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welcome back to real estate team builders this is lars hedenburg the founder of real estate b-school this is going to be an awesome conversation we're going to chat with chris snow today uh what is he north east florida right northeast florida yes in augustine jacksonville that's exactly it awesome so 220 sides this year uh 90 million of volume 2.4 million gci had the honor to partner with uh with chris in real estate b-school back in 2016 through 18 in some of his growth years and the challenge that is building a real estate team and uh just a high level uh guy that i'm honored to introduce uh the listeners to so chris give us like a minute or two like how long in real estate you know tell us a little bit about the complexion of your team and give us a quick overview here absolutely uh so yeah it great uh being in your uh in your program for 16 to 18 uh got a lot out of that during our time there um started in real estate in 2004 so i've been in just over 17 years now 2010 uh left the brokerage that i was at at re max and started my own independent brokerage we focused a lot on reos 2013-14 we started the market see the market shifting and so we we opened up a second retail location by 2015 we had bought a franchise and uh as part of that franchise one of the things that we saw was that we really needed to be more team based than a traditional brokerage and so we really started growing that team starting about 2014. the way our team is made up right now we've got about 21 sales associates on our team a good 13 or 14 of those have been with us a majority of 2021 uh so we've got quite a few people that came on towards the end of last year that are now starting to ramp up and do production this year so we're kind of excited to see how that looks yeah awesome and and i'll say this and you're going to unpack it for us here the the reason you can scale up in that way to go from like 10 agents to 20 agents is pretty much the three points we're going to go through today we're going to go through lead management lead conversion and ramping up new agents so thinking of what's the most logical order because you're doing all three of those things at the highest level that i've seen most uh most team leaders do it where do you think the the where should we start um i i think it goes with the lead generation um because in order to grow a team first you've got to have enough business to to feed them right why would somebody come and join your team if you've got barely enough business to to pay your own bills and to to to you know live off that so it's got you've got to have an excess of of leads and for me um what i've found is that really since 2010-11 it's always been internet lead generation um so google pay-per-click uh bing pay-per-click uh facebook lead ads you know those types of force registration leads gets a lot of high quality longer term but high quality leads into the the team members hands so that when they come we already have a bucket of leads that they can call from because we've got a bunch of excess and people who haven't done anything plus we have about 300 new leads 350 new leads coming in every month this is this is awesome because i i consider myself to be a systems builder but i know you're even more thorough and you've gone deeper in this area because at some point what was it like three years ago we completely tapped out we're like this is too hard we're getting like a third to a half as effective roi that that you're getting on lead source i think you mentioned six seven times uh roi and it's 40 of your sales um so let's get into it so you know these are uh realtor.com zillow pay per click courses a majority are going to be uh google pay-per-click and facebook we've done zillow and it's some op city but the realtor.com we've really scaled back from that at the end of 2020 and really 2021 was filling our bucket mainly with our ppc leads you know pulling people that have been in our our buckets for a year two years and just nurturing and having enough people to go in and call them and what we found was that you know an interesting thing is that a zillow lead today is what a ppc lead was six months ago and when i say that is the person starts at ppc six months ago and they don't get nurtured properly and then they end up on zillow and now you're having to pay 130 150 for that lead where you could have got it for nine bucks and nurtured it and that that was the turn for us was really figuring out how do we how do we get the leads in work the ones that are low hanging fruit as quickly as possible and the ones that are nurturing making sure that we've got systems in place that we are focusing on the people who are are spending time on our website and calling people who are more likely to answer okay so let's let's break it down here for for those that are struggling um with making these lead sources work so pay-per-click um making the leads work and getting the kind of roi that you're getting let's break it down into a few steps what are the most important things that someone needs to start doing or do better than they're probably doing uh so the first one is if they are paying for zillow and and realtor if they're getting a good return i would say keep doing that but just know that your business is is at the hands of a third party that could turn that off at any time right google ppc if you're not doing it it's it's very cost effective it's a great way again as you're you it's very hard to scale a team with with zillow and realtor it's just it's too expensive and you've got it you don't have enough leads coming in for the team to feel like hey i've got enough leads to work with on a daily basis or on a monthly basis so you've got to have those good high quality leads that they're not going to transact today and and and know that they're going to transact six months from now seven months now from eight months from now if you're starting from scratch you've got to start to build that bucket up so i would say right now is turn on the faucet you're gonna have more leads than you can then you can really handle right away unless you've got people right now that you can plug into those contact them right away and treat them like they are long term okay so as you and i if you if you just came in lars i'm not gonna say hey lars man are you ready to go save some houses i'm gonna say hey lars thanks for connecting with us i know you're a year two years away from doing something i'm curious what are you liking about what you're seeing online so far and and so it's really taking all the pressure off of the customer that you know that hey i'm not i know you're not going to do something for a long time and all of a sudden now once they know that you're not in it for the i need you to buy something today their guard lets down and they and when you ask them their opinion they're going to give it to you and so it's it's just making it conversational right off the bat taking all the pressure off of them so i would say that if they're not good at converting those or they're they say oh i don't get a good return on my on my ppc leads it's typically because they're trying to treat them like a zillow or an open house or a you know a right now lead versus a further down the road lead yeah and that's a that's a key point what percent uh do you estimate are you know buying the first 90 days from registering versus you know three to 12 and then 12 plus months what one percent will do something maybe two percent in the first 90 days and then um really from that three month to about nine months you might see another three or four percent possibly you get beyond 12 months and now all of a sudden you're talking eight to ten percent are going to do something right and uh for me it's all about building up a pipeline that whether it's paying me today or it's paying me five years from now or seven years from now we we closed one last year it's the longest we had nurtured at least seven years it was in our database and they came back around they bought a seven hundred thousand dollar property now they may have bought two other houses during that time period it's just that we kept them in our system we kept reaching out to them and um if they didn't buy something prior to that it just it was a long-term nurture but even if somebody tells us today hey i just bought a house which we get that awesome great we put them in our nurture program because they're going to be a seller three years from now five years from now so why go pay for a new lead five years from now when i already got them yeah that's awesome so let's talk about the the specifics around league conversion lead management you know you train inside um our game game changers nation which is a a big organization with within in exp um and i know you teach this stuff every week but break it down for those that are looking really to scale a real estate team you know when you talk about keeping in touch for a year or two or three years right text sequences email sequences property searches dialers let's break down the system yep so we use i'll start with the technologies that we use um our crm is follow-up boss and so inside of the crm we have our own texting capabilities we have different phone numbers than our cell phone all right so the customer's seeing a a crm phone number not my personal cell all those um are every communication that we have with the customer is recorded within the crm so when we make a phone call out from the dialer that's built into it it also records the phone call so we can train and we can go back and listen to notes and stuff like that the websites that we use follow-up boss is not a website so we use two different website providers one is wilopo and the other is sierra and each of those has their their our our own rationale for why we use one versus the other uh one of the things that we like with wylopo is it does have an ai component to it which means that when my agents may not be doing what they're supposed to be doing there's an artificial intelligence that's built in that's sending text messages to the customer to get them to respond back sierra we use they've got a real nice front-end website good converting front-end website so we use that website to uh to bring the ppc leads in we use uh wylopo to bring in the facebook leads um and between the the three technologies it's been very effective for us you don't have to use all three that's just what we found over time that makes it a little bit easier for us we do not do generic text or drip campaigns when it comes to emails and if you think about the reason why is that a ppc lead goes on you know goes on to google they type in homes for sale in charlotte right whatever that whatever their keyword is they want to look at houses and they don't want to get spam emails so we we stay away from drip emails and we if we're going to send an email it's got to be very specific to where the customer is in the process and so we talk about it be okay to be on the journey with the customer from them starting with just looking to i'm ready to to buy and our follow-up process is and we can break it down in just a little bit but really i i call it being relevant and not annoying um when's the last time you took a long trip with your uh with your kids uh in the car not not in a plane uh we fly for that reason okay so we just went to kentucky which is a six-hour drive but we took the 35-minute flight yeah so we'll go two hours to orlando and literally we're 10 minutes into the drive and my youngest is like hey are we there yet are we there yet that get that gets annoying right and if all we're doing is picking up the the phone and saying ours are you ready to buy are you ready to buy and you do this for a year they're like this guy's not bringing any value to me so we we say be relevant don't be annoying and how do we be irrelevant how are we relevant i cannot do it with a with a standard drip campaign so what i do is well how we teach it is when you're looking at the customer's behavior be specific to what they're doing so if i know that they're looking in charlotte right and they're looking in uptown i'm going back from memory here i'm going to say hey there's some really good deals in uptown do you want me to send those over to you versus hey it's spring cleaning time you know the the same boilerplate emails that you get from everyone that's like look this guy doesn't know what i mean you know and then you're you're one click away from the customer saying unsubscribe and now all of a sudden i cannot market to them so if i'm sending something to them by email it daggum better be as as precise as it possibly can to their particular situation because once they unsubscribe for me on the email i'm going to have a hard time getting what i want delivered which is property alerts that's why they sign up they want to look at pretty houses so we always make sure there's pretty houses going to them every single day awesome and that's that's managed that's outside of your follow-up boss your follow-up boss is just to organize the contacts and then why lopo and sierra are sending out property alerts that is correct that is correct and and for us if we've never spoken with someone then we allow uh follow-up boss or sierra to create the initial um uh alert that goes out and we go in and we look at it and we say okay this person based on what why lopo or sierra put as their search got their seven homes for sale okay that is not enough for me to be in front of that customer every single day when i do their search so i'm gonna set up a second search and i'm going to make sure there's 150 properties in there i don't care whether it's the right property or not because i want my branding which is pretty houses to go into their inbox every morning so every morning when they wake up they have something there if i got if if there's only seven houses available for the search that's set up by the system chances are another email may not go out for three weeks okay that person's forgot about me oh there's no other houses available let me go to another website to find them are you personally so when someone registers are you personally texting them as well yes yeah so our our initial cadence is as soon as a lead comes in we pick up the phone we call if they don't answer the phone we're going to let it play all the way through the end we're going to try to see if the voicemail matches the phone number the the name that's on the registration if it's a generic we just make a note in there generic voicemail if it matches or if it's a guy that's uh that's on the voicemail but it's a woman's name we just kind of put a note for the next person who potentially is going to call just so we know that okay we don't know whether it's a good phone number or bad phone number yet and um and we'll immediately hang up we do not leave voicemail messages at all for anyone we have not spoken with okay that's the important piece we don't leave voice messages unless we've spoken with someone we hang up we immediately dial them back a second time after we've listened to the the voicemail um we hang up we call them again and if they go to voicemail again we hang up and we send a text message and we say is this blank whatever the name is that's on the registration and if they say yes who is this we have a text message that we send out that says calling now and then we're we're immediately calling that person back and all we're trying to do is find out is this a number that we need to keep calling or not and if they don't respond to the text message that's okay um you know we'll keep calling until someone says no this isn't larry this is sheila okay great you know larry put this number as a good contact number you know to look at houses is that incorrect do i need to update the information yes great now we're taking them now we're not dialing that person anymore now that saves us time we can dial another number all right so let's talk about this let's talk about i imagine if you went back to just you working a a reasonable amount of leads where it was just you and your skill set and your understanding of how all these pieces work that you could probably get a lot better than the return you're getting now and that's no i don't know any of your real estate agents so it's nothing personal if you're an agent on christmas team it has nothing to do with you so how do you go from like chris can do this probably 12 to one yep and now you drop to a number below that which is still acceptable right because you can scale what what have been some of the lessons learned as you've dialed the systems in for yourself personally and then you've kind of taken yourself not totally out of it but you've taken yourself out and now the system runs with new agents coming on board so tell us about that process yeah so so the first thing that we take our agents through is what you lack in skill you have to make up in volume if you suck on the phone which we all suck on the phone and we suck for a while until we don't suck anymore and we get a little bit better and a little bit better and a little bit better and so it's being okay that my first month i may need to make and this isn't this isn't um conversations this is just dials i may have to make 200 dials a day for the first 30 days five days a week until i have enough conversations that i feel much more comfortable and then 30 40 50 days 60 days later all of a sudden hey what i used to stammer over now all of a sudden i've already got i've already got the uh i've already got the uh responses down pat right i've heard there's only so many different ways that someone could say i'm not interested i didn't mean to do that there's only so many objections that you have to overcome it's just being okay to do it and if you're if you're only going to do a little bit at a time it's going to take you a heck of a long time to get good and you know when i got on the phone the first time you know 12 years ago 13 years ago calling internet leads it was a little bit different but i sucked back then but you could suck back then and nobody else was doing it so you actually had good conversations but as people have gotten more sophisticated and they're used to people calling in it's like okay i've got to change my technique just a little bit to make sure that they actually take my call and they don't they don't hang up in the first five to seven seconds yeah the um it makes me think of a guy that i had um greg sisson out of myrtle beach he said for his first three years in real estate 60 conversations a day he said in his first three years he he got enough experience on the phone that it would take most people most people will not get to so what's uh 60 times 5 is 300 times 50 is what 1500 15 000 times three forty five thousand conversations in three years with decision making adults about real estate most agents will never get that in a 30-year career so he was just willing to consolidate you know time on task massive action yeah which is exactly what you said like you have to get to 200 dials is probably what's the answer rate on some of these eight ten percent ten percent yeah yeah so you're at 20 minimum 20 conversations a day for your first 30 days in real estate which is probably way more than the average agent gets uh anyway but um and we actually we actually broke it down when we do our team goals we broke it down to it's 20 conversations a day um no i'm sorry 20 conversations week 80 conversations a month leads to one closing say that again 20 conversations a day oh gosh i've got to go back and look at our number it it basically boils down to it's about 80 conversations will in a month will lead to one closing okay yeah and and 20 a week yeah so whatever the numbers are are for you they may be different for for whatever lead source and it varies by lead source but you have to know like dials meaningful conversations appointments set appointments met appointments signed under contract and closed by agent by lead source and if you're not tracking those things you're you're probably going to lose the game of scaling scaling your your uh your business and i'm good i'm going to be honest with you i am not great about the tracking of the appointment set appointments met turning into there i i look at it more from a high level of how much of my spending how many closings do we have from that lead source and are we are we making money from it um and you know can we do better probably um but uh my whole goal for our agents is for them to and this kind of goes into the whole lead management how do i make sure that we don't have brand new agents or agents who aren't skilled burning leads um so we we implemented what we call a pawn system where if you all new leads come into a pond we have an agent that's on duty and then in order to get to duty you have to have gone through all of our training to to be able to get a duty shift you're on that duty shift from 8 am to 2 pm any new lead that comes into the database you cannot claim it it's not yours it's the it's it's in the the new lead or what we call our money time bucket and the only way that you can work with that person is you have to have a meaningful conversation with them and then once you've had a meaningful conversation now you're responsible for telling us are they an a a b or a c lead and now you have to manage that lead as under the a b and c plan which means if i go back and i see that you have a c lead which should be called at a minimum once a month um because they're a long-term nurture and i see that you haven't made a phone call in three months that mentally gets reassigned back into our reassigned pond and now anybody else can can have free game at it and so it's it's this internal accountability of you know my leads are going to get moved and the hardest thing for me to do is to have meaningful conversations so once i have them i don't want to lose them what's the one metric that you're you're driving with your agents is it dials meaningful conversations appointments set what's the the highlight of it it really is the meaningful conversations because if you can because if i put someone and they're having 60 conversations a day and they're like oh man the metric is 200 calls and they burn themselves out because they can get to you know those conversations in fewer dials i'm going to burn out a good person saying the dials are more important than the conversations um what we're letting our new people know is that hey look it it's the meaningful conversations as much as it is anything though the longer you stay with us and the longer you plug into the system the fewer those dials need to be to have those meaningful conversations and it's not always meaningful conversations with brand new leads right sometimes it's it's hey today i'm i'm gonna go and nurture all my people that need to be nurtured and i have meaningful conversations and i'm moving the ball forward with those people that i've already had conversations with but they're not ready to transact yet and that keeps me from always just focusing on the ready now business because that from an agent's perspective if if all you have in your bucket are three people that are ready to buy today but you have nothing in the future once you get those three under contract you're like okay well where where am i at now but our agents are it's have those meaningful conversations build up your pipeline and most of our agents that plug into our system will build up about a hundred quality leads people who've said yes i am john doe that filled out this registration and my intent is to buy a home in the next year to two years once they build up to about a hundred and all i see they have a hard time keeping up with that so they don't need to go focus on the brand new lead that just came in because what's the most valuable lead in our database and i'll ask the people oh it's the brand new leads yeah i need to have new leads no it's that lead that's been in the database for six months eight months nine months that's just nurturing itself they're the ones that are going to be most likely and ready to transact that's probably where your next closing is coming from yeah we had an agent we had an agent on our team and and she came out of nowhere she had corporate experience in sales but she was new to real estate and all she would do and she would get two to three closings a month at whatever price point she decided going into our pond and between the hours of like 10 and 1 10 p.m and 1 a.m yeah just get into the pond and just message either text or email people that were active on the site exclusively in the trash and archive bucket yeah these weren't even in like like good leads these were the bad leads yeah but she would she would bring stuff out of you know resurrect leads out of nowhere um we only have a few minutes i want to get your take on you know what lessons probably painful have you learned about the the agent personality type that fits into a system like this so um you know we do a disk assessment on pretty much everybody that comes through now i'm sure that there are going to be ds that are very good with this because they are very much you know not afraid to ask for the business um i have a hard time managing these because that's not my personality um but the folks that i have on my team that are doing the best they're a high i they've got a little bit of c and they've got a a good amount of s in their uh in their profile um my profile high i high s i've got enough c to keep me where i'm not like just pulling my teeth out managing the database but at the same time got to realize is that no agent that's going to do well with this is going to manage the database a hundred percent the way that you want it and so be okay to be flexible that is it more important that they you know capitalize the name of every people that every person that comes in that has a first name last name that's that's that's in lower case is that more important or is it more important that they've had a really good conversation with them so understand where to coach and and how to coach and and not burn people out on the the things that don't don't lead to more conversions that is awesome um i want you to comment on what i love about your story and your journey and the way you present it is that it's clear to me that you you figured out um how to get good at at one thing you know and not all your businesses from this lead source but you mentioned about 30 so you've got database and referrals and all that going i'm sure yeah but you you figured personally how to get good at a lead source then you built the system to make you the best at it and then you brought in others to be able to to scale it up and most people will never scale because they never build the system to replace themselves in the activity right so real quickly maybe you like the question uh the way i just asked it what have you learned about onboarding agents that we can all benefit from a couple sort of words of wisdom around onboarding so um if you want to grow your team and grow fast and i don't want to say big but just grow fast you it cannot be me sitting with the agent for five hours four hours three hours even an hour at a time trying to train them on what i do because i'm going to be distracted they're gonna be distracted and so what we did was we put two two training systems in place they're both video based um and the the most painful part was getting it put in place to start with um but what it's allowed me to do is to leverage and grow the team as big as i want and not worry about oh my goodness i just put 10 hours of time 12 hours of time in this agent and they're struggling and now they're looking at me because i'm not training them right and i'm always half distracted when i'm sitting down with them and why can't they learn everything in that first time that i i just dump everything on them because none of us can right so our onboarding and training onto our team is now based in two two buckets one is a basic agent training system that goes into the tools and systems that we use how to use them um we go into um you know how to process a lead how to go through the whole process of you know what are you looking for what's our cadence what's our rhythm um we test them a little bit on that so it's about a week long where they can probably get through in about two or three days if they really you know want to fast forward and get up to speed once they come out of that then we put them into our 90-day training program and that 90-day training program is going to tell them what to do each and hour of every day for a uh for eight hours a day 90 days in a row so there's never an excuse of why i didn't know what to do today i didn't know who to call today um if they have some experience and they've worked databases like ours as soon as they're up and running with uh the systems that we're using they're going to plug right in and they're not going to need to go through as much that 90 day program as the person who's never done online lead generation and stuff like that so yeah and the moment that you have that in place it's it's a little bit painful to first do it it took us about 30 days to get it really set up but what it's done is it's given me a life back where now i can look at it and go wow if i want to bring on five agents next month i can certainly do that yeah and it's really you when you think about the the e-myth the entrepreneurial myth right we're real estate agents that we're business owners but it's it's a myth right we can't even step away from our business for a day you know without it falling apart um and the e-myth question is you know how would i have to think about my business differently if i were to replicate it 10 000 times so think about your little real estate business if you're listening and what would it look like to replicate it 10 000 times it would probably be impossible but chris just mentioned like he's got a a an agent onboarding system that will allow him to bring on five agents at one time where it's completely leveraged so as you think through areas of your business whether it's lead management or lead conversion or scripts or training or whatever it is it has to be in a way where it's not you as the main cog in in the business so uh let me ask you this last question so whenever i get a chance to interview somebody who is playing the game of business and life at a very high level and they've pivoted their business into exp you're celebrating just over three years with exp and i i don't know why you never reached out to me but you never did so i said no in my mind a thousand times in the four years that you know came before me actually joining so why are you an exp you know tell us something about the platform a myth maybe that people think about the platform that it isn't like shed some light on why a top player like you would come into the exp platform for us it was looking at uh two real main keys one being having the ownership in the company even though we bought a franchise we didn't own anything we owned a two and a half mile radius around our franchise that you know someone who lived 10 miles away was probably not going to join our office why because there's closer offices uh so we we we love the idea that um we got ownership in something that was was real right and so and we got ownership for doing all the stuff that we've been doing the previous 13 years in real estate so for me what that's looked like is um almost 15 000 shares of stock for selling houses and recruiting people to come join my team which i had already been doing for the last seven or eight years the biggest difference is that and we saw this with the value proposition of why would an agent if they left my team would they stay with the brokerage and when we were with century 21 we could not keep an agent at century 21 in our brokerage that was not on our team why because there were better models out there and so we're like wow if we can have a better model that we can recruit to we've got a great value proposition we can retain we're we're giving people ownership we're giving them the opportunity for multiple streams of income the likelihood of them leaving exp and and and building a team beside us is is it is lessened a lot and so our recruiting pitch for us is that now we look and say okay before they come to our team do you believe in the exp business model if they don't then we're like all right i don't know if you're necessarily going to be the best fit for our team because we want to invest in you to build you up to not be on our team if you don't want to be if you want to grow and build your own team of 10 15 20 agents we want to be able to be to be able to do that and feel comfortable that you're not going to just walk out the door and all that training and time and effort is just now gone right so we we love the idea of the stock ownership and then we love the idea that for for telling people that we enjoy where we're at um we get to build a passive income stream and um when we were trying to build our quote unquote century 21 traditional franchise the most agents we ever had in our traditional franchise was about 15 and now i look and and that was in a three year period so now i'm celebrating my three years with exp and i've got 200 agents that are in my virtual brokerage and i've got 200 agents that are incentivized to go make my brokerage 400 agents next year never had agents come to my brokerage at century 21 going hey you should bring my buddy with you because they look at it as competition and so and i like i like the way you you said it and i've heard it said before but not quite the way that you said it as a real estate team builder so and again this is not the exp show there's 99.99 of what we talk about has nothing to do with the xp yet as a team builder you're naturally going to have agents newer agents needing the systems and the accountability and the cadence and structure come through your team and they're all gonna leave i hate to say it but if you're in the team building business long enough they're all gonna leave yep now maybe you keep one out of ten but they're all going to leave within a you know two to five year period essentially so this now you can build up these incredible systems and you can just build agents up and say hey listen this is going to be a two-year boot camp essentially an mba in real estate i'm going to teach you how to do this on your own you can stay with me as long as you want or you'll be ready to to get after it and the uh what 80 failure rate in real estate right for second year anniversary and two year two-year real estate agents are grossing nine grand so 80 dropout rate and the average to your agent is grossing 9 000 and so it's just a great combination if you're running a real estate team you know to be on this on this platform chris i appreciate you you know i would say if you're listening if you're listening to the podcast and you want to understand the stages of growth you know that a real estate team builder goes through i put together it's about 15 pages long it's called the real estate business growth navigator you can go to realestatebusinessgrowth.com thank you chris for your time and your wisdom and just a really good example and i didn't highlight this when you were saying it but anyone can scale their business as long as they scale it in line with who they are and that's something that i didn't really highlight but you said it really great like you're not a high d you know you're you're an is with a little bit of c right and you decided that you still wanted to scale and grow and get after it and i think people think that like building a business is is reserved for because i'm like super introverted i happen to be a d but i'm really introverted and sometimes where pegged as you know you can't be leaders if you don't have d or whatever introvert extrovert but um just build it in line with who you are so i really love that about your story i appreciate you absolutely my friend awesome we'll see you guys soon be good