Top 5 Tips for New Agents with Trevin Oberkrom

[Music] welcome back to Top 5 my name is chance brown i'll be your host for today joining me is trevon obergram with CB&A Realtors we are going to talk a little bit this is your first time uh watching a Top 5 this is a place where we have subject matter expert in the real estate industry or business world come and just kind of share their Top 5 best practices of what's helped them build their business become an expert in what they do so i've asked trevin here today because in a relatively short amount of time inside of his brokerage he has gone from really a brand new agent to continuous top producer and so we want to talk to him a little bit about what helped him build his business but first let's get to know trevin trevin introduce yourself tell us a little bit about you how you got into real estate what what'd you do before those kind of things uh i have been in real estate since 2017 the latter part of the year i think i got my license in october i came from a lot of different backgrounds honestly i'm actually a second generation Realtor my parents were in it in the late 70s and 80s in kansas city and denver and moved around and ended up in dfw which is how i got into texas and um i just tried to find my own path i didn't want to follow down and be the same as my dad i wanted to do my own thing i got into the corporate world working in a large manufacturing company in dfw for about eight or nine years and then i was in the television production world uh for seven before i got into real estate i was producing tv shows for the outdoor industry and the commercial market things like that they just kind of tapered off as the internet became more popular and the on-demand stuff became more popular and i knew that i needed to be proactive and find something that was going to give me some longevity and not get caught in a bad scenario i guess if you want to put it that way but once upon a time you literally just hunted and fished it 115 right all over the country yeah it wasn't it was not a bad gig seriously that didn't suck so cool so you got into the industry you didn't know much about real estate you had a marketing background which helps always right absolutely uh but what were some of the things let's just start in on your Top 5 here some of the things that really kind of helped you build from zero to now almost every month you're in the top producers list here um i would say probably the biggest thing for me is i'm very driven and i'm not somebody that really has to be micromanaged i hold myself accountable but i'm also super humble to the fact that i know that when i first got into this i was a sponge i wanted to literally ask questions from everybody that was where i wanted to be and i was humble enough to say hey i'm a nobody what can you tell me yeah and i would take any little baby tidbit whether it was this small or this big uh and try and take something from it and put it into into play as quickly as i could and i really just did that for my first probably six months in the business was just trying to be here in this office every solitary second that i could my mentor at the time he was like look uh you're not going to do any good sitting on your couch go be around people that are productive that are doing what you want to do that you can just be around it and have the energy around you and so i i did i tried to spend as much time here as i could i had people that i could ask questions to that they're pushing me kind of giving me that that drive and that was one of the biggest contributing factors for me at the very beginning so surrounding yourself by people who are where you want to be and kind of just learning from what they're doing you know the interesting thing about that is i did exactly the opposite until i hired a coach who told me to go hang out with Realtors i was like i don't want to hang out with Realtors why the hell would i want to hang out with Realtors it's not going to buy a house from me and he's like no dummy because you can go and you can learn and you can see what the best in the industry are doing and that's when i started getting involved in real estate stuff uh outside of just trying to sell people home and it's it's driven it's you know it's the old parallel of iron sharpens iron when you see what the best are doing you learn from it uh you know i was emailing earlier with chris smith with curator and you know chris had a blog back in 2007 through 10 or something like that that was the tech savvy agent because it was an industry that didn't have a whole lot of tech savviness for sure you know you think back then like zillow had just really become a thing there just wasn't a lot of of tech and chris was at the forefront of the night store everything i could from so whether it was yeah absolutely so whether it was you know somebody that i was working with inside of like h.a.r or something because i didn't have a big brokerage to go into uh or it was finding people online who just had great ideas and stealing the [ __ ] out of them making their own absolutely so surrounding yourself with with the people you you want to be like and learning from them that's that's first on the list yeah what else number two really for me is once i got pretty comfortable in the real estate world and necessarily what i was up against every day whether it was on the buyer side seller side uh prospecting whatever that was i tried to just be who i thought the industry thought i was so my dad right he was in real estate he was always dressed to the nines button-down shirt pleated pants all of that stuff so my first year in the business i was running anywhere that i got a potential it didn't matter if it was galveston wherever it was i was running around i was running around in slacks and a button down and just was uncomfortable sweating to death in the summer and i was like what in the hell am i doing this isn't this isn't who i am what's going on and um i i talked to um bill graf who is one of the agents that's been with us for a really long time and he's like you've just got to figure out who treven is we were playing golf over in longwood one day and he's like you need to just figure out what that is and things will just develop for you and i really took it to heart and i'm pretty low-key i'm really easy going i'm shorts tennis shoes i am who i am uh black and white either like me or you don't it is what it is and so i i just i got comfortable with that i figured out who i was in this business and um i just ran with that and funny enough as it is everybody used to kind of joke that i was real serious or didn't take any bs or whatever and that unfortunately well no maybe not unfortunately but jokingly ended up turning into the tagline of our team right um and so it just kind of stuck but since i figured out really who i was what what i was trying to accomplish in this business it really was kind of that next step that helped me then figure out where i wanted to be and not just what i was doing every day at that point i was just literally i'm just trying to get a contract i'm just trying to find a sale i was trying to find a prospect versus where do i want to be in three years where do i want to be in fives stuff like that yeah so i think you brought up a couple of really good good points there you know this industry is one where there's a lot of comparison right like people are always comparing themselves to other agents and the things that they're doing and part of that is because by our nature we tend to be relatively competitive people absolutely right but the other is there's a race to try to get get that next thing and so you know i i joke about the people who are always taking like model photos and instagram model photos and stuff like that because you know if i did that i would just i would make funny ones right like beer belly hanging out that kind of thing um but if that works for them that works for them it's just being true to who you are i think that's the key because you know whether it's people who are afraid to get on video because they don't like the way they sound or they don't like the way they look you may be funny looking and you may be funny sounding it's possible your client's going to find out you're going to meet them and they're going to find out that you are in fact funny looking or you are in fact funny sounding just get over it and move on that's who you are own it and let's go um and i think that that is a really really good point to bring up to people is you know just be you if somebody doesn't want to do business with you because of that then that's fine don't do business with that person just but be yourself be true to yourself nothing else right absolutely and and that really kind of helped me um then get into the next step and i know this is cliche especially from a sales stand pointer we've all gone through tons of training of um things of that nature but i had to figure out realistically my why when somebody first said that to me i didn't know what the heck they were talking about i was like oh it's my family or it's easy to throw a surface yeah right oh my kids exactly like oh i mean it is what it is and um it took me a little while to figure that out and figure out the dynamics behind actually what that meant and so for me all of those little steps leading up to that helped me figure out okay i want to be one of the elites i want to continue to strive for that i want to continue to build for that and so it was really um it was figuring out okay number one i had to pay bills right i mean you've got to do that so that's a given um i have a good uh strong background at home i've got support so that wasn't anything for me it was then going okay i'm not just a real estate agent this isn't just a hobby this is a business and i remember sitting down with you very early on um you you preached that to us and thankfully by the grace of god that hit me quickly and maybe a lot sooner than it does for some others um and so i i immediately went into okay where am i going to take this what's going to happen down the road what i want to happen down the road not just with work but my personal life my family life things like that because they all correlate to each other whether we really realize it and so for me it was really trying to figure all of those things out so i could then figure out what my focus was going to be on a day-to-day basis and not just going through the routine of chasing people yeah i think you know that why question is one of those that it's real simple until you actually start getting into it and then it's really not no it's really really hard so you know like my why with my kids has always been and i've known it from the get-go because of the example that my parents said my why with my kids has always been i work as hard as i do because i don't want to ever tell them no because i have to yeah i'm going to tell them no and i do tell them all the damn time right but i don't ever want to tell them no because i have to and my parents were that way like if there was a great opportunity for me to develop to do something unique that would help me in the future it was almost always a yes and they told me no to a lot of other dumb stuff that i that i asked about but that was always the thing for me but it took some time to just sit there and instead of just saying oh my kids are alive really it wasn't my kids like i mean my kids are great i love my kids but it really is my role is to provide the most opportunities for them to be better humans as they get older and i want to be able to do that no matter what the circumstance is if i can and that's that's a big thing for me honestly and where i am today is the not even just the want but the need for success and i know that may sound strange to some but um one of the reasons i was hesitant to get into real estate my dad started out in residential real estate and then got very big and very successful with it and then got into development okay and develop some of the largest um still to this day nicest subdivisions in the kansas city area well over the course of about 15 years he was a millionaire lost his ass and was a millionaire and lost his ass again yeah in that span of time yeah and so for me when i was a little kid i went from hearing stories and seeing things of anything and everything you can imagine to i mean pinching pennies from a thing um and so for me there was a underlying need to be successful with this business not just from a financial standpoint but after going through industries that i never was really happy with i needed this to be the thing that was going to pull me to the steps of where i wanted to go in all aspects financially family et cetera and so i really pushed that when i got into this to figure out really what that meant where i was going to take it and what i wanted to provide for for my family um our rugrats going to be out of high school in six years and yeah we're going to be in our early 40s and i'm like well i want to travel i want to be able to do things so how the heck am i going to figure out a way to create that for my family and so those are some of the underlying things that pushes me for my why it's not just solely financial it's being able to have those experiences because i didn't get that with mine my mom worked her tail off but we didn't have a lot right and so i want those things and those help me to stay grounded on a regular basis to to be able to do and provide for them so since we're on the note of like cheesy questions and like motivational speakery what's your why type of stuff so you talk about these things that are i'm working hard now for the future do you as part of either a daily routine or anything like that do you vision board do you have like visualization apps you know any of those kinds of things in your business do you just sit there with a picture of like italy above your computer i don't know what no so um ironically i guess about a year and a half in i read a book called the seven levels of communication um by the way if you haven't read it for sure awesome i've shared it with all of my mentees stuff too it was a game changer for me just like i guess mindset wise if you want to put it that way um i read that book and it clicked for me i had real bad i had once but i didn't have productive habits i guess if you put it that way um and this book was underlying the fact that i mean yeah you have the freedom of schedule and you can be your own boss and whatever so if you want to sleep in you can sleep in well the thing that i guess really triggered for me is the most successful athletes that have ever lived the people that are incredibly incredibly successful in any industry that they're in they all have very precise habits routines schedules time blocking whatever you want to refer to it as um and i honor at the same time i was reading that book i ended up uh watching a documentary on michael jordan and kobe bryant about how insanely regimented they were from the second they woke up to the second they went to sleep and how strict it was well that book was detailing the same kind of mentality with it um and ironically when i got finished with that i challenged myself that i wasn't gonna get up at five or five thirty every single day because if i had a two or three hour jump on all the other real estate agents while they were still snoozing well guess what i had at least a 15 hour jump on you every single week in productivity right and i tried to carry that through through my entire week my months leading up and i'm gonna be honest whether it was coincidental or not or it really tied in it was productive as i adjusted my schedule and created the non-negotiable items things like that um my business really changed definitely in a positive direction yeah it's amazing so as part of my morning routine i've taken on the challenge of with the greatest salesman in the world reading each scroll for 30 days three times a day and all that and so the first scroll is exactly about that it's i will form good habits and become their slave uh and that that's the the difference between successful and unsuccessful people is that successful people have great habits for sure and you know i one of the habits i'm trying to form i'm not gonna tell you the perfect uh by any means is that getting up early yeah and on the days that i do and i take some time to myself to keep the day started right it makes just such an enormous difference uh and you know i say that as a long-time night owl you know people get emails from me at one two in the morning that's the norm and i'm trying to change that up so yeah that's great all right next up on our Top 5 um for me really was kind of tying into the tail end of that um i'm a very very habit driven person i don't do well with the just fly by the seat of your pants improv life like it almost gives me anxiety and stresses me out and i'm not productive right uh if you turn me into a living ping pong ball i'm a disaster uh i'm one of those people that like when i come into the office here i get in at least a half an hour sub for anybody else that i'm gonna cross paths with so i can get myself situated get into my times that i can no this is not interrupted i can get this done this time this time and this time um and kind of like you said i have my days where i'm not perfect with but i can easily see on those days that i lean away from being strict with my schedule there's not as much positive that comes from those where on the days that i go okay i have non-negotiable prospecting at this time i have class at this time i am going to make all my phone calls here i'm going to follow up here i'm going to do my emails here which i'm going to say was the most difficult freaking thing in the world for me was phone calls and emails um i was new i was just about to ask you yeah you know one of the things that people i think one of the traps that people fall into is a when you're new everything's urgent right so everything's got to be answered right now but the other part is i've got this thing that i'm going to do and i'm going to block it out of my schedule but i'm going to leave my email open i'm going to leave my phone on i'm going to leave facebook open you know whatever it is and you you're just asking to be distracted oh yeah without a doubt right so how do you force yourself to kind of i'm laser focused on this do you set time limits do you like what happens there so um i'm a spreadsheet nut everything from my prospect keeping track of them to scheduling-wise i do in excel or on google docs and i try to i mean we talk about in real estate non-negotiable stuff all the time i try to make sure all of that stuff was literally laid out to where i understood from time to time and i would set alarms on my phone and i would literally turn that sucker upside down and put it away from me because i knew if i could see something or saw an alert pop up that it was game over i would be chasing squirrels right um and so it was really trying to figure out okay majority of the time we show homes is in the afternoon or evenings or whatever okay i need to get all my non-negotiable stuff done earlier in the day so i have less of a chance that i'm going to interrupt that or screw that up because i know if i put it in the afternoon all of a sudden showing is going to pop up and next thing i'm not going to do that and then i haven't prospected for six days right and that's the easy thing to give it's an easy thing to not do right absolutely i mean nobody loves to sit down and prospect it's not and you can easily see with your business especially if i look back over the course of months and even the years um one of the cardinal sins that we get into as real estate agents is we get three or four things going all at one time right we're working with a bunch of clients we're getting overwhelmed there's so much going on we don't want to drop the ball well the one thing we do drop the ball on is continuing to call people or follow up with people from before to continue to fill the pipeline for when all those deals are done because the next thing is you know you're literally done with all four deals and then you're sitting there tooling your things next what am i going to see those big peaks and valleys and production and income and kind of leading in for me with that is uh that was stressful for me because i have always come from even financially in the years past it was always you had a paycheck that came in on a regular basis so one of the i guess the goals that when i sat down with my wife as i got further into things was one of my goals was i was never going to go a month without a paycheck because i wanted to treat this literally like a sustainable thing and not a oh i got a stockpile stuff for six months and then we'll just we'll just pull off this this fund so for me that was one of my my next goals early on was i'm not going a month without a paycheck and then whatever happens beyond that i i can scale up and develop etc yeah i remember when we first got started you know my wife was working in a place where there was a paycheck so worst case scenario i mean if you weren't making much of a paycheck the worst case scenario we knew that our mortgage was going to get paid for sure right um and when things really started to kind of click and i felt like you know not that i had made it in the business because i don't let you ever really feel like that but i felt like you know i was going to be doing this for a while right like i could see further down the road um that was when we kind of set the goal of okay we're going to close two transactions and that way that amount of money based on average sales price and all of those things not only does our mortgage get paid by her but we can live relatively comfortably on those dollar amounts we're not going to be you know making huge investments or anything like that but we're at least going to be able to live a lifestyle that we like to live by doing that and so that became the goal so yeah yeah for me that was kind of the leading factor with stuff um as i kind of mentioned earlier the the hunting industry that i was in at the beginning it was it was decent from a fruitful standpoint of finances but as things progressed it got worse and worse and i got tied into some business deals that really weren't all that productive and ultimately probably could have been the end of me and a lot of other things in my life and um so my wife was kind of the breadwinner there for a while keeping us afloat the same thing right so keeping the mortgage paid keeping food on the table all that stuff and i would contribute as things came in and that was one of the promises i made to myself was i was gonna pay her back for that because she carried a lot of load that it's difficult to put that all on your shoulder it's stressful and while it was hard to show appreciation when you're not showing it financially i tried to that was one of my goals for for down the road i was like i'm going to get her the hell out of there she's going to be paid back and be able to kind of go for a little bit um and and just take it easy because that's that's a lot to carry for for a family and i can thankfully say um three and a half years into this um that my wife left her job of 15 years about a month ago and i am not nervous to carry the load i'm not frightened to be responsible for all that i'm in a position where i know that i can comfortably do that and we don't have to sabotage our lifestyle and so those are the things that continue to push me to think okay what's my next plan what's my next goal because if you can get to those attainable things it it at least for me it drives me to push on to the next absolutely yeah and i think you know there's also a piece of it that you look back at at those days right and i think it helps with the humility piece i think it helps with keeping you focused on the next thing and making sure that you know we went from literally like rolling coins to pay for diapers to a few years later doing really really well but working so hard that it was just miserable and so you look at those those kind of learning experiences and how you progress and you set goals and you start to build systems and processes around stuff that you never in a million years when you're in your 20s or early 30s would be like let me set a system about my budget you know it just yeah um but it's a huge difference maker right when you set those things up and you start to achieve them i mean it is big time the confidence of the snowballs it has and it's made honestly really in the last i don't know maybe not even 12 months but i mean 9 12 months um i i sat down with you at the conference table in the middle of covid last year when we were actually able to get back in the freaking office and i was so swamped that i was hardly around them and i remember asking you i was like look i'm doing real well in business right now but i'm like a real crappy ass part of my family how the hell do i fix this because that starts to weigh then in different ways yeah you're all finding danny that business is going well but that that's not the big picture for all of us right um and so you told me that day you're like you're going to have to systemize everything and i didn't take that lightly but i still didn't really fully i guess didn't know what that was going to mean until i spent a little bit more time and for me i knew that from a longevity standpoint both for the next six years why my rugrats still in school as well as when she leaves that there's got to be some form of plan for every day to where i don't have to be the control freak that's managing everything right um and so i did i started um i i got even crazier with scheduling planning things in certain ways for myself but then that's kind of how the evolution of uh kind of my team took place was knowing that i needed some people to have my back not not just as much for me to boss somebody around or trying to make money it was really just kind of a support system even um for me to have somebody that i knew that if i needed to sneak away for three days to try and be with my family and not feel guilty about it i could figure out how to do that right um because they're the first probably two and a half years in this business i don't think that i really got to take a day off i mean we went out of town a couple times but guess what you were still working your computer and your phone find you and next thing i know i'm still being a crappy member of my family and not giving anybody devoted attention and so that's kind of where that that was born was figuring out how i was going to create that um because i'm completely honest i like money but i also want to be happy and enjoy my life and so in the next seven to ten years i don't want to be working probably the same amount of hours that i'm currently working and i'm okay admitting that but i don't want to lose the financial side of where that is and so i started planning for the three years or so those systems and processes to be able to let other people do that and pick up some of that peace because there's only so i mean there's only so many hours in the day and there's only so much that can be spread around right and you know to me one of the hardest things especially it was hard at first anyways because we're entrepreneurs and we're in a service industry so we're always on right it got even harder when my wife left her other job and came to work in the brokerage because now we're working 24 hours a day we're together we're yo she's and so we had to really figure out a way to to clearly delineate this is work time and this is family time and remember the twitch show me right and that doesn't always work like everything else but more often than not we're able to separate that and i think that that's helped with our relationship with the kids and things like that um because there was a time there especially when she first started working with us where you know we'd get home and we just opened up our laptops to keep working the kids are sitting there you know on a device or watching tv or you know doing their homework or whatever and we're just we're not even there that's that's no way that's no way to do it no it's not and and i remember when i was a kid my dad was never around and so like i didn't have that super close relationship because of that and thankfully my wife is one of the most like centered people as far as like family and all that stuff we both lost parents when we were younger and so um she's like you you can't do to her what happened to you what happened to you you know that you know what it was like so thankfully here recently um i've really tried to be very mindful of that now i'm even like non-negotiable every wednesday night is date night with my rugrats we go wherever she wants to go go do those kinds of things so um while she understands i'm the leader of the house and i'm taking care of all these things that i'm not i'm not just putting them to the wayside and so that's helped me even more so probably stay organized on the other days away from that because i know this is this is now a non-negotiable just like prospecting this right and if you think about it from that way not only does it break into those systems right but it also ties back to your this is why i'm doing all of this and you get that those constant reminders that continue to drive further and further down the road for sure awesome and that's really been a big changer for me and kind of the tie-in with all of those items is the last two big things for me um that have really been a game changer in my business and it seems so elementary when i'm gonna say this but it is consistency and follow-up all right so let's talk about the consistency part first because i think that that's one of the the hardest things in this industry it is i really do we have the tendency again because of who we tend to be as humans like our innate nature of chasing the shiny objects right shiny object syndrome and so just getting that you know we we talk about it here at the brokerage the daily disciplines that are executed over time and that's what builds your success so let's talk about consistency go ahead um this is something that i i'm just blatantly honest i battle with weekly okay um i i won't lie i uh funny enough i'm not a night owl i'm i've joked with my wife for years i'm like when when the rugrat goes to sleep do i get to go to sleep no no that's not how that works well so for me um i have always gotten tired more at nighttime and so for me i don't want to keep up with a few odds and ends in the evenings well we're Realtors guess what you get calls you get messages you get inquiries about listings whatever it may be and i've battled going because our clients aren't getting up at 5am they're going on a website they're doing that stuff while they're sitting on their couch watching tv and they're sending you stuff um so for me it was it was figuring out that routine consistently and so i had to go okay same kind of thing of when you're doing prospect and i was like you know what at nine o'clock my phone's getting flipped over and i'm not doing this and i will get into calling everybody at eight to nine in the morning eight to ten whatever how do you set that expectation i'm very i know that that's what some people are gonna say as well they're gonna they still call they still call so how do you set the expectation of you know these are my business hours so again um i'm pretty black and white i don't i don't have gray area with anything and i i'm very vocal about that with my clients whether i've known them for however long or i just meet them um i'm very just here it is wednesday nights i will not be returning phone calls to you i may text you back later in the evening like home whatever sunday mornings uh church i'm not gonna be running around ragged um and i one of the we kind of talked about this a little bit ago but one of the biggest issues is Realtors is somebody calls you think you've got to text them or call them right now right okay i screwed that up royally for my first year in the business because i i just oh god somebody's calling me i've got to do something or i got an email um where i probably got some of the greatest freedom in this business was from a consistency of something this minor was i said at times that i'm going to return phone calls in this hour block and i'm going to return emails in this hour block in the morning i have two of those i do one in the morning and one in the evening and the rest of it i don't mess with it and unless it's something dire crucial involving a closing that has to be addressed other than that um i let them know hey look i've got this going on this going on and this going on uh if i don't answer you shoot me a text i'll get back with you as soon as i get freed up so i try to be very very just upfront about it and i haven't run into any issues because they don't have the surprise factor or the why are you dropping the ball or why aren't you calling me back so let's pull the thread on that first okay because i think that one of the reasons why a lot of agents specifically new agents i think one of the reasons why a lot of agents are hesitant to do what you're talking about is the fear of the client going to work with someone else of losing the piece of business or something like that so of all the times that you've gone about setting this expectation how many times have you lost idea because yeah and because people are normal people right well they get the fact that you haven't failed so i'm a firm believer in all honesty that um people are to sense your expectations since your feelings on something um some call it cocky some call it confident i don't know what it is i'm very confident in where i am as a person as well as i am as an agent and so i don't fret that really from any regard because i i i'm open in communication with my clients and so i don't worry um i don't worry about that um because i haven't ever had a reason necessarily to if i started losing clients left and right because of my actions maybe but i think that there's a piece of it that the client actually respects you more yes right you're telling them that you're involved with your family you're doing these things you're showing attention to other clients that they want that same respect well he's not gonna interrupt them to call me back i would appreciate not being interrupted right when he's with me and so i think that there are others i think it's a mental thing that we psych herself out more than anything else and um as soon as i got out of my way with that that panic or that anxiety of things uh life got a lot more so nervous were you the first time you tried it well god i mean it was it was bad it's the first time you do anything that's the trick the first few days of the only calling people back when i'm going to call people back and i'm not pulling my email up because it's right there yeah it did it like gave me almost an anxiety feeling like oh what's there that i don't know or what am i about to screw up or are they going to leave and they didn't they didn't uh and it took a little bit to get over that but once i realized that it was that was made it even easier for me just to explain to them up front hey look this is when i do this and this and this so just expect this and to this day i have not i've not had any issues but it's created the freedom that i've needed in other aspects of my schedule and things like that which has allowed me to have what i call more productive time throughout my day and you're probably getting more done in that production right now there's days that i'll literally work four or five hours and it's straight productive time and then there's days that i work eight or nine and i feel like i didn't get i think there's days like i should have worked my ass off today but i really what did i do yeah exactly exactly all right so consistency and then the other thing that you mentioned um and i uh especially when they tied it together right which you have to follow consistently without a doubt and it is the single-handed thing that i can if you were to show an example of proof of something that works or doesn't work right um i'm a firm believer like when i i'm coaching or whatnot i share the crappy stories the mistakes that i've made because i personally have learned more from somebody telling me don't do this because this bit me in the rear end right and so i'm very adamant about teaching that's the same way too well follow-up has been the one thing that i will never forget and it's something like there's still times that it bumps me and but i quickly can pick myself back up but i have literally had deals fall apart because either i was too busy and i didn't set an expectation or i was so busy and i wasn't organized that i let something slip through the cracks and it's cost me thousands of dollars uh and i don't care how many times that occurs you'll never forget that i literally remember the transactions to the t for the ones that i lost and dang near how much commission i lost because i wasn't organized i wasn't consistent i wasn't in a good routine and i can easily say that those contributing factors is why i probably have cost myself at least thirty or forty thousand dollars in my career yeah uh and i know that other agents are like that too but you'll never forget those things and i guess thankfully for me is it it does stay in the back of my mind which helps me when i do drop the ball a day i'm like oh crap i can't do that again it's never the easy ones where nothing ever happens we don't ever remember those we're like yeah i did that but it's the ones that are like holy crap i made three dollars an hour on this transaction right yeah those are the ones we always remember so walk me through what follow-up looks like either in a transaction or with a prospect for you are you using a crm are you using what kind of systems are you using is this phone as an email it's a type like what does that really look like because i assume the goal here is for a client there's no there's no unnecessary surprises or for a prospect it's nobody slips through the crack right so for me um there's some variables too number one uh i i learned very on when i was younger and i was in the corporate world that you can't manage everybody the same way and expect the same result you can't teach people the same way expect everybody to learn that way so one of the very first things i do when i meet somebody or we get time to talk is what's your schedule like what's your preferred method of communication because for some people that's give me a call yeah i need to talk to you i want to know what's going on um a lot more this day and ages shoot me a text message please and for me i always follow up with everybody whether it's prospecting or past clients but for me it's in basically three different platforms okay um my past clients uh i don't know if this is way overkill or what but one time a month every past client in my entire career other than two um they have a special i um i literally either have a phone call or a text chain with them every month is something that that became one of my goals was they're never gonna forget my big old ball hit right never it's never gonna happen um and so they i keep a separate spreadsheet where that's my past clients and as more come through they filter in and that is that's a goal and so as things progress i have to change my weekly routine if i've got a couple more people i've gotta hit everything um and so they're separate um the prospects that i haven't gotten full communication with and i'm still just kind of dripping on them they're in a crm system to where essentially whether we've had a lot of dialogue or not they're they're getting something from me all the time they're constantly hearing from trevor trev and trevin truman they're gonna whether they like it or not and until they unsubscribe or tell me to buzz off they're gonna keep getting information until they fire it out they tell us uh and the third step for that is uh is the ones that are in between for me the people that i've had dialogue with they're not quite there yet or whatever that i call it my nursing phase but i'm kind of figuring out each one of them individually and i've got them color coded by call text or whatever on my spreadsheet so i don't forget because i don't want to be the bozo that's a pain in the rear and calling people like dude i'm in a meeting this afternoon leave me alone i'll call you back this afternoon and so i've tried to again systemize things for my clients not even really what's productive for them but so i can manage it and that has really been the follow-up side for me uh and i can say easily that i've had deals that have popped up from people in my crm that i hadn't had any real good dialogue with in over two years and all of a sudden we're getting ready to have a conversation and so it does work but i can also say same thing from mistake wise there's been times that i've let some of those up to the cracks and so it it's staying again consistent with everything you're doing that alleviates you from those those problems uh and so i i just try and beat a dead horse here but i try and systemize everything i'm doing so if we've got new people coming in or what have you there's things that are very scalable teachable and you can kind of plug and play and create the next step to the business instead of me being the control freak that i was the first couple years of i can't let go of this and i still am but it takes a little while to get better with even your follow-up to when you're handing something off releasing even those little things like social media posts or whatever have somebody else do um because i mean we do tend to be kind of controlling oh i'm big no one's going to love your baby the way you love your family right sure and so all right so i have to ask this because you brought it up you said everybody in your past clients but two but i think that i think it's i think there's a teachable moment here right sure for sure so i'm assuming the but two were two that you don't ever want to talk to again right i want to be completely i don't want to work with it yeah i would never work with them again i don't personally have any reason that like i would be rude to them in any way shape or form but um one of them was an investor that watched entirely too much hgtv and if someone on tv can do it i can do it of course it was earlier on in my career and she was purchasing flooded homes after harvey okay and she was trying to cut corners with certain things with like the mold remediation stuff and i was like i'm not putting my neck on the line you have got to do this stuff and i was early on she was like if we can make this work i'm going to buy a handful these a year and then turn around and sell them so for me i was going okay well that's four or eight transactions a year just off this one client so i'm going to work a little bit so one of them hell i even paid for the mold remediation certificate just because i was like i'm not going to continue to put my neck on the line or stuff like that well we got past those things and we're we're doing better about communicating with each other getting more comfortable she she called me to ask about what kind of building materials to put in flooring things like that and ask about comps and how it was gonna relate to the sales price and um i gave my professional advice and what i felt was gonna be the best way for her to make money et cetera and um she didn't she didn't really take that route and went her own direction and it kind of came back and put her in the behind and guess what i'm the one in the middle that somebody has to be blamed that's right so for me uh i separated myself from that relationship because it it wasn't going to be a good thing moving forward i think one of the things that we see a lot especially with newer people because everybody's you know when you're when you're new you want to try to capture as much as you can is that they stay in these kind of i don't want to you know make light of an abusive relationship but they kind of stay in these abusive relationships where you know it takes an emotional toll on them it just wears them out uh and they're trying to make money and i get it like i've been there but i think that it's really important that we recognize is this worth you know if if we're sitting down we're figuring out how much money we make an hour right is this worth the amount of time that i'm going to put into this or can i take that time and put it into something that's going to make me more money and make me happier yeah right and so i think it's important that as we go through this process of building a business we identify the people that we just don't want to work with again and then we put them into you know the d file for if you you pick whichever word you want that starts with v uh and we just we're not going to send them any follow-up we're not going to do anything with that yeah because chances are also if they refer they're [ __ ] they refer to somebody their friends are probably [ __ ] too most likely birds of a feather [ __ ] yeah you're darn skippy uh that's a that's something i believe with every aspect of your life so yeah yeah for sure it was a it was a train wreck and thankfully earl i separated early on the other one wasn't as drama filled or anything necessarily as far as that goes um really where the kind of the relationship went south is as we got ready for uh closing day and there was some items on the repair list and they just had a really bad at it they agreed to it signed the stuff and had a kind of a bad attitude about it and literally busted up some sheetrock in the walls and stuff like that before they left and when the people came for their walk through they're like what the heck right and we want to do that again i was i was embarrassed because i was like this is my reputation sitting here and so i actually had one of my handymen go over there and take care of it because i i wanted to at least the buyers know that hey this guy's not a boat a bonehead he actually is a good person and unfortunately for me there wasn't any drama filled conversations or anything i just i don't really want to be around people that take care of business like that and so i kind of separated myself from any further communication really awesome all right so let's recap so we're surrounding ourselves with people who we want to be like we can learn from all day every day and remaining humble enough to to to actually sit there and learn and admit that we don't know which is tough sometimes for people one of the biggest battles we have as agents is i think being coachable yeah and that's not necessarily like a hiring a coach thing but like actually when somebody tries to open their heart up and explain something to you legitimately listen yeah i think i think that that relates to two things honestly number one i think that that's a for a lot of people [Music] for a lot of people in this industry they have very low self-awareness right and so i think if there's a skill that we could perfect it's really taking time to be honest with ourselves and again you know going back to what you said be true which is you know number two on our list be true to who we are and understand that you know there's some things that i'm good at and there's some things that i'm real bad at right and so the things that i'm real bad at actually either trying not to do or try to get somebody else or do it right and so i think that's one of the things and i think the other thing is again going back to kind of the nature of who we are we're problem solvers yeah and so we hear something and we immediately want to spring into action to do something about it when really a lot of times we just need to sit there and listen or ask a few more questions and really get down to you know what the problem actually is as opposed to what's at the surface okay so number one was surrounding ourselves with good people number two is we know our why we're being true to ourselves right number three was really being regimented with scheduling in business and in personal life all day every day be consistent and never let follow through slip through slip through the cracks you don't want to lose thousands yeah learn from me for lord's sake don't do it yeah exactly i think we've all been there though so awesome thank you man this is great stuff appreciate it i appreciate it so thank you for watching Top 5 we'll be back with another episode soon have a great day [Music]