[00:00:01] Ok, we're back, we're live track the afternoon session, quick, 30 minute break, we're right here back and ready to go. Zach, happy to have you kicking this one off with us. Yeah, happy to be here. I saw you commenting on some of the other the other streams. So definitely excited to have you here, Zach. I mean, you have your I feel like you've got your hands a little bit and everything in the real estate industry. I've, as a vendor have coming to you for marketing advice and they're knowledgeable there. So that's been fun. But today we wanted to talk about was the work that you've been doing with with this broker, just actually Aaron Alessi's broker, try to read anything on it and maybe you could just kick us off, maybe a little bit of background on you and then a little bit of background on this project and what we'll be talking about today.
[00:00:58] Yeah. Yeah. So quick background on me. I've been doing marketing for about the past, what, 10, 12 years? I kind of lose track and I say this thing a lot. So I have that where they just throw out every time and I haven't actually double check to make sure it's accurate.
[00:01:12] But I think that that there's at this point, it started out as doing a lot of marketing for small businesses in general, building websites, some level of campaigns, that kind of thing, and then you'll have some success. And that ended up taking a job as marketing director for a real estate team in Las Vegas. And at that point, I had no real estate experience whatsoever. I was just familiar with marketing and I learned real estate on the job. And so while I was there, I find that teams lead flow because they're constantly in half. And we traveled in business every year that I was there. But unfortunately, I am not a great employee. I met with entrepreneur at heart, Ed, and so we parted ways and we parted ways on good terms, but we parted ways. And that's where my company that I have today come from real estate growth. So I essentially started helping agents all across the world with the same same ideas and processes and things that I figured out with that team in Las Vegas all over the place. And I moved from. Yes to everything to focusing in an agency spectrum for a while. And today I'm much more in the training, teaching and consulting.
[00:02:25] And so that's got to have background on on me and who I am. And so what we're talking about today with this with this client in in Las Vegas, Erin, what we've been working on is it actually kind of started I mean, we've been working together for a while to kind of all bleed together. Let's say really the major impetus of what we're working on right now started in the in the chaos of it. Right. So when that hit, we took the opportunity to say, hey, we're like we have some time right now to really look at business systems, to really look at overhauling the business, to make it as efficient, as effective as possible for everyone, in order to make sure that that company can run really well efficiently. You can bring on people consistently, get those people trained up, et cetera. And so there are a lot of things that went into that. But that's kind of the back story of what brings us to what we've been doing. Does that make sense? You have to dove into anything more that first like a back story.
[00:03:28] No, no, that's that's good. That that gives us a good place to start. So have we had Aaron on our mastermind a while back? You're probably there. And we're talking about all of these different systems that go on and you're trying to integrate them.
[00:03:41] We got transaction, we've got recruiting. They've got tracking inside of Sisu. Yeah, exactly.
[00:03:51] And so that's I mean, that's a big part of it.
[00:03:55] So ultimately, ultimately, our goal our goal is to think through and say if we're going to build this thing out and and get your systems in order to be streamlined, to be scalable, to be able, the the fewer places we can have somebody needing to go in order to look at the important data, do the work that's necessary day to day those daily tasks, etc., all of that stuff, the fewer places we could have someone go, the more likely it is to be done, the more likely it is to be done right, the more like the easier it is the train and all of those things kind of compound into. If you want to actually run a business effectively, the the fewer the fewer routes somebody has to go under in order to get a job done, the better. And that's that's that was our goal. And as often as possible, we're we're doing that. We're simplifying those processes. And actually, I mean, we've been doing that on two fronts at this point. So we've got a lot of the a lot of like the the the outbound work, the. Of just getting the job done. The transaction management, the recruiting, the sales tracking, all that's being housed under the umbrella. But but we are now building out as well, a single umbrella that looks like the business resource for agents to manage their knowledge, their resources, that kind of stuff. That's actually another part of this project overall, so that people have essentially one place to go when they're looking for certain kinds of ideas and one place to go for something else. And it's nearly impossible to put them all under one roof. But we're we're simplifying as many of them as possible.
[00:05:41] Yeah, it's interesting. So so that concept that I want to dig a little more on the training side of things, because I've been hearing that coming up with a handful of teams of brokerages. So what exactly do you call it?
[00:05:55] Yeah, so we're we're calling it. We actually just gave it a name. I don't I don't think I'm actually released to say what we're calling it. The working the working for what we were calling it. It was the Training and Resource Center.
[00:06:10] We've given it a we've put it like more of a branded product name that we're going to be launching to to that group of agents. And I see a lot of the agents in the in the comments here, actually, that are that are from that company. So you guys will be hearing about it soon.
[00:06:22] But it's all but yeah. So it's it's a site.
[00:06:28] It's a WordPress build is what it is. And we all using a learning management system, elements like you said, called learned in order to house the actual training courses and videos and that kind of stuff. But further, we actually have more things built out into it. We've got a script library that's that's searchable and indexed so that people can can find the scripts that they need in order to make the the calls and communications that they need. We've also got a resource library in there where people can download templates for material, social media posts, all sorts of stuff like that, logos, all of that kind of stuff. And we've got like a directory of of all of the places where where these agents can go to get help. So the preferred vendor is the key contacts it like at Zillow or the lenders, all that kind of stuff, that if somebody is looking for help, looking for solutions. There's one place that they can go kind of get access to everything, and that's that's what we have set up and it's all designed to be fairly streamlined and automated as much as possible. One of the the the previous I think it might have been the last track right before this one.
[00:07:40] They were talking about the concept of progression as a new real estate agent and how you how you develop in your career. And it's very much a chaotic thing for most people. It's like you get your real estate license and thrown into the deep end and expected to swim. And so a big part of what we've done is we've tried to set up the system so that for especially for new agents, but really for anybody, you have a clear path to be able to learn how to become a master agent. So you can brand new and we start introducing you to the skill sets you need to start learning the business of real estate rather than just being able to able to practice. So the courses unlock depending on what you've completed. So there's a natural flow and natural progression in order to say, hey, you're ready to learn this thing because you've learned the foundational building blocks that get you to the next point. And so it's it's really designed to be kind of the thing that somebody gets in and just sort of takes over and takes them through this path of really learning real estate as a business that they can they can master it.
[00:08:49] Tying in another theme, we had this conversation on the earlier track with Marilyn, who does a lot of work to a lot of a lot of times your team, your brokerage, you have all this content, you have all this knowledge, but can you go out and sell it and present it in a way that's easy, right? Where I could just pop in, there was this awesome system. I unlock courses, I can run through it. I probably even maybe I've seen a lot of these glimpses, which is a learning management system. That game, if they give you points, you have to I don't know if yours is doing any of that, but it just makes it a better experience to learn.
[00:09:29] Well, and really, the the biggest reason why I think more like more places to do this is that it's hard. It's it's not even necessarily at the technical level. Right.
[00:09:40] Like the tools to say, hey, if you do this, then you unlock this. That part isn't too difficult. The technology is fairly simple.
[00:09:48] The hard part is that you actually have to really very much understand what it's like to be brand new when you are not brand new and doing that work of putting your back and putting yourself back in the shoes of somebody who's just starting out and kind of that that process that they need to go through. And and what you would recommend for them, that that isn't something that a successful agent, a successful brokerage, a successful business intuitively understands off the bat. You have to go through the work of breaking down the concepts and saying, like, really what what is the most important brand new? What is the most important thing to start off with? Why? And then how does that bill the next thing and it's a lot of you sort of throw out a bunch of ideas. You say, I think it might be this, and then you get in, you kind of mentally test it out, figure out there's something wrong with that thought. There's a piece you needed in front of the piece that you need in the middle and it sort of grows over time. And so you've got this organic process. We're saying, yeah, like I feel like if somebody started here, they would readily get here. And along the way they're learning their lessons, they're putting it into action, all that kind of stuff. And that's the way is a really key point. The the quicker you can get somebody to actually take action on something that they're doing, the more likely they're actually going to learn it. Right. So it's not about just giving them a massive set of courses saying, hey, go with God and learning this information. It's it's a lot more about sequencing it to say, hey, you're going to learn this thing and this is the thing that you need to do so that you can actually practice it and really learn it, learning stuff. And so I've actually done it. So try to figure out those point. We're like those action steps need to be in place.
[00:11:24] So implementing something like this, obviously the good chunk of the beauty about it is the good chunk of the work happens up front where you're says it's almost tedious when you're creating and documenting and you guys just like lock yourselves up and then force yourself to do it. And knowing that it would, what did that look like?
[00:11:43] Yeah, like no joke. Erin and I started calling each other roommates because we were seeing each other. We were seeing each other about as often as as I do my stouts. There are literally like that. We ended up getting it done because it was so important and we're still working on this.
[00:12:02] But the way that we got that we've got done what we've gotten done is we would work for me from about eight o'clock at night till midnight, many nights for three or four weeks. We did that where we were just at night. We were carving out time, say we're going to break down this process, we're going to break down this concept that we know that we need to teach what needs to be covered. We need to be covered that way. Why does it need to be sequenced this way? And we go through and we literally we just what what we would do is we actually would pull up my node. So it my note is a mind mapping program available on the map. There's other versions explained is one that's available across all platforms. But mapping is what we were doing. And for anybody who's not familiar, it's basically like a way to do like an organic outline is kind of the idea. So you can you give ideas, hierarchy and you say this idea is kind of a sub idea for that anyway. So we went through and we broke out processes and we just talked to them. It was a lot of like just sitting and thinking and talking and but in doing that, we created what I would what I would call like Aaron's resolution Realty's a property, right? Like we solidified Aaron's model, Aaron, some incredibly successful real estate agent at this point. But his model for success and we we documented it, we thought through and we when we laid it out, it's it's clearly tangible and workable. And from that now we're able to actually go through like three, eight the courses and the trainings and the sequencing and all that. But further, even before we actually created some of the actual courses, now Aaron is able to to kind of have this roadmap to be able to if somebody comes in with a question, he knows how to direct them. He knows how to. He knows really from the map they are wearing the same time.
[00:13:49] Exactly, yeah, and even even before the automation portion in place, because just just giving a name to processes and knowing it's like, OK, this is this is the thing, instead of instead of trying to hold all my head, I've got this document to refer back to that sort of reminds me of the things that I already know. Right. And and you can say it's like you got this question, OK, this is the point that you need to learn. This is what I need to talk about. This is what you need to dove into. And it made it drastically easier for him to equip his team has it as managers, as leaders of the company to be able to take action on this information and really help the agents there. And it's paying off huge.
[00:14:30] They're getting drastically better results now as a result of this clarity that it's not so taken a step back here a little bit more. What caused all I mean, this is a lot of work and a lot of time and effort being put it. What was there like a breaking point or was it just there and saying, I need to get everything in here down on paper? Do you have any insight into that?
[00:14:52] Yes, I'd say honestly right now, one of the biggest things that that caused is that we knew with with what we were seeing, especially at the beginning of of the bad stuff, we saw some potentially scary times ahead.
[00:15:09] Right. We saw some potentially we didn't know exactly what was going to happen. What we did know is that if if if the business is going to work, if it's going to if it's going to survive, it's going to be sustainable. It has to be able to be run fairly systematically and and have documentation to keep things up and going. And so we we started in the process, quite honestly, not really knowing the extent that it was going to take. Right. We didn't we didn't realize everything that we uncovered. We sort of figured out like we started by saying things like we want to put together this training center is like, OK, great, but we need to know we're actually going to teach and we need to know how we're going to send people through so that they actually learn it. And we need to know all of these things. And we sort of uncovered all of this other work that was necessary. And and and yeah. So it was it was starting with just that basic idea of we need to solve this problem of being able to bring people on and not have it be like one hundred percent dependent on what what Aaron could teach and what Aaron could do. We needed to be able to offload his expertize into something that that could be scalable, that could be repeatable.
[00:16:17] And and so that's what we got to work with. And Matt, it's it's a lot of work. It's incredibly rewarding, though. And I think when when it's all said and done and we're nearing the point of launching kind of this first this first go of the of that training center, it should be coming out pretty soon. But we're nearing the end of that. And it's been a lot of work. But, man, we already see, like, the level of difference it's going to make once it's available, it's going to free up so much of Aaron's time. It's going to make the process for new agents so much more streamlined and effective. We're going to get people drastically better results. It's like everybody wins in this environment. Everybody wins.
[00:16:54] Yeah. It's interesting how you when you're in the business, you just don't see things that like someone like yourself, a consultant or even your own self. You go and look at all your processes and dig that deep into them. You're going to start saying, why the heck do we do it that way? Right. And I'm assuming that's part of what happened, is you started documenting out all these processes to teach them the agents and you're like, oh, wait a sec, maybe we could do this better. Right?
[00:17:20] Exactly. Exactly. And it's an interesting thing.
[00:17:24] I mean, it really is for anybody listening. If you're if you are in the process of of sort of trying to do this or trying to document your processes, I would highly encourage you bring somebody else into this.
[00:17:38] It is very hard to just sit and document your own stuff. It's incredibly hard. You have blind spots that you're not going to notice until you bring somebody else in and try and explain it to another human.
[00:17:51] And so that's part of what's made this work really well. I don't know how effective somebody can be if they're just like, I'm going to sit down and do this. To me, it's very much it's like a it's something that you have to go through, I think with another person where where you have somebody asking questions and you're you're immediately getting that feedback of is what I am saying here to another person is that they get it when I'm describing this, because if you need to unpack why that is and how to make it clear and that's that's that's how you that's how you make these processes actually teachable and actually implementable.
[00:18:24] Yeah. Yeah. So I think getting a little more actionable on that for someone who is thinking, man, I'm too busy, everything goes through me, I'm the team leader and everything goes through me and I don't want it to be that way anymore. Right. First thing is what let's let's start mapping this out and maybe getting someone with fresh eyes on it, too.
[00:18:45] Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And I'm going to. I'm not going to sugarcoat it, there really isn't as far as I've seen or as far as I'm aware, there isn't a shortcut to this, right? There isn't a shortcut to say, hey, this is the magical solution that's going to save you the hours of work that it's going to take.
[00:19:02] If you've built up a big, complicated, successful business and you have your way of doing things, chances are you've been building that or refining that intuitively over the years. Right. So unpacking that, actually getting it so that somebody else can do that, depending on how long you've been in business, it's it's going to take work. And that's part of why I think doing it with somebody else can be helpful, because it gives you the opportunity where you're not just having to sit down and try and think about it. You have like you have a meeting schedule out that you're going to show up to and do the work of talking through it. So, yeah, definitely like your next steps, if you're looking to document your systems and make it make it something that you can use for somebody else, you find that person who's going to work on it with you and then get the meeting in your calendar of when you're actually going to sit down and talk a process through a system so you can get it documented. And that's going to be the thing that's actually going to make it happen. And you may not walk away from those meetings immediately with the thing that's going to be the training that you can actually give to somebody, but you're going to walk away with clarity that will make it easy to create those trainings, make it easy to turn that into a class or course or something that you can offload. But, yeah, it takes takes time and it definitely takes a little bit of a skill set. You want to be you want to be doing this with somebody who has good systems thinking that they that they can understand how ideas flow and the cause and effect nature of of actions.
[00:20:34] This is so it's so critical and I'm just I'm just in my head thinking of all the sessions that I've already done so far, very often when we were talking with Gary Johnson, who was saying that he basically had to rip out his whole business, document it, and then he built it up and now he's just flying. Right. Mike Novak, if you listen to Mike a few sessions ago, he was everyone's freaking out about this partner model that he's talking about. Right. You can make that shift, but it's not just changing a couple things. You really get into the hard core of your business. And this what we're talking about right now is that's what that's how you can make a change in your business. Otherwise, you're just going to keep kind of path of least resistance and doing things the same way you always have.
[00:21:20] Yeah, exactly. And it's that it's one of those it's one of those little things.
[00:21:26] You know, there's a proverb, metaphor, I don't know what you would call it, but the idea of, hey, if you want a massive tree, you know, the the best time to plant it was 20 years ago. Right. But second best time is right now. Right. That that that that's that's what you got do.
[00:21:47] So if you're in a situation where you've got this daunting task in front of you, it's not going to get any easier if you wait. Right. So if if you are at the point where you need to make that shift, where you have to have that clarity in your business, where you understand how your business works and you understand well enough that you can if that give that understanding, that training to somebody else that you can skills that you upload some effort yourself so you can bring on agents effectively, so you can bring on staff effectively. The only way that you do that is by is by getting a very clear understanding of your business. And you get that clarity by understanding the the nuts and bolts of how it works. What are your processes? How do you think about things? How do you move from A to B? How do you how do you do the work that you do? And it takes documenting those processes and really understanding.
[00:22:36] And I think it's it's really good time to be talking about this right now, and part of the reason we're doing this whole business planning summit is you're going to come in here, you're going to learn tactical things that you want to say. And I want to make this change in my business in twenty, twenty one. This thing this one thing that I can change, that's what's going to take me from one hundred to two hundred transactions or whatever your goal is. Right.
[00:23:00] But this is the work it's going to take to actually make that happen. And it's exactly the. Exactly.
[00:23:08] And a big a big part of it is part of this is stepping back and really understanding and saying it's like, hey, if I want to double my transactions are like, are you able to double the amount of work that you're doing? And you just are you able to just do what you did last time?
[00:23:26] They're already working 60 hours, right. So it's not like you can scale ours.
[00:23:32] You can't get scale up in the day the amount of time that you can put into things. So the the only way to be able to to to increase your results is, is to essentially increase the amount of of output from your effort.
[00:23:51] So you've got you've got to work on the activities like eight more more leveraged outcome. And you can do that with people. You could do that with software. There's lots of different ways that you can that you could take something and decrease the amount of time that that it takes you to run it or increase does the effectiveness of somebody else to run it for you. But the only way, honestly, the only way to do either if you if you want to automate something, the only way to automate something is understand the process that created it. So you know what factors what things you can say. Yeah, I can I can have software do this thing for me. That's the only way to automate what software if you're if you're going to offload to people, it's a lot of the same process. It's just creating the system that somebody else can take and implement and run with it. You've got to document those processes.
[00:24:37] Yep, cool. So documenting it just wanted to cover a little bit. You talked about this whole mess. There was transaction management. I mean, kind of bringing all of this under one roof. Is that what do you mean by that? By bringing that all under one roof? Is that just getting it all documented? Or would the actual external things and you have to bring it back into that brokerage house. How did that all work?
[00:25:05] What what what I mean, when I say bring it all under one roof is pretty simply minimizing the number of websites or logins that somebody has. Does that make sense? So so literally at the at the state level of saying understanding how humans work, if I have to log into multiple places in order to check something, especially if I'm in one frame of mind, I've got to have like three to four tabs on my computer open.
[00:25:35] I'm not going to notice things as often. Right. I'm going to miss things. I might I might be in one software and I'm going to miss the fact that something is going on over here because I'm just not in that mode. But further, that's more more information to keep track of. That's that's more opportunities for the software to change readily, quickly. And and that makes it that you have to retrain all processes. So by bringing it under one roof, you tend to simplify the whole process where you say, hey, if you need to do this, this bucket of things, this is the one place where you go. So it's like in someone's mind, they can they have those things to keep track of and they're more likely to be able to get it done. So when we're trying to bring things under one roof, we're really just trying to simplify that process of saying, hey, you've got to do business. Where do you go to sort of stuff that to make business happen? And even with this this training center, that's part what we're doing there, too. So all of the other tools. So even even like linking out to we're going to get access to Sisu and all that kind of stuff so they don't have to remember their links to the login and all that kind of thing. All of that is accessible under that one training center where they can go to that place and that launches them out to everything else that they that they might need and their business. And they might still need to have some other logins for some of the other sites. But there's at least one place where they could say, hey, I'm looking to do business. Where do I start? I started this website. And the the more streamlined you make that process, the more likely people are going to actually be able to do the work, do it right, do it effectively.
[00:27:15] Yeah. Cool. Well, Zach, thanks. Thanks for coming on, man. We're getting a little short on time here. Anything else you want to leave us with? You probably got so much up in here of tools. Anything you want to share, put it out there.
[00:27:30] Yeah, I'm happy if anybody has any questions. I know we're kind of talking about some high level, high level stuff. Yeah, but if you have any questions for drop, drop a comment. I'd love to answer any questions that you guys might have otherwise.
[00:27:43] If you guys like this kind of this kind of information, this sort of high business thinking when it comes to real estate as well as really what specialize in is is helping real estate agents to generate and convert leads. If you like that kind of information, I just recommend connecting up with lots of free resources. Our website, Real Estate Growth, Ackers, dot com. We've got some Facebook groups and stuff like that and that. And really, I just like to connect with with you as an agent if you're listening to this and and see what I could do to be helpful. And and yeah. So I mean, that's that's that's really what I'd say overall is just kind of giving people some opportunity to dove in about more. This this is really a very specific thing that we're still somewhat backing.
[00:28:29] Right. Like Eric and I are still working through this. I'm still figuring out the specifics. But but yeah, I really like I really like the opportunity to sort of dove into some of the stuff that honestly, you likely will not hear me too much in terms of class or courses around some of what we've done with this, because it is it's it's at that higher level, like very specific needs sort of thing. But I think a lot of people can get some major value out of it.
[00:28:55] I love it. I dropped your link there in the comments, so make sure you check out Zach has some really awesome stuff there, newsletters, all kinds of stuff.
[00:29:03] I mean, you give pretty much everything away free that's up there in your head and it's appreciate it.
[00:29:11] I've learned a lot from it. So we'll take a little break here, Zach, to let you go. And we'll we'll be hopping on with Lindsay here next.
[00:29:21] Thanks for having me.