In 2006, Ricky and his wife got into the real estate business with just $2,000 between them. The first 2 years were treacherous and they needed to figure things out on their own. It’s a fact that very few agents survive the first 2 years and even fewer go beyond year 5. Despite this discouraging statistic, Ricky's biggest motivation was: to never say no to himself or his family, when they deserve a yes. This is what made him pull through and eventually find success.
As his business grew, he decided to create a team. He determined that it is his duty and obligation to provide opportunities for other people to be blessed by real estate the way he has. Today, he is the president of the Cain Realty Group - Keller Williams Realty- which has been awarded as America’s Best Real Estate Professionals for six consecutive years.
He is also the president of Cain Cares, a non-profit organization who serves clients of The Cain Team, their families and community in times of severe need.
In this episode, we talked about:
(2:58) The value of having a strong “why”
(7:44) Finding purpose in your life
(10:25) What is an impactful way to identify the core values for your team
(13:55) How core values attract the right people you want to work with
(17:15) What things you need to have in place when building a team
(19:42) Why you need to hire for the position and not for the person
(20:32) Ricky's three (3) favorite questions when hiring
(21:53) Why you need to dig 3-layer deep when interviewing references
(23:07) What are the benefits of shadowing
(24:23) How important is it to get buy-ins from your agent’s significant others
(26:28) How to determine an agent’s success through their trak records
(27:07) Why leaders should also focus on their personal growth
(27:48) What is the most important thing that Ricky is doing to ensure that 2021 will be a great year for his business
Episode Transcript:
Brian Charlesworth 0:34
All right, Ricky Cain, welcome.
Ricky Cain 0:36
Thanks for having me.
Brian Charlesworth 0:38
My pleasure. My pleasure. I'm excited to have you here with us today.
Ricky Cain 0:42
Yeah, to be here. I can't believe I was asked after seeing all the talent you have on.
Brian Charlesworth 0:47
I mean, I'm just soaking in all the knowledge from all of these amazingly incredible just leaders in the industry. And you're one of them. So welcome, welcome in today. Super excited to have you here and excited to learn about your team and what I mean success through others. So many people have been talking about that over the last couple days, Greer was just talking about leverage. And you're talking about success through others. I know, we had people on here yesterday talking about ISA's. And the importance and I mean, ISA's have been talked about in this industry forever. Kyle Whissel talked yesterday about calling them SDRs sales development reps, like the large software companies do instead of ISA's. Because ISA, kind of has this connotation of Yeah, I want to become an agent. But anyway, looking forward to hearing from you about really building success through others. I know you're part of Gary Keller's mastermind. And obviously, Gary is looked at as one of the top people in the industry.
Ricky Cain 1:52
So it's interesting, his role, day to day isn't changing too much from what it was, it was literally just a strategic move to bring on more top tier talent to help us through the future and the future challenges that are in front of us that we can crush.
Brian Charlesworth 2:08
Okay, well, it's always fun to talk to you being you've been a part of his mastermind for so long. And it's, you're always like a direct connection of helping me stay on top of what Gary's thoughts are, which is, which is a great thing to be aware of. So
Ricky Cain 2:22
Yeah
Brian Charlesworth 2:23
Let's talk about really what your focus is for 2021 and getting ready for 2021. And I mean, your team, as far as looking at systems and processes. I know I always come to you for advice on Hey, what would be the smartest thing? What would be the best thing here? So anyway, I'm really looking forward to hearing what you have to say today, I'll let you just take off.
Ricky Cain 2:49
Yeah, well, you know, this, this session is about success through others. And I think it kind of like to take it from the very beginning of my personal journey, me and my wife together, we got into business, we, we maybe had $2,000, between us, we didn't start with a fat bank account. We also didn't start with supportive friends and family members, outside of a few people. And so we really had to kind of figure it out on our own. And the first two years are treacherous. I still remember having to reach out to my father. And if I was showing properties that were near where he lived, I needed him to stay home and not go to the coffee shop. Because I needed him to take my call Brian, I might run out of gas. And I will might not have the gas to get back because I don't have the money to put the gas in my gas tank. And there's a lot of stories like that that I have that we went through for the first two years. And so when you start thinking about reasons to build a team and succeed through others, First, you need to have kind of a why behind it right? You have to have what's the purpose? Why are you doing what you're doing. And in my opinion, if you're able to succeed through all the adversity and getting into real estate, we all know that real estate has an 85% turnover rate over the first two years. And then the 15% that make it 70% of them are out of the business by year five, the real estate licensing schools are crushing it, but the fact of the matter is that very few agents survive. And
Brian Charlesworth 4:19
It's like you Ricky, I think you brought up a very good point. Most agents I still see today coming into the business, if you're brand new into the business, your family, possibly your wife or husband, your spouse doesn't support you in your decision to move into real estate. I mean, I'm glad you brought that up. The Why always starts with something selfish. The Why is always about I want to do this, I want to prove them wrong, I want to make money I want to. And then all of a sudden, as soon as it shifts to contribution, giving back to the community giving back to these agents making a difference in their lives. As soon as that becomes the focus. That's when I see things take off.
Ricky Cain 7:37
Yeah, 100%. And that's a good point, too, then we fast forward probably eight years into it. Then we started thinking, well, we're blessing the people on our team and helping them create a legacy. What can we do to tax that? And then that's when we started our own nonprofit, to give back to our clients and their direct family members when they're in a severe time of need. So it's all about thinking, How can I continue to give give give, so that I have a purpose behind what it is that I do every day?
Brian Charlesworth 8:08
Yeah, thank you for sharing that. I think it's such a vital piece that so many of us Miss in our purpose of life. So
Ricky Cain 8:14
Yeah, when you know, when you're in your last few weeks, if you're blessed enough to know those your last few weeks, you're not going to be checking your bank account app, you're going to be thinking about all the people that you help, you're going to be thinking about your memories, your time with your family, it's just about making a big as big of an impact as you possibly can.
Brian Charlesworth 8:33
Yeah, 100%. And I think Steve Jobs is a great example of that, as he knew he was dying. He had the opportunity to do what he wanted to do. And to let people know that money was not the most important thing.
Ricky Cain 8:48
Money is good for the money for the good that money can do, Brian.
Brian Charlesworth 8:52
Yeah. All right, Ricky. So thanks for giving us that background to get started here. Moving into to maybe a little bit more about how this transition happens to building a high performance real estate team, the natural graduation, especially for kW agents, because kW taught the millionaire real estate model forever. It's like, okay, at some point, I'm going to get to where I'm selling 50 60 homes a month, a year, I mean, and then at that point, I'm gonna go try to build my team, or I'm gonna build a team within somebody's team, whatever it is, but there's like a natural progression to do that, which I think if you can figure that out, and allows somebody to do that within your team. It is a way to keep your agents around longer because your focus is continuing to help them grow.
Ricky Cain 9:41
Yeah, 100%. We do have teams within our team that's working very well. I think that there's there are some crucial things though, before you start the team. It's not just about unit count and some of these things Brian, full disclosure, I didn't learn until after the fact. And so this session, I'm going to be sharing a lot of screw ups. I did a lot of the things I'm saying you need to do, I didn't do them at first. And I again duty an obligation, it's my duty and obligation to share these things. So those that are building a team are starting to think of building a team can skip some of the screw ups that I did. And at the same time, you want to fail as fast as you can, because on the other side is a road to success. I think it's crucial to know who you are and who you are as a company. And that starts with your core values, your core values define you in terms of how you live your life, how you run your business. And I think it's important for people starting a team to know what that looks like. And if you already have a team, I'll share with you what we did that was super impactful in identifying what those core values are for your company. And you get such buy in from your team members. And you learn a lot about where you are from a cultural perspective, because when we started, we had mission, vision, values, beliefs, we had all that starting in real estate, Brian, but we didn't really know who we are in terms of core values. And if you don't know who you are, other people don't know who you are. So you don't you're not attracting the people that are just like you. And when you're identifying candidates to join your team, you don't know really what to look for outside of natural personality style, which is super important. And we're gonna get into that. And are they driven? Do they have a track record? All those things are great, but you need to know what their core. What does that look like for them in terms of those values. And so what we did, Brian, as we said, at the time, we had 12 people and we separated them into two groups, we got a stack of 50 cards, every card had a core value on it, and we separated them. And what we challenged them to do is go through the 50 cards, you have five minutes, I want you to pick out the 10 values that you think best embody Kane Realty Group in your opinion. And so they went through that exercise, they couldn't hear each other either Brian, they were totally separate, which was really cool. And, and then what we said is, Okay, awesome. Now you have five minutes to break it down to five core values. Now remember, we had 50 core values there, Brian, that were all a variety of different things.
Brian Charlesworth 12:14
Now everyone, everyone brought back 10. And then you came together with all of those and narrowed it down to only five is that
Ricky Cain 12:20
they still narrowed down to five, and they're separate groups.
Brian Charlesworth 12:24
Okay.
Ricky Cain 12:24
And so then they came back, they have one presenter for each team. And then on separate boards, they wrote down the five core values, Brian, out of those 54 of the core values, each group picked the same value.
Brian Charlesworth 12:41
So for the five or the same,
Ricky Cain 12:44
Oh my gosh, I just got goosebumps, again, I remember just how proud I was that man, we're actually doing something right here. Because one, these are the values that I would have picked. And to everyone kind of agrees that we are who we are, and it's consistent. So that was awesome. And then Brian, the two that were different, they meant the same thing. And so it was a matter of, well, which word do we want to use to convey that sentiment. And so it was an impactful exercise, it's something that's great for you to do on your own if you're just building a team. So again, you know, who you want to attract. And you know, when you're looking at candidates how to measure them. And then again, if you have a team, it's such a great exercise, because it shows you where you truly are within that journey. Because you may have those groups come back and they have totally completely different values. And then maybe you take that in a different direction. So I didn't want
Brian Charlesworth 13:41
Those core values up in your office. Now I'm guessing
Ricky Cain 13:44
We do have those five core values in our hallway. And so there's an image for each core value. And there's a description of what that means. And what's really awesome, Brian is so faith is our number one core value. And we put it out there we are who we are, we pray every morning before we get into lead generation and coaching. And it is what it is, we put it out there and our candidate volume did drop by about 20%. But what happened though, is we started getting people that are more in alignment with who we are by letting people know who we are to those core values. And so while we got less candidates, just imagine for someone else to you know, someone's coming into their first day in the office, and they don't know who you are from a core value perspective. And maybe they're an atheist or they're Scientologists, or they just have a completely different belief system. And we're going in to pray on the very first day. That's not just uncomfortable for us. It's uncomfortable for them. So again, duty and obligation. It's your duty and obligation to know who you are. So you don't put them in a situation that they don't need to be in.
Brian Charlesworth 14:51
Yeah, so that basically means by having your core values, you're going to weed out those people that don't fit Your culture upfront.
Ricky Cain 15:02
And that's okay. There's other things that they will have different values, or maybe they don't even have any value some people, I mean, that's a great thing about real estate. There's so many different brokers and so many different teams, I can't tell you, I would say 90% of the time when we don't move forward with a candidate, we help them find their home. And that's another duty and obligation, I think that we have, because it doesn't mean they're not talent, it just means that they don't line up with where we're going.
Brian Charlesworth 15:26
So how many, I think it can be a challenge, not just take everybody into your team. So how many agents do you interview before you accept one,
Ricky Cain 15:36
You know, these numbers by and I'm so happy.
Brian Charlesworth 15:39
And I don't want to know like how many you interview, maybe there's three things, how many of you interview total, how many are not interested in you, and then how many are interested in you that you have to walk away from.
Sisu 15:50
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Ricky Cain 16:00
Well, I know numbers from the perspective of 367 resumes we make one hire,
Brian Charlesworth 16:05
I know that I know that number, because I track it.
Ricky Cain 16:09
In terms of how many resumes two interviews, it's about 10%. And then from screening call to inviting them to the shadow, which I'm going to explain in here in a little bit. It's about 50%, then from shadow to next steps, which is a very comprehensive interview going over their life and what they need to accomplish over the next five years through Crg. For it to be a massive success, from that step to that step from the shadow. And the kPa validation, which I'll get into in a second, which is a natural personality assessment based off the Burgh from that step to the next step of that comprehensive interview, it's probably about 20%. And then once we get through, once we get to that near final step, then from there, I would say it's probably it's probably about 50%. Because we've already invested so much time in the front end, asking powerful questions, we've seen them in the shadow and seeing how they show up around other people. So we have a pretty good indication of what that looks like. Real quick to some other tips and what to have things in place. When you're building a team. Make sure you know what your standards are for the roles, inspect what you expect. If you're hiring a role, and you're doing that same role to let's say you're an agent, and you have standards for an agent roll over here, oh my gosh, make sure you're meeting your own standard. Don't expect someone else to do something you're not doing if you're in the same role. And then making sure that you have enough serviceable leads. Video Training library is huge. Whenever someone has a question or whenever you're doing something, record it, we use screencast o Matic we love it, record what it is that you're doing, put it in a video training library. And that way you can scale your training and your onboarding faster.
Brian Charlesworth 17:59
I think that's the one thing that is probably the easiest thing to do that people don't do, which would save 1000s of hours a year.
Ricky Cain 18:09
Man, it helps so much, we have a very comprehensive 30 60 90 program. And it's, it's really cool, because half of it is in a video training library. That way they learn how to use their systems, they have access to our playbooks for all of our different lead levers. Everything's within that library. The next step that we want to do is have something like lessonly or triannual to put those videos in so we can kind of monitor the progress right now. It's kind of on the face system. And we do sometimes have people ask questions, and our returning question is, oh, gosh, did you see that video in the video training library? It totally covered that. And we thought they had already watched it. But then I had them asking that question. We think maybe they did it. And so
Brian Charlesworth 18:54
Does the technology you guys use let you know if they've watched it?
Ricky Cain 18:57
No, it's just think Unfortunately, the great thing about it is it's segmented in Google Drive. We have something called a growth library drive. So they can search it by different keywords we've put in and they can watch them but we don't get an alert if we wanted to. We could go and see who opened that file, but we just don't have the capacity to do that. So train you on lessonly something on our end of year plans for sure.
Brian Charlesworth 19:21
Okay. Yeah, I know, in speaking with Greg Harrelson yesterday. Something where they know whether or not somebody has watched a video is like, it checks it off automatically once somebody has watched it.
Ricky Cain 19:34
Yeah, I think it was a sauna.
Brian Charlesworth 19:36
Yeah, yep. Okay, let's keep going. We have eight minutes left. What other areas did you want to dive into?
Ricky Cain 19:42
Man, I've got a lot. So I'm gonna go fast and furious. Some tips and tricks to hire the best talent. Make sure you hire for the person and not for the position. Or sorry for the position and not for the person. You may really love someone and you see something in them and you think they'd be great. Or maybe you're being held hostage because you have a particular role that you have to fill because it's causing you pain, hire for the position, have good screening called questions, people, that's probably the biggest mistake I see agent recruiters or agents building a team make they don't ask the right questions in the beginning, and then they spend so much time with this candidate. Whereas if they would have asked the right questions on a 30 minute phone call, they wouldn't have had to waste their time to find out what they could have found out early in the process. I'm happy to share those questions with you in a document anything that we cover if you want any of it. shoot me an email at Ricky@cainrealtygroup.com three of my favorite questions I love. I love asking, Why shouldn't I hire you? I love to see why what people say there. I love to ask, Hey, Brian, what question Haven't I asked that I should have asked by getting the answer that question will give me even more clarity as to the value you provide to the company. It's interesting what you learn from that question. Are people fast to think and respond? Are people intelligent to actually understand the question, if they're asking me over and over again, or they say they're not sure tells me a lot. And then my new favorite is, tell me about a time when no one held you accountable, Brian to your goal except yourself. And you achieve that goal, when you think other people would have given up? That question right there is huge, especially for what we're going in what we're in right now, with the pandemic, it's crucial mission-critical that you find people that are self-motivated, that don't have to be motivated by an environment, or by coaching. It's huge, they have to be self-motivated. And that's a great question to get to that. I'd also say, go deep on references, get their permission to ask their reference for references, make it a goal to go at least two to three deep on three references. That's a standard with us when we're in our career visioning process that Keller Williams gives us, when we call the references, we make sure that we are asking the reference for a reference, sometimes they give us a reference, it's already on the sheet 80% of the time, they give us a reference that's not on the sheet. So because here's the thing, Brian, you're gonna get a sheet of everyone that loves them. You want to find the people that they're all right. You know, you want to find those people and get to the truth. So the primary goal and calling references are to get those second and third layer deep references. And again, if you shoot me an email, I'm happy to share that document that we use to get their permission for that.
Brian Charlesworth 22:38
I don't want to take references lightly. And my experience has been earlier in my career, I ignored references, right, I didn't call them and you learn as you grow through experiences, that that is the number one most important thing. And
Ricky Cain 22:55
huge
Brian Charlesworth 22:56
Hiring is to make sure you have real conversations with those references to really know how they feel about this person.
Ricky Cain 23:03
No 100%. A couple other things, too, that are part of our process to make sure you get the right people is that I mentioned the shadowing before, so that used to be in person right now we're still working virtually. And we do it from 8am to 11am. It allows people to see what our systems look like. It allows them to see what our coaching looks like and sounds like it allows them to participate. It is a participatory shadow. It helps them decide, can I see Crg is a long vehicle, or the long term vehicle for my career success. And it allows us to quickly see what the group of candidates between six and eight every week. Can it doesn't make sense to continue a conversation with this candidate. We also have them send a follow up email and we say please send a follow up email with what you loved and what you learned in a timely manner. It tells us what is timely manner mean to them? How motivated are they? Because if they're getting back to us three days later, they're saying they're excited. And there's three days later, this is a life-changing opportunity for them. So what are they going to do when a lead comes in man? Are they gonna call them a week later. And so that gives us a lot of a lot of perspective as well. So the shadowing is great. It's been highly effective for us, and it helps us scale faster. Another thing I would mention is the very last part of our process is meeting the significant other. And so what we do now, the first time we meet someone in person right now is during what we call a meet and greet. And so we have this place where it's outdoors, we can socially distance, and we allow the candidate and their significant other to come and meet myself and our leadership team just to have a couple of drinks and have some appetizers. Let's get to know each other. The main point of that is one to make that bond with a candidate because we're in a virtual world still, and we still did this before the virtual world. And then we also want to see whoever We letting into our organization, right, because it's not just the candidate you're letting that significant other into. And when your candidate and your hire has a rough day, or maybe a rough week, we need them to be a support system. And so by getting buy in from the significant other, and having them as excited about the opportunity, as the candidate is, we know we have an at home support system that's going to be there to give a positive, you know, motivation and accountability and so forth to the person that we're bringing on. So that's been huge for us as well.
Brian Charlesworth 25:37
Ricky on the spouse thing, I think I mean, so often, we don't even think of including the spouses, I think it's important that even on your annual retreats, you have a portion of that where you have the spouse involved where you're thanking them. And it's so important that their spouse buys into the fact that I'm going to support them working nights, they're going to be showing houses at nights, I'm going to support them in that.
Ricky Cain 26:09
And we do that during our advanced as well. The evening part is always, always significant. Others are invited. And so that's a big part of our annual business planning advance as well.
Brian Charlesworth 26:22
Okay, last thing, just because we're, we're out of time,
Ricky Cain 26:26
I'll mention some mistakes I made in the past. Look at the track record, y'all. If someone's never been successful in a sales role, they're probably not going to be with you. And I know right, then when you heard me say that, they're saying, Ricky, but maybe they just haven't been in our environment, they haven't had our systems, they haven't had our leads or haven't had our coaching, Oh, my gosh, look at track record, if they've never succeeded, as great as you are, they're not going to succeed with you. So that's, that's something that is huge. And then the last thing I would say is your business grows to the extent that you do your lovely bride mentioned that yesterday, I love that she said that. If you're not personally, if you're leading others, and you're not personally working on your personal growth daily, you're not going to be able to get the best out of the people that are working with you and for you. So make a commitment to have a growth calendar, put three to four things on there a month and make it have an intentional focus on your personal growth so that you can get the best out of the people that you care about.
Brian Charlesworth 27:29
Yeah. Okay. Ricky, you've done all kinds of great advice today. And I have a few minutes. So I'm going to ask you a few questions. You've had great advice around how to leverage and build and bring the right people into your business. let's shift gears a little bit, which I know you weren't planning on. But since we have a few minutes, what are the most important things you're doing right now for your business to make sure that 2021 is going to be huge for you that you're going to capitalize on the growth that the market seeing right now.
Ricky Cain 27:58
All right, well, first and foremost, keeping score. And we keep score through a product, you may have heard of it. It's called Sisu, kind of a funny name, but it's a great product. And, and so it's all about keeping score and keeping what you just like earlier, I said, inspect what you expect. So it's keeping score, keeping the scoreboard front and center for everybody to see so that they know when to celebrate, and they know when to push harder because maybe they're not succeeding. So that’s a big part of it. And we also know that all the lead generation we're doing right now, it's for January closings. And so if you're not 90 days ahead, you're already behind. If you're thinking well, I'm going to start these activities for my business planning in December or January, you're not going to see that until March or April. And so one thing that I would tell everyone on the call is whatever you're doing right now, you're going to see the fruits of that more than likely January of 2021. So if you're not already working on your new and improved systems, or your new standards, or whatever that may be, because you're waiting a little bit for whatever reason you're behind, and other people are gonna pass you up. Because most high-performance teams and high-performance agents understand that what they're doing right now is January of next year.
Brian Charlesworth 29:17
Yes, 100%. Ricky, thank you so much for joining us today. I always love listening and learning from you. And not only as an individual and a person on a personal level but just also as getting advice on systems and your experience and working with so many of those. So, thank you for joining us today. We're grateful to have had you here and we'll be in touch with you shortly.
Ricky Cain 29:44
Thank you for having me and blessed to be here and blessed to be partners with you.
Brian Charlesworth 29:48
Yeah, thank you so much, Ricky.
Ricky Cain 29:50
Alright, bye.