[00:00:00] Mac, everybody, we have Greg Haralson in the House. Hey, Greg. Hey, what's up, man? How are you? Awesome. Great to see you.
[00:00:08] Yes, absolutely. Great to see you, too, man. Always enjoy our conversations.
[00:00:13] Yeah, me as well. So I'm excited to hear Greg. I mean, I've always been amazed at the way that you can run a brokerage. And I know you're going to talk about running a brokerage of two hundred agents. But I mean, I see you run a brokerage of twenty five hundred agents just like a team. So maybe we can start. I think most people know who you are in this space, but maybe just give us a quick background on what who you are, what you do. OK, well we'll go from there.
[00:00:41] Yeah, we'll call. I'll try to be brief on that. And but so Greg Haralson, I'm in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I am I am in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, but I do own brokerages in Columbia, South Carolina, as well as Charleston. So I'm in three different markets across the state of South Carolina. I've been selling real estate about twenty five years, was very, very, very fortunate. Met Mike Feri probably two years into my real estate career. I latched on to his coaching. I became one of those guys that drink that Kool-Aid.
[00:01:14] And I say that in a in a very positive manner because I learned a lot about building a business the right way after doing hundreds of transactions and whatnot, as a solo agent started building a team coached for Mike. So then I was had the benefits of Mike and Tom coaching us on how to coach agents across the country. That was a very important part of my my growth and my trajectory. And now I'm again in Myrtle Beach running. A group of agents are just shy of about two hundred agents. Last year we closed thirty eight hundred transactions. So that's a lot of transactions for a for a group that size. And I think a lot of it is because I kind of run I run like a teen model, even though each agent is their individual. So I kind of when people ask me, are you a brokerage or are you a team? I'm like, I do say I'm a hybrid. Yes, I'm a brokerage. But it functions as if it's a team in the sense that I provide the majority of the resources, whether it be lead channels or technology. I provide all that for them. We all kind of use one central system like a hub and spoke type of model. So hopefully I covered in general kind of covered who who I am.
[00:02:33] Yeah, I think it's great. I mean, running three brokerages and being able to run those like a team that's. That's really where the profits are and the excitement that so you going to talk today about knowing your name, what knowing your numbers looks like for a two hundred agent brokerage and something that's so impressive to me is great. You have always known your numbers inside and out, backwards and forward and share with us what that looks like. Yeah.
[00:03:05] You know, it's so funny. I'm thinking about our relationship, Brian. And yeah, it's nice that you say I know my numbers backwards and forwards and I think we do. But, man, before we met you, we sure were doing it an archaic fashion. But but I guess at the end of the day, we did know our numbers and we had good data.
[00:03:23] Look, you know, none of us would would feel comfortable. I used to use that analogy. You get in the car. And one of the things that a lot of us, though, we look at the gas gauge to make sure we have enough gas to get to where we're going. Right. And but I don't think that that's as powerful is the times that I get in my boat and like like, you know, I'm really concerned about gas when I'm in my boat.
[00:03:48] And and so just imagine, like, us getting into the boat in and let's just say we had a big boat and we were going to get into the boat and we were going to leave the harbor in Miami and we're going to go out to Cuba at some point. At some point, we're going to get far enough into the ocean. When we look back to the United States, we're not going to be able to see land. And then there's going to be that same point where we look forward to we're not going to be able to see land on that side either. And when you're in a boat in the middle of the sea, the only thing that you can do to make sure that you get to your desired designation is look at the instruments. And the instruments are nothing more than data points.
[00:04:30] And what's interesting is, like you can even put it on GPS now in the boats and you could put it on GPS, but in order to put use the GPS, you've got to have data, but you can set the GPS. And even when you set the GPS, if you notice, you never, ever track exactly on the line.
[00:04:52] The line you use, you swerve to the left and then the then the GPS will automatically correct you back to center, and then when you get the center, you swerve to the right. We're never on the straight line. We're constant. It's a jagged line. And the key is, is imagine this is a center line between where we want to be, where we are, where we want to go. And the key is not staying on that center line. It's making sure that we don't get too far outside the center line. And to me, that's the data. That's the importance.
[00:05:24] And if you're not measuring, you don't know if you're moving away from that center line.
[00:05:29] That's right. And that's the point when we're in the middle of the sea and we can't see land on either side and we don't look at our instruments and measure where we are, we're not going to hit our destination. We're going to we're going to land wherever we land. And we hope that we like it in a lot of times when we land where we don't really where where we land, when where we weren't intending to land, we're typically not happy about it. There's usually a pain. And that's what happens with real estate agents and brokerages all the time. They land where they figure out where they land after they've landed and they're typically not happy about it.
[00:06:05] So. So what are the instruments as a real estate business owner that I need to I need to look at?
[00:06:13] Well, I mean, I think there's two sides of it. I think you've got the profitability side. We've got the operational side. And things like that would be like the number of ratified contracts to fall through ratio.
[00:06:27] Ok, so because like from from a business, from an ownership side and operational side, and this could apply from an agent standpoint, too. But, you know, we know that we may know that it takes X amount of contacts to write X amount of contracts. And then when we write those contracts that it takes X amount written in order to ratify. There's a difference between written contracts and ratified contracts and there's also a difference and ratified contracts and close contracts. So just if we just took those simple data points right there, the importance of knowing them is to be able to kind of get an idea of where we're heading. But when you start looking at them and you see trends in every single data point, when you take two data points of any sort, you can create a ratio.
[00:07:14] And and the ratio to me is important because the ratio tells us. How good are we in that one particular area, for instance, contracts written to contracts ratified, we wrote 10, we ratified five. That means we wrote five that never got ratified. So just say that we're at a 50 percent written to ratified ratio. I'm going to want to know that because as an as an owner or as a leader, I'm going to say, OK, now what can I do in the form of coaching, in negotiations and expectations inside of negotiations?
[00:07:54] What can I do? What kind of coaching content can I provide my agents to move that needle from 50 percent to a 60 percent?
[00:08:04] So, Greg, I hear all the time from teams that have 10 agents, how difficult it is to get people to track numbers, you've been successful in doing that your entire career. What is the secret?
[00:08:19] I think the secret to being an example.
[00:08:22] So I think the secret is, like most of the people that are trying to get their agents to track numbers of their team to track numbers, most of the leaders are not actually tracking their own numbers. And and so, in other words, I think the secret for me, whether or not people want to duplicate this or not, is I focus more on being an example than actually just being the coach instead of just telling them what to do.
[00:08:46] I'm showing them what to do. Now, that's a challenge for a lot of teams around the country now that pride themselves of working themselves out of the business. When you work yourselves out of the business or you work yourselves to the CEO level and you're no longer on the ground, there's a disconnect there. So what I've done is I've been careful. I've actually delegated all the upper level stuff and I actually stayed on the ground level so I could continue to be an example.
[00:09:12] So there would be an example to the words that I'm showing or I'm speaking, OK, when I'm sitting here saying I've got you've got to track numbers. Well, what they're doing and most teams, they're secretly saying, yeah, but they never I've never seen them track any numbers.
[00:09:28] Yeah. So I brought up to I think I brought up twenty five hundred agents, but I was meaning to say transaction. So tell us how many agents do you have doing how many transactions. Because that's two.
[00:09:40] Yeah. Two hundred. So two hundred agents we closed last year. Thirty eight hundred transactions.
[00:09:45] Close to 100 agents doing thirty eight hundred transactions. Amazing.
[00:09:49] Yes. No and that's not, I'm not dealing with any builders. No builders gave us like two hundred transactions or a thousand transactions or anything like that's one to.
[00:09:58] Yeah, so I don't even know the math on that, how many is that per agent on average?
[00:10:03] Oh, I would be a little bit probably slightly shy of 20.
[00:10:09] Yeah, OK.
[00:10:10] Twenty four thousand, yeah, so to do that with two hundred agents is really incredible, which yeah, it can be done by a great leader. So thank you. So so anyway, that that is is awesome. I want to make sure everyone understood what we do. We were speaking with here because what you're doing to get that kind of production at a brokerage level is amazing.
[00:10:38] Yeah. Yeah. I appreciate that and know and I think a lot of it has to do with, you know, number one, I'm in the trenches, OK, so I decided I could be one of two leaders. I could I could call the shots from five miles behind the the the front line in my nice, great, wonderful office with all the pleasures. Or I could actually be in the ditch with the troops. I'm in the ditch with the troops. I don't even have an office.
[00:11:07] Yeah, yeah, I've seen every time I talk to you, I'm just amazed at some of the things you do that are different than what everybody else is doing with with regards to this. So, again, I'm here going, listening, pretend I'm I'm one of the listeners out there and I maybe have a team of 10 or 20 agents. But I want to get to where you are, Greg. I want to get to two hundred. Yeah. What what's the best advice you can get me give me to get there.
[00:11:38] You know, I would say take your time and it's OK to grow one person at a time.
[00:11:46] So what are the focal points that I've had is to think I'm thinking of two things now. So we're just finalizing our business plans for twenty, twenty one right now. OK, it's October twenty twenty.
[00:11:59] And now to me we're pretty much starting at twenty twenty one, so we've got to finalize everything in the next week or two. And when I look at growth, I look at growth first in two ways, the first way I look at growth as I'm looking at internal growth, I'm first looking at let's say that you're a person of 10. I'm first going to look at the 10 that I have, OK?
[00:12:23] And I'm going to say, OK, I'm going to take all my ten agents and I'm going to say this one did this amount. Agent two and I'm going to put down their their level production by each one of their names.
[00:12:35] And then I'm going to put to the side a different in another column. I'm going to say if I show up differently for them, this is what their production could be in twenty, twenty one. And so let's just say I've got somebody doing 30 transactions and then I say, OK, they did 30 transactions in 20, 20, but if I showed up for them like this. That could be 50 transactions, that 30 could be 50 and twenty twenty one, and that's that's 20 extra deals right there for growth.
[00:13:05] And then I do that times 10, I could actually say, OK, well, these 10 people, I could get another one hundred and fifty transactions to two hundred transactions out of these ten people. So let's not think of growing heads. Let's think of growing revenue through a growing number of transactions. So the first thing I'm going to focus on is, am I optimizing the team right now? Am I am I really optimizing what I have? So I'm going to look at their numbers. I could look at their ratios of contacts to appointments, appointments, the list is taken, et cetera, and see what do I need to do to get them to the next level. So now I just realized and that team of ten, I just figured out and identified how I can grow by two hundred transactions.
[00:13:46] Now I'm going to say, OK, but I really want to grow by five hundred transactions. Well then how many people do I need to add to my team in order to get five hundred transactions. So I've already got two hundred I should say. I've already got two hundred. How many people do I need to add to my team to get to. Three hundred to get to add three hundred more. Because to the three. To the five to five.
[00:14:10] Now you're talking about adding agents, I think there's there are a lot of people that want to focus on getting all experienced agents. There are a lot of people that go both. And there's a lot of people that focus on no, maybe there aren't as many people that focus on new it, but I believe you do. Right.
[00:14:28] So tell us what I do. Yeah. So that's been I kind of like not a secret, but that's that's kind of like my secret source in the sense of is I go after new talent.
[00:14:39] I believe that I have a passion for developing talent. And so I have these analogies in my head. I'm a visual. So, you know, what I enjoy is I know that there's two ways to to to develop somebody.
[00:14:58] You could either take somebody that's already thinks they're pretty good at twenty five dollars a year or at seventy dollars a year. And I could go ahead and break them down. And then start trying to train them all the new things to get them to one hundred and fifty deals, or I could actually take somebody that knows nothing and just train them to do one hundred and fifty deals. What I found is that it's easier to take somebody who's new and build them up to one hundred deals than it is to take something that's already doing 50 deals.
[00:15:31] It's already set in their ways, break them down and then build them back up to one hundred deals. It's much more difficult to do that. There's a when you see people recruiting other agents, you never you very rarely do you see somebody be recruited to a new company. And then that new company actually takes them to another level. Very rare. Do you see that? And so all they're doing is they're just they're just trading transactions. They're saying, OK, well, I want to take these transactions away from that company and I want to bring them into my team. OK, great. But you had to buy it to get it today. You have to just pay that you're not really making a lot of profit by doing that. It does serve the ego, but you don't make a lot of profit doing that because that's a race to the bottom. Because if they come to you because a commission splits, guess what? They'll leave you because of commission splits. That's just always going to happen.
[00:16:21] So when you take on these new agents, not only can you get them up and running faster, in my opinion, you can get them to run faster and they'll stay with you a much longer it's a much more stable way to build it.
[00:16:36] I think a lot of people steer away from that or maybe a little afraid of that because it may be more work up front. Greg. Yes, it's front loaded. You've mastered systems. How is it you've been able to do that with so many people? You're talking about two hundred agents that to stay on top of that is difficult. But I know you've put some systems in place that maybe every real estate company should put in place. Maybe you could share some of those secrets with us.
[00:17:03] Yeah. So, you know, we have a we have a training calendar and so it's a coaching calendar for the entire month. And if you were to look on that coaching calendar, there would be no agent that could physically attend, even though it's Zoome not live anymore, there's nobody could attend all the coaching opportunities that we offer in any given month.
[00:17:25] So we go overboard in our offerings. Now, just because you offer it doesn't mean people consume it. So what we have to monitor within our operations is we monitor content consumption among our own agents. So we want to know, like on Tuesday on my coaching call at ten forty five out of the two hundred people, how many people do we have on the call?
[00:17:49] And if we see that on average we have seventy people on the live call.
[00:17:54] But there's two hundred people in our company, then we're like, OK, 70 is our baseline, what can we do to get to 80? What can we do to get to 90? Now we archive everything that I coach. I archive every time I do a video and audio archive. And then we've set up our own company membership site, kind of like a coaching site. And but it's only for our agents. They have exclusive access to it when they access it. It has everything that I'm doing archive there. So you could go into our our membership site and see every coaching call based on the category of what I talked about for probably the last two years on there. And so then what we're doing is we're constantly pushing our agents back into our training portal. We're pushing our agents to our live training and making sure that they're consuming. And we know there's a direct correlation between the consumption of the content and the growth of their business.
[00:18:49] So you're adding to that how frequently? Oh, five times a week.
[00:18:55] Ok, so every day you are trading, you're teaching, you're recording, you're putting that out there in this library. So everyone has access to this content. If they're in the office, out of the office, not available, they can they can sit there at midnight. They want to figure out how to do an amazing listening presentation or they want to figure out something else, just how to work in your systems, no matter what it is.
[00:19:18] You have the content library there for people to dove in it for every every subject that we train on. And so I might I might do the live call at ten forty five. And let's just say there's 70 people on it that day. And then later on in that afternoon, my staff is going to text that the text, the video link to that to two hundred to two hundred agents. And then in the company newsletter that's going to go out weekly, there will be a link to that training in that. So we're constantly making sure that they have access to it. It's at the top of their minds.
[00:19:53] Do you have the ability to see who's looked at what?
[00:19:56] Yeah, yeah. That's why we built it on a membership platform so we could see we can measure consumption that way. We know who's logging in, who's not logging in, how long they've logged in, what courses they're taking, how far like, for instance, when we on board a new person, I've got an entire onboarding process. So when they a new person comes, switches their license or as their license to our company, they go through this onboarding course. Well, I know. Or my staff will see where they are in the process. And if they get stalled somewhere in one of the videos for a couple of days, then then that triggers some sort of reaching out to that person to make sure that they keep pushing them along.
[00:20:34] Yeah, that's that's great. I mean, I don't know how many of you out there actually have something similar to this, but it doesn't come quickly and and it's just something that's so vital. I think so. I think so many people are afraid of it because it's daunting. It's overwhelming for me to even think of doing what you've done, Greg.
[00:20:55] Yeah, but, you know, Brian, I mean, think about how many times you're coaching somebody in your in Sisu and things like that. All I'm really doing is I've made sure that one thing that I've done, instead of disconnecting with my agents as we grow, I try to connect deeper. So that means I need to be face to face, belly belly or ear to ear or eye to eye. Now, ear to ear and eye to eye, I guess, is what it is today. Right. So what I'm constantly doing is trying to figure out what can I get off of my plate and delegate to somebody? That will give me the time to have more eye to eye and ear to ear with my agents, and then all I got to do is just hit the record button on everything. And then once I hit the record button, my staff goes into the Zoome account, pulls it out of the cloud and then sends it to the VA, has it edited and puts it on the membership site. Everything all that's all systems. That's just standard procedures. All I got to do is talk on record.
[00:21:53] That's the you need to remember to hit the record button and have a team execute behind it. That's it. Yeah, I just I just wanted to share that with everybody because that's that's crucial. I mean, I just think most people don't think about doing that with a real estate company with desu. Of course, if you have questions. Yes. We have a knowledge base where you can go find answers to that information. And it's the same thing every time. Every time someone has a question, we make sure we address that with a video. Yeah. And it's the same thing for you guys to do with your teams and your agents and training.
[00:22:28] It's like for those teams out there. This, in my opinion, is a critical component for scale. So you've got to scale, you know, there's a few things out there, you've got to know your numbers. You've got to be you've got to really understand your numbers inside and out if you want to scale. Another area is you, if you really want to scale, you've got to be able to figure out how to scale coaching and training and that's all going to be kind of what we talked about here, because you can't keep repeating the same thing over and over again.
[00:23:03] You don't have enough hours in the day to grow a business if you're going to do that. So you have to archive, preserve and get extra mileage out of everything that you say. So if somebody asked me sometimes, well, Greg, can you help me with, like, role playing, some objection gambling. And here's my response every time. Yes. Schedule an appointment with my assistant, she'll set up a zone for us. You go ahead. And just at whatever time the appointment is, you show up, I'll show up.
[00:23:27] I don't care what you're going to ask me what objection you want me to handle. Just throw it at me right there on the spot. I'll handle it. I'll record it. Why did I do that?
[00:23:35] Because I'm going to I'm going to help that agent, but I'm going to archive it now. I got more content for my.
[00:23:41] My membership site, yes, genius, so you said something a second ago, you said in order to scale. You need to know your numbers. Yes, I mean, you mean I can't hire two hundred agents without knowing my numbers and be successful?
[00:23:57] Yeah, well, the last thing you said is what I'm going to have to say, say no to, yeah, you can do all that, except you can't be profitable. Successful, right. And in our industry, we're in a margin compression industry right now. Our industry, our margins are compressing. That's different than commission compression. I'm talking about margin compression. And so when you start working with tighter margins in any industry, you have to know your numbers.
[00:24:29] You have to know your numbers. If not, you could be you could be in the in the red, like, really fast.
[00:24:41] Really?
[00:24:42] I'm actually I'm actually reading a book just actually finishing it measure what matters, but it's it's really talking about that.
[00:24:50] But it's for all industries. It's not really a real estate book by any means. It's it's talking about Google and Intel and companies like that and how they got to that size. So if you want to really scale your business, you absolutely must. One hundred percent need to know that.
[00:25:10] Yeah. And a lot of the teams that are out there, there's some really good talent that are building teams. Right. And and unfortunately and you know, I have a CFO, so I'm at a stage now that I have somebody that really feeds me the numbers and really just helps me. But my point was, is this and there's a reason why I said that is there's a lot of a lot of these teams are started with a really good talent, somebody and wants to start it and they have a good talent. The challenges is when you build a team, you've got to you can't rely on your talent to be the reason why your team builds.
[00:25:49] You have to rely on the numbers and then use your talents to interpret the numbers, to tell you how to build your team, how to strengthen your team. So a lot of people are just relying on their talent. And I agree that a lot of them have some great talents but talents without the numbers.
[00:26:10] Typically doesn't lead to scale scaling, comes from knowing the numbers and using your talents to then use those numbers to scale your business.
[00:26:21] It's hard. It's hard to make smart decisions no matter how talented you are if you don't know your numbers.
[00:26:27] Listen, I will get numbers weekly. And I'm telling you, there's probably very few weeks that on my coaching call that the subject is not influenced by something I saw in the numbers.
[00:26:39] Yes. OK, Greg. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. Always a pleasure. I feel like I've got so much to catch up with you on. So I'm going I'm going to connect with you here in the coming week. But anyway, thanks for joining us, Greg. It's been awesome.
[00:26:55] Yeah, man. Thank you for everything you do for me. Yeah. I would like you to get my.
