuff with my franchise, very high level stuff we were doing with the actual franchise. And he was one of the first people that started having people come in to do listing appointments.

And I thought, that is pretty smart. They showed up. There was a TV screen. Welcome, Chance Brown. Had a picture of their house. Come on in. We can't wait for you. Coffee. Set up everything on screen so that they could see their house, their competitor's house, maps. It's probably 10 times better than doing it for real. And then all we're going to agree here is that we're going to work together. Then we're going to go out at the house, look at the final few things and decide on a price. But right now, let's not worry about the price. Let's just decide this is the best place for you to get your house listed. Yeah. I just think we can do it so much better online. So awesome. Jim, I want to thank you. I feel like we covered way more than five topics. I think we snuck some others. We just got some bonus content in here, didn't we? I think we did. So thank you for taking the time out of your day. I know you're busy to talk with me today. It's been great having you on. Thank you for watching.

And we will be back in a couple of weeks with another episode of Top 5. Have a great afternoon. Thank you.