Zac Muir: [00:00:00] All right, so next speaker we're bringing on, as is Brandon Doyle. Brandon, I'm bringing you on here. Am I pronouncing your name right? Man, I'm sure that you know, Brandon, I got that call.
Zac Muir: [00:00:14] Ok, Brandon, we've chose this topic and we did a webinar about this.
[00:00:20] But you are kind of the the metrics guy, right? You like your numbers. Am I am I wrong?
Brandon Doyle: [00:00:27] Yeah. The fourth Sisu, I had, you know, Excel spreadsheets for everything that's tracking my metrics there. When this came along, I was like, wow, it's way easier.
Zac Muir: [00:00:38] And there's so much. I remember when we first talked, you actually wrote a book that is about metrics in real estate. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about that.
Brandon Doyle: [00:00:46] Yes, I have actually written three books now. My first book was called Mindset, Method and Metrics. I coauthored that with two other guys here in Minnesota. And my focus on that was really the metric side of things, just measuring where I'm spending money and marketing and what the impact is. And then I went on to write the real estate marketing playbook, which is just a basically a playbook of all the different things you can do to market best practices, expected benchmarks, kind of things. And then last year, really success rate marketing and that that's just for all small businesses. But taking those same concepts that like really looking backwards at the previous year to identify what it took to create a sale and then using that to forecast your goal and then hold yourself accountable, you actually tried to pull numbers like conversion rate numbers across the industry as a whole, which was pretty difficult, right?
Brandon Doyle: [00:01:43] Yeah. So what I was doing was every time I in a mastermind group, I just ask everyone, you know, what what are you doing to get business and what what kind of ratios are you seeing? And then I would compile those and average them out. Obviously, there are some outliers or people are extremely good or they just it could've just been they are tracking their numbers in a different way so that I kind of eliminated some of the ones that were skewing it. But yeah, I kind of boiled it down to see, like, what does it take to get a sale? You know, if I want to Dornoch, how many how many doors I have to go if I own a male postcards. How many should I male. I spend money on Zillow real. Sure that. Com or like a paper clip website. And how much do I need to spend and how many contacts do I need. And so when do you start to quantify what it takes to get the results you're looking for. It's a lot easier to to forecast in the budget and really that accountability piece. So instead of just kind of living your life every day, you know, waking up and hoping that you're going to get a sale, just knowing that if you complete these tasks, if you have this number of conversations or you're spending this amount of money in the right places, you know that you should most likely hit your goals. And that's worked out really well for us.
Zac Muir: [00:02:57] Yeah, maybe a little background on your team and what you're doing as far as business this year and maybe where you hope to take it. Twenty, twenty one.
Brandon Doyle: [00:03:07] Yeah. So it's kind of interesting. I joined my father in the business about eight years ago and I think about six or so years ago we started a team, we've got an assistant and we had gotten up to about four, hovering around four or five other agents. So we were working with, you know, buying leads for them online mostly and spending a lot of time helping them grow their business. And just by tracking everything and using the dashboard, we were able to help, like, hold them accountable. And we kind of had the scoreboard going on in our office, which was fun. We did a lot of incentives around that. But actually at the end of last year, we really took a look at our numbers and said we either need to grow and become a team of of like ten or fifteen, become more profitable and to get out of the day to day sales or we need to go the other direction and it's become smaller again. We actually ended up becoming smaller. So now it's just my father and I and we've got an administrative assistant. But this year would be like seventy deals so far. And so the interesting thing is that our our overall gross number really didn't go down very much. Our expenses went way down. I was able to cut about sixty thousand from a profit. The last statement and then of the overall impact, my net up like fifty thousand for the year and I'm working less. So I divide out when I'm making my real net after taking in all these expenses into account and then dividing it by how many hours I've worked. My hourly rate has actually just skyrocketed year over year. So personally, I'm really happy with that. We kind of decided we don't really want to be the number one team with the biggest.
Brandon Doyle: [00:05:00] We want to be small and mighty, and that's been working out really well for us, it was an efficiency move and you were able to make that efficiency because you're just looking at the numbers and figuring out where you can cut out and how you can maximize your. It's all about how much return you can get for your output. Right.
Brandon Doyle: [00:05:18] And and and that allowed us to have very real conversations with people that needed to happen and just say, you know, here's here's what we spent. Here's the expectation. Here's how things worked out. This isn't profitable for us or it's not profitable enough is not worth my time. So we can either, a, you know, fix this or B, we can do this part ways and most of the part of the way. So we help some of the guys. We help them find other teams that we're still buying leads in bulk. And others said they just want to go on their own and we've supported them, let them use the systems and stuff like that and put them in the right direction, but less hands on transaction wise and stuff. So that's really helped eliminate a lot of stress as well.
Zac Muir: [00:06:06] You know, it's interesting because we were just talking with Jared, who is and I think we're getting this theme and I've been hearing this a lot, but a lot of people when covid head, it was like, well, we're we're pivoting.
Zac Muir: [00:06:17] We're going to shift. We're going to adjust our business. Right. For Jared, it was let's slow down, because I still want to build this team and go big with it. And they were at a spot where they weren't efficient for you.
Zac Muir: [00:06:26] It was, you know, even cutting out, I think a lot of times just too much going on in the business. And you can really minimalize and and see some success there. So it's cool to hear your your perspective on that. Where did you start? I mean, when you start looking at these numbers and you're like really starting to analyze things and thinking you need to make a shift, was it was it LEED conversion? Was it overall profitability? I mean, where did you start as far as the numbers go?
Brandon Doyle: [00:06:55] You know, I think the biggest thing for me was customer sale and a return on investment annualized. So just how much they spend on marketing in this category for the year? How many sales did I get? And then, you know, was it profitable? If yes, then keep doing it, maybe tweak it a little bit to make it more profitable. If it's not making money, then it's just got to stop doing it or change something or those categories where we were making money on it. But it was like. It's just not enough, so it wasn't worth the risk and it wasn't worth the time. We've got other areas where I'm sure most agents can relate their sphere of influence. Past client referrals are huge for us. We get a ton of leads just organically from our website because I've been writing about neighborhoods for years. And that's just like really easy business for us because literally the people call and say, oh yeah, we're looking to sell or buy and come work with us versus the paper clip where we're having to make all these calls.
Brandon Doyle: [00:08:00] And people are like, no answering their phone, just don't feel like a good use of time. And then we were really early in with Zillow and that was super profitable for us for a long time.
Brandon Doyle: [00:08:10] But then the last two, three years, they've made all these changes and they've increased their costs. And it wasn't a mutual thing anymore. It was not a win win. And we expressed our concerns throughout all these changes and we just didn't feel we were being listened to and clearly looking at the numbers that it wasn't working in our favor. So, like one year, my team members were making money, but I wasn't. And that's fine as long as I'm getting other business from it as well, you know, helps with our organic placements and people finding us within the next year. It was like I was losing money and I'm not in the business of losing money. So I had to pull the plug on that. And it's made me very happy.
Zac Muir: [00:08:57] But I've had people that were team leaders that have had very real conversation with their agents to say, look, we're buying Zavaleta, we're buying whatever type of leads it is. And here's the numbers. This is how many this is how many we're bringing in. This is how many are converting. And here's the loss that the company's taking on with these links. You know, there's two options here.
Zac Muir: [00:09:18] We are thinking we might take this money out of this one lead source. We're going to go pump it into something else where we think we can get a better return. Or if you want to keep getting Zillow or Realtor, whatever, if you want to keep getting these leads because you like them and you feel like there's value in their business there, that's fine. We just need to just split subthemes, not take what's right. That conversation is so much easier to have if you've got graphs and numbers and just that. It's and it's not just anecdotal, right?
Brandon Doyle: [00:09:43] Yeah.
Brandon Doyle: [00:09:45] Yeah. And we were at 50 50 split with the buyers for Zillow and for anything that we generate. And going back, if I could change things, I definitely would have had a different spot.
Brandon Doyle: [00:09:57] If you want to get paid, it's hard to go back.
Brandon Doyle: [00:09:59] You know, you can't tell someone that they're at one thing and then, oh, by the way, we're changing that. I need more money. Yeah, it is what it is. If I could do it again, I would probably do things a little bit different. But for now, I'm quite content with where we're at.
Zac Muir: [00:10:18] So it sounds like you're saying, you know, if I'm a team leader or I'm broke or whatever kind of business I'm running and I want to deep dove.
Zac Muir: [00:10:27] I want to look deep at my business because I think I need to make some changes. You're saying need source conversion, probably a good place to start.
Brandon Doyle: [00:10:35] Yeah, just not even conversion. Just the profitability of it. OK, so like you can have something that if it's really, really cheap, you can have a super low conversion rate and it's still profitable. But if you've got even with Zillow, if I had a 10 percent conversion rate, I still would have been losing money because that's how few leads they are giving us. It was like we were paying ten thousand a month. I'm getting like ten connections. So if I converted one of them, I still wouldn't even make my money back because our average commercial and I was like seventy five hundred dollars. So like explaining that to the wrap, your numbers don't make any sense as pricing is completely out of line. What's going on. What can we do to change this and this churn so they don't care. There's a line of agents behind me that when we gave up on it they filled it in and then six months later, that person was out and somebody else was in.
Brandon Doyle: [00:11:33] So whatever I think I think you mention this, too. But consider also that there's not just an expense like monitary there. There's also an effort expense. Right. If I I was talking to counsel who's speaking a little later on, and he was saying that they were able to pull in thousands of Craigslist leads for like a buck, a lead and a supercheap of those thousand leads, one of them converted.
Zac Muir: [00:11:58] So the hours that were wasted chasing these Craigslist leads where one out of a thousand or worse converted, you consider there's there's a there's an expense there that's a little less measurable, right?
Brandon Doyle: [00:12:11] Yeah. So you either have the sweat equity or the check point they want to call them. So, yeah, there's definitely that. And I think too, and people look at their return on investment or their for leads. They. Like only looking at the actual leader, they're advertising spending, they're not factoring in the cost of all the systems that they had to purchase and maintain, and then definitely the time for that somewhere, whether it's you personally figure like an hourly wage and then figure out how much time you put into it or if you have a team and you could just look at the split and look at company dollar, which is a little bit easier.
Zac Muir: [00:12:50] Yeah, that's why I think so many. I mean, even even Tom Perry, coaches and cowboys coaches at the highest levels, you know, they get people who have these rocket businesses and it's still focused on Sfeir and organically because they're just usually so much easier, right?
Brandon Doyle: [00:13:08] Yeah. And a few of them have, like, you know, they're representing new construction and they've got some big relationship with like Aryo and Bank or they've got some investors like there's usually you'll find they have like one thing that's different and then that kind of accelerates everything for them. Yeah, interesting. Or they're all in on one platform, whatever. You know, it's either pay per click or Blackcomb or Zillow, but at least I here locally there was a team that was all in with realtor dot com and then overnight they just pulled all those leads away and switched over to whatever their new system is.
Brandon Doyle: [00:13:48] And those guys were screwed over by all their leads. You leave yourself exposed a little bit when you're reliant. You've got all your eggs in one basket, which is never good.
Zac Muir: [00:13:58] So, OK, so really good question here for you. Brandon Ginger's asking, let's say, and Ginger, feel free to clarify, but let's say you were going to go do it again.
Zac Muir: [00:14:08] You're going to go build you want to build it, you want to go the other route. You want to go 12 person team. Right. And really expand things. Where did you start? What would you do differently?
Brandon Doyle: [00:14:20] Oh, yeah. So I think I would bring in a recruiter right away. Interesting, because you really need to get that critical mass and I would only train five people and wait until I have five people at a time so I wouldn't bring in one person and train them, bring in the next person. I would wait and do it in like a cohort, because you're going to find that like. Some people just don't work out like the interview really well, then. You know, they just don't make the calls or they don't whatever they're not. First of all, I don't know. It's weird. Like we have one guy we brought on and I thought he was going to be the next rookie of the year and. Couldn't sell anything. I don't know, it came like highly referred and the interview really well other than like he just was horrible and like we coached him and I should've just let him go after, like, 30, 60 days or something. But I was like, no, no, no. Like, I, I felt like I was like letting him down. So I kept coming and going and I kept trying to get him to do something. But he left our team over a year ago and I'm still in the business is still hasn't sold it. So it's like, all right, well, then and other people that track their transactions. And if I added them back into our sales, I definitely made the right choice. It's kind of sad. But, yes, I would I would try to get big really fast because I in my opinion, they're not profitable unless you have a lot of agents, because the cost of the systems and in managing people is just so high that it's you know, I was taking time away from my own business. And prior to starting a team personally, I was selling 30 houses myself. So then I'm giving up time there and giving these really good leads to agents and in theory, which is the right thing to do. But yeah, yeah, it's not to say it didn't work.
Zac Muir: [00:16:25] It just like it's a decision that you made in efficiency and makes. You know, it's interesting, you talk about bringing on new hires and a cohort and there's a lot that's being said about that. I've actually read quite a few articles that are really interesting that say even say even I have a 20 person team or have a two hundred person organization. A lot of times when you bring on one new hire, they just kind of blend into the system and they learn everything that the system already has. And they take on that same culture and they become a part of it, which is great, especially if you have an amazing system. But a lot of times you lose that person's the individuality, what they could have brought from their own experience and actually changed things. Right. So when you bring people in as a cohort, you say two to five people and you kind of isolate them a little bit so they can learn on their own and and almost break the mold a little bit. You know, obviously still in a good way, but in a way that they can come in and actually make a change on your culture and teach the people who have been there forever. Hey, there are some things that could be done differently and we're doing them. And, you know, it's just part of the way that we came into the system, the way that we were trained. So I love that you say that you bring these people in and then there's the efficiency bonus of training five people at once versus one on one and one.
Zac Muir: [00:17:52] And you're always training. Right?
Brandon Doyle: [00:17:55] So I think I actually learn that from Chris Waters.
Zac Muir: [00:17:57] So, yeah, he's a great guy.
Brandon Doyle: [00:18:01] Awesome book. Millionaire real estate team or something. That million dollar real estate team.
Zac Muir: [00:18:08] I highly recommend it and a pretty sure course does give it away for free or really cheap.
Brandon Doyle: [00:18:13] So there you go. What he does a good job of bringing up by step. And I kind of like realize what step we were and what it would take to go to the next step. I was like, yeah, that that doesn't look like me. Like, I don't think I actually want to do that. I think I want to go the other way. So which is fine. You know, whatever one thing I like to tell agents to, just like in my travels and stuff. And whenever anyone asks, is that like there's a million different ways to make money in real estate and it's just about like finding what works for you and what you enjoy. You don't want to go Dornoch or Cold Call or chastely. It's like you don't have to just find what works and then figure out what makes you happy, how many actions you need to do. Like do you need to close vents or do you need to call people? Is it five calls a day? Is it ten? Whatever it is, just figure that out and then do it. And it should be said, if you focus on your hourly net instead of like this big gross number, like, yeah, sure. And be fun to say, I mean, a million dollars in real estate in one year. But if you're, you know, only ten percent profitable and you're taking home one hundred thousand, I'd certainly rather make two hundred thousand and and do like sixty deals, you know, like so. I think just focusing on the net is a much better approach and less stressful, you know, for sure.
Zac Muir: [00:19:41] And I think we're kind of getting into this next question, which change? Keep the questions coming. But you talked about recruiting. You talked about, you know, back to this whole question of how how would you do it again if you are going to do it again, what would you change on Onley?
Zac Muir: [00:19:57] I mean, would you would you start throwing money and where would you even start with that? Yeah.
Brandon Doyle: [00:20:02] So I've heard some cheerleaders paying out as little as twenty five percent on Zillow, which is I don't know how they get people to accept that, but it is what it is. And I would probably be like 40, 60 with the housekeeping 64 Zillow. But the problem was that like you don't control the costs with Zillow, so like they're just going to keep raising costs and you're always going to be in that same position. So to do it differently, I just controlled the lead source. That was that's pretty easy to do. Honestly, if you just invest in other things, pay per click is fine. We do a lot with organically. It's so like we come up real high on Google and we just get those like wholesomely type calls which work out really well for us.
Zac Muir: [00:20:52] Do you have anything that you like if you're if you're going to go trying to lead source, excellent sources or anything, do you have any kind of system or advice that you would take to say, here's how you can try this light source, here's how you might want when maybe you would pull the plug, how you would track the conversion on it?
Brandon Doyle: [00:21:13] Yeah, that's a great question. So I always tell people, you know, a minimum of six months, ideally a year, because these things take time. And depending on what the cash conversion cycle looks like for a lead source, some of them could be over a year. Yeah. So, I mean, we've got leads that we're still converting that are over two years old. So it's hard to say something didn't work, just just haven't been paid. I could use the analogy like the miner that's mining for gold and then it stops and it's six inches away and the next person comes along and just there you go, get all the good, all the gold. So. Yeah, I guess I guess I would say six months to a year and then I would also talk to like everyone else, but, you know, that's like already using the science to see, like, what's the minimum benchmark, you know, because if it's going to take five hundred dollars a month to even make any impact, then if you're not willing to spend that much, then you just shouldn't do it. So, like, I like to think about, like take the money, put it in a pile and light it on fire.
Brandon Doyle: [00:22:21] And if you're not willing to do that, then just don't do it.
Brandon Doyle: [00:22:25] Kind of having that benchmark and then constantly looking at like, OK, how much am I paying for leads, how much, you know, just make sure it looks good as you go. Work your way through the fuddle.
Zac Muir: [00:22:36] I think there's two so to two reports that come to my mind that a lot of people run and obviously the reports in Sisu as well as your your source are why.
Zac Muir: [00:22:47] So I insisted we got two little graphs that show basically your expense versus your profit. Right. That's that's a big one. And then the other thing that you mentioned was the days to closing. Right. So can you can you run an average across all your leads and say, here's the day the lead was generated, here's the day that it closed? And this is a typical from generation to closing. Here's our average on on this lead source. Those are sounds like two reports that could help you evaluate a lead source. And you're saying give it six months at least.
Zac Muir: [00:23:17] Ideally, give it a year.
Zac Muir: [00:23:19] And if interesting are you it sounds like you're a little more inorganic and you do a lot of CEO type stuff. But are there any sources? We had someone asking, Nancy, asking if you feel there's a better lead source for listings or maybe lead sources that you have in your mind that you'd like, that one would be interesting to try.
Brandon Doyle: [00:23:43] Certainly some of the best source for leads is going to be your sphere of influence and past client referrals.
Brandon Doyle: [00:23:50] I mean, when you look at the graph, which is off the chart, what your return on investment is there. And if you haven't mastered your database first, you know, that's where you want to start. And from there, I would say for us, it's organic. We have a ton of reviews, a really good Google placement. So someone just searches like Realtor, Maple Grove or whatever.
Brandon Doyle: [00:24:13] They're going to find us and we'll probably get interviewed for that spot. So that's good. We've had good luck with postcards in the past and moved away from it just because I didn't like spending that much more. I just I wanted to, like, lower my overhead. At one point I was spending over one hundred thousand just in marketing and now I'm down to like one hundred thousand a month.
Brandon Doyle: [00:24:36] No one is like somewhere between at one point like 10000 on Zillow. And I think with the postcards is like five thousand. It was, it was good, but I don't know, I was like working with people I know. So I kind of shifted money. I didn't do a lot of like client events and. Happy hour type stuff, and that was just like we more we have an app called First, something that was rolled out years ago, but it went so the essence of it as a kind of predictive analytics, who's going to move? And that's cool. Whatever. You should follow up everyone in your database, not just the ones that are likely to move, but kind of fun to see and highlight people and its predictive nature to see if they're correct. But one of the features they added was your network efficiency. And so it actually shows you the deals in your network within your database that you missed.
Brandon Doyle: [00:25:33] Eye opening first is what it's called first that I recently acquired them.
Brandon Doyle: [00:25:41] So that's interesting because you get like these people that you thought were friends or you thought you would have got the business and you did.
Zac Muir: [00:25:50] And it's just like, oh, man, why would you buy that now?
Brandon Doyle: [00:25:54] Well, it just goes to show you, though, that, like, all you had to do was call that person and check in and you would have had the business would have cost you very little. And it's a lot easier to call a friend or somebody that you met in the past versus chasing these leads that, you know, I don't know that they are John Smith, but John clearly doesn't want to talk to me, call it like eight times like for me. And that's not fun. I don't I don't enjoy chasing people around. I just want people to come to me and be like, hey, Brandon, you're an expert. Let's go. So that's kind of where I focus my dollars now. Not to say that all this other stuff isn't profitable. I have tested it all and I've got it all to be profitable. I just feel like doing it anymore, to be honest. The.
Zac Muir: [00:26:44] I was going to say something, if you want to hear a really good session, that's going to be, I believe, later today in the afternoon on track, a frank closets with viral marketing to be talking about data. But he is like the original database guy and he's got an amazing session. He'll be getting on that. So, Brandon, you said doubling down if you were to go and go back on another lead source. Yeah, see, that's that's the tried and true. And it's the easiest to get in early on. And frankly, we talk about that a little later on.
Brandon Doyle: [00:27:18] So that'll be a really good session that is having multiple columns know. So have your main column, your sphere, and then maybe network referrals, maybe it's online or organic stuff. Maybe it's paper click, maybe partnered with one of the big portals that we were doing. Just finally, what works for you and then having all these these pillars so that you're not just reliant on one source and then as you grow, you can add more pillars or if you like, so you go the other way, you just start knocking them down and not worrying about them anymore. Less is more for me.
Zac Muir: [00:27:55] Yeah, I get some teams that have a framework that do like a monthly audit on their lead sources or a quarterly and and it's almost systematize to where you take twenty five percent out. You know that the bottom two lead sources, you're going to take twenty five percent of the spend and or effort out of them and pump them into either something new or something that's already working. And that's just because you said it. Zillow is crushing it for you two years ago or however long ago it was, and then it ended up not being a great lead source. And you can pivot off of that as long as you're constantly evaluating these things, right?
Brandon Doyle: [00:28:30] Yeah, we do a profit and loss statement every month. So consider looking at that and logging our contacts and our appointments and Sisu. So I know like our our conversion ratios and if I'm slacking, I can get my butt in gear and start making some calls. So I think I might like forty two contacts to sell right now. So it seems like it's pretty on par. And obviously for everyone it's going to be different because what you consider a contact when I consider contact could be could be different. So that's why it's is important to track your own metrics. And if you look backwards that last year is a good benchmark to go off of and then you can adjust accordingly for the following year and tweak things and get a little bit better.
Brandon Doyle: [00:29:16] If you're getting five to 10 percent better in each area every year, then it's not going to take long for you. Double your income.
Zac Muir: [00:29:25] Yeah. Good stuff. Anything else we're going to bring in our next guest here, anything else, words of wisdom you want to leave us with? With all of this CPI's and tracking that, you've I mean, you've pretty much like I said, you've read three books on it. Right.
Brandon Doyle: [00:29:40] But anything you want to leave as well, you just don't get overwhelmed by the numbers. Keep it simple. Focus on what matters. Know, return on investment. Is this lead source profitable?
Brandon Doyle: [00:29:51] And then from there, you can kind of get deeper into the cost, really cost sale conversion ratio and working your way down the sales funnel, you can get really into the weeds of some of these things.
Brandon Doyle: [00:30:05] But it just kind of focusing on that overall goal is really big.
Brandon Doyle: [00:30:10] And then there's kind of two ways to look at your goals as one is financially what it takes to convert to get a sale. And how much money do you have to spend on the other side of that equation is like, how many people do I need to talk to if I start with all of these leads that only a handful of them actually pick up the phone or reply to your email, or are you able to have a conversation with them? And only a certain percent of those will actually set up an appointment. And then of those, only a certain percentage are qualified and then it dwindles down.
Brandon Doyle: [00:30:44] And so you kind of start with the big number and work your way down to your goal of getting a sale and just understanding at each stage you can tweak things just a little bit. And that if when you add that all together, that's a really big impact on your overall return.
Zac Muir: [00:31:01] So, yeah, little tweaks, a couple percent here and there, and it adds up some colbran and we'll think. Thanks for coming on, man. I really appreciate it. Let's go here. I want to bring Josh in and we'll we'll keep this thing going. Really appreciate it. All right. Take care.
