[00:00:03] All right. Next session, we're bringing on Andy, we are capping off our for our live stream and a good friend of mine, Andy. Andy, how are you doing, man?
[00:00:13] Hey, what's happening, Zack?
[00:00:15] I'm happy. This has been an amazing experience so far. I mean, we've had like fifteen hundred people signed up. They've been bouncing around sessions. I think there are some people that we've managed to hold our attention for almost four hours now. It's on my mind. Or maybe they're just having in the background that me out right now. So who knows. Right. But happy to have you on here and maybe introduce yourself, tell us who you are and a little bit about your background.
[00:00:44] Yeah, sure. So I was thinking about your last speaker's comments about Jim. A quick read the book, Limitless. Great book, by the way. He would have the book. The author would have suggested you need to take a break.
[00:00:58] Your brain your brain can't do the four hours.
[00:01:02] You need those short sprint breaks and then get back to it. But hey, man, kudos to you guys, to you and Brian and the rest of the team. Frank, thank you for doing this. As a guy that is active in the coaching ecosystem and I have a team myself and a user of Sisu watching what you guys are doing and that that plays not only are you doing this super marathon summit, but you're doing it for free, that place of contribution. So thanks to you guys. Really awesome of you to do it. So a little bit about me. As I told you, I am a coach with Tom, very organization. I coach like ninety nine percent of what I coach our teams all across the country, from small teams to small teams like four or five agents on the team besides the leader, two teams that have 30 plus agents that are on track to do six hundred transactions, many of those Sisu users. That's why you're my go to guy for I think this is broken.
[00:01:57] The data is not there and not playing on that speed dial speed text. So, hey, text. Yeah, I got the secret text. No special sacred gift this out text.
[00:02:09] No, but thank you for being faithful to getting those things for the clients that we coach. I run a team here in central California, in Fresno of a team of agents. We have ten people on our team. And then in my prior life, that team, by the way, is just a little over a year old because prior to that, I was a CEO for a Home Services of America company here in central California and loved it, but really missed my independence and my freedom and flexibility to do coaching. And really, I coach as a team leader as well, an introduction. And we are on track in our first full year back as a team to do a little over one hundred transactions this year. So super pumped about that.
[00:02:50] Yeah, I know that because I check my Sisu autographs telling you how it like I said this on the last session, it's a blessing or a curse. You can't hide from the numbers.
[00:03:02] So for the numbers, especially in the accountability sessions.
[00:03:05] Yeah, I love it. So this session we talk a bit. I know you coach some amazing games. I've seen these teams. I've seen your list of Sisu clients that you coach. And I know you have some clients that likely are not yet Sisu clients. What do you see in I mean, this is kind of an open topic, but what are you seeing from you have this unique perspective of talking really getting deep into these teams, businesses? I mean, what are a couple of the things that are big that we can really dig into?
[00:03:37] Yeah, so really this this is the season of business planning. And if there's ever a season where you see a team or even an individual agent that's using your product is leveraging it and and digging in deeper or realizing how little they know about the tool that they're paying for, it's not what did you do in twenty twenty and what do you want to do next year? Let's go take a look. And there's usually that moment or. All right, let's go. But in coaching teams for Tom for nearly four years and then just being in leadership and mentoring new agents and experienced agents alike, I've I've learned a couple of things through that process that without fail, they show up in this season and, well, maybe we can have a dialog about them.
[00:04:25] I think the number one call it a mistake or a lesson.
[00:04:31] Growth mindset, I'll call it a lesson, let's call that number one thing that I see is the business planning season is about like, OK, I'm on pace to finish with two hundred and fifty transactions this year.
[00:04:45] So next year I think we can do to 75 or next year I think we could do three hundred and or they say, you know, the agent said I should end up with GCI somewhere around one point one million. So next year I want to do more. And the reality is that's not really a plan that's more of like a wish list and they almost feel guilty.
[00:05:08] Do I should have this goal that's higher? Yeah.
[00:05:11] So what I'm finding time and energy spent on right now is instead of focusing so much on increasing your GCI or increasing the number of homes sold, how about we have a deeper focus on profit and planning for profit? The biggest challenge in planning for profit is we have to set aside our ego and say it's not about going and doing more, but how about having more and keeping more? And so I was reminded I was I was thinking about this talk.
[00:05:44] I was reminded about a relationship I had with with an agent who was a top five producer many years ago when my market and I got I was going to an event and I got on an airplane and somehow I sat next to him and I was picking his brain about, you know, his business and how he's been so successful. He's about 20 years my senior.
[00:06:03] And and so I was just asking him ultimately, I came to this question. I see you everywhere. See you in the newspaper. I see you in the magazines. This tells you it's about 50 years ago. Plus, how big is your marketing budget? Like, how much money are you spending to do what you do every single year? Like you're this perennial top five producer? And he shared with me the number. And I just remember later that week going, OK, I'm going to go figure this out, and so I saw the number of homes sold, I saw the the sales volume, and I kind of reverse engineered conservatively what what he would be making. And I'm like. Selling over 100 homes a year every year to make maybe one hundred and ten to one hundred and twenty net, oh jeez, that's not worth it. So, you know, just if you're watching this and you're in that planning mode, what do you want? Like, what is it that you really want to pursue and plan for in profit, not just in GCI units?
[00:06:59] You could reverse engineer. And the first thing you have to figure out is your expenses.
[00:07:06] If you're going to go pursue your profits, you've got to know your personal and business expenses because or what most people do in this situation is the expenses are known when it's tax season, the expenses are known when the credit card bill comes, the expenses are known lag measure, instead of knowing the expenses from the front end and reverse engineering that to figure out the profit.
[00:07:26] Unless you start, you start digging on someone's expenses, what are you finding or the most just where the prince is running away and where are you? You just kind of laying the hammer, I guess?
[00:07:41] Yeah, I don't do that. The latter part is not something that I think that is the role of the coach. It's to ask the questions that are that are oftentimes the hard ones to answer. You know, when you ask great questions, especially when you look at expenses and related to ROIC, you know, you tend to find the parents. One of the things that I'm discovering, I've taken on a handful of new team clients recently, and because one of our amazing coaches is going back into production, killing it in production, and and so got a couple of his clients into my schedule. And I'm seeing this theme of team leaders. Production is going to the top line revenue and they're paying themselves a salary, but they have to have their their production on top line revenue to be able to pay for a lot of the things they have inside as a benefit of the team. That's a little bass ackwards. You know, as a benefit, you need to be able to pay yourself first and to have the team support itself. And so really trying to unpack that usually, particularly if it's a large company top to expenses or salary and occupancy, usually it's the rent they're paying. You know, sometimes they're paying themselves. They own the building, which is great, but salaries and occupancy. And so we're going to go and look at their org chart, figure out if they're fat on, you know, the salary side or sometimes they're too lean and as a result, spending too much money in other areas. They shouldn't like outsourcing. Now, maybe this is time to bring that person in and not have to outsource. So it depends on the dynamics of the team. It depends if they're happy with the online leads. It depends if they're, you know, have a lot of you know, we have a couple of teams that I coach that do a really significant amount of sphere of influence and possible healthy lead generation. But we need to diversify. So depends. So I have another one for you. Another lesson learned that comes up this season.
[00:09:28] It's similar to the first one. But, you know, if I was to to to rephrase it in this context, it's that they, you know, that ego that wants to do more. I got to sell more houses or I got to make more commission. Almost a little passive, they say, well, I'm you know, this next year, we did this this year. So next year I think we can do we could sell more houses and we're just going to sell more houses and we're going to recruit agents. And that's how we're going to get to my goal. And the bottom line is, OK, but what about let's look at some of the things that you're doing as an organization. Well, and let's do more of those. Yeah. You know, what happens is, you know, right now there's a lot of big name channel accounts that are showing up in different teams across the country. And there's a lot of energy focused on making that channel account successful. So the energy goes there, well, in order to do more of that channel account, I need to add more agents. Meanwhile, the percentage of business that's going to that channel account is increasing 50, 60, 70 percent of total closings. Let's look back at where this is what I love.
[00:10:38] I spent a lot of time in the last couple of days inside of Sisu looking at the clients lead sources close to year to date. And whether you look at your transaction screen or you look at that report for lead sources, report for lead sources is amazing, by the way. And you see where you start losing leads as well in these different phases of the the process. That's another one to really dig into.
[00:10:59] What can we do better is the question you should be asking instead of just saying, hey, we're going to grow to this by adding agents or we're going to grow to this because I think this group is going to sell more homes, which is a gamble. I'm not saying either one of those is bad strategically. Spend some energy looking at your lead sources that you've closed and what could you do better or more of? You know, say it's past clients and Sfeir, I like to ask this question, OK, be really honest. How consistent were you with your lead sources on Past Client and Sfeir and then follow up is this. If you close that many from Pascaline and Sfeir this year, did they call you or was it as a result of an actively generation plan? Because it's really easy to brag about. Oh, we got seven deals this month from my past clients. And all you did was answer that then. Great, you've got to come. Lets me call. Awesome. But what if we worked it. Yeah, but we put some energy into it. Then what would we get and have a plan for consistency. You did something for me, for my team on this subject and I don't know that you knew it was going to speak into this at that point. But I said, hey, I'm not seeing the pay per click conversion that I want to see inside of my team. Cool. Well, let's make a contest around Appointment, Sekhmet, etc.. All the lead measures around paperclip conversion and what you put a contest on, you'll expand. Yep. So very similar to that subject.
[00:12:25] Instead of saying, you know, we could just sell more homes, let's actually make some projections based on energy, on sources that work to maybe lead source that didn't work. I think it's interesting, Zach, that most teams. Inside of our coaching ecosystem at Tom Feri, we talk about these large teams that typically have two to three lead sources that make up 60 to 70 percent of their closings.
[00:12:51] Interesting, and some of them aren't necessarily predictable, some of them are they're just coming to.
[00:12:56] Yeah, and I'm guessing, you know something? You talked about this and people say it's been a big task for you. I mean, you see, you can throw more money and get more people seaweed's and predictably convert them. Right. Is that part of a reasonable person in trying to make PPC even more profitable?
[00:13:17] Yeah, it was it wasn't just that I wanted to push it and get PPC more profitable. I was asking the question of can the team figure this out? Who are you and the team, you know, kind of crowdsourcing it? Who and the team can figure out a better way to increase our conversion. If our conversion is X, what could it be if I empowered them, giving them some ideas but split the team up into two groups? We're going to have an old school sales contest, steak and beans. At the end of the deal, the winning team gets fed mazing steak. The at least the losing team has to eat the beans right there in front of them.
[00:13:46] And those are the so-called sacks.
[00:13:49] So you create a team gas X and Team Dino. We had a lot of fun with it.
[00:13:53] You don't even have to spend money on this, but just giving it attention and pressing into it. And sure enough, one of the two teams is really excelling, not because they found a magic pill, but because they're focusing on it.
[00:14:07] Yeah, well, you focus on focus and measuring.
[00:14:12] Agreed. And I'll tell you that in this particular case, it's make your flipping calls, doing more focus on it, make you want to drive out focus.
[00:14:21] Right.
[00:14:22] That's it. All right. So here's like the but the big aha. Epiphany and the thing that I've been most excited about, there's there's I'm sure some people that are going to be watching, either from teams I coach or others that are in staff level positions and support positions.
[00:14:38] And the people that really, you know, they grease the skids and they really make the teams work. When it comes time to business planning season, the lesson I've learned is there's not enough energy spent helping them plan.
[00:14:52] There's a lot of energy spent planning around, you know, sales, driving, revenue, increasing units, agent based planning. I mean, even the business plans that you see out there are agent based planning. But when it comes to, you know, your admins, the people that, to be honest, know most of the problems already that are going on inside of the team, the people that should be asked, hey, what kind of two or three things can we work on to improve your department in twenty, twenty one? We don't do that. And so recently I was exposed to it was it was a call that Tom very loud just for the teams that we coach I was exposed to, OK. And I'm like, what the heck. I know that, I know that from somewhere. And then Tom's like, yeah, it's from Measure What Matters, John Door and who was who's a venture capitalist today. But back in the day, he was a he was a godfather at Intel and he was he gave Google like nearly 13 million bucks in 1999. Not a bad investment, but he he did he made his his his millions because he applied the system of objectives and key results. So let me back up one more step. The bigger challenge that I've experienced personally is I've always adopted a management philosophy of four disciplines of execution. And, you know, we're going to get everybody to make a goal while the important goal, focus on it, act on the lead measures, keep a compelling scoreboard and have a cadence of accountability. I use that in all the teams that coach and I use it on my own team and literally Sisu if you use it, it enables you to apply for access or and actions.
[00:16:33] There were reports in our early days that were named like the sheet. Right. Which they're still there and probabilities actually. Yeah. Because everyone said, what the heck is AWEX more like for the X? And we just have very good fun.
[00:16:45] But you got to go to wild important goals or anyways. But so but when you take that same management philosophy and it works so well for sales teams and you apply it well, particularly using the scoreboards and the kids have accountability, it's awesome. Take that same management philosophy and try to apply it to an admin that says, you know, hey, we've got these three projects that are a pain in our backside and we really need to get them done. If we did, they'll fix some of our systems issues. OK, so go ahead and scoreboard that for me, and I'm not saying because I know there are some really smart people in the ecosystem of four disciplines of execution outside of real estate, especially, that go, yeah, this is how you do it. I'm sorry, maybe I'm just slow, but in five years I haven't been able to apply it that well for. So then you get two objectives and key results and it simply says this as a leader, Zach. So let's say Brian is a leader. Three major objectives for Sisu and twenty twenty one, no more than three. And then he is transparent about those objectives. And your department, Frank's department, everybody inside the company goes, OK, I can get behind that. And I've got two to three objectives of my own. Awesome. Now, unobjective is not like a smart goal. An objective is more like a B Hagg, a big, hairy, audacious goal, something that is the author talks about it as a it's something that you aspire to attain. Like if you he says if you bought a football team, your your objective is to win a Super Bowl.
[00:18:21] It might not happen next year. It might take five years. So you say to let me give you a sample objective and a real estate team. You say to your team, I want to have amazing systems that run independent of me, the leader, so that as a leader I don't have to get involved in low level tasks. I can stay focused working on the business. It's an aspiration objective. Right. So what are we this is the key results. So what are we going to do in Q1 to move us closer to that objective and we break it down into bite sized mesh? Now, it has to be smart that, you know, specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time bound. Right. So it's going to be from X to Y, but we're going to do this to here by this time. And when you read the key result, it's easy to see you either can do it or you can't do it. You either did it or you didn't do it. Now, imagine as a team, you put that tool into the hands of your staff. And you see projects and systems move forward and literally have spent the last couple of weeks implementing this with teams like Coach and you can see light bulbs happening, you can see them getting it. Yes, that totally makes sense. But here's where the real magic happens. You, as a leader, write your two to three objectives that you want for the year. Again, sexy, big, hairy, audacious goals, things that are aspirational.
[00:19:45] Most people on this must team leaders. I have no problem coming up with a plan.
[00:19:50] I agree with you 100 or so.
[00:19:52] Then you take your staff to an off site. And I don't mean like a retreat. I mean a one day, you know, three quarter day off site where you present the objectives and begin to empower them, developing objectives for their own and key results so that when you leave that off site, you are set with plans for them for the year and key results for the short term. Maybe it's monthly, maybe its quarterly, and you meet with them regularly to see how they're progressing through their key results. That little tweak in planning has changed. I mean, it's very fresh for me. I'm just being honest about it. It has changed the way that we're implementing strategy and moving forward within teams.
[00:20:32] It's such I mean, this is perfect. That's why we're doing the summit now. It's perfect timing. It's business planning season. And I think right. I mean, I don't hear a lot of people talking about, you know, business planning for my admin team and all these projects if they're going to roll out, because it's not as intuitive. And I think the way you've laid it out makes it significantly more wanting to add it. The two, I can now measure it. Right.
[00:20:56] And as a leader, I think it's OK to be that big in the way they're thinking to be that general. I should say, like when you say I want to have amazing systems that run independent of a leader. OK, awesome. And the question to your staff needs to be which one system, whether it's closings excuse me, transaction based listing coordinator, onboarding of new agents, finance systems, maybe other non property centric marketing systems. Which one system can we focus on now? First, that would give us the biggest return on investment in the shortest period of time. Know there you'll not only find success for the business, you'll get energy. And this culture around this thing works, right? By the way, if you didn't hear it measure what matters by John Doors, the book, the reference for that, the other reference for disciplines of execution. If you haven't read that, you need that for the season. There's a bunch of great short videos on YouTube, by the way, that also explain both there's a TED talk. This is what got me, Tom, on that conversation a couple of weeks ago, said, go watch the TED talks, start there. It'll hook you. I had the book by the time his talk was over and just immerse myself in it. And then we've been testing in an application. And here's the thing. It's so simple. It works.
[00:22:17] Dropping some points and make sure dropping some likes, we can get these books. Love it. And this is great, and I actually know Brian who's doing the keynote with. It's very tomorrow, right? Yeah, and he picked up the I think you saw it on the story that Tom was right. So they're going to be expanding on that conference.
[00:22:45] Oh, good. I had no idea. Well, you know, I give all credit to my head coach. He's the one that really pushed. He actually said we are OK. Bring his entire management staff to staff, OK, from a sales team for disciplines of execution. Don't change that like one of my clients said. Andy, are you telling me to do one or the other? Like, why are we shifting from 40 X when when it's been working like no. 40 X sales team? OK, our support team. And when you start seeing them through that lens, it really starts to come off the page and you start to find confidence and how are we going to do this? Versus we always have these big aspirations at the end of the year and we put these things on paper and the next year we pull that file out of the door or download the PDF off of our computer and go, how about I just copy what I wrote down last year because we didn't get it done. OK. Are going to activate that for your staff.
[00:23:47] I love it. That's awesome. If anybody has any comments, please drop them. And we got about five minutes left here. Happy to take some questions. Looks like we got a couple of your your clients in here and the giggling, laughing, laughing team.
[00:24:02] What's up, guys?
[00:24:03] Yeah, I love that you're there. I would love to see, like, if you guys are watching and you're on it, you're in a support role. I would love to see you put in the chat. Like, what's an idea of a system? Excuse me? What's an idea of an objective? It's that idea of something that, you know, you guys need to do work on implement.
[00:24:23] What would it be?
[00:24:24] Yeah, we stopped that, and I think one I mean, I'm seeing all the time, people are always going through system changes, right, for whatever reason. Right. And I think that is both a it's it's an amazing thing that's going to help. It's like just getting a CRM implemented could be your behalf, right? In a way.
[00:24:47] But it's a lot of work. Well, I'll take that as an example, I have a client that has Cierra Interactive, a handful of clients, and Cierra interactive and Sisu. And when we're in our coaching conversation, the first thing I'm looking at is Sisu. I have coaches' access thanks to you guys. And I'm asking questions and giving recognition based on what I see. But the comment will come up.
[00:25:10] I'm like, they'll say, I just I just don't get it. I just don't see what you see. And so that's the objective is to know the system like your coach does. Right. It's a simple, objective, key result every day. Be in your system for at least ten minutes. Like, what would that do? How much are you in the system now? Not at all. I get a lead, I respond to lead, I go, yeah, I'm talking about leaders. I'm not talking about agents in production. Right, what's up, MJ? Thank you. What would be an example of a support role as objective depends on what you're supporting.
[00:25:46] Kelsey, great one. Tell spreadsheets.
[00:25:51] How about how about get out of Google sheets and into the systems that we pay for? Yeah, right. Great to centralize all of this like segregation of data. And where do we have that? It's over here. It's over there. It's over there. So one of the you know, this one of the things that we're experimenting with for projects is Click Up was super inspired by some of our clients that showed us the insides of Monday and Trello. And one of our assistants goes, I know. Click up, go. Well, then why are we using it and just getting all of this stuff in 72 different locations into one? Yeah, my books are so listing. Manager, what's an example of a support role as objective as a listing manager. Oh, I got one for you so and you tell me, is the process that you guys go through transparent to all the parties involved? And I don't mean the client, I mean everybody on the staff or are you getting asked where are we? Was this done? Is it. An example of an excellent system on the listing side is it's transparent and owned or used by all the parties involved. For example, you guys have an amazing transaction checklist, task based system. I like it because all of the parties that are in can engage in one list, whereas if you're trying to do that in Sky Slope, it's more of the agent and the co agent in the tsay to each other. Right. You can have that transparency.
[00:27:23] That's why we get a lot of that task list. Type management is keeping your data, your processes in one place so they complement each other, can be based on your data and your data is going to complement the task. Good stuff. I was going to say one more thing, Andy. I'm getting for our brain or running up on this and Mark, time to read Limitless time to read Limitless. Appreciate you coming on the show, man. Anything else?
[00:27:54] You know, I've said it. My gratitude is to you guys. Thank you for for saying your appreciation. But, you know, you're helping us get our jobs done easier and you're also helping me do my my coaching gig a whole lot easier. So from on behalf of all those clients that I get to coach with Sisu, you guys have gone out of your way for some of them. I mean, there's there's some guys that are that hopefully to watch this, they're going to go. Amen to that. I had the pleasure of coaching like what you guys are doing, super pumped with and proud of him and his team. I can't wait to see you guys are innovating in a way that most companies go. We'll put that on our list. And you guys are jumping in and getting it done, super pumped to see what comes out on the other side. So thank you.
[00:28:35] It's been fun. We have an amazing community. I just look at these. I look at all the people speaking on our list are like, man, that's a stacked lineup. I'm like, it's just people I talk to, like every couple of weeks, like, I'll take it for granted. But that's the kind of community around Sisu and it's been really fun. And thank you for being part of that. We're going to we're going to call this one a day. We'll be back tomorrow at two more tracks of eight hours each, live streaming. It's going to be a blast. Andy, thanks for coming on. Have a great night and everyone will see you tomorrow.
