Behind The Scenes of a Real Estate Machine

I've been an entrepreneur my whole life.

I grew up watching my dad do the same thing. He had quite a few businesses, but I remember pretty distinctly when he was in real estate. I remember watching the highs and lows, and it gave me a lot of context later on for when I'd go all-in on real estate.

The year was 2016, I was newly remarried, and had just sold the last of a handful of real estate-related companies (Budget Blinds and HouseMaster).

If you've ever sold a company, you know it's a weird place to be in. It's weird to be so committed to something and then, all the sudden, have very little to do with it.

My wife, who had been a very successful agent for many years, was in the thick of building a real estate team.

Real estate became the perfect place to focus my time and energy. That's where it all started.

I went all-in on listings

I became obsessed with creating a predictable, repeatable machine for listing homes.

I didn't want to take all the time struggling through the learning curves of this business, so my wife got me set up with an amazing coach (Jared Zimmer, he's a beast of a listing agent, Ironman athlete, and was a coach with the Mike Ferry Organization at the time).

The obsession with creating predictability quickly became an obsession with the numbers. Jared couldn't help me if I didn't have numbers for him to look at. In fact, he wouldn't even meet with me if my numbers weren't straight before the call. I respected that, and I've put it in place with all the agents I coach now.

In our coaching calls we focussed on conversion ratios. Conversation to appointment set, set to met, met to signed.

I was shocked how quickly I was able to make a lot of money in this business. It's just so simple. Simple, but not easy.

We were never going to scale that business

As I started to master the listing side of the business, I started to think more on how I could help the team scale. How could we take what I was doing and make it more predictable, something that we could easily train other agents on?

And we ran into the problem that just about every team owner in this space is familiar with.

You can't scale the business if you spend most of your time working IN the business.

You need to get to a place where you spend most your time working ON the business.

At the time, that seemed like such a pipe dream. Looking back at it now, it totally was. We had no chance of scaling that business. Everything was too messy, took too much effort, wasn't simple enough. We were doing about 120-150 sides with 5 agents, a huge chunk of that coming from myself and my wife, and pretty reliant on our agents—who were great agents. If you do the math, the average on the team was 20-30 deals per agent. I thought that was a strength of ours at the time. Turns out, it was a weakness. Because the second one of those agents walked out the door (they did)... we didn't have a business anymore. It was back to square one. Brutal.

The numbers were turbocharging everything we did, but our system for tracking them was a nightmare. I used to spend significant time in a tracking spreadsheet, which I would then enter into the Mike Ferry Number Analyzer before my coaching calls. I remember being excited because we rolled out Smartsheet's, which is still just a spreadsheet, but it could send daily reminder emails.

The scalability problems were even worse on the administrative side

We thought our top producing agent going his own way was tough... until we had a TC move on.

It was devastating. There were literal tears. My wife was filled with dread at the idea of spending the next 90 days trying to hire and train someone to do a fraction of what her TC was doing for her at the time.

Worse than that, so much of what our TC did was in her head. So it truly did mean at least three months of training a new TC.

There was something else we started to realize, too. The business just wasn't profitable. How could it be? We required 3 US-based adminstrative staff to handle our 120-150 transactions. If we wanted to double production, that would likely double headcount, and we'd be lucky to profit much extra at all.

A lot of teams out there are in the same tough spot.

We needed to build a completely different real estate machine

We got really clear on the purpose of the business.

The purpose of the business we were in was to make money. Turning a profit, and doing it the right way, were the priorities.

And our small team just wasn't built for that. It wasn't going to take us where we wanted. So we needed to build a completely different machine.

It couldn't be reliant on a handful of rockstar agents. We needed to create a place where brand new agents, struggling agents, or inexperienced agents could plug in and thrive. Even agents who maybe wouldn't succeed elsewhere... they would be able to succeed with us. Because the system we've built is plug and play. Maybe not easy, but definitely simple.

It also needed to be more efficient, so that admin costs didn't skyrocket with increased production.

And most of all, it needed to do one thing better than anyone else in our market—it needed to be the ultimate vehicle for creating wealth for our agents.

A system anyone can plug into

7 years later and now doing 750+ transactions/yr, we have all kinds of crazy recruiting stories of The Utah Life being that ultimate vehicle for wealth creation. People from all different walks of life. People who knew absolutely nothing about real estate... people who knew a ton about real estate, but struggled big time with the sales side. Agents who were extremely talented and grew into leadership positions.

The system worked for all different kinds of agents. The only common denominator was a few core character traits that we evaluated hard in our recruiting process. They needed to be hungry, above all else—because it doesn't matter how good you are in this business, you can't want it for someone else. That has to come from within.

If they have that, that's all we need.

Because we have a secret weapon in our back pocket—something that simplifies the business so much, that really all you have to do is want it. If an agent wants it bad enough in our business, they'll win. Every time.

The secret weapon for building a wealth creation machine

I'm a big fan of coaches, but I think most people don't understand the main thing coaches do that makes them so valuable.

Sure, they bring experience. Motivation. Real sound strategy and tactics.

But I'd argue that the #1 value that most agents get out of a real estate coach is hardcore, dedicated focus on the numbers, and accountability to those numbers. Conversations > appointments set > appointments met > signed > under contract > closed. All great coaches focus here.

When you get your numbers straight, it's actually self-explanatory how to get to the next level. It's intuitive. You can figure it out yourself at that point—a coach just speeds up the learning curve. For me, that was worth it. It would have been worth it at double the cost. If a coach didn't know my numbers though, and didn't coach me to those numbers... it wouldn't be worth it, no matter what the price.

If agents don't have their numbers straight... the best coach in the world can't help them.

A coach can't fix an agents business with a blindfold on. They need those numbers.

Getting their numbers straight is the #1 thing an agent can do to improve their business.

Our secret weapon was figuring out a way to create that same obsession and focus on numbers that a $1000/mo coach would create in an agents business, without actually needing to pay for it. We figured out how to do it at scale, to simplify the numbers side so that anyone could plug and play with our systems.

And then we recruited hard to our persona, which was anybody who wanted it bad enough. Because if they did, we knew we could make them successful.

There's a lot of ways to replicate this numbers-obsessed approach. I've spent the last seven years since then systematizing it and packaging it into what is now Sisu to make it plug and play so that you don't have to beat your head against a wall like I did.