Matt Mick started his own real estate team with 5 to 6 agents. However, year after year, they noticed that their sales slowed down, with only minor growth. In order to go to the next phase of their business, they knew they needed a better way to manage things in their team. That’s when they decided to jump on with Sisu.
Today, Matt is the Team Lead at Lincoln Select Real Estate Group - Nebraska Realty. From doing 130 transactions a year, they are now aiming for 500 this year. And after finishing with $50M two years ago, their closings and under contracts are currently at $60M with 6 more months to go before this year ends.
In this episode, we talked about:
(03:10) What Matt’s business looked like before they had SISU
(04:44) What to love about having systems
(06:00) The key to doing more transactions without having to hire more agents
(06:44) The difference between hiring experienced agents vs. new agents
(07:20) What are some misconceptions about teams
(07:50) How important is transparency when it comes to commission splits with agents
(14:22) How to deal with ISAs who want to transition into the agent role
(18:00) Why do some team owners/leads prefer to select which agents get certain lead types
(18:42) What does an agent have to do to get into the lead rotation
(26:03) What are the 3-5 things that you absolutely must do to succeed as a new team owner
(32:25) One of the biggest challenges that a leader must face
(34:47) Why we must always keep learning
Episode Transcript:
Brian Charlesworth 0:35
Alright, Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the great podcast. I'm Brian Charlesworth. I'm the founder of Sisu. Where real estate transaction online and your host of the show, and today I'm here with Matt Mick, and super excited to be here with Matt known Matt now for, I wanna say three years at this point, I believe I met you three years ago, Matt. So we were at. We were at, I believe it was Jeff cones event in Nebraska. Is that right? Is that where we met?
Matt Mick 1:06
I think so. Yeah. And of course, running into each other and other conferences, but I think that's probably where it originated.
Brian Charlesworth 1:11
Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, I know. We just got finished being at the summit. Zac went there to Jeff's event this year. Were you there this year?
Matt Mick 1:19
Yeah. Yep. Saw Zac talk to him about a few things. Okay. Where he goes way back to because he's been with us since I think the beginning. So it was good catching up with him. And yeah, hearing what you guys got coming on. So
Brian Charlesworth 1:30
yeah, very exciting. So, yeah, Zac actually started out writing blogs for her company. And we, we basically, when he was getting ready to graduate from college, we didn't want to let him go. So anyway, he's been great. So anyway, man, when I met you, I think you just had, like you had a small team, doing maybe 100 transactions, maybe you can give us an update on that. That was three years ago. Today, you're shooting for 500 transactions. So I mean, just massive growth. Congratulations. I think every team owner out there is like, hey, I want to, I want to do that. And just the number of transactions you guys are doing is phenomenal. And so just to see, to see you and watch you go from here to here. That's one of the things I love most about what we do here at Sisu. So I'm grateful to have you on the show today. What do you want to add to that? Or did I miss?
Matt Mick 2:24
Yeah, I mean, you're right, I think we had five, six agents when we jumped over. Honestly, at that time, our sales from year to year stalled out a little bit, we've only seen a pretty minimal growth, and try to try to figure out what we can do needed a better way to manage everything we had going on. So I think that's when we jumped on with you guys. And then started seeing just some pretty, pretty quick growth, and Sisu is buying that a lot. giving us the ability to, you know, get our transaction staff focused on being able to do more, because it's able to just capture everything, you know, through augmentation.
Brian Charlesworth 2:58
Yeah, awesome. So, tell me before Sisu, what were you doing to manage your business? What did the operational side look like? What did the sell side look like? I really want to, like go back in time, and just really see how, how that's helped you transition your business and how you guys really run a different business today than you did back then.
Matt Mick 3:20
Yeah, I mean, we were always believed in tracking, you know, if you run a business, and I think that's where a lot of people miss when they're running a real estate team is they're not tracking enough. But we were using, you know, probably Kevin Magallon. Using some of his Gold's old spreadsheets, really, I mean, they were 50 rows across 300 rows down, you know, 1000 different little functions built into that if one messed up, you're spending two weeks trying to figure out where you messed it up. So yeah, we were tracking our prospecting their sales or ROI on lead sources, everything and those spreadsheets. So Sisu was nice, because it cleaned it all up, made it far more difficult to mess something up. And if you did, it was easy to find it.
Brian Charlesworth 4:06
Okay, so that's, that's on the sell-side. You were tracking everything in, in spreadsheets. What were you doing on the just for your TC, I think you'll have one TC at the time, but what were they doing? How are they managing those transactions back then? Were you in Trello? or What were you doing that?
Matt Mick 4:24
No, I mean, honestly, she had built a few of our own Excel spreadsheets to keep track of things. So it was just a hodgepodge of whenever which, you know, haven't seen as to when we started hiring on more TCs made it a lot easier for us to just sit them into a seat and put them to work because it was all just built out. And I mean, anybody could fill in Sisu
Brian Charlesworth 4:44
That's what I love. That's what I love about having systems right with having those systems in place like you do now. If you hire somebody, you just started signing transactions to them and they, everything they need to do is right in front of them, right? Yep. So so going back And time that that was where you were, you were doing how many transactions that?
Matt Mick 5:05
I think were around like 140 ish, our first that first year. And I think that's when we reached out to you guys, because we wanted to grow. And we needed a better system to do that than a bunch of cumbersome, you know Excel worksheets.
Brian Charlesworth 5:17
Okay. And so today, what is your goal this year? Where do you guys want to be by year-end
Matt Mick 5:24
Your goals around probably 500 we got a team of we float between 12 to 17 agents, mostly full time, so they're cranking them out. And our market price points about 250. We're about 60 million close to 60 million closing under contract right now for the year. So I think thanks, thanks. Yeah, I mean, two years ago, we finished at just over 50 million for the whole year. So and that was with a pretty similar size team. I think we had about 12-15 agents a couple years ago. So it's fun. It's exciting.
Brian Charlesworth 5:59
So how are you doing with the same size team? How are you doing so many more transactions
Matt Mick 6:05
Training, it's a bunch of training our agents we brought on two years ago, we're all brand new right out of school. So we spend a ton of time and resources getting them up and going and now they're, they're up and going self sufficient. And we're getting to the next stage of our business, going through growing pains, trying to figure out where we will find those next agents to help us continue to grow to where we want to be here in Lincoln.
Brian Charlesworth 6:29
Okay, so it sounds like you've recruited mostly new agents that you guys have actually trained. you've trained them to follow your systems. And I, you know, I talked to a lot of team leaders, broker owners, and, you know, some people prefer experienced agents and some people prefer 100% new agents, so that you can actually train them to go out and operate the way you want to operate is that how you guys think?
Matt Mick 6:56
Yeah, I think so we have a pretty small pool of agents in our market. And we've got like 800 total agents, and you know, 80% of those are close to retirements. And so our actual pool of agents that we could go after is pretty small. And so and they're pretty happy. It is seemingly being small, a little bit dated of a community industry here. But a lot of there's a lot of misconception on teams as well, we always battle that too. And so those are things that we're always working on, little speed bumps are trying to get over.
Brian Charlesworth 7:28
What is the misconception on teams? What are you referring to
Matt Mick 7:31
Man, everyone I talked to there, they think that their splits with the brokerage and then with the team and all this, they think their money is getting pulled out seven different ways. It's it just baffles me. And it really just comes back to us not educating them more. They just don't know. Really.
Brian Charlesworth 7:48
Yeah. So I know when we first started Sisu, and we started rolling out commissions and commission forums, a lot of there were a lot of teams back then I think everyone is open to sharing 100% Here's your Commission's here, I want you to see everything. But back then there were a lot of teams that were like giving pushback on, you know, I don't want my agents to see their commission breakdowns. I don't want that. How do you feel about that?
Matt Mick 8:14
Oh, yeah, we're completely open. I mean, if you have the right mindset of agent, they're gonna want to know what they're making. They're gonna want to know all of that, if they're the mindset of tracking how we want to be tracking things. I mean, that includes tracking your income. Yes. So we're 100% on board with that. And they I mean, they fill out a commission form. When they get it goes to our accounting, it comes back, they see where everything split, where it goes, who gets what. So you've got to be transparent that if you're not, I don't know that you're going to retain agents very well, you're going to always be thinking, Well, can I get more money over there without even knowing how much money they're actually getting today?
Brian Charlesworth 8:53
Yeah. So I met with a coach a few weeks ago, who said that one in 10 agents who come into the industry today survive, but they said that one in every three agents that come into a team survive, and I don't know what survived was, I think it was doing, you know, like, at least 10 plus transactions a year, and you know, survive is barely getting by, right. And so then you have those that are really doing well. And you have those that aren't but like, what kind of results there. What kind of outcome Have you seen with people you're recruiting? How many? How many of those actually end up making it?
Matt Mick 9:33
Yeah, one thing we've been pretty proud of is our retention that we've seen with our agents. We certainly don't have many agents that have left our team that have stayed in real estates and gone off and done their own thing. Most just realize they're not meant to be real estate agents is too demanding for them. But we've had really good retention. We've always kind of praised ourselves on being an open book, right? Like, here's what you're making. Here's what we do for you. We also I think, do A lot more on the value side for agents and a lot of people as well, with a full time marketing director mean we schedule appointments for our agents, they just have to show up at the office, and then work with those clients out, we have showing assistants, you know, TC is to handle all the paperwork. So our agents are pretty spoiled in that manner, I would say. So I think that really helps with the survivability of that, when we go, we do evaluate where their business comes from. And, you know, quite a few of our agents have a good portion of their business coming from the team. And I don't know, if they were to lose that if they would have made it, you know, 2,3,4 years now on just their own business.
Brian Charlesworth 10:40
So let's talk about that for a minute. How you said that you know, you track that it's not like you're tracking everything. But I mean, how do you keep track of that? How do you have conversations with your agents about how much business is going to them? From you versus what they're bringing in from their SOI? And how did those discussions happen? Is that in a weekly one-on-one, and what, what's the flow of that, if that's what it is? Yeah, so
Matt Mick 11:04
we have a weekly team meeting with everyone. And then we sit down with ej, one on one every week as well, for about 20 minutes. And we, you know, we go over accountability. As far as you know, how they're handling their CRM, we also have a little scorecard, we keep as well for those agents. So making sure they're hitting the goals that they set for themselves, that they're staying on top of their CRM. If they're not at their sales quota, we have, you know, kind of a requirement, quote, unquote, that they come to the trainings so they can continue sharpening their axe. So when they get out there, they can convert these leads. And as long as they're hitting those quotas, it's four out of five metrics. Every week, we track that continuous daily rotation in which we give them leads that are ready to go leads our appointment set forum. Are those beings that through an ISP, or how are you setting? Yeah, yep. So I say through Pay Per Click ads, Craigslist, Zillow, they all flow through him. And then he distributes them accordingly.
Brian Charlesworth 12:02
Okay, so it sounds like you have one ISA right now. That's correct. Yep. And how long ago did you bring in ISA because what might My take is everybody right now, every team leader right now is they're either doing ISAs now, or they're like saying, that's where I'm going, like, that's where I need to be, I need to be generating my own leads. So tell me what that process was, like, how you set that up? Because I know for a lot of people, they've challenges in getting that set up.
Matt Mick 12:30
Yeah. And that's, you know, a pretty tough retention spot, I'd say, you know, it's the money is on the other side of that, and the outside salesperson. I was fortunate enough, it was a buddy of mine that I've known for a decade now. And he was looking for change got him in. He's a conversational guy at heart. So he's been in there. Over two years now, I think, doing 60 to 70 deals a year setting appointments for our agents helping us convert the leads that we have coming in. But honestly, we were two months ago, thinking about growing that department out. We just don't know where we want to go. It's kind of a weird, we're trying to figure out what shift we want to make. Do we hire out and have 10? An entire team of ice days? Where do we bring it back to the agents and we've agent-focused agent first? So we're kind of in the became in the between there? We're honestly leaning towards sending it back to the agents, I think,
Brian Charlesworth 13:24
How many appointments? Is he doing a month?
Matt Mick 13:28
25 or so? Okay. Yeah. And that's we're seeing some pretty bad. I guess he's overwhelmed. We have far too many leads coming in for what he should be handling. Like his qualifying in the given days got 150 people in it, and you haven't his new his watch, which would be like, a year out within a year. He's got like, 500 people in there. So he's trying to just not drowned at this point, which is why we're thinking about moving to some more ISAs
Brian Charlesworth 13:58
Either more ISAs or start feeding leads to agents and make him make him go hunt. Right. Yeah.
Matt Mick 14:06
I think that's what we're thinking. Because he's, I mean, he's been around, he's been to trainings, I think he's going to be a rock star agent. I think it's a good time for him to progress into that and start earning some pretty high-level commissions.
Brian Charlesworth 14:17
Yeah. Okay. I think, you know, I've seen I've seen that I've actually seen that with my wife team, where she had an is a shared shout to Isaiah. And then they wanted to move into being agents. She recently hired an ISA really to head up or is a team and she's planning on building. And she specifically looked for someone who, like they have no desire to be an agent. Their goal is to be on the phones, you know, setting appointments. And I think part of the trick to that is getting the right, you talked about you know, as an ISP, you can't make as much money What if as an ISP, you could make as much money.
Matt Mick 14:59
Yeah, and you really could honestly. All right, I say really just came back to him. It wasn't the best position for him. Yeah. So yeah, we're currently we're trying to get creative with some ways to recruit agents, I think we're going to, because of our small sample size of agents here, we're going to start, we've been in communications with a headhunter, like a recruiter, and going after outside of real estates, sales industry professionals to bring them into our organization. And I think when doing that we might come across some people that would rather be more of like a nine to five type in the office, sales-oriented type person that's making calls all day right now, that would be just fine and suited to make calls in an office all day.
Brian Charlesworth 15:43
Yeah, so currently, how are you tracking your ISA leads? And how do you what how do you measure, okay, they set this many appointments for these people. These people went on the appointments these people didn't, how do you? How do you keep track of all that?
Matt Mick 15:58
Yeah, so a mixture of Sisu and to do's so we use our Boomtown as their CRM, he schedules it for them in Boomtown and then he sets himself also to do to follow up like the day after to make sure that they met or did not meet that appointment. So we can track that set to that ratio. So really, it's just a mixture of that integration that we have with Boomtown and Sisu, to see what our ratios are going to look like there.
Brian Charlesworth 16:24
Well, good. I don't know if that tells you. I'm guessing not he probably isn't aware. But we do have a new is a report coming out here with our next release. Not the one this week, but the one in two weeks that will give you a whole new level of insights. They're just all everything on one page. So awesome. Awesome. He'll love that. Yeah, it'll make it really easy for him to see who converts on his leads. And who doesn't?
Matt Mick 16:52
Yeah, that's always something we're tracking. And always a soft spy, you know, you're like, because you want to give the agents the fair opportunities. But I can't tell you we do track that we track how many leads they're getting how many end up in their archive, how many end up in their closed. And in fact study and I have a piece of paper right here. But those numbers on there that my ops manager sent over to me the other day. So yeah, those are important numbers to know for sure. Because that's a coaching point for you. So you go to those agents that are maybe producing or performing lower, work with them, or even have the agents that are producing higher their work with the agents that are producing lower a little bit help mentor them to get their conversion up. But those leads.
Brian Charlesworth 17:34
Yeah, I remember when it was everything was around the Shark Tank conversation, right? Yeah, just let your agents fight for these leads, or distributed them all equally. And now I'm seeing more and more and more especially from our customers who know their lead source, ROI and conversion ratios, and not only as a team, but in an agent level. And I can tell you, I've spoken with so many team owners who you know, they only give Zillow leads to their top five agents to convert Zillow leads, they only give up city to the ones that convert up city, they only give ISA leads to the top three to five that convert is a lead. So is that something you're doing to run your business where you're really discovering which agents are better? Which with which lead type? And how do you determine that? If so?
Matt Mick 18:26
Yeah, so not really, we try to keep it a level playing field. I can't say that the agents that aren't converting leads well aren't typically on lead rotation, because they're missing on other parts of their business as well. So they kind of weed themselves out for us.
Brian Charlesworth 18:40
But again, I mean, in order to be a lead rotation, what does somebody have to do in your business? Yeah, so it's great for people to hear right? Like,
Matt Mick 18:48
Yeah, so we. So they've got to hit their prospecting goal for the week. They've got hits the, they've got to have their active categories and their CRM cleaned up, so they can have people behind, but we want to see less than 10 of those leads being neglected. in there, they've got to come to our team meeting, which is required on Tuesdays. And then if they're not at their progressive sales goal, they've got to be at our team training, and then dialogue training. So we've got four of those five, we do give them the ability to not hit four to five, one week, it gets if they have two weeks back to back, that's when they fall off. We do get that you might have a crazy week, one week, you know, you just can't make a couple meetings because you've got five closings going on and walkthroughs. But back to back weeks is where we start questioning that we'd hand off.
Brian Charlesworth 19:39
Okay, so there are overperforming you're good if they miss a week, but let's say they miss two weeks, and maybe there's one of those is their prospecting. They're not having the conversations they need to have. They didn't show up to a meeting. You just now you're going to pull them off of lead rotation. And that's just for one week. There.
Matt Mick 20:00
Yeah, that's for that week that gives them the time to get cleaned up, you know, to get in there get caught up on their calls get focused back on their real estate. And they simply share a calendar with our ISA of their availability. So if they're not on lead rotation, he just minimizes their calendar from his calendar, and he doesn't even see their availability for that week.
Brian Charlesworth 20:22
Yeah, I think that's great. There are so many ways to do that. And just hearing, hearing all the different ways, I think it's extremely valuable because it kind of depends on what sort of leader you are right? How do you? How do you want to break it up? Where you only give certainly type certain people? Or do you want to give everyone the same leads? And just not give them any leads? If they're not performing the way they need to? Yeah.
Matt Mick 20:47
And then seller leads, you know, those are a little different. We do make those go to more higher producing agents. Of course, in our market, the commission payout on a seller lead is at least twice as high as a buyer lead.
Brian Charlesworth 21:02
Explain that. What do you mean by that?
So is no Pac is lower than that.
Matt Mick 21:17
Yeah, so the buyer, the buyer leads and our market in Nebraska really, it's always like a 60-40 split 60% goes to the listing agent 40% to the to the buyer's agent. But few years ago, for some reason, in Legion, they went to 2% payout for buyers for buyer's agents. And so if you're taking six or 7% listings, you're walking away with four or 5% on the left side, which makes it far more advantageous to carry a listing in our markets than in most markets where it's a 3%. Split. So because those are far bigger moneymakers, we want to make sure those are in the closers hands. So for that we said just minimum requirements. So we're not handing over, you know, listings to brand new agents yet.
Brian Charlesworth 22:01
So for those of you listening, I mean, I don't know this has happened in your area. I know that hasn't happened in Utah yet. But I do know there are a lot of power listing agents now that will say, guess what? I'm gonna take three and a half percent, I'm gonna give you two and a half percent. But it's not to the extent of what happening. It sounds like that's a standard thing in Nebraska.
Matt Mick 22:24
No, this is just a LinkedIn just generally. Oh, just in LinkedIn, it's, it's unfortunate. For sure. Yeah, it makes, especially in this market, you know, we've got no inventory buyers are out there, you know, writing and negotiating 18 offers for one client and at the end of the day, they walk away with 2%. were five years ago, they got paid 2.8 to write and negotiate one offer.
Brian Charlesworth 22:47
Yeah. So, so mad, I'm guessing going through your head right now and over the last year probably is how do I get more listings?
Matt Mick 22:56
Yep. And that's what we've been investing in a lot higher this year. But halfway through last year, we just started setting up way more back end funneling of seller leads, getting lead seller type leads into our funnels, getting postcards going out home bought going out more follow up on sellers, knowing that that's it's that's not going to change for us, you know. And then, because we have an in house marketing guy that helps us sell ourselves to them as well, you know, we're not just I'm not an old bartender that kind of tries to do Facebook. Now we've got a guy with a degree, that's gonna be marketing your home for you. So that's helped us a lot.
Brian Charlesworth 23:35
Yeah, good. Good. Any other things you're doing to drive listings?
Matt Mick 23:41
Our agents prospect, we do challenges right now we have a challenge going to battle the sexes challenge. So our male agents are competing as our female agents for listing appointments and signed listing agreements. So we're doing that right now.
Brian Charlesworth 23:57
So how do you run that challenge? I mean, you make that sound easy. But how do you run a sales challenge?
Matt Mick 24:03
Yeah, we just take it to them set up and Sisu, you know, using cc challenges and create groups. So we just put all the boys in one group, all the gals in the next group and at every appointment, they realize they get five points. And I think every listing they take, they get 15 points. And at the end of the month, the winner the winning group gets a happy hour and we're trying to have fun with that sometimes we have like misuses at those like Chairman sizes. And then the losing coach because I have a business partner as well. So she's handling the women's side I'm healing them inside the losing coach gets tight in the face. So I'm actually scheduling
Brian Charlesworth 24:42
that's probably what they like most about it right?
Matt Mick 24:43
I think so. Yeah. So I'm, I'm actually going to sit down and prospect myself and handover some listing appointments to some of my mail agents here to try to just get some point stack for us here in the next couple of weeks. But yeah, we've I mean, we've paid a monthly mortgage. We've done You know, tickets and dinner to concerts, we try to run a six to eight challenges a year to just get motivation. It helps us try to target place spaces in our business where we might be weak. So if we realize, hey, we're kind of behind where we want to be with listings, let's do everything we can to incentivize some listing type activity.
Brian Charlesworth 25:20
Yeah, I think that's awesome. I've also noticed that it really has an impact on the culture. Like I'm guessing right now, all of your guys are holding each other accountable instead of you having to do that all the time. A little bit. Yeah. Yeah, that they're probably pushing each other. Do you? Do you have Slack channel going on? Where they're all chatting in the groups to do some of that motivation now?
Matt Mick 25:43
No, not quite. But we have been emailing back and forth, you know, some texting here and there.
Brian Charlesworth 25:49
Really nice. Yeah. Okay. That's great. Let's see. So I wanted to ask you like, just in your opinion, if you're a new team leader today, just starting out, like, what are the keys? What are the must? What are the five things three to five things that you absolutely must do to be successful in your business?
Matt Mick 26:10
Well track your numbers, as a new team leader, you know, you don't have the ability to just throw money away. So know where you're spending your money, know where that's going, definitely hire a TC, if at all, just for your own purpose. So you don't have to focus all that backend stuff on transactions, because there's a lot that goes to building a team numbers leads, and we're big on training, it doesn't matter, you know, what level agent you are, we're huge on training, you can never learn too much. So figure out training, whether you pay for it. There's dozens of training organizations out there anymore. Jeff Cohen has one with ers. So we have a membership to that as well. But we do in-house training for everything. Which has been nice now, because like I said, we have an ops manager that can help with training, we have a marketing guy, the marketing guys, phenomenal. I mean, he can he goes into the nitty-gritty on how to set up your Google profile to get people to find you online, your Facebook, your LinkedIn, how to shoot video, how to edit video, all of that stuff. Not to mention having a good marketing person, on your, on your staff, our organic traffic has gone through the roof, with his with how he's been, you know, tagging photos and data that goes out there. Before he started, you know, organically, we were getting 1012 leads a month through Google. And we're like 8090 leads a month right now. And we've seen huge increases in that and you know, basically pays the salary, you know, with how much leads costs anymore. So training leads, tracking what you're doing. And then a TC, I would say those are four things that you've just got to have. I would imagine you could run a team, but your team's not going to grow where you want it to grow. If it's just the mat MC team, and it's just me trying to do everything by and find the scenes and
Brian Charlesworth 27:59
yeah, so track your numbers. Yeah, make sure you have a TC get some good training. Yep. And provide good training to your agents. Right. Yeah. And then make sure you have an in-house marketing person so that you can really drive organic leads.
Matt Mick 28:17
Yeah, that marketing? I mean, and honestly, I've been, I've been looking at some other models, where we bring in like, psychologists, you know, to lead our sales team. I mean, they're all over the place. You know, it used to be this just taboo thing. But now you have sports psychologist, you have elementary psychologist if they're all over the place. So bringing in a professional that can ask the right questions at the right time to get to the real motivation for your staff for your agents. I've been really looking at that and see what the ROI on that would be. It's a whole other level. Right? It's I don't know that. I've heard of anybody that necessarily has that on their team. There's a sales lead that has that psychology background. It'd be I'm interested in seeing what that would look like for an investment. on our end. I've been thinking that digging into it a little bit.
Brian Charlesworth 29:06
Yeah. You, you may want to talk to spring about that she brought in somebody who used to be a speaker for Tony Robbins. And you may have heard him, I brought him into our masterminds a couple of times. But he really coaches on mindset. And it's kind of what you're talking about, right? You're gonna train them how to think and 80% of what we do comes from our mindset, and so if or 90%. So if your mindsets, not there by talking to Justin, he would say 100% that is really that's where it all starts. So I think that's great advice.
Matt Mick 29:43
No, it definitely is, you know, I'm a high D on you know, the desk. We have a lot of agents on our team that aren't high these and I find that I'm not the best leader for those people, right because I look and I'm just like, just just just go do this. And that might not be their personality. Just go do that I need to be saying or motivating them in other ways. And so bringing someone into the organization that could do that, I think is going to help us grow quite a bit. So that's something that we are looking for here as we move forward.
Brian Charlesworth 30:12
Man, I think it's great, you recognize that? In my opinion, most team leaders are Heidi's. And most people who are on a team or not. And if they were, they probably would be a team leader instead of being on your team. Right. So anyway, sometimes as leaders, we expect the people that we're leading to think like we think and that's, you know, you can't expect that right? Or you think that you expect them to get the same results you get, you can't expect that. So anyway, it's just being aware of that consciously is going to have an impact on how you're able to, to really lead and guide them. So
Matt Mick 30:55
know for sure, yeah, I mean, everything in our organization is kind of stemmed off of that, and making sure that you can, that's where the shift is for us. Right? It's not necessarily the market, it's the mindset. So getting agents getting them into the right mindset, because they'll come in here and you go over goals and their goals to do this. But if they don't have the right mindset to do what it takes to get there, even if you know, we're tracking and we say hey, like last year, it took you 26 conversations to go under contracts, 26 conversations, what was 140 call attempts? Getting them to do that sometimes is the most difficult part, even though they know the answer, right? So finding someone that can really just show them the way that understands how the mind works a little higher level, I think it really changed an entire organization.
Brian Charlesworth 31:45
Yeah. Which goes back to what you suggested, which is there why, yep. And so if, you know, about 10 years ago, when Simon Sinek came out with his whole Why, why what how, right. So I actually sat down with our team, and this was a, you know, different business I was involved with at the time. But we had everybody watched that. He did a, just like an hour long presentation on it, which was extremely valuable. And then we just met about it. And it made a big difference. I think getting people to understand their Why is one of the challenges of a leader.
Matt Mick 32:28
Yeah, no, it really is. And it's more than than just saying what their Why is I mean, it's so much deeper than that. And getting to that is, is some is really tough. And I think that's why most agents like you said one out of 10 don't make it right, because they can't really harness what their why is that we'll get them up in the morning and get him, you know, to get dressed and get to the office and do what needs to be done.
Brian Charlesworth 32:52
Yeah. Is that why for sure. As a team leader, you can help your people discover that and give them tools and make sure they're just selling instead of having to manage transactions. And the list goes on and on. So so much value of being on a team. So now I know two team leaders, and Lincoln and you guys are both crushing it. It's a small market Do you to own like 100% of that market? Or what? situation there?
Matt Mick 33:19
Yeah, I think, you know, last year, we did, we did 339 units last year. And I think that that was about 8% of our markets. I've seen numbers here that I haven't looked at him quite yet this year of just total sales. And I think we're I mean, we're pasting over 10%, which is pretty awesome. Being one team that they are brokers told us that we're like half of their production and cool thing about our brokerages. We joined them. They were in a closet, honestly. We came over they had like five agents and we doubled the size of the brokerage. They were out of they weren't Omaha different markets predominantly. So we came on they'd good leadership. And now they're the top brokerage in town three years later. So they've got more agents than any other brokerage and signs all over town. So I think we made the good move there. But it's been interesting seeing that growth as well. And seeing just the mindset that this whole organization is taking.
Brian Charlesworth 34:17
Yeah, great. Anything else? Like any last advice? I have a few personal questions, I'd like to ask you, but I really appreciate you walking us through just the things you've done to take your business from 130 transactions up to 500 this year. I think it's phenomenal. And I love being able to be a part of that. I mean, I know you and I don't talk every day, but we've definitely had time together. And I've gotten a lot of great insights and feedback from you. So I appreciate that as well. But anything, anything that you'd like to share outside of what we've discussed today. No,
Matt Mick 34:51
I mean, just always keep learning. You know, that's, that's the tough part. I can tell you last year with COVID. I kind of felt like I was in a cage all year. You know, it wasn't able to Get out, go to different conferences, talk to other team owners. So if you haven't done that, if you're new to the business, find those don't go to the big ones, you know, find the niche ones, the smaller ones, where you actually have time to sit down and talk with people. They're the guys on stage, you're going to see later on that day sitting in a crowd with you. I mean, though, that's where it's at read books, podcasts. That's we're always telling our agents, you know, we can tell you to do a bunch of stuff, you're probably not going to listen to us. But if you listen to four different people on podcasts, read two different books, and you're getting the same message out of it. And that's probably going to lead you in the right direction. So that's, that's where I'm at with that. Yeah, yeah.
Brian Charlesworth 35:39
Yeah, that's, that's really great advice for anybody who I don't care if you're an agent, team, leader, business owner, anybody, always, always be learning always be growing. So it sounds like you do that through a combination of books, podcasts, and events. And these mastermind events, I think, really, like you said, if you can get these niche events, you're really digging in with, you're able to spend some one on one time with pretty much anybody at that event and really learn, learn the things you want to learn. It's kind of like today, I get to learn anything I want from you. But if you're the ones asking the question, you get it, you get to learn the things, they're going to have an impact on your business. Yeah,
Matt Mick 36:22
and even being a fly on the wall. And some of those, you know, you're just hearing the, the failures and other people have failed, you know, people you might look up to, they failed. they've overcome it, it was wasn't necessarily a failure. It was just a learning experience for him. As a new agent, as a team leader, you get a lot out of that. So you get lost in those big events, you know, family reunion, was there like 40,000 people at those things? I find the smaller events and actually have some good conversations with people for sure.
Brian Charlesworth 36:53
Good. Well, we are getting ready to have last year we had kind of a season event, but it was virtual. So we're getting ready to have an event this year. And I'm super excited about us having our first event. So Matt, tell me what is your favorite book or podcast that you learn from? Yeah, well, this
Matt Mick 37:11
podcast, of course. This is a good podcast, though. I, I told my essay that I was gonna be on another podcast, and he can see my calendar. And he came in this morning when I got on here. And he was super excited about this podcast. He's like, dude, I listen to Grit. I was like, dude, that's awesome. Books, though, you know, Extreme Ownership as a book that I really enjoyed reading. relentless, I found what that was a really good, really good book as well. Both of those just come back, if you're going to be a leader, they just come back about taking ownership, like you make the calls. So I can't really throw it on anybody else. And here lately, I've been using a few pages as a Miracle Morning. You know, waking up a little bit earlier. You know, having some my own time get some stretching in some miracle mornings. Also. Pretty good book, too.
Brian Charlesworth 37:58
Yeah. All right. Thank you. Yeah. So you're there in Nebraska. You're there in Lincoln. When you want to get out and go, go have fun and go travel. Where's your favorite place to go? You know,
Matt Mick 38:13
I really enjoy Frisco, Colorado. I don't know how familiar with Colorado because you guys have your own mountains and stuff up there in Utah. But it's a lot quieter town than some of those other mountain resort towns up there. So we try to get away. My wife's been pregnant. So we haven't traveled as much as we'd like to but Frisco where it's I like just getting away for a week there and just breathe in fresh air. For sure.
Brian Charlesworth 38:36
That's great. I've been a lot of places in Colorado, but I'm not even familiar with Frisco. So where's that located? You know, where like Lake Dillon is? Yeah,
Matt Mick 38:45
It's right on the shore of Lake Dillon. Like I said, it's a smaller little quaint spot, just nestled right in there white by Breck and Keystone. Yeah. Silverthorne. So it's, it's, it's an older population for sure. But it's quiet. And sometimes you just need to get away and have some quiet.
Brian Charlesworth 39:03
Yeah, right. Oh, that's check that out. What in your spare time like your personal time while you're at home? Like what are what are some of the things you like to do?
Matt Mick 39:13
Ya can go golfing. I'm trying to pick up golfing. I married a college golfer. I've never beater once. I've been trying to do more of that. And I've been taking her off here. I call it because she's pregnant to try to see if I can position myself to get her on the rebound here. So I'm going to pick it up quite a bit of golfing and then just raising my I have a five year old daughter and then we have a daughter on the way so this year has been just prepping for that.
Brian Charlesworth 39:40
Good. Congratulations. Sounds like you're gonna have a whole family of female golfers I hope a great thing about golf is in the world is changing. Now getting a scholarship is changing all the time. But I remember golf being like the one thing that if you were a female golfer, You're pretty much guaranteed to be able to get a college scholarship if you chose to.
Matt Mick 40:03
That's right. My wife had a full ride for it, which was nice. So
Brian Charlesworth 40:06
yeah, yeah. Great. All right, Matt. Well, thanks for being on the show today. I really enjoyed just seeing and learning about how you've gotten to where you have, because I still remember meeting you and seeing your business. And now I mean, you know, one of the things I would say is, you know, it might be time for you to start putting on some of these events and doing your thing along those lines. So, one of these days. Yeah. All right. Well, congratulations on all of your success. And everybody. Thanks for joining us on the show today, if you'll reach out and give us a review that helps us bring in some of these top team leaders, top business owners. And we'll look forward to seeing you guys all next week of the Grit podcast. Thank you for joining. Thanks a lot, Matt.
Matt Mick 40:53
Hey, thanks.
