In 2011, Josh Cunningham was working as a recruiter for a small boutique brokerage. He attended a Mike Ferry training event when he met Frank Klesitz, CEO of Vyral Marketing. Frank’s story of success inspired him so much that a few months later, he reached out to Frank to ask how he can work for him. This was when he decided to take a leap of faith and jump into the entrepreneurial world.
A couple of years later, a client he had at Vyral Marketing, Spring Bengtzen, shared that despite the work she puts into her real estate business, she just wasn’t seeing the results she wanted. At that time, a lot of people from the industry are attributing their success to the ISA model. Josh then decided to help Spring make her first ISA hire.
Today, Josh Cunningham is the CEO and Founder of rokrbox, a premium real estate ISA company that connects serious buyers and sellers with highly reliable and successful Realtors across the US and Canada. To date, Josh’s team has managed more than two million Internet leads using his proven model.
Let’s hear from Josh as he shares his insights on the ISA model and the top 5 biggest mistakes agents are making with their leads.
Top Takeaways:
01:23 How Josh got started in the real estate industry
04:06 How rokrbox came to be
09:34 The formula they follow at rokrbox
10:18 What entrepreneurship is all about
11:06 The value of having a dedicated person to follow-up on your leads
11:27 What are the biggest mistakes agents make with their leads
18:47 How to hold a conversation with somebody without any local market knowledge
21:37 Why you should always communicate strong recommendations.
26:44 Why you shouldn’t waste all your time with leads who are not yet motivated
28:43 Josh’s take on where the real estate industry is going
Download the Top 5 Mistakes that Agents Make with their Leads: https://bit.ly/3JdZVDy
To get in touch with Josh Cunningham, email him at Josh@rokrbox.com
Or check their website at https://rokrbox.com/
Podcast Transcript:
Brian Charlesworth 0:34
Alright, hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Grit Podcast. I'm Brian Charlesworth. I'm the founder of Sisu, and your host of the show. And today, I have someone with me that geez, I think Josh was kind of my intro to real estate since my wife and Josh go way, way back. Maybe not in the way you guys are thinking about but and business building. Anyway, wanted to kick things off to them with Josh Cunningham CEO and founder of rokrbox. Josh actually helped Spring from, or he replaced her building her own ISA team back in the day. So we'll dive into that today. But Josh has some fun stories to share with us today. I'm excited to hear about it. And Josh, I'm just gonna let you maybe give a little more bit more your background, and then we can go from there. How long have you been in the real estate industry now?
Josh Cunningham 1:26
So I got sort of a jumpstart in the industry in 2011. I was actually working back in Texas at a small boutique brokerage, and as a recruiter, and the brokerage followed Mike Ferry, and so my broker would send me to Mike Ferry training events. And in July of 2011, I bumped into a guy named Frank Klesitz, who for those of you don't know, he's the founder and CEO of Vyral Marketing, and ran into Frank Klesitz, you know, kind of really hit it off just chatting about business and entrepreneurship. And, of course, we had a great time out of the nightclubs in Las Vegas. And at the end of the trip, I really had no idea what he was up to, I thought he was maybe an agent or had something to do with the conference. But later on, we connected on Facebook. And I came to realize that he was actually the founder and CEO of our marketing, which at the time, he had about 35 clients, it to employees and but the most important thing about his experience in his success was that the 35 clients that he had, were all top producing agents across the country. And I knew that because a lot of them were speaking on stage at this Mike Ferry event. And, you know, there are so many different cliches about how to be successful or how to follow successful people. But essentially, if you surround yourself with people that are doing greater and bigger, better things than you are, then you can, you know, follow their, their path and learn from their mistakes and, and learn from their successes. So I literally reached out to Frank on a Facebook post, back in August 2011. I said, Hey, how can I work for viral marketing from College Station, because viral was based in Omaha, and I was in College Station, Texas. And so that simple decision to, you know, make that post and start a conversation with Frank and I took a leap of faith and left my cushy job behind and jumped into that entrepreneurial world. And that's really when I got, you know, sort of a, a rocket ship in the real estate industry, because Frank and I were literally on the road two or three weeks out of every month going to all these different seminars and masterminds and conferences in any sort of prestigious room that we could buy our ways into. And it was through that experience through traveling with Frank for a couple of years that sort of opened my eyes to the opportunity that is rokrbox. And so
Brian Charlesworth 3:37
That was, Geez, that was about 11 years ago. So yeah, regulations. How old were you at the time?
Josh Cunningham 3:43
I don't even remember when I was am 37 now, so I'd have been 26,
Brian Charlesworth 3:48
26 years old and you've been in that entrepreneur world ever since. So, yep, started out thinking, hey, I may be in real estate. And now you've built something that supports the real estate industry. So So you and Frank were going around, we might as well finish that story. And you worked with Frank for a while. And then how did rokrbox come to be?
Josh Cunningham 4:10
Yeah. So Spring was one of my clients, one of my first clients ever. And
Brian Charlesworth 4:14
You're talking about at Frank's company
Josh Cunningham 4:17
At Vyral marketing. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So that's how I got introduced to Spring. And of course, our mission at Vyral Marketing was to help people create video content and send it out to their database. So they get all that referral and repeat business back. And so I was working with Spring, you know, coaching her on the videos that she needed to be making. And at one point in time, she asked me for a little bit of additional help with, you know, a buyer sequence, she had a boomtown account, and she's like, Hey, I need to get a better conversion on this or there are videos that I can create an email drip that I can do. And so I helped her out with a little bit of that we built a sophisticated email, video drip and she still wasn't seeing the results that she wanted. And she was getting really frustrated with all the money she was sinking into the ads then the Boomtown platform, you know, as well as just all the agents that They're just cherry-picking leads, and she's not getting the best ROI from it. So, again, I'm getting all these conferences and seminars, rubbing elbows with all the top producing agents and top producing teams. And I'd heard about this model called an is a model inside sales assistant. And one day spring and I were sitting at a mastermind, it was a boomtown breakfast mastermind and people were going around the room talking about their frustrations, and some people were talking about some of the things they've done to succeed, and is a model kept coming up, kept coming up. And I was like, Well, that's what you need to do spring, you just got to go higher. And I say, and she's like, well, it's much easier said than done, why don't I just hire you to help me do this. And so that was the initial, you know, journey, the initial project that we set out to do is to help her hire an ISA in-house. And of course, she paid me a consulting fee to help her apply all the hypothetical theories and models. But we very quickly understood that just about two months into the process, the ISA that we had hired, we trained her up on all these phone skills, trained her up on all these scripts on all these objection handlers, she got very comfortable talking to lead, she got very comfortable handling rejection. And she was handing off all these hot opportunities to the agents in the office. And that's when she saw the real money being made. So one day is a Carly, you know, things are looking good. And she marches and springs office and says, hey, guess what, I got great news. I'm signing up to get my real estate license, I want to be an agent just like everybody else on the team. And so that's when we were back at square one. And I realized, though, there really needs to be a permanent turnkey is a solution for the industry, and the talent piece of it, I decided to go back to College Station, Texas. So for those of you who don't know, that's home to Texas A&M University. And despite all the Aggie jokes, you may have heard, it is actually a very prestigious university, they collect one of the top 10% of high school graduating classes, and, you know, these students come to this town, which is pretty much a college town, you know, it's in the middle of all the metropolitan areas, and they're looking for ways to invest in themselves and grow their skills and explore new experiences so that by the time they graduate, they can walk the stage with multiple job offers. And so that was sort of the connection that I saw to be able to find a good consistent supply of talent. And so I went back to college station and said, Alright, Spring, you don't have an ISA. Guess who's gonna make the calls now? Me, myself, and I. So I strapped up a headset that was in the summer of 2013, and started smiling and dialing in and just, you know, again, applying all the hypothetical models and strategies. And, you know, really the most important thing was determining what was the best investment of human capital that was going to equal the greatest return on these internet leads. And so that's the puzzle that we've been solving over the last eight years now. We've handled over two and a half million internet leads. And we've hired and trained over 350, inside sales assistants to do this work for agents all across the country. And of course, we've helped hundreds and hundreds of agents from coast to coast, close more deals from their internet leads by following our process and doing it consistently, on a day-to-day basis. So that's really where the magic is.
Brian Charlesworth 7:57
So Josh, when I met you, it must have been seven and a half years ago, about seven years, we just got married, somewhere around there. So anyway, you've come a long way and tell me how many souls I call themselves development reps. SDRs, is what that's called in the software world. Yeah. But remember, in the software world, but you know, the real estate world is now getting to where every team I see is talking about AI essays, either. How do they solve this with somebody like you? Or how do they build these on their own? Or maybe they've had them on their own? I've seen I know, I know, teams that we work with that have had as to or ISAs now for, for the last 10 years. So it's all over the board. But how many? How many of those reps do you have now?
Josh Cunningham 8:48
Actually, we have at any point in time, anywhere between 35 to 50. And like I said, over the course of the years we've hired and trained 350 We don't have all of them on staff now because again, these are college students. So they've all most of them have graduated, moved on to, you know, the next steps in their professional career. But yeah, at any given time, we'll have between 35 to 50, part-time ISAs on staff.
Brian Charlesworth 9:10
Okay, so if I want, I can just leverage you guys to be my is a team, and you'll pass leads to my agents.
Josh Cunningham 9:19
Exactly. Yeah, we, we specialize in a couple of different CRMs. We work in Boomtown Commissions, Inc, we're also rolling out a Chime department as well. And then, of course, we always keep our ear to the streets and keep exploring other CRMs that we would want to learn because I mean, that's what we are. We're a human capital organization. At the end of the day, what our client cares about is there's a really high-quality call made. And so we're not a technology add on. We've never written a line of code in our life. We leave that to the geniuses like you at Sisu. But we have to essentially learn that CRM, you log into it, we take a seat, we call the leads, we pass them along to the agents as soon as they get hot and ready. And that's the formula that we follow. So yeah, we've had a lot of teams that have grown and scaled with us. started out as an individual agent and just needed some extra help. And then they started, you know, leveraging our services to recruit agents to the team, and provide, you know, an abundance of opportunity for them. And they've really been able to grow and scale their organizations and, you know, spend their time doing what it is that they want to do. You know, that's, that's what entrepreneurship is all about is about creating freedom in your life to do with it what you want, whether that’s spending time with your family, or spend more time on work or, you know, open up another business on the side. That's sort of the freedom that we allow people to create.
Brian Charlesworth 10:33
So I've seen, obviously, Sisu has been around now for five, I guess, five and a half years, something like that. rolled out about three and a half years ago. Anyway, what I've noticed though, is all of these companies just call it realtor.com, Zillow, Redfin, you know, the list goes on, these guys all have people that call their leads, and follow up on them, and hand them off. And so you as a real estate team, like you need to do the same thing, right? Agents are not lead follow-up people, you know, so it's critical that you have somebody that's going to be there on top of it, or are they’re going to disappear? So when we talk about that Josh, agents are not being lead follow up people. I know, you know, all the mistakes that agents make. So maybe we can talk about that for a minute.
Josh Cunningham 11:26
Yeah, we actually just compiled a, you know, internal report at rokrbox about the five biggest mistakes that agents are making with their leads. And it doesn't really matter at what point in the process, whether it's a brand new cold registration, or warm opportunity that's been handed off to you or someone from your database that you're reaching out to, or referral that you've been introduced to, these are pretty much the five most important mistakes that agents are making with their leads right now. And I'd be happy to share the PDF with you if you want to put it on your tools and resources here. But the first one here is that they ask close-ended questions. And again, we've been in sales for a really long period of time. So sometimes it seems like a no brainer to us. But for a lot of people who are new to the industry, they're new to sales. I mean, for the most part real estate, a lot of times it's like a people came from somewhere else and landed in real estate. So they may not have had some sort of formal sales training. But the difference being a closed-ended question, an open-ended question, a closed-ended questions, anything you can answer yes or no to an open-ended question is intended to open up the conversation. So the first thing we always hear from agents all the time, is they get a new lead, or they get a hot opportunity, or they get introduced to a referral, and they call them up and they say, Hey, can I help out with your home search? Like that's a closed-ended question? Can I help out with your home search? Someone could say no. And where do you go from there? It's an uphill battle. Instead, think about the difference, the significant difference by just adding one word, which is how, how can I help out with your home search? You can't necessarily answer yes or no to that. So a lot of times when we're working with teams, and we're handing off these warm, vetted leads to them, and they're still having struggles, you know, what will encourage the team owners to go in and listen to the calls that are being made by the agents? And just starting right off the bat? What is the first question that they're asking them? Hey, my name is so and so I was given your information here. Can I help out with your home search? Oh, no, I'm fine. Just looking. Thanks. See you later. Right. Yeah, so just that one, you know, addition of that word, how, how can I help out with your home search?
Brian Charlesworth 13:29
Yeah, that's an invaluable thing. Anybody that has new agents coming into the business, like, if you could just teach them that right upfront, it's gonna make a major, major impact on their success.
Josh Cunningham 13:43
They're gonna have significantly more conversations than they are right now by just literally providing an opportunity for the door to be slammed in their face every single time. So yeah, that's one of the first things we noticed. Another one of the big mistakes that we've see is that, and this is this even goes into our own training, when we're training all of our ISAs. Like, we have a very thorough one-on-one training course, where when someone comes into rokrbox, they get 16 hours of one on one coaching before we even put them out onto the floor. And so these are obviously a lot of the things that we're, you know, aware of and coaching into our callers as well. But the second thing is, they don't listen to understand. But most people do is they fire off a question. And then they just blank out. And they're thinking about what's the next question that I need to ask. I just learned this brand new script here, right, and I haven't really internalized and I haven't really memorized it and practiced it. So I'm literally just worried about what's the next thing that I'm supposed to say instead of actually listening to understand because a lot of times when you get into a good conversation with somebody about real estate, you may have five or six questions you know the pre qualifying questions that you want to ask, timeframe motivation, do they have a home to sell, how are they planning on making this purchase? Things of that sort, and a lot of times what will happen You'll ask one question. And the lead may actually answer another question in their response. And then you sound like a complete amateur, then turn right around and ask them the same question that they've literally just answered. And so, again,
Brian Charlesworth 15:16
Or you ask them a question that's totally unrelated to what they just stated, right? Yeah.
Josh Cunningham 15:19
Yeah, exactly. And so I mean, in this game of cold buyer, lead generation, I mean, this isn't the referral and repeat business that we're used to here. Are people know you, they like you, they trust you. I mean, you literally kind of stole their information off the internet, like you, you baited them with a website that gave them some listings, after a couple of listings, you literally forced them to register. That's a cold lead man. And by the way, that the key AdWords and phrases that they're searching for online are not Realtors for hire, it's homes for sale. Like they're not looking for you as a realtor, what they're looking for the homes. And so you have to interject that search and provide some value. So if you jump on the phone with a cold lead, and you just start firing off questions, and they feel like you're not listening to them, like you're not understanding them, it creates such a chasm of disconnect, that they're not going to want to move forward with you. I mean, what type of precedents does that set when someone thinks themselves? I just told this guy, this answer, and he's sitting here asking me the same question again, like, how is this gonna phase out through the rest of this entire process, which for most people is the largest investment they're ever going to make if you can't listen to understand. So that's one of the most important things again if you go and you start listening to some of your, your Ishs, or your agents and listen to their calls. That's one of the things that we actually have, we have what's called a customer service evaluation. And it allows us to scorecard and grade someone's call. And that's literally a checkbox in each section of the CSE, did they listen to understand, did they listen to understand, or they're not just thinking about what they're going to talk about next?
Brian Charlesworth 16:52
So, Josh, it's interesting, because, you mentioned something that is, these guys are looking at homes, they're not looking for realtors. So I know that just from Spring, right, she works closely with a lot of these big companies. And I know that Zillow’s strategy has been, you know what, just get that person in the home, you know, they want they were looking at a home, schedule a showing and go meet them at the home. Like that's, that's their number one thing, because that's what those people are looking for. And I think so many agents out there thinking, Oh, I've got to get them pre-qualified. And I've got to understand if they're going to sell their home, I've got to understand all this stuff before I meet with them. But like you said, you know, these are us that these are cold leads, I think there's I think they're warm if they're looking for a home, and you're taking them to that home, because you can get in front of them. And at first, the first agent in front of them is the one that wins. Yep, no. Yep. But it's such great advice that you're bringing here. So those are the top two.
Josh Cunningham 17:55
Yeah. And it's a great transition because you bring me right to number three, which is that agents, you know, besides listening to understand, another thing that they'll do that's just terrifying, is that they talk about themselves, instead of acquiring about the needs and motivation of the lead on the other end of the phone. And that's the whole reason we've been able to grow and scale our operation from coast to coast. Again, all of our callers are based out of College Station, Texas, their students at Texas a&m university, they have zero local market knowledge for every single one of our clients. Like they don't know anything at all about the homes, the listing the inventory, and they're not supposed to because they're an unlicensed assistant. But how do you still hold a conversation with somebody without having any information, see what most agents think is who I need to brag about myself and all my accolades and all my knowledge on my expertise, but the way that we went
Brian Charlesworth 18:42
And my team and what we're going to do to support you
Josh Cunningham 18:45
That we've won, and all this stuff, but the reason why we're able to hold a conversation with somebody coast to coast without any local market knowledge is because we have the conversation about them, about the other person on the other end of the phone, what are their needs? What is their motivation? What is their timeframe, and so you can have that conversation with anybody in the country without having local market knowledge? And you make the person feel very special and important and wanted and needed in their life because you're allowing them the opportunity to talk about them. I mean, if you've ever studied any sales or any, you know, social networking type of dynamics, I mean, it's always about giving people an opportunity to talk about themselves. People love talking about themselves. And that's what makes the quality of a good listener. And that's why people feel more connected with people who just listened to them. So don't talk about yourselves. But ask really good questions you want to learn and find out about the other person's needs and motivation. And then you can use your expertise to connect that with the best resource that's available to them. Whether that be Hey, let's go hop in the car and go look at the homes right now. Or hey, you know, it sounds like you're a little bit further down the line. Let's keep in touch you know, once you stay active here on the website, and let us know if you need anything. So that's the third biggest mistake we've made they make
Brian Charlesworth 20:00
That skill people can take and put that into all aspects of their life. And it'll completely change your life, not just your business, right?
Josh Cunningham 20:09
Your business, your personal relationships, your you know, relationships with your parents, your children, whatever that might be, if you give people more of an opportunity to talk about themselves, and you listen, you're gonna make better connections. So great point there. Number four here is they make terrible recommendations.
Weak recommendations really are the way to put it. I'm sure we've all gotten to that point in a sales process where you feel like it's time to take the next step forward, whatever that might be. And you just don't know how to get the words to come out of your mouth without sounding like an idiot. And so what happens, a lot of times people use a lot of mitigated speech, beating around the bush essentially, is what it is. So a lot of times when we're listening to one of our callers when we get to the recommendation portion of the script because that's how we have our script set up, there's a contact, we ask questions, we make a recommendation. And then we encourage them. So when we get to that recommendation portion of the script, you can't be using words like maybe might, should possibly could, if you'd like to, like that's a weak recommendation. Well, hey, Brian, you know, maybe possibly, if you weren't busy next week, we could maybe go get in the car and possibly look at some homes. Of course, if you weren't busy doing anything else, that's a very weak recommendation. When people are working in real estate, they wouldn't work with a professional, this is a very expensive price tag. They don't want to be working with an amateur, they don't want to be made a fool in this process and feel like they lost out on 10s of 1000s of dollars. They want to work with an expert. And the way that an expert communicates is they make strong recommendations. If you go to your doctor, and you have to have some, you know, immediate surgery, your doctor is not gonna tell you oh, well, you know, you might want to consider maybe possibly thinking about getting the surgery here that might could maybe improve some things possibly later on down the road, they're going to tell you, Hey, man, here's the situation, this is exactly what we recommend. And let's go ahead and move forward with it. So that's what you have to be thinking about when you're making recommendations in the real estate world, whether again, whether it be let's go look at homes, or whether it be let's just stay in touch. Or, Hey, let me introduce you to my lender to see what you can qualify for, you've got to make a strong recommendation. So remove all the mitigated speech, quit beating around the bush, and get straight to the point. And a very simple easy phrase that you can always use is based on what you told me, I would recommend blank, it's a very simple phrase, you can plug and play that in any industry? Well, Brian, based on what you told me, the best resource available to you would be to meet with one of the experts on our teams that they can help you put a financial plan in place to see what you can afford and go start taking a look at some homes. So it's a much stronger recommendation. So a lot of times again, there's so much that's been put into this process, you had to pay for AdWords, you had to get a registration, you had to have the courage to pick up the phone, you had to ask open-ended questions to get into the conversation you had to listen to understand. So you don't sound like an idiot, you had to give them an opportunity to talk about themselves, instead of you talking about yourself. And now you get to the point where it's really time to make money, which to the recommendation. And people flushed down the drain by using all sorts of weak language. So
Brian Charlesworth 23:24
What I've seen with this, and I still coach a few of Spring's agents, three of them. And it's interesting, it's basically the way you said is perfect, but what I think of when you talk about that is Are you coming with confidence? Or are you afraid? Right? Because fear is going to make you feel like you you're not worthy or not qualified to make those recommendations. And if you just come with confidence, they're gonna feel that and it's so important, which, you know, the simple thing is in Utah, this is not in every state, but in Utah, people ask for buyer broker agreements. And if you could go out and show 15 homes, then they could go have someone else write their offer you don't get if you don't get one signed. So there are some agents that never asked for those because they're afraid. Yeah, because they don't have the confidence. Yep. And so anyway, great example. So thank you. Great advice. I'm excited to hear what the fifth one is here, Josh?
Josh Cunningham 24:23
Yeah, just to close up on that. I mean, your income is a direct reflection of the value that you add to other people's lives. So if you're afraid to ask for that, you're not going to make much money. It's just as simple as that. If you're afraid to ask people for permission to add value in their lives. How in the heck are you ever going to be able to add value to someone's life you got to be willing to ask? Yeah, like you said, people are drawn to that, that confidence to that excitement to that enthusiasm to that energy. So great point. Last one here, is they invest too much time with unmotivated leads. How many times have you seen this happen? You got a handful of leads. You get this little pile of leads. Whatever it might be, and you're operating from a scarcity mindset, and you've got this guy, he answers your call every once in a while, you know, and then he has a 20-minute conversation with you about how it's just not quite yet the time. And so at rokrbox, we call this painting a rock. Because a rokrbox of corals, of course, is an old gold mining tool used to separate grant gravel and sand from the gold. And if you can think about all the funny stories in the gold mining days, what was one of the things that people used to do is there was a, there's some other rock that looks like gold, but it's not quite gold, that they would try to pass it off as gold. I don't remember what it was full of gold, full scope. Yeah, and so. So we that's what we call it Rock marks, painting rocks, we don't want to paint rocks, you don't, you can't create an opportunity where there is none. If someone has these, you know, hallucinations have a wish list for what their home is going to be. And you keep spending time with that person hoping that Well, maybe if I just spend more time with this person, eventually they'll qualify for a home, or eventually they'll start looking at things in their price range. Or Eventually, though, you know, finally take the next steps to get their home on the market or get it sold. But too many people waste too much time. With unmotivated leads, and you can't motivate a lead. Again, this is a personal situation that's happening in somebody's life, that's causing them to buy or sell real estate, you're never going to convince someone that they need to be buying or selling real estate. So a lot of times with weaker agents, people with a scarcity mindset is they're holding on and they're grabbing on to these unmotivated leads, and thinking maybe if I spend more time with them, than eventually, I'll get them to become motivated. Well, you need to move on from that lead. And still be respectful to your audience. Be respectful to your database, and give people an opportunity to stay in touch with you. And definitely stay in touch with them. But don't waste all your time. With that cold lead, that's not yet motivated, you got to move on, you got to find another lead source, there are a million different opportunities under the sky of people that you could be having conversations with about real estate. And so again, we see that time and time again, where people are just they're holding on to too much hope from that one own motivated lead. And it's wasting a bunch of time that they could have had 20, 30 other conversations with other people to discover more motivations from other leads.
Brian Charlesworth 27:09
I see this all the time, Josh, I think it's it's that fear thing again. Because if I have 20 or 30 people in my just saying my hot funnel, and I feel like oh, yeah, I've got 2030 people here, I just need to focus on getting these guys closed. Well, anyone, anyone that is a rockstar in real estate spends at least two, maybe three hours every morning, prospecting new leads. And there's a reason so they don't get caught up in that right? Yep. Every single morning, two to three hours, prospect new leads, and then in the afternoons follow up with those people. Yeah, and you're gonna have, you're gonna have a lot more of those people. Yeah, if you're prospecting every day, and you're gonna really be able to get the ones that truly are interested that truly are hot leads versus, versus those ones that will just drag you out for six months.
Josh Cunningham 27:57
Yeah, that allows you to have an abundant mindset.
Brian Charlesworth 28:00
And I think so many agents think, you know, it's, it's almost it's their way of making an excuse to themselves of I don't have to prospect.
Josh Cunningham 28:11
I got some leads here. I got to talk to him, you know, no, no need to generate new business.
Brian Charlesworth 28:16
So that’s great advice. Yeah, if you'll send these over to me, Josh, we will, we will publish these
Josh Cunningham 28:21
Awesome,
Brian Charlesworth 28:22
Especially as we roll this podcast out. And yeah, that'd be great.
Josh Cunningham 28:26
Always happy to serve the community in any way. That's how I got to where I was from learning from others, and so happy to be in a position to share with others from our mistakes and our successes that we've made as well.
Brian Charlesworth 28:37
So Josh, I've got a couple more things I want to talk to you about. The first is I just want to get your take on where this industry is going. You've been in it for 11 years now. Your take might be different than mine. But I love to just learn what you see is happening right now in this industry.
Josh Cunningham 28:54
I think one of the most exciting things I've seen over the last couple of years is the emergence of new brokerages and virtual brokerages like eXp and real because, you know, just literally three or four years ago, it was almost like a joke, when people were being introduced to eXp and you know, the opportunity to create, you know, revenue streams and actually take it an industry that's never really set people up for retirement, to actually give them some, you know, some sort of life plan for what happens after I stopped selling. And then just recently, I know, Spring just joined real close six months ago, and I've had a lot of really good conversations with her about that and just talking to a lot of the high-level teams, team owners and influencers, and vendors in the industry and just really seeing that that's definitely caused by the shakeup in the industry. I think obviously, a year and a half ago, the whole world was brought new challenges with you know, the whole crisis of COVID. And for myself, I've actually worked virtually for when I started about marketing I worked virtually when I started rokrbox, of course, I was in the world headquarters College Station for several But four years ago, I moved out to San Diego. I just love it out here. It's just kind of a lifestyle choice. And I've been running my company from zoom for four years now. And so about a year and a half ago, I felt like the rest of the world currently finally caught up to where I was. And so it makes it a much more easily navigable, and business environment that we're in. I mean, so many of us are working from home or working remotely. In fact, this summer, I spent four months traveling across the country in an RV with my wife, and my one-year-old daughter, and just, you know, got a little bit of internet connection here and there a little bit cell phone service here and there and was able to stay connected to the business. So I think it's a really cool thing that we're seeing again, that the way it was kind of started three, four years ago with the evolution of eXp and people saying, why did we do this brick and mortar? Why do we need all this desk space? Why do we need all this stuff that people don't actually use? And let's just think outside the box? And let's think about, you know, realistically what is it that we truly need in order to solve our clients’ problems. And so, again, I felt very fortunate that that's kind of how our business started. You know, obviously, none of our clients are in our own backyard, all of our clients all across the country, and we're able to grow and scale and leverage that, that resource for agents to grow and scale their teams as well. So I'm just very excited to see the quick evolution that has happened over the last couple of years. And excited to see where what's gonna happen in the future.
Brian Charlesworth 31:23
Yeah, that's the Sisu is the same way we were we've been remote since day one. We do have an office that people can go into, but we have a team that spread all over the country. And I think that that used to not be the case for everyone, right? People used to say, if you're a tech company, you need to be in the Bay Area. Yeah. Now everyone is in the Bay Area is moving out of the bay area. They want to be somewhere else. So I spent, it was up on the ski lift this weekend. And I met with a couple of people and they're like talking about all these, it's just a couple, you know that their kids are out of the house. And they're just talking about all these places they're going and they're basically, you know, talking they listed off like six different ski areas, and states that they've been to this year, is trying to find the good snow. And so you guys retired. They're like, No, we're both attorneys. And we just, we can work from anywhere now. So that's awesome. Anyway, they've just adopted that schedule. And you know, maybe they get three or three or four hours of skiing every day. And then they work. Just work a little bit different hours. Yep. So there's, there's more and more and more of that. And I ‘m seeing it everywhere I go. Yeah. And, you know, I think the thing is for a lot of people, and we, I took my sales team part of them to dinner last night because we had this awards contest. So I took the winners to dinner with their spouses last night. Nice. And it was interesting to just get their feedback on this whole remote thing. Because it's not about the hours you spend. It's about what you produce. Yep. Right. Yep. And so So anyway, back the value. Yeah. You know, what is the value you're providing? What is What are the results you're getting every day have nothing to do with the time you're sitting in the office looking busy?
Josh Cunningham 33:12
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the world has changed pretty quickly. In fact, one of our clients actually sells you're talking about ski towns. Her real estate team is up a ski town in Colorado, and her and her husband lived down in Puerto Rico, sit down on the beach selling mountain ski resort property. So yeah, anything is possible. It's it's really cool to see how this evolution of the business world has, which again, people like you would have been used to this for a while, but we were outliers. We were kind of weirdos for working from home, you work from home, what you can't afford an office or what like, that's not necessarily the case. But it's really cool that now, the rest of the world has been put in this position where, you know, a couple of years ago living out here in San Diego, I have a new baby. And I would ask my parents, Hey, you want to get on a zoom? They'd be like, Wait, what is this again? I have to download something. What is it? I don't understand what's the password? And now it's like they're asking me if I want to get on a zoom so they can see their granddaughter. So yeah, isn't that great? Yeah, it's been a great evolution.
Brian Charlesworth 34:10
Good, Josh. So just a couple of things. So you traveled for four months. I think that's, I think that's a little extreme. Like, I'm sitting in my home. People don't know if I'm in my home office or my office. Or if I'm in my motorhome, and you spent four months in your motorhome? Yeah. traveling the country and thankfully we got to see you for a night but yeah, like, how did that work out? Just give us like your daily schedule when you're in a motorhome. And you know, how do you make How do you make that work? Because it's a little bit different.
Josh Cunningham 34:46
Yeah, the motorhome life was definitely a little bit different. Not as systematic as a normal business week. But the most important thing was that I had my consistent meetings and one on ones anchored throughout the week. That then I would schedule around Want to make sure you know, I was not driving or I had a solid internet connection. But essentially the what our board chart and what our flow of business looks like week to week at rokrbox, like I said, we have about 35 to 50 callers on staff at any point in time. And roughly about 20% of them are in a leadership position. So 80% of the people doing the work 20% in leadership. And so that's as far as my reach goes, I spent a lot of time with that top 20% We have floor leaders, we also have some full-time managers that manage the client relationships. And so each and every week, I would have no meetings with the leadership team. And we would talk about the growth and development of our own talent and our own staff, and what our needs were and, and what improvements we need to make. And then I would have a meeting with my managers, and we would talk about our relationships with our clients and how their accounts were performing and what lessons we've learned, and what best practices, we want to share with the rest of the team. And then I would do one on ones. So that would be the opportunity for me to really invest in each one of those people in leadership and their development as a leader. And so that would simply be you know, 30 minutes one on one once a week with those top leaders on my team. And that system that you know, consistent flow of business would keep everything, you know, fully operating, all the communication was was getting out on the table, all the action items are getting completed all of the, you know, metrics are being analyzed. So that conversation was happening every single week, I might be in you know, Salt Lake, Utah, or I might be a bit, you know, Olympic National Park in Washington. But either way, it was the same meetings, the same one on ones the same level of accountability and sharing of ideas. So other than that thing you're doing in San Diego today. Exactly, exactly. Yeah. So I know when you were traveling you, you were like, Hey, we're looking for where we might want to end up and what we might want to do. And you know, I see you're back in San Diego. So I think San Diego is still your favorite place. Yeah, yeah, my, my, my soul feels complete here. It's, it's, I grew up in I was born in Kansas. So I definitely suffered some of the worst of the weather in the in the Midwest, you know, you get the coldness of the cold and the hottest of the hot and you get all the tornadoes and, and all that stuff moved to Texas when I was in first grade. So then I got to get used to the heat and the humidity of the Houston area, if you've ever been there before, you know what I'm talking about. And so I entered that for a couple decades of my life. And, you know, finally when I got to the point in my business where I'd achieved some financial success and some, some some freedom of, you know, time and choice and where it was that I wanted to work from. I had always loved San Diego, and actually sort of following the path of Frank closets from viral marketing. He moved out here about three, four years ago before I did. And I was like, hey, that's kind of a cool idea. Sit out here and enjoy the 75 degree weather year round. And you know, like you said, stay connected and stay, stay connected through zoom and phone, Internet, and you can keep everything going. So yeah, San Diego's his home for for me, my wife and my daughter.
Brian Charlesworth 38:04
So now that Frank got you locked into San Diego, he moved out to Nashville I saw so
Josh Cunningham 38:09
Yeah, he did. Yeah, just yeah. Just this summer. He moved out to Nashville with the wife and kids. And he's enjoying it out there as well.
Brian Charlesworth 38:17
Yeah. Well, Josh, thank you so much. I mean, jeez, it's always great catching up with you. And we need to spend some time together over the next week. But yeah, certainly. Thank you for joining me on the podcast, great getting your advice and something that every every team owner and every agent should be aware of these five points. So thank you for sharing those with us today.
Josh Cunningham 38:36
Yeah, happy to help out and if anybody has any more questions or suggestions or thoughts or want to share your own feedback, shoot me an email Josh@rokrbox. It's spelled a little strange. It's r-o-k-r-box.com. Shoot me an email. Let me know what's on your mind. Love to continue to conversation with you.
Brian Charlesworth 38:55
Is that the best way to get ahold of you just to email? Yeah, yeah,
Josh Cunningham 38:58
I mean email. I'll be sure to get a hold of it and respond. Alright.
Brian Charlesworth 39:03
Thanks so much, Josh.
Josh Cunningham 39:04
Thank you, Brian. Appreciate you having me on the podcast.
