[00:00:00] Next guest, we're bringing on two guests, actually, Chad and Dustin Griffith from from Colorado. Not a lot of time between sessions. We're moving quick, 30 minute sessions. We're trying to pack as much content in here as we can and hopefully find that one thing that's going to change your twenty, twenty one business. Chad does. And I'm bringing you on, guys. How's it going?
[00:00:23] What's going on? Hey, Zach, how are you?
[00:00:25] I'm doing great. I'm I'm super pumped that you guys could join us. Thanks for having us. Still, I think you guys we're talking with with Brian the other day. Right. And he was just what Brian told me is he's like looking at your numbers, looking at your progress. And he said, man, we've got to share some of this with our with our community. So you guys have a pretty good year then, it sounds like.
[00:00:53] Yeah, we are. It's it's a record year for our our entire team, which is just crazy. You know, like a lot of people have been talking about six months ago, is you have no idea what this year was going to shape up to be like. But we just kept on focusing on, you know, just real estate as essential. People still have needs. And certainly it's been a very challenging year with it and how we run our business. But, yeah, I mean, we're having a we're having an unbelievable year. I mean, we're hitting records. I think we're going to be we'll be up about 30 percent from our our high, which was two years ago.
[00:01:32] I have a lot of people I talked with yesterday who they said I actually had a printed out business plan. Twenty, twenty. And when everything hit, I crumpled it up and I threw it in the trash, like physically threw it in the trash. And then he said he like to test it out a little while something. I'm hearing that story a lot because the people who kept their hair kept their mind in it just kind of one day at a time, kept pushing. They're actually having a pretty awesome year. Right. So, yeah, it was a done on the both of you and who you are. And we can jump on some more stuff.
[00:02:06] I'll let you take a guess, what was your question? Two different places here.
[00:02:11] So they're going to be together, but maybe just introduce yourself and where you guys are coming from. A little bit of background in the business.
[00:02:20] Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Dustin Griffith, older brother of younger brother, Chattier.
[00:02:26] We've been in business for about seven years. We've had our Griffith home team set up a business license for 15, had a few years in the in the world. We actually went to Remax about two and a half years ago, moved the team over. We spent about four and a half years with Berkshire Hathaway when we first launched our team. Obviously, both Colorado natives grew up here our entire life.
[00:02:52] Love it to death. And obviously, the thing is that the team is really growing and we're doing pretty good for given our circumstances.
[00:03:02] And just a little bit about the teams that we have, we have 18 agents, including Dustin, everyone's full time, and then we have two full time support staff. So so far this year, we are just pulling up in the app right now at Sisu app. So I can tell you we're close and under contract. Three hundred and thirty three units at four, one hundred and fifty nine million. So I think we're going to land probably.
[00:03:32] You want to share that score in real quick, Chad. Oh, it's on your phone. Nice. Even better.
[00:03:40] That's why we love Sisu, everyone's got the app and then obviously you have the desktop version too.
[00:03:46] But we definitely live and breathe Sisu. We actually it was last year out in Omaha where we obviously met you guys at the Jeff Konza event. And we were we were thinking about using Sisu for about a year prior to that and we just never pulled the trigger. And then once Brian did his presentation, you know, I mean, this business, when you when you lead a big team like we have, it's all about accountability. And that's exactly what. Sisu, does it hold our agents accountable because we rank everything you can see what everyone's doing and it sells and sells environment, right? We're we're competitive and you don't want to be at the bottom, right? You want to be at the top. So don't Sisu allows us to do that. So it's been great. We have you now. We've been on it for about 18 months, but we uploaded all of 20 nineteens data. And there and then obviously now we'll have almost a full year here. So once you start to get all that data, you start to quantify it and it starts to paint a pretty cool story, a picture of why some people are having this success that they have versus other agents that are not.
[00:05:02] But it also quickly makes you realize to you know, if you're trying something that is not working that it's time to pull the plug in and quickly change focus to a different avenue, if you like, on lead flow. I mean, we're big on Internet leads. And so Sisu for us is a quick way of, you know, pulling a report, analyzing numbers. If it works, keep truckin. If it doesn't pull the money back and try to allocate it somewhere else. So that's probably the biggest piece for us on the accountability piece is just from a business management standpoint of just kind of keeping track of. What the heck's going on? I mean, we're Chadiha, different than most teams we still produce. So we're not we're not your typical team leader or just the CEO. You know, you're right on the back office. I mean, so we're kind of wearing two hats of producer and CEO. And so, you know, I think we do run a pretty good ship. We could tighten things up a little bit on the accountability front. But overall, I mean, the Sisu app really kind of helps us stay in line when things kind of get busy and we kind of lose track a little bit.
[00:06:12] So so maybe you're a little bit like you guys doing a lot of Internet leads. What is what are the systems and processes from actually generated through to to closing?
[00:06:25] Well, I mean, we I mean, obviously the Internet liebchen itself is is one giant bucket, but we're big players and OK, we kind of Zillo, Zoids are a little bit different than your normal. Your paper click leads, if you will. So we definitely do kind of classify them a little bit differently. We run all of our leads out of the Zello app. Yeah, it's for stuff. It is in Boomtown. But the general theme across the board with those is that we've tried to do, you know, seven to 10 reach out in a ten day period. Right. And so between the boomtown and obviously the the Zillow stuff, I mean, again, that's just kind of our baseline of what we try to do. You know, executing ten reach outs on three hundred plus lives a month is sometimes a daunting task, but that's what we try to lay the foundation of. So. It does vary a little bit.
[00:07:28] I was just going to add, I know a lot of people who, because they can connect their Sisu whatever they're checking with to their CRM and then from ratio's like that, here's how many of XLE type you received versus how many calls or dials you made. And then they'll run those ratios. And if the ratios are a little lower, then they're just going to cut back to leave a little bit red. I think Boomtown has some routing tools you can use to divvy up leads and a lot of people doing that. And you basically give this agent the option of, OK, if you can handle more legal, if you can keep those calls to leaders ratios up, then we're going to just keep feeding more or vice versa.
[00:08:06] Yeah, and that's exactly how we manage it to Zach. I mean, it's how we do it. And then, you know, it's they know how many lives are going to get roughly and we'll capture them if, you know, we have our our expectations. If they don't hit it, we just hit the button and it turns them off and you cut off their food source for, you know, sometimes we'll cut it off for a month or even longer until they get caught up on all their calls.
[00:08:33] Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. How often are you auditing that, like in weekly meetings, or is it like a monthly audit? Like how frequently are you looking at those numbers and adjusting.
[00:08:44] Probably about every other week. You know, like Zillow, Zillow stuff's a little bit different because they've they've changed their model so much. So now it's a lot of that. It's the direct connections. So I really watch we pretty much cap each agent at no more than four connections per month, but our expectations are to close those. Twenty five percent, though. So if I give you four, you better close one. And so we set those expectations and then we have certain price points. I mean, the ones that are million plus they only go to a select few agents that are that we feel are confident to handle those leads.
[00:09:25] So and I have a couple of questions here I wanted to ask you guys. But if you wanted to add anything else on the the tracking front, I'm happy to dove into that. One thing does and this is a hope. You don't mind me bringing this up. I remember when we spoke back at Jeff Summit, I mean, you connected because you actually played professional baseball right back in the day.
[00:09:51] Yeah. And I instantly thought, oh, man. Well, baseball player, we love to get out on all the stats. And it's like I remember I used to keep a little book with all my numbers in it. Right. Like the baseball thing right up to. Yeah, and in that, if you can translate that into real estate and, you know, obviously it's different, but. Having that, I guess, thirst to know your numbers and improve them and have something to measure yourself against. I think it's huge, right?
[00:10:22] Yeah, well, I mean, we're only as good as our last, right? You're only as good as your last outing. And they were only as good as our last whatever day week, whatever you want to call it. So like I said, we've got we've got room to grow on our end for Guidoni with the accountability. I mean, I'd say we probably follow. These Sisu seventy five percent of it right now, we're not a hundred percent using like every category, every feature, a lot to do with what?
[00:10:56] With what we're tracking for us, it's a good middle ground to make sure we're doing we're supposed to be doing. But we also get down a road where, you know, it's it's just it's going to end badly, right.
[00:11:12] When it comes to, like, the accountability. And I've seen the lead flow and, of course, budget. Right. I mean, we're I think when you're running a team, it's.
[00:11:21] You have to adapt a little bit to new things, right, and don't be afraid to try a different lead source or do whatever, but you also have to be very quick to pull the plug and move on to something else. I mean, I think that's probably the biggest thing we took away from me. First met Jeff Cohen. She's joining me now six years ago now. At this point, seven years ago was he's just, you know, try something that works, keep truckin. If it doesn't, then pull the plug. I think he's going with that piece, too, with just quickly analyzing it. And before Sisu, we frankly didn't know really our numbers, to be honest with you. I mean, we obviously knew how many lives we drove in for the year. And obviously, you know, we have our entire stats with closing. But until Sisu came along, we really didn't know down to an actual lead source and lead source versus agent lead count what we were really doing. And so it's really helped us kind of find to our skill set is as owners and leaders to just kind of keep things a little more organized.
[00:12:31] So I was just say the other thing that we do track on here, Zach, what I love, I'll show a showdown here on the app. So we track all the agents activity. So every day at six o'clock, they get a notice from the Sisu app that to update their their activity. So basically, it's it's conversations or connections, a number of dials, text, text messages, hours, work hours, prospected appointment set days in the office. So we like to track that this year.
[00:13:05] This year's obviously much different with that and then prequel sent to our lenders and then handwritten notes. So they just use the app every day and they plug in what their what their activity was for that day. Or if they miss you, if they miss a day, then they could just catch up on it. We have it. We have some of the agents that will track it all on a worksheet, on a piece of paper. Then once a week they'll update their numbers. But this is great because you see the activity of the agents and there is no doubt is a hundred percent correlated.
[00:13:41] The more activity, the more they produce.
[00:13:44] And if you look at our leaders, other team and you look at their activity, those two are they're directly correlated versus the others. So I love that aspect of Sisu. You get a lot of that pull from Boomtown, but there's a boomtown doesn't track, you know. Did you show up? Did you go in the office today? Did you how many hours did you prospect etc.. So I just want to share that. That's another thing that we use that's powerful tool for us.
[00:14:11] I think there's two lines of thought, too, when it when it comes to tracking in general. And if you read, I think one of the best sells books out there is fanatical prospecting. It's an awesome one. And this guy, I mean, he has this huge sales teams and he has all the money in the world to put into Salesforce and all these systems and everything like that. But he still has all of his reps manually reporting numbers every single day where it could be automated, which it's actually good in his mind. He says, look, I've done automated and I'm not saying it's different for everybody. And I think automated tracking is awesome, too. But there is a case to be made for manual tracking. And his point, his whole point was, look, if I am sitting down every day and I'm thinking about these numbers and I'm tracking my calls as I go and whatever system that is paper or Sisu or whatever it is, I'm a lot more mentally focused on those things because I'm tracking them all day where sometimes I sit down and I spend an hour in Boomtown or I spend an hour in my CRM and I think I've made one hundred and fifty calls. But when we actually dig into the numbers, there's I made seventeen. And you tend to exaggerate that number in your head, right. Where if you have something visual or something that you're tracking or a scoreboard or a leader board or a monitor somewhere that's showing you as that progress is going in real time, you're a lot more grounded in reality because you tend to exaggerate that in your head, those numbers in your head a lot and think, yeah, well, that you guys do that. So I wanted to ask you something here. A lot of people were talking to. There were shifts and changes that they had to make in 20, 20 or that they want to make going in the new year. Is there a shift or something that change in your business that you feel like made a difference?
[00:16:16] Mean, I, I feel like we've been business as usual. It's different because we're doing we do our weekly meetings virtually just like everyone else. We haven't got together as a team since February. But we've been business as usual, I mean, we make our phone calls, we reach out, we connect, we're we're we're in flow with our team. And also every market's different, too. I mean, we're in Denver and Denver is going to be the best year yet in real estate for most brokers, or I would say the full time brokers. And we just we've we've just it's been challenging. I mean, it's been really, really challenging, especially with how you conduct how you list the homes and the showings and all showings are exclusive showings. There's no overlapping. And so there's a lot of those challenges. You have a lot more paperwork with covid, et cetera. But in terms of the actual process and everything that we do. I mean, I don't think we've changed anything, I mean, we've literally been business as usual and everyone's kicking, but working from home and and having challenges at home. Right, because we're your parent, your teacher and full time agent, your spouse, etc.. Right. But we just haven't made any excuses. I mean, I was one of the biggest things that we when covid happened. And it was there are a lot of uncertainty. It was scary. You didn't know what this is going to look like. But you know what we just said? You what? There's no excuses. It's we can't control the situation. We can't control the law and regulations that are going to come out. Right. And just control what we can control. And that's activity that's reaching out to your your sphere. I mean, what a great time to reach out to connect and just just say, hey, how are you guys doing? How are you? I mean, we're a shit show at our house, you know, how are you guys doing? You know, and just being real, you know? But I don't know. I mean, what would you add anything had we done anything different?
[00:18:28] I mean, I would say the beauty of what we're going through is everyone's in the same boat. Right. So I think we've just made the best of. What we've had to deal with, right, and I think we were just like our agents have done a very good job about not making this a, you know, five month vacation sitting at home. Right. I mean, everyone is still trying to execute their plan. You know, I think everyone on our team, as far as you know, they're the breadwinners, right. And so they're just at home. Business as usual, grinding up again, process of change a little bit. But I don't think we really done much of anything. I mean, hell, if you look back in February, I think we've added more money to our ad budget, just that we have at any point in time in the last seven years of our team. As far as just the incremental bump, that tax.
[00:19:24] That's a great point. We added a lot of people cut their budgets. They were not freaking out. And I get it. I mean, we Gus and I, we're worried, right? There was a lot of uncertainty. Didn't know what what was this you're going to look like. Right. And when you run a big team like we do, there's a lot of overhead. Right. But we just said, you know what? We trusted that real estate is essential. It's going to be there. I mean, my God, if you were if you were a buyer and you hated living your apartment covered. Yeah. Hated. We really hated because you were stuck. Right. Everyone's circumstances are different, but you move for a reason because you have pain of some sort. You're selling your house for a reason because you have pain of some sort that never change. And in fact, covid probably just made that worse. So we decided we're going to increase our budget. Everyone else is going to go down, we're going to increase it because everyone's going to be online. And the Internet leads have been the best that they've ever been this year.
[00:20:22] And I think it's because people have had so much time sitting down on their phones, scrolling through photos, dreaming of that new house.
[00:20:32] So so that tells you I mean, you guys probably had a pretty solid routine pre covid. You just kind of roll with it. I mean, what does a week look like for you guys as far as beatings, as far as like check ins coaching? What's your kind of weekly routine?
[00:20:48] What we typically do team meetings every Tuesday pre covered. We would do two meetings via assume and then we would flip flop our meetings north and south to in some virtual meetings, pre, pre. Yeah, I was actually just we were using the conference line, doing a quick phone call just to check in and say hello. And then now we've gone for full on Zoome for it and then just doing some you know trying to do some one on one weekly accountability on Wednesdays, you know with each agent one on one and then again everyone else throughout the other five days or six days left me everyone just kind of on their own program trying to squeeze in there the routine email that we kind of really harp on day in and day out. It's just trying to fit in an hour or two of prospecting, OK? Right. And then outside of that, I mean, again, there, you know, at the end of the day, they're running their own show. So we just try to give them some tools and let it roll. You know, it can be good.
[00:21:58] That's great. Yeah. That routine, I mean, just the stability week to week, if you're already doing it, if you're used to prospecting for an hour, that routine almost becomes like like a harbor. When things start going crazy, when things are bad, it's just like stick to the routine. Right.
[00:22:16] It's the only it's it's your safety net. Yeah. But I think the agents they get in trouble are the ones that don't have a routine. And then it happens and you have to balance home life versus work life. I mean, you've got to you've got to be somewhat dedicated to time blocking. So I don't know of any agent is really perfect at time it but I think if you can manage it, you know, if you can manage time like a four out of seven days a week, I think you're going to survive and be just fine.
[00:22:48] I mean, look at the look at the best of the best in anything, whether that's an athlete, whether that's a speaker, like a Tony Robbins or any of these guys, they've got these these crazy routines or baseball players that they they won't step on the line as they go out onto the field. It's like everything is just so dialed in. A lot of a lot of these things that put you in the right state, that put you in the right mindset. They're not really tactical. They're more about that, about, you know, getting yourself prepared, getting yourself in the mindset, things like prospecting, things like that weekly meeting, whatever it is. And if you can help your agents fall into a routine like that, like you guys have, big things happen, big shifts happen. But it's like just stick to the routine and keep rolling with it.
[00:23:35] Basic stuff, right? Get up. Take a shower. Get dressed. Brush your teeth. You know, like act like you're going to work even though you're working from home. At least try to get up and get on with the day and prepare yourself mentally that you're still going to work. Yeah, I know.
[00:23:52] I know a lot of teams that started doing when they when they moved virtual. They don't want to eat up everyone's time right in the morning, but they want to 15 minutes everyone on on a video call, you got points in their contest or whatever if you actually showed up. And and the whole point of it was, let's just hold each other accountable to sticking to that that routine that we know is going to put us in the mindset so we can go out and perform down now 15 minute huddle boom, right into prospecting. And they're all blowing up slack about it. Right. Like that's how you create momentum even when you're not with somebody.
[00:24:27] One hundred percent, man, make no excuses.
[00:24:32] And that's that's what I'm taking away from this. You guys have done an awesome job.
[00:24:36] Congrats. Excuses the consistency. You do those two things. There's people are going to find a lot of success in this business. Yes, absolutely.
[00:24:46] Well, we're going to we're going to wrap this one up. I am going to take a quick water break, 30, 60 seconds here. We've got a big session coming up next with Mr. Roberte. Everyone show some love for Robbie. In the comments I heard, if he doesn't get at least like 20 or 50 comments, he won't even show up. So thanks for coming on, guys. You guys rock.
[00:25:08] And thanks, Jack. You'll appreciate it, man. Take care.
