[00:00:00] I'm going to take Mike off, OK, so we now have Ron coming on with us. We're going to talk about a lot of good things here with Ron. Ron, I'm going to bring in and this is so fast. This is exactly how we wanted the summit to be, is fast. We're moving from session to session. No fluff. We get right into things. Ron, I'm going to bring in Matt.
[00:00:23] What's up? Good, good. Can you hear me OK?
[00:00:27] Fine. How how how excited are you to be on the Sisu summit? Because I'm excited to have you.
[00:00:34] No, no, it's it's amazing. I was just reflecting back on you know, it really is the community that you guys have created around you, right? It's there are so many different people from different brokerage's different brands, independent or, you know, the core group of major brands that are out there. And it's just pretty amazing to to see how everybody shares. And as Mike said, as he was leaving and I'll preface this, Mike had the slides and the presentation down solid minds, a bit of more of a conversation. So I don't have I don't have the slides to follow that. So, Mike, you set the bench pretty high there. And I'm impressed. The R&D side of it, the rip off and duplicate is is really a lot of what a lot of us have done. Right. Is not having to reinvent the wheel, but building upon one another and learning from one another and taking the tools and the systems and the support and just stacking it and simplifying it and then communicating it to our team. So anyways, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
[00:01:37] It's an interesting it's an amazing industry. It's an amazing community where those who want to go outside of their market and attend events like this and listen to people and take things, you know, these concepts and like set up a duplicate, put it in play, things that have worked and already proven and can really revolutionize your business. So, you know, I'm I'm grateful we have all these people off and on and people like you and Mike and all the other speakers who are willing to share a little bit of of what it is that's that's helping make them successful, right? Absolutely. So, Ron, you and I had a conversation and maybe before we break in anything, you could just give us a little background, your brokerage. Right. Maybe tell us a little bit about your model, your production and what you're looking to do in twenty, twenty one.
[00:02:26] Ok, so a little history. So I've been in the business for 17 years. My mom opened up a real estate company when I was four, so I've been around it my whole life, but I didn't get in until 17 years ago. Started working at a traditional brokerage, found myself with the remarks brand. That's the brand that I met. As I started to try to grow a team. I had some limitations that were placed on me and I did not have the ideal environment to grow and have a team that an office that really kind of supported what I was trying to do. So I did a quick recapture of looking at everything that was available in the marketplace and decided to set out and create our own brokerage. And we did remain with the Remax brand. So I'm the sole broker owner of Remax Nexis and at the same time I operate a team within that brand called Nexus Group. And so it started out five years ago is when we started that brokerage. Actually, we're in our sixth year, but five years in our in our location, we started out with me and two agents. We're we're now a total of 40 agents, the in the brokerage, the brokerages trying to do one hundred and fifty million dollars this year in production for roughly five hundred and fifty units. And the team itself represents about 50 percent of the unit volume. And our goal will probably be about 40 high, 30 to 40 percent of the total sales volume of that. So that's my kind of like little summary of who I am and what we are.
[00:03:56] So so it's interesting. You are actually a lot of people on this kind of spring and spring is our CEO's wife has a brokerage, was a team. And it's been interesting to watch that jump from team to pro, kind of like what you said you can talk us through. I mean, when that all said, what was it? Was it you had limitations on your growth and that's why you looked into becoming a broker. How did that whole thing shake out for you?
[00:04:23] You know, I I had nothing but great things to say about the other offices that I was that it was just when you when you take a look at the blank canvas. Right. You want to be able to create this in an ideal environment. And the only way to do that really was to build it from the ground up. So while I have great relationships with all the brokerages that I worked for in the past, we just decided to create our own environment. That was a little bit more conducive. We didn't want to have as many concerns about color copy fees and black and white this and, you know, as far as the the color copies and black and white copies and Internet shared expenses and stuff like that, we just wanted to create an environment that was more conducive for agents to to operate their business and whether it's individually or on a team. And then I also just looking at the historical trend of real estate, real estate brokerages started out as being fairly full service. The agents, the brokerage splits equally indefinitely. They then migrated a little bit. You were the agent, get the lion's share of the commission, and that was really kind of a transitional shift that happened in the 70s with re max.
[00:05:31] But then other other companies followed suit with that, with different top models, et cetera. And as the as the commission and revenue shifted more towards the agent and the team leads, the brokerages were just a little bit more of an infrastructure kind of rent space, coworking type space. And so there's a lot of great teams that are operating great businesses. But there are also hiring their own executive assistants, showing assistants, marketing assistants. And since we already had those things in place for our team, we thought, why not just offer all of those same items to our brokerage? So that was one of the things that was kind of unique. We are we are a brokerage and we do operate a team and we have other teams that operate here, but they all partake in this suite of services that we offer to our agents. So that was part of when you and I were talking about the agents having an ownership mentality is is that they feel like they are part of this know, when they plug into us. Right. So Nexus is the connection point as we like to refer to it. That's how we came up with re max access that we are the agents are able to plug right into our connection point and operate their self-sustaining business under our brokerage.
[00:06:36] And a lot of them are choosing to affiliate with our team because we have set so many systems in place, not just the services and the support and the tools they can plug right in. They can use our CRM, they can use boomtown, they can have access to a very robust lead generation platform. They can have protocols, they can utilize Issei. They can utilize our field services team, which is kind of like a showing support model, our marketing team that helps that helps all of our agents, whether it's at our brokerage or on our team. You know, it's our marketing suite of services that we offer to our agents. So we try to take the agents and have them focus on the highest dollar productive activities, which is all the lead measures we talk about, you know, making outbound attempts and and scheduling appointments and being in front of them, not filling out the listing agreement or and putting the listing or ordering the pictures. We take care of them on the back end for all those things, OK?
[00:07:32] So as an agent that's going to I'm going to come plug in the next system. There are assuming there are different levels or different maybe roles that I can come in at, or is it brokerage agent versus team agent? Like what does that look like?
[00:07:47] Great question. So we have other teams that operate at our office, but for the most part, we we keep it stupid, simple, like the KISS model, as we like to call it. We have three three plans. We have room for new agents. As a matter of fact, the founding principle really of the team that I created was it grew into what is now the number one team in southeast Michigan for all of the Remax offices in southeast Michigan in just five years. But I built that team with brand new agents. We didn't do it with agents that had a track record of success. We brought them in and we trained them from the ground up. So agents joining our company have the option of joining under the green model, which is a newer model with a mentorship, and they typically affiliate with a team. So they have a mentor support lead gen systems. The other the other option is, is just our growth model. Right. So that's more of a traditional real estate brokerage where they have a split. They don't have monthly expenses, they have a split and they pay us over time and they reinvest their their their revenue back into growing their business. And then we have our more experienced guru plan, as we call it. Right. The ones that have know that they have a predictable stream of business every single year.
[00:08:59] So that's our most competitively priced. But the agents take a pro rata, share the expense. They pay us a flat dollar amount month after month, whether they sell anything or not, and then they keep the lion's share of their commissions. So that was really the founding principle of what Remax was based on. Remak stands for real estate maximums, and that was that model. And we still have that. We still have that option that's available. And so with that model, you know, it's nice because we always tell our agents, instead of joining an office and hitting your cap after two months and then feeling like you're beholden to your brokerage, you know, for an entire year, and when's the best time to make a switch? We always present that. As you know, we have to earn your business month after month. Right. So you're going to pay us monthly if we ever let you down. That's why we have to hold that same commitment. There's no contract with that. Right. So it's just a it's just a different way of looking at it. But we try to look at it from one of those three lenses and then give people options because no, nobody's business is exactly the same.
[00:09:55] And I'm assuming there's there's a progression there, too. We're at an agent might come in on one of the one of the terms, one of the models and move into another as they grow. Right. It's going to allow the more of that flexibility.
[00:10:06] Absolutely. And because we have that option available, the agents will typically choose to remain here a lot of times if they join a team at another office and then they you know, maybe they outgrow the team because it's too much of a it's going to the team lead and maybe they want to experience what the other agents have to offer. A lot of the times they will fly the. Say, and maybe leave the brand where here they're welcome to stay right there, just they're all part of it. We're just one group. We are a team. We huddle as a team. We're very collaborative and it just works out well.
[00:10:36] So we try to ask every single person that comes to us, you know, what is it that you're looking for and how can we help you get to where you want to be? Right. If we feel like there's something that we could help everybody, you know, so we want to learn as much about the agents and then maybe lay out that three to five year roadmap utilizing a system such as yours. Right. Helping them with goals and helping them with plans and looking at what their numbers were of a very few agents actually know what they did or what their ratios are. And the second we were able to demonstrate that, then our agents within our company, whether they're on our team or at our brokerage, have just spoke very highly of us that we are doing more we're giving more than we're taking. Right. We're not nickel and diming them. We're just bringing them value system support, allowing them to highly leverage themselves to go out and do the productive activities that are most important to them and then let us take the things off of their plate. So we have a very high assistant to team member ratio. Right. We have a great support infrastructure where some offices have no support, but just a very inexpensive place to park your license. And that me as somebody who is working in another brokerage, I didn't feel like there was a whole lot to gain from that.
[00:11:49] Yeah. And we talked about we actually talk about this the other day, but you have a pretty good per agent with that hire, maybe admin and overhead expense. You're getting a lot more. You're able to help your agents to get to a higher per agent productivity. Right. Maybe you can dove a little into that.
[00:12:07] Well, yeah. For example, one of our agents that started brand new with us, this is his fifth year. We started from scratch this year. He'll probably do fifty six transactions, two hundred and fifty thousand plus in GCI. So he's like, that's a perfect example. Living a completely different life. Many of our agents join us that are maybe doing fifty thousand at another brokerage and double their income to one hundred thousand. But they also doubled their quality of life because they're instead of doing all the other tasks that were they were once doing in the evening or on the weekends, they are now utilizing some of the other services that we offer. So by taking on new agents and then also training the agents, our agents get to work in a field service capacity, as we call it. So we have all of our agents at any level that can actually hire another agent to do a task for them. So the newer agents are going out and showing Morehouse's their preview Morehouse's. They're opening up more lockboxes. They're getting a feel for what's out there. They're giving feedback. They're strategizing with the agent that they were working for. So it's accelerating their experience. So it snowballs. And that's where we just we continue to snowball. So you go from 10 million to 20 million to 40 to 80, we're tracking to do in excess of one hundred and fifty million. I know that some some people always tell me you can't just keep saying that you're going to double the numbers. I say, why not everybody else? Maybe we can maybe we can be more realistic and say maybe it's a thirty five percent growth next year. But we're hopeful that in next year that we're reaching for the quarter billion dollar mark and and not with necessarily one hundred and fifty agents with like fifty or sixty agents that are living an amazing life.
[00:13:44] Yeah, it's funny because we are just talking some of the same things that we're just talking with Mike about and that have come up a couple of times in this session is offering a career progression that's huge for retention, offering a system to track your numbers to take this number. If I want an agent and I want to do 30 deals this year and what exactly do I need to do? And even you just mentioned the ability to work with another agent. My office has a showing partner and you can have that extent built in as well. So the same things are kind of coming up. And I think that's what creates as an agent in your brokerage, feeling like I'm a part of something, feeling like I have that ownership.
[00:14:24] Right, right. Absolutely. And then recognizing the agents. Right. That's another key key variable here. We would be nothing without the agents. And even so, the team that I started a while at another brokerage, it yes, it evolved into what we call Nexus Group. It doesn't have my name on it. It doesn't say Ron Rose's team. It was just Nexus Group, every single agent that affiliates with that team. And that's really a core group of ten agents that we're looking at getting to twenty. But last month they represented thirty six transactions of our seventy two units that we closed. So even though they're a smaller percentage of the total, they're a number of agents, they're representing a very high number because they're plugging in to all the systems that that we offer Legion the CRM suite and allowing us to really analyze their business with you and taking all of that requirement of accountability off of them by just. Having a gun in the background, so if we're using the boomtown platform and they log a call, it's going to log a dial. If if we have them have a conversation, they log the call and they just position the call. It's going to not just have a dial, but it's also going to have a conversation.
[00:15:36] When we set an appointment, it's going to show that it set up an appointment. And then when they move it down the pipeline as it comes in the final, it will then drop to their pipeline reports and then it just works through the system. And then we can just sit down and have a one on one with them individually on a pretty regular cadence. And that's available to any agent at the brokerage, but more specifically, the agents on the team, which accountability has been the cornerstone of that growth. And accountability is two way. Accountability is love, right? It's it's we need to be able to count on the agents. But more importantly, the agents feel like they need to be able to count on us. We're providing them with a system, support tools and leads, and they need to know that it works. And so we review with them and we huddle every Monday and we go through. Did you work last week? Are you working this week? Who's on call? What's the rotation? How do we make the most of this week? We only have fifty two of them this year or actually fewer. Right, because of the pandemic anyway.
[00:16:39] Yeah, I think as a as somebody that I'm going to come in, I'm going to take I'm going to give this agent 30 minutes of my time to coach them. If I don't have those numbers in front of me, I can't have I can't have an intelligent conversation about this is exactly what you can be doing if I don't have those numbers and those insights. And I think obviously coming from a Sisu background, I love hearing that. But I'm just such a firm believer in that, even in our own internal teams, too.
[00:17:06] Well, we tried other systems in the past to to obviously get that same information. Like I'd mentioned, it's such a great community, not just here, but being a part of Boomtown, for example. I had an opportunity to meet a lot of a lot of your other speakers, and I've learned a great deal from them. Like Jeff Cohen, I flew out to his office and he was early on using a Google doc, filling out forms, and it was filling a Google sheet. And that Google sheet was going to a checkerboard. And we were displaying that early on, you know, as a source of tracking. We knew early on that what you measure, you manage what you track, you improved. If you want to lose weight, you've got to going to have to know how many calories you eat and how many steps you take, etc.. We always knew that. But then when we when we found the solution, that really took all the extra effort off of our agents to be able to forecast their business again, it was one step in the right direction. They didn't have to call somebody and then log put a checkmark on a piece of paper like we used to have to do is just keep it's always getting better. And our agents know that when joining us that we're always working to improve.
[00:18:13] The one thing that is going to remain constant here is that we're constantly going to be tinkering and improving and just challenging the status quo. It's one way that we can always make sure that we're growing in the real estate market is going to continue to rapidly change in evolve, and we want to be ahead of it. So either you're growing your or you can't remain stagnant long. The other ways you're going to be declining day, redacting, shrinking. And we want to be in growth mode. We want to be generating opportunities not just for our agents, but for our clients. When a buyer hires us, they want us to find them a property. Right. They want us to win in that highest and best offer that a lot of us are experiencing. When a seller hires us, they want to make sure that we're getting the most for their for their dollars. Right. So when we have the agents work, a predictable system that we call grow, which is generate business and recruit the clients to work with us, whether buyers or sellers, then we be on board, then this is our process. This is how we take you through. Then we work the process and that working the process by by taking all these other different systems that we used to use asana and different checklists, Google Docs and bringing that into one system, the agents will take a conversation to an appointment from an appointment to a contract, from a contract to our transaction team that then launches those transactional details.
[00:19:38] So you guys have allowed us to be considerably more efficient with our process because we can now see all the steps that have to be taken for our new listings. Do we have to get a price reduction if they did sell for our buyers that are under contract? What are the what are the series of steps that we have to go through? Who's doing what? As we huddle with the agents, the agents feel like they're getting to delegate and elevate to a whole new level. Right. They will even say to their client, my my assistant's going to reach out, make arrangements for the final water bill. We're going to take your order in that final payoff for you. So our agents get to walk in to their appointment when they're representing, when they're working with their client and just come in and at a different level. That sets them apart from the competition.
[00:20:22] Yep, I love it. And I just keep thinking, as I'm hearing this, how important it is to have that progression and that there's somewhere to go within the brokerage, because that's ultimately why you're going to keep your agents, right, is if they're growing.
[00:20:35] So run.
[00:20:38] I did want to ask because I believe you've brought on quite a few.
[00:20:43] I mean, you're working on productivity also as a brokerage recruiting. I mean, how has having this different model helped you in recruiting as well?
[00:20:54] Well, you know, honestly, most of our growth has been very organic. So we've we haven't taken a very proactive, hard stance on recruiting, dialing, pounding the phones. You know, we've been we've been taking on our our real estate agents that join us. We look at them as our partners. Right. We look at how because you have a certain respect level, different for your for somebody that you're partnered with. Right. It's a mutual they need us as a brokerage. We need them as agents, you know. So how do we partner with them? By taking that proactive stance and just really caring about their business and giving them the cliff note version to success. Right. We can literally shorten people's success. We can take people from we can double their numbers if they. Our system, it's not out of the question for somebody to grow their income fifty thousand dollars per year every year once they join us, and we can do that because we have a predictable system for how we handle sphere of influence this way. And we handle your listings this way. And so when they join us, they don't have to hire an assistant to learn about it. They just plug into it. So by doing that, whether agents are joining our team or our brokerage, which we consider just like one big happy team that collaborates together, the the agents all feel like they're a part of that and that we really care.
[00:22:11] So our biggest source, just like our agents, biggest source of business, has been referrals, repeated referrals from satisfied clients. Right. So our satisfied clients, our agents are the ones that rave about us. We celebrate our agents. Our agents feel great detail, other agents. So most of the people that have come to us have actually approached us about how we can help them with their business. They already know what we're doing. They see our success. They see our agents success. And that's been a good a good formula. But at the same time, we are starting to take our strides to make a more proactive approach in a systematic manner using your tasks and your recruiting module that's built into Sisu to do it the same thing. So if I expect agents to commit to accountability of you, they're going to make outbound contacts. They're going to maybe shoot some Bambam videos, they're going to schedule some appointments. We should do the same thing and be able to demonstrate that we're holding ourselves accountable to the same metrics that we would expect the agents to write. People want to see that we're caring. And we also say to the agents, do you want to grow your business? They say, absolutely. We say, well, so do we. So if you know somebody that could benefit from being with us, why don't you make a warm introduction? And that's really been a very easy way for us to realize success with growth.
[00:23:28] Well, I think, Ron, I mean, just it's a very apparent how how genuine you are and how how much you care for your agent. You've said that multiple times. And you get your agents raving on how to best broker in Michigan from on. But I think that speaks for itself and that's where you get that organic agent growth as well. Right. Wrapping this thing up here, anything else that you want to throw out there about your journey the last five years from from on the brokerage or just anything around the topic in general?
[00:24:02] You want to leave us with our place open in an open ended question like that, you get yourself in trouble.
[00:24:11] But, you know, I just want to thank you and and Brian and Frank and everybody over there, you guys are great. You guys really have created a community much like Boomtown. I've learned so much from those core communities that we've decided to go deep with. We tell people to go deep in what they're doing right. They don't need to go an inch deep and a mile wide. You know, we've really built the success of our business by focusing on our agents and helping them. We have we have a strong relationship with Boomtown and the other boomers within that community that have shared and the people that I think I think Kyle's on after me. I've learned a great deal from him. Doug was on earlier. You know, the list goes on and on. Jeff Cohen, I flew out to his office. He was I think we were doing thirty million and now we're one hundred and fifty million within a couple of a handful of years after beating him. It's just a great community. And you guys have replicated that same community of bringing people together, not just brand agnostic. It doesn't matter. We're all here with the same mindset, the same intentional growth, and we're all looking to grow. So I appreciate all that you guys do. I appreciate you putting this together. If I can ever be of assistance to to anybody, if they have a question about a model that's similar to ours, I'm happy to answer that. If somebody is trying to putting all this together and they can't figure out how to do it and it takes a substantial investment upfront, you know, and you just want to plug in cars, you know, you're welcome to talk to us as well. And we already have the platform for you. I mean, we have boomtowns, we have Sisu, we have marketing field services showing support.
[00:25:44] So glad to help. Anyway, I can and thanks for thinking of us.
[00:25:49] Thanks, Ron. And I didn't know you. Thirty to one fifty. That's actually that's pretty freaking awesome. Congrats.
[00:25:56] We started, we started with I think less than ten and in the first year. Right, so I think it was ten and then it went to twenty forties from there.
[00:26:05] Very cold.
[00:26:07] All right, well, Ron, I'm going to let you go and we'll we'll see you later. Thanks for hopping on. Anyone who has any questions head over.
[00:26:18] This is the last session on our morning track B, so we'll kick off the afternoon track. Be here in about 30 minutes. I need to grab something to eat and take a breath because that was a lot of content. We will kick off here in about 30 minutes with Zach Hammer, who you've seen in some of the comments. A lot of, you know, Zach is a marketing genius and will have a lot to talk about there. So we'll see all that. Thank you.