Sisu Growth Blog

Spring Bengtzen, CEO at The Utah Life - Making Cultural Tanbile-Concrete Ideas You Can Implement That Will Give Your Team / Brokerage The X-Factor | Sisu

Written by Brian Charlesworth | Oct 7, 2020 4:00:00 AM

[00:00:01] Hello, springtime. Hi, how are you?

[00:00:04] I'm awesome, thank you. Thanks for stepping out of your busy schedule today.

[00:00:11] I'm in I'm in the hotel restaurant and I had about a complete meltdown panic here. And I have a new computer and I haven't downloaded Chrome. And so connecting the Internet and then had to download Chrome.

[00:00:24] I'm like, oh my gosh, it's so perfect. But I've been I've been there was streaming. So, yes, chrome is a must, so.

[00:00:33] Spring is spring is it. It's raining today. For those of you who don't know, spring is my wife. She runs a team of about twenty five agents and a brokerage of 50 agents is starting ancillary businesses like we were just talking around about around title mortgage and that will expand beyond there. So spring, one of the things I love about you is that you are always in growth mode.

[00:00:57] So Spring actually heard from one of her friends about a week ago about this amazing MLP training and said, yeah, I'm going to do it. And so just like that, she's in this training and was able to step out for us. So thanks for joining us. Spring. Yeah. Any. So today I really wanted to drill in on your business spring and talk about just the main things, just culture, really. I think culture is the thing that has made a major, major impact, a major difference in your business. And as I've watched you guys. Grow your business. I think there's two things there that stand out for me. One is mindset and your mindset training and the other is all of your contest yourselves challenges and just the culture of having agents hold each other accountable, which is super fun for me. So I'm going to turn the time over to you and let you share with us some of those things that you've added into your business.

[00:02:02] Yeah. So like Brian mentioned and run a large real estate team, we've almost doubled in size in the last year. And in about and March has been March. I opened up my own brokerage.

[00:02:15] So part of the reason I wanted to do that is I wanted to create a culture that I wanted to be in that for the whole environment, not just the actual brokerage, but not for the team, but the actual brokerage. And so a big component of that for me was the mindset we all talk about that real estate is 80 percent mindset and 20 percent skill. And I knew that if we could get the the culture around them, growing personal growth, personal development, growing them as a business, just helping them in general accomplish what they wanted to, then my world would grow right. My business would grow and everything. So we've implemented a lot of mindset. Coaching, we do performance coaching is what it's called everyone's day. We actually offer it to anybody who wants to come so they don't have to say it in our brokerage. And I will tell you, it's probably the single best thing we've done because we attract that room is packed with covid. We've had to be a little bit more cognizant of it. But still we attract agents from all over and it's nothing but brokerage specific. So we don't even like it's not a recruiting thing, but we're recruiting talent into our world because they're like, whoa, I want this. And so it's usually not pertinent to real estate.

[00:03:32] Sometimes we'll put some real estate spin into it. That's really been a big thing. And then, as you mentioned, we use Sisu at a very, very, very high level. Of course, I've got you in my back pocket of how to execute it.

[00:03:46] And so we do a lot of sales challenges and a lot of a lot of accountability around it. So those are probably the two main components that have really changed our world right now.

[00:03:57] So so I think when you say sales challenges, that goes over most people's head. It's like, how do you run a sales challenge? What do you put in there now? What are the key things maybe you can talk about what what you have going on this month for a sales challenge and maybe just what you've seen be the most effective as you've been doing this now for at least a year?

[00:04:19] Yeah, we've been doing a little more than a year, but sometimes those challenges month is actually boys versus girls, which I don't know why. I have a I have a culture that just loves a friendly competition. And so somewhere they wanted to do male versus female. And so I don't have an equal number of men and women.

[00:04:39] And so I've had to wait. The challenge, the points in Sisu differently for the male and the female. But a third challenge looks like this. Generally, I'll figure out what's going on in my culture and the space of like how is production or do we need more listings or are they sending the business to the ancillary, to the ancillary partners, etc.? I'll look at it based off of looking through Sisu at the different reports and whatnot, and then I'll decide based off of that what the contest needs to be. Sometimes I'll run them monthly. If I do run a monthly contest, I'll run it with weekly incentive. So for example, right now the men and women contest, if they get points, it's for the month. They get points for having conversations, agree, listing agreement signed and under contract and a small point for each appointment going on. They have to hit forty under contracts this month or there's no reward period. But whoever if once we get to forty then the winning team point wives gets the gets overall price of whatever they chose. And so the gentleman chose something completely different and the females. But the girls chose to do a dinner, a night out and a spa day. It works.

[00:06:02] We use it in our channels. So our VA posts to the Fox Channel three times a day, the scoreboards to keep them top of mind. And then we have TVs up in all our offices. So we're very aware of where we sit for the for the for the contest for the day, week, month. One of the tips and tricks I would tell you if you are using Sisu is we keep our scoreboards for that day so we don't do it up until after the whole month so that they can see like, where do they have to end that day to stay on pace? I only started implementing that probably a month ago. And it's been a game changer because it just seemed. Overwhelming in a month, we see the circle most of the way not finished, even though it's blue, it still was a little bit overwhelming. So we just have it be for that specific day and it's been awesome.

[00:06:53] So you're actually having people report out cells contest numbers on a daily basis, even though it's a monthly contest, is that right?

[00:07:02] Yeah. So the VA. Well, they'll do so. The VA post first thing this morning, our overall scoreboard on the slack and then all say in our morning huddle, hey, guys, looks like we're two listing's behind, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is. Or we need to have two hundred conversations today and they all slack out to redo our huddle. They slack out their rocks. But then we have the scoreboard, the actual scoreboard. So our dashboard and then the contest scoreboards posted three more times in this back channel for that day. So it just keeps that top of mind of where, where are we sitting and when you when there's not a lot of I don't want to say accountability, but when there's one that just as the contest goes silent, it loses its momentum. So we do everything that we can to do that. Oh, you're showing my selection.

[00:07:58] Do you have special access to that? Is that OK?

[00:08:02] Yeah, I actually I actually got a text over the weekend from one of our customers and said I think they'd seen this or something. They're like, do you guys automatically post daily posts in this channel of pictures of the snapshots of the scoreboards and leaderboards? Yeah, spring has a value that so just yeah, I do that and you can see.

[00:08:23] So there is the there's this for this this morning and then you can see the challenge scoreboard and you put in these were their names or their teams that may Hem's or seventy nine. Eighty five and the boys thing is over, the boys score but and Diego and then throughout the day which is a brand new age of mine. So he just put one appointment by a team meeting. Those are, those were his Brocks for the day. So I just posting out what their rockies' rock is listing by five, whatever. And then throughout the day, as they do cool things or have success, they'll post in the Slack channel. So like Mitch put Beeber signs and you can see they give him seven people, gave him the yay and then. Good job, Mitch. Yeah.

[00:09:08] So we run as a culture of let's cheer everybody on and all that jazz. So it's awesome.

[00:09:17] Yeah. It's, it's really fun to see. I don't know if you guys like if you guys are not leveraging slack, maybe there's some other thing you use for that. But if you see the culture of her business, it's, it's very much just team camaraderie. Everyone is cheering for each other. It's a culture of positive accountability. And I think I mean, you've always had that.

[00:09:45] But with this whole mindset thing, it's really taken it to the next level. So maybe talk a little bit more about that spring, because I think that's something that's really new to. To most people, I mean, it's one thing to talk about mindset, it's really another thing to live by mindset and type of training you guys are doing. And Ricky can actually put in here that they would love to attend your next mindset class. So maybe maybe you can stream one of those four on this.

[00:10:18] Yeah, I'm actually yes and yes. And we're actually going to come out with a coaching platform for our agents because we see that it's so necessary. But absolutely. Let's connect on that. So so what happened?

[00:10:32] And I would advise all of you guys to do this. So probably about a year and a half, two years ago, I had a life coach and she approached me and said, hey, spring, I have this vision. I want to do like a seminar.

[00:10:47] And you're who I want to partner with on this. Can you help me with that? And I said, yeah, what are you thinking? And the problem with life coaching or mindset coaching? And my perspective is that it's a lot of this which we all know our whole life is created between your two ears. Right. But there's not a lot of action. Like what do you have to do to make this happen? So we created this Love Your Life summit and we are targeted agents as my avatar, because that's where I had the influence in the marketplace to to fill it.

[00:11:19] We packed the room. We have like one hundred and eighty people, I think. Right. Show up. Full day event. Awesome. Amazing.

[00:11:28] From that, though, my heart was I recruited so many agents through to the brokerage or whatever, people just being like this was amazing. And so I realized that that was the secret sauce is you give them what they come for, but you actually give them what they need. And most agents and or people anybody really needs that training. And so we started implementing it at a crazy high level and partnered with the gentleman who used to work for Tony Robbins. He was one of his speakers for five years. And I was fortunate enough that he moved to Utah because he was getting married.

[00:12:07] And it's around in way that we connected. But so together we'll figure out. We'll come up with what the performance coaching is and we'll do the mind set training will at this time.

[00:12:19] So what we're doing right now, because we're heading into twenty twenty one is we're already talking about twenty twenty one. What is it you want to create. What do you want to create your personal life and then what do you need to leave and who do you need to become in order to accomplish that.

[00:12:34] So if you want to make one hundred thousand dollars awesome. Or two hundred or three hundred or whatever that number is, but what do you need to believe about yourself and then who do you need to become? Who do you need to show up? And we coach around that.

[00:12:47] So we are very heavy on the numbers and productivity, but I would say it's a fifty fifty. We're also very heavy on Mike. Who are you becoming as a human? And we have a massive growth plan ahead of us for each one of them in my world of how they can grow, whether it's like I'm helping them get to become the top agent, do a team within the team on a team doing whatever it is like.

[00:13:10] We know that if we can help them grow, then our business grows. And that's kind of our mindset around it.

[00:13:17] So let's bring I think it's more than just growing business.

[00:13:20] When you talked about growing, you said grow as it's the team within a team or whatever. But what I've seen is you guys are really focused on their overall lives and helping them grow and just have a better life. And I think that's what really sets you apart from any team, especially any brokerage that I've seen, because I just I just haven't seen that.

[00:13:43] That's what I'm focused on. It just not at the levels that you guys are.

[00:13:47] Yeah, well, that's what I was saying. Like, I love your life or love your life had nothing to do with real estate. Right. But that was my aha. Of like, whoa, people want or need this. The high energy, high vibe like how do I create. Right. And so when they started to realize that, hey, I can create the life that I want and that kids can feed into real estate. Pernot But when people start showing up differently than their world start to shift. We had this conversation last night, right. With the training I'm going through, there's three key components, you guys, to your life being magical. And most of your wealth is either from your personal relationship, your your health or your health and then your wealth.

[00:14:33] So it's all it's all intertwined. We can't just focus on one thing, so.

[00:14:40] Ok, so he is off the microphone, so Amy, Amy is probably experience and help.

[00:14:45] So, yeah, it's been it's been it's just really fun to see in these. And I've been to obviously a few of these mindset trainings that you guys have done. But it's not just about real estate, it's about how they're showing up in life and all areas of their life being their family life. Whatever it is they're doing and really taking their life to the next level.

[00:15:12] Yeah, yeah, I would say 90 percent of our training is not on real estate. But you can find that on YouTube. You can Google it. You can you can get that from your brokerage. I mean, you're coming into my world if you want to grow that that's of mine like your own and grow as a person. You want to grow your business by growing as a person. You're going to grow your business.

[00:15:31] Yeah. So Spring, you guys are working on something right now that Greg Harrelson hit on earlier today. I thought maybe you could talk about that a little bit. You guys are working on some videos for, like all of your agent onboarding and different things like that. Anything along those lines you want to share today?

[00:15:48] Yeah, so we're wanting just to make that process super streamlined. So, I mean, we have some of it. We've done the Google Drive thing, but it's clunky. Let's just be real about it. So we're in the process of just filming absolutely everything like we've documented.

[00:16:03] And whether we use lithium or we actually spent all of last week in the studio filming. And so we're going to put it in KJB so we can actually see if they watch the videos. And then we're also building it out into our Sisu recruiting platform. So we we know that in my business that recruiting is the name of the game. We know that agents will come and go and also that agent's goals can't be my goal. So meaning that if they might have the goal to sell 40 homes, but ultimately they don't hit it, my numbers aren't reliant upon that. It's like I need to have enough agents that based off of my avatar to hit my goal. So we use the Sisu recruiting just like we use our other one. But we're building out the actual onboarding process and we have some of the built out in there from when they were in the task management, when we brought in to them coming in. It's all built out in our Vegas. Handle it all. But from there, we're going to take it and build in the complete learning like step by step and have it just in Sisu right now. I do have it in another platform, but I want to have it that everything goes in to see if that's really what we use for pretty much ninety percent of our business at this point. So just be nice to have it all in one place.

[00:17:22] Yeah, and along those lines, for those of you who don't know, our focus right now at Sisu is really making it so we can be the core communication platform for all of your communication between your vendors, your clients, everybody. So Spring, I want to back up a little bit and go back into culture for a minute. People always ask me what what are the best challenges to run? You talked about the men and women. Yeah, but like. Should I run ten challenges a month, should I run one, should I run three? What's what's the most effective or has been most effective for you?

[00:18:04] So I usually I always do a monthly challenge. There has been one time that I ran a 10 day challenge with another team. This was awesome. Actually, they were another team on Sisu exact same size in our marketplace, but that we can have a little bit camaraderie. So we kicked it off with a Zoome of all the teams kind of talking trash a little bit and and then we measured it and that particular one we did based off of conversation listings and under contracts. The ten day one was super fun in that regard. That was awesome too, because the whole team worked together as a team. I really enjoyed that. A couple of other contests that we ran have been like like I said, it's going to be based off of what we want or what we need to accomplish. So usually I'll just pick one metric so that last month we did the metric of under contract and I said, OK, if you guys as a team hit well, I broke them into three different teams.

[00:19:15] The one thing I'll say about this on the contest, if you have too many people on a team, some of the people get lost, meaning they it's OK if they don't perform. And so I've broken down into smaller teams so that every person has to contribute to the overall score.

[00:19:33] And what we did is what if they don't? What happens?

[00:19:37] Well, if they don't, they don't, but I mean, at the end of the day, they work in a small enough team that they're the team leader is holding them accountable. So what we do is we break them into teams. So I had three teams and I assign one person to be that team leader and that team gets their own channel. And so they communicate that way. And it's nice going to take some accountability off of me having to be like, what's up? What's up with that? Their peers are holding them accountable, right? Because they're like, hey, what's up? You're not showing up. And so that's been really nice. So I usually will not run a large contest where they can get lost. I'll break them into smaller teams at this point. So it broke them into smaller teams. And then I said, OK, if your team hits the standard of 15 homes, you guys qualify to go to Park City for the night. And whoever gets the most points of the teams is the winning team. But if you as an overall team hit forty five houses, I'll take you all to Park City. And so once they started getting really close to that, they came together as a team and it didn't matter who won. And I think they well, I know they did fifty five houses. So I think that it just depends on what you need or what what your culture at that point of what's going to get people going next month. They'll do some cash. So I'll do a Christmas cash or whatever I do right now, like we have new lenders on board and so we are trying to get them a little bit more business. And so we are running incentives of like fifty dollars for every preapproval letter that comes back from our lender. And and we pay that out cash that next morning. And it's just so they're highly motivated by that now money. So that's another thing that we do as well, but only when needed.

[00:21:34] What I've noticed is that the beginning of your contest, with all the trash talking and all the team choosing and stuff like that, that your agents are more productive at the beginning because they're in this battle and there's the trash talk and they're staying late and they're trying to get the lead because you're giving out you're giving points for four conversations for maybe appointments and maybe for whoever goes under contract usually choose like three three different things like that. So that's one thing is they're working late. I also love that your agents hold each other accountable, which makes you have to do a lot less of that, which is which is the culture that you've created.

[00:22:15] Yeah, it just makes it nice because it's like I'm sure most people listening to this are team leaders and it's just it's crappy to have to go in and be the one that's holding them accountable all the time. Yeah, no question. On here, do your agent self report their numbers and Sisu? Yes and no. So yes, they do on their contacts. That's just one of those things. I know I could probably connected tomorrow, but I heard the whole feedback of I made the call from there, so they called here, whatever. And I'm just like, that's a battle that I'm not going to go with. But they do have to submit in there by our brokers and listings and everything for those numbers to count. So we do run off of the honor system. And do I think that it's all one hundred percent probably accurate now, but it does give me a good metrics and we have a high accountability around there. No. So twice a week they're reporting the numbers out once in their one on one to me and then once in team meeting in front of everybody. And so they don't want to have numbers that are accurate, like they don't want to let me through our conversations. But I didn't do any business or I only made twenty conversations or had twenty conversations. So I'm assuming they're probably semi accurate. But the metrics on the actual appointments gone on under contract from about our point.

[00:23:45] I think the thing too is if somebody is just lying about their conversations.

[00:23:50] Very, very quickly, you're going to discover they have a horrible conversion rate from conversations to appointments or appointments set, and there's an opportunity for coaching right there. Either they're lying or they're not very good at what they're doing.

[00:24:03] So, yeah, I mean, we like I said, I do a weekly one on one with them. We sit down or Justin or their team leader and we go through like, OK, you made one hundred you had a hundred conversations and activities.

[00:24:16] And so we'll talk about if there's a disconnect, like, wait a minute, you had one hundred conversations and no results, like what's up? Or, Oh my gosh, you had one hundred conversations but you didn't convert this. Does that make sense?

[00:24:28] And so we'll we'll go we'll be able to figure out where the gap is and their business pretty easily by that one on one.

[00:24:38] So share Springsure Square on the mindset. So I think this is the hardest question for most people, as I think some people have experienced a little bit of Justin. And it's it's like, OK, I don't know if you all saw the video we sent out prior to this, but that was Justin Springs', business partner. So what's the best starting point? I mean, how do you do this on a daily basis?

[00:25:07] Good question. I'm highly trained and I'll be right now.

[00:25:13] Invest in yourself. That's the first thing.

[00:25:15] Yeah. I mean, here's the thing. You guys like your business grows to the extent that you do. So you've got to be able to provide massive value to your agents. And so I would say it starts with you. But if you want to start that process, I would I mean, it all started with me probably even like a little bit of Tony Robbins. And then we we took some of those materials and have implemented them. I think for me, like, if I were to tell you where to start, because it is the end of the year, I would have them start getting really clear on what do they want. So the tangible and the intangible of what of how they want to feel and what is that look like and then start doing on the training of who do they need to become in order to create that? And that's how I probably like start that process. And we are going to we're launching a coaching company that is based off of that. It's going to be for the real estate space. It's going to be called Meadowview, which is madames beyond so beyond you, beyond real estate, probably within the next month. We've just we're in the studio filming. So that will be an option as well. If you're like, man, I need to leverage this. This is not like we're going we are going to have that option of our weekly coaching that you can plug into. But I would just start with each one of them, one on one, and really get on that personal level.

[00:26:38] What is it that they want and then figuring out how they can get there and then go from there.

[00:26:48] Great advice there, spring, so. Sunny is asking, do you care if we share your challenge boards and so we'll just put them in the chat today?

[00:27:00] Yeah, it's great. I also just you guys know, too, I'll run different things, like if I'm like, what's going to incentivize? Like, I feel a little weird telling you guys this, but the guys chose they wanted an X boxes and Mike. All right, an Xbox is going to motivate you. OK, so like, if they do win, they're getting an Xbox. So I will go I'll go with what is going to motivate what's going to motivate them to perform. And they are showing up crazy levels. They must really want that Xbox.

[00:27:32] But oh, so I would tell you that to get what they want.

[00:27:37] And what do the women get if they said they wanted to do dinner and a spa night. So we'll figure it out from there. Well, one of them actually was like, hey, how about you pay for half of our hair extensions?

[00:27:51] I was like, yeah, no, that sounds great, but no. So they come up with some weird stuff you guys like.

[00:28:00] I bought skis before.

[00:28:03] We've done trips and we've done all kinds of incentives. So again, just make it fun, something that they're like. My team loves the contest. It's a huge part of our culture.

[00:28:14] So I think a big part of it is you've let the team help decide what those rewards are going to be. So it's something they care about. If you just came up with some gift cards or some random thing that nobody cares about, you're not going to drive motivation.

[00:28:28] Yeah, actually, I'm glad you said that. I know my time is almost up, but some things motivate others and some don't.

[00:28:35] So, like the trip, motivate certain people and the money motivates some people. So I try to mix it in throughout the month. So like right now with the whole lender lender incentive of getting prequels back, that is designed for the people who are incentivized for that now money and then the Xbox, the trip or for those people that just depend on what they want, like if they want that overall goal, you know.

[00:29:01] So we will wrap up with surprise values. I think this is I think it's important that no matter the size of your team or brokerage, that whatever you're rewarding, make the make the number high enough that you know you're going to make more than enough money to pay for something nice.

[00:29:19] Yeah. So you and I have had this conversation a lot because I feel like I've got myself on a slippery slope of these contests that started. I went big and it's got bigger and bigger and I'm like, oh, there's no turning back. So I, I learned my lesson the hard way one time. That and that I didn't put a bare minimum of what they had to hit as an overall team and they had a crappy month and I still had to pay out some tax dollars on a crappy month.

[00:29:49] So I always set that bare minimum standard to have a team. This is where you have to hit. And then above that, this is what surprises. And that seems to work for me. If I'm going to larger dollar prize, I'm again, I put out really high stretch that if I have to spend three grand on a contest, I'm making it because they're pushing. But it hasn't always been that way. So. All right. Yes, OK, I'm going to answer this. Yes, I'll let you go. Yes, I have had them buy into the contest, especially if it's like a fitness contest.

[00:30:24] We did one of those tracted in Sisu a few months ago. They all had to have a buy in. And it was interesting. But yes, we will do that sometimes, but generally not.

[00:30:36] So, OK, let's bring thanks for jumping out of your training to be a part of our training. We really appreciate it.

[00:30:43] And we'll see you today. All right. Bye, guys. All right. Bye.