At the same time, leaders are facing shifting interest rates, limited inventory, and the challenge of keeping agents productive in a competitive market.
On this episode of the GRIT podcast, Brian Charlesworth sits down with Robert Conway from the Jeremy Orton Group in Idaho. Robert leads both operations and sales, giving him a unique view of how to scale while keeping systems and people aligned.
Robert shares how he approached cutting lead costs, building a referral-based business, and using Sisu’s predictive models to forecast closings with precision. He explains why accountability is central to the culture of their team. “Accountability is the highest form of love,” he says.
With a team of 12 agents today and a goal to grow further, Robert talks about what it takes to bring new people into production quickly and why referrals remain their strongest growth channel. “It’s not the quantity of leads, it’s the quality and how you work it,” he adds.
Top Takeaways:
(4:40) Cutting lead costs without losing closings
(7:05) Using Sisu to forecast team growth
(10:39) Industry consolidation and AI ecosystems
(15:36) Explaining rates with “marry the house, date the rate”
(21:12) Will the U.S. hit 5M home sales again?
(26:03) Data, Sisu, and building accountability into culture
(28:37) Netting 18 agents before expansion
(33:46) How the team staggers new agent onboarding
(37:01) Fixing cracks in systems before they become canyons
If you are trying to figure out how to balance growth with profitability, and what to expect as the market shifts again, this conversation will give you practical insights you can apply to your own business. Tune in now to catch the full episode.
About Robert Conway
Robert Conway is the Director of Sales and Business Development at the Jeremy Orton Real Estate Group in Twin Falls, Idaho. He oversees both operations and sales for the team, which currently has 12 agents and is aiming to grow to 20. Robert has more than 15 years of management experience, with degrees in psychology, business, and human resources. He moved into real estate over three years ago to bring more flexibility to his life while driving the group’s growth and systems.
Connect with Robert:
Brian Charlesworth 00:35
Hello everyone, and welcome back to the GRIT Podcast. I'm Brian Charlesworth. I'm the founder of Sisu and your host of the show, and you may recognize that you don't recognize where I'm at today because I'm moving into a new office. So this moss wall used to be springs moss wall, and we'll see where that ends up. But today I'm I'm excited for this, this episode, because I have Robert Conway with me. He is from Twin Falls, Idaho, with the Jeremy Orton group. And Robert heads up all of ops, and this is really unique, and all of cells for their team. So they have a team of 12 agents looking to get to 20 agents here over the next year. And I'm going to see if today I can persuade him to get to 50 agents over the next year, and that's going to be, that's going to be my goal for this episode. We'll see if I'm successful there or not. But welcome to the show. It's good to have you, Robert, yeah, thanks for having me. Brian. To kick off. Robert, why don't you just give everyone a little bit of background, maybe just on yourself, how you got into real estate and, like, why you're where you are today? Yeah.
Robert Conway 01:40
So my background is I've been in management for about 15 years now. I worked at a BPO, started on the ground floor, and worked into middle management there, and then, when I was doing that, also getting a psychology degree, got that, went to a startup for psychology. While doing that, I got a degree in I got my MBA, and then I got a graduate in human resources, so I became a director for a large trucking outfit for their HR however, I was also a foster parent that worked specifically with high needs individuals, so they're called, like, level Three. And what happened is it's nothing on the trucking company or anything like that, but I constantly had to have flexibility, because I'd have to go get these kids from school or something because there's an incident that occurred, or I'd have to talk to a teacher or something of that nature. So I needed something with more flexibility. So Real Estate just naturally fell into that, and I jumped on to the operation side. Been with Jeremy for over three years now, and just really worked on growth and separation of different entities and businesses to really streamline the real estate side of things.
Brian Charlesworth 03:00
I've been here streamlining is a word that clicks for me. That's my whole goal in life, is to streamline and automate the real estate industry, right? So that's why you and I are on this call right now, and why we're aligned. I just learned that you're the most educated human in real estate.
Robert Conway 03:16
Is that true? I don't think that's accurate, but
Brian Charlesworth 03:20
it might, it might well be, right? It might well be so anyway, well, congratulations. You've only been there three years. You've already taken over not only running ops, but also sells, which is very unique. And so it sounds like you're just when you came in, you were just like, hey, I just want to help you grow your team. Like, I want to help you grow your business. I'll do whatever it takes. Is that? Is that how you got into
Robert Conway 03:41
this role? Pretty much so I sat down with Jeremy and kind of talked about what his vision and goal was, and then just kind of worked everything that I knew how to do and things that I learned along the way into that vision so that we can achieve exactly where we're kind of headed right now.
Brian Charlesworth 04:05
Cool. So I know streamlining is something you have said, and I never hear an ops person talk about streamlining, so I love that you said that. I think they think they want to streamline. They want to eliminate duplicate entry, right? But streamlining is not a word that most use. I use it. But I think with your education, you use it. I'd love to hear, like, three years now in the business, what are some of the key like, big, big changes you've made to the business that have had a massive impact thus far.
Robert Conway 04:40
One of the like largest shock to the system changes that I made is significantly cutting our lead spend on online leads over two years, to the point where we're less than 10% of the initial budget when I came in for online lead spend, and it hasn't. Affected our amount of transactions that close or penned, or even who we're working with, just because, if you get lots of leads, that's great, it's the quality of the lead and how you work it right. So we're a very Soi. We're a very apt client, as well as just anybody who knows us refers one of our agents, and that's kind of our bread and butter for our business. So that was referral
Brian Charlesworth 05:32
and soI business, yep. So that was a
Robert Conway 05:34
it was a big shock. And when I say referrals, they're not paid referrals, they're just, we did a great job. So somebody recommended us, yeah, and we did it again. So then somebody else recommended us, and so on. So that's really big to us to make sure that we're delivering on that goal.
Brian Charlesworth 05:51
Yeah. So it's it's so crucial. I sold real estate for about two years, and I learned the easiest way to grow was to get a referral before I close every time. So about a week before closing, I'd really focus on getting a referral from that person, because they loved me. They did. We did a great job, and that's the perfect time to get a referral, right? So anyway, I found, I found that it's really easy to double your business if you can get a good referral every time. So same thing, you're learning. What I love about the way you think Robert is you are like, you're not only focused on growth, but you're focused on profitable growth. And I think that's a big piece that's missing in this industry right now. There's so many, I've seen so many leaders that are like, Yeah, I want hundreds of agents. I want this, you know, I want 1000 transactions. And so to get there, they go against everything they know about running a successful business, from how much they spend on leads to agent splits to everything. It's just like their business goes completely out of whack. And then they get there and it's like, how do I reverse this mess I've made? Right? And so I love that you guys are taking the approach you're taking and just really scaling a profitable business. You guys have 12 agents now. How many transactions will you do this year? Roughly 218 Okay, that's roughly 218 I love that. You know you most people when they say roughly, they're going to say 202 50. But 218 is pretty specific number. How do you know your number so well?
Robert Conway 07:23
Well, this is your own plug, because it's Sisu. So we use predictive models and everything in order to really hone down where we're at on a weekly basis and know where we're projection like, projected to hit to meet that like standard that you just talked about, making sure that like growth and profitability grow together rather than opposing. So that's where that uniqueness of operations and sales comes into place, where we can pull on both levers.
Brian Charlesworth 07:55
Okay, so, yeah, that might have been a plug for Sisu, but not really, because there are a lot of Sisu teams that don't, don't know their numbers to that extent, right? I'll bet if I asked you today, how many cells have you closed here today? You could probably answer me, what's the number? It's 132 132 Yeah. Okay, so here we are end of September. We have four months left, and we're gonna go from 132, to 218, tell me how you tell me how you figured that.
Robert Conway 08:26
So right now, we have over 30 transactions that are pending. We have roughly 14, and I use like roughly with exactness, because I can't guarantee those things. So, so mathematically it equates to this, but without true guarantee, I'll always use the word roughly, so that's why it comes into play there. But roughly, it's 14 transactions that are a very high likely of closing. It's just it's not to the state of where we have a actual signed contract yet. So that gives us 4046, and then on top of that, just our normal cadence of production,
Brian Charlesworth 09:17
okay, are those 14? I mean, and I'm asking this because I'm really intrigued. Like, are those 14 you have over 30 pending? I think that would be 32 pending based on the 46 you said. So you have 32 pending right now. You have 14 that are probably signed buyers or sellers. Are those mostly sellers?
Robert Conway 09:39
It's a mixture, like, it's a true mixture, because it's okay, it's more like a 5545 kind of thing, where we have 55 right now is on the seller side, and 45 is more towards the buyer and percentage wise,
Brian Charlesworth 09:54
okay, okay, cool. And so you're estimating with those two, it's 46 Yeah. And then on top of that, you have another three months of production, two of which, willing count towards this year's closings,
Robert Conway 10:08
right, correct? And that's the way you're looking at it, yeah. So we have 46 listings right now that are active, and with months of inventory, like, that's how we are kind of projecting that cadence.
Brian Charlesworth 10:26
Okay, I love it. Your guy, that I can tell does research, so I'd love to know what do you think is happening in this industry right now? From let's first talk, I want to get into interest rates, but let's first talk M and A, because I think it's pretty interesting. What just happened with anywhere? Just happened two days ago. Relevant information, right? Happened this week. Compass buying anywhere. So anywhere. Brands, century, 21 Coldwell, banker, jeez. What are they? There's a bunch of them, and I've had contracts with some of them, so but anyway, those those brands, which there's five or six of those, all acquired by compass now to make a massive, massive organization of, I think it's over 350,000 agents, is what I've what I've seen, how do you think that affects this industry?
Robert Conway 11:25
I think what we'll see more and more is acquisitions inside of it, and then in addition to that, is ecosystems that are forming around either the lending side of things, the title side of things, or directly the agent side of things, especially with the advancement of AI integration into the industry and being able To provide like multi service pieces in that same ecosystem, rather than having to have this person and that person and this company and that where it will be more cohesive in it, and I think that you started to see it with like Zillow, getting their own agents and things, and then offering mortgage through themselves?
Brian Charlesworth 12:24
Yeah, totally agree. I mean, I agree so much that we now have a company called simply mortgage, where we partner with our team owners and we we do all the mortgage side of the business, and they help grow the business from a marketing perspective. And I think the best thing about doing what you're talking about here is providing a better experience for the consumer. Right? You can know if you know your lender, and obviously they can choose any lender they want, but if you know that, if they use a lender that you're associated with, that you work with constantly, that, you know, can close in, you know, three weeks or less, it's a big difference versus just using any random bank. So in what kind of experience you can provide to that consumer. I remember when I was in, when I was actually selling real estate a decade ago, and it seemed like every time somebody used a credit union, we had to push out closing we missed the closing deadline. So I don't know what's your experience with that.
Robert Conway 13:34
So we've had and it's gotten better over the last couple of years. My initial first year, we had five deals that were pulled at almost the closing table, like it was two days out from the closing table, or they just got there clear to close. But then something shifted, or whatever.
Brian Charlesworth 13:56
So the lender last minute, yeah, pulled out, yeah.
Robert Conway 13:59
So we had hover down. We had to cover down. And we used lenders that we're familiar with and that we knew would be able to, you know, get the job done. Okay?
Brian Charlesworth 14:09
So they went from thinking they're closing, you pull in a new lender, what? You had to extend the dates by by three weeks or something, to hit your lenders timelines.
Robert Conway 14:19
No, just luckily, it's only been about a week, maybe two at most, just because all of the, all of the work is done on it, yeah, it's just that the bank no longer felt comfortable with the loan. So then we find somebody who does, and then they close it, and everybody walks away happy, which results in us getting, you know, great reviews on different platforms from being able to accomplish that with our lending partners. So we cultivate really strong relationships with our lending partners, because we know that they are a crucial part of this business. And. Our business, and we are a crucial part of their business.
Brian Charlesworth 15:03
Yeah, absolutely. And again, I want to emphasize, it's all about that experience, right? Sure, there's an opportunity for you to make money as well on the mortgage side by owning a mortgage business. In any case, the most important thing is that you provide a better experience for the consumer, right?
Robert Conway 15:22
Oh, yeah. That's, yeah, it's our 100% goal is, what do we call it? We call it luxury experience at any price point, yeah?
Brian Charlesworth 15:30
Okay, Robert, I know you're a data person, so let's jump in. I want to know your opinion of this as well. What's your opinion of interest rates?
Robert Conway 15:38
My opinion of interest rates are that historically, it's a good rate from a short term, it does not look like a great rate, because you're talking about current rates, currently, historically, yeah, historically, like a 30 year trend. 6% is a strong rate. Looking at it over the last five years, it's not the best rate, because of the fact that we've seen his like historically crazy rates, where people were in two percents and things, and then that spread like wildfire. So then you have public opinion that affects things as well. So understanding kind of the analogy of like marry the house and date, the rate is huge when we're talking with buyers, so that if that's an objection that we have to handle, that we have the appropriate tools and the appropriate conversations so that they understand what they're doing and where they're at.
Brian Charlesworth 16:53
Yeah, okay, good. So that's that's really been the story over the last two years, right? And now here we are. Rates just dropped. We have two feds have said they're going to drop two more quarter point. Rate drops this year, projected to be at least three next year, by the end of next year, what do you see? Let's just say, Everyone that I've talked to, my research has shown that we'll probably be in the low fives next by the end of next year. I did see something this week that actually said we'll be in the high twos, which would be a shocking thing, but let's assume it's the high let's see, assume it's the low fives. We're in the low fives by the end of next year. What's that going to do to the market and to buyers and sellers. What kind of what kind of effect will that have? In your opinion,
Robert Conway 17:46
we're still at an inventory shortage, so it's going to shift the market again, and it's going to increase the price of homes, because you're going to have a more competitive market. So now you're talking that you're going to lose buyer or seller concessions towards the buyer for inspection, repairs, other things like that. You'll probably see some instance of waived inspections. You'll probably see more in line with, I wouldn't say necessarily, 2021 to 2022 but more so funny, where people were still in a uptick in terms of buying and the price increase as well. My hope is that we don't hyper inflate the market, where we're jumping from a historical 4% to 10 plus again, where maybe we're, you know, we jumped to, like, a seven or an 8% appreciation so that it doesn't out price a lot of potential buyers that now have more purchasing power, so they can get into the market, right, without any kind of permanent oversight to it, there's no way to guarantee that somebody entering the market is going to be able to afford a home, right? It's going to be you either saved up, your lender has amazing rates and plans, and they worked with third party partners and other things in order to get you some form of assistance or whatever, so that you're able to enter the home. Yeah, otherwise, it's going to be more so that second time somebody's purchasing a home. So all of the people that purchase in the two like 2020s and 2020 ones that have just been off of wanting to kind of pursue the next home, right? So that not even necessarily an upgrade, but just like I need an extra bedroom because I had a kid or something of that nature, or I want to move to this different neighborhood, or what have you, will then come back into the buying market, because the. Trust rate is closer, so there's not that hesitation of, I'm losing so much because I'm giving so much away to the bank.
Brian Charlesworth 20:08
Yeah, I mean, it's a it's a fine balance, right? Because lower interest rates usually means higher prices. Lower interest rate means you can afford more home, higher price, which drives higher prices, higher prices, go there and now you have a high interest rate. Now you can't afford the home. That's that's the market we're in today, right when the rates get down into low fives, what I'm hearing you say is, you expect we'll see the market again where we have maybe 10 offers on every home,
Robert Conway 20:34
maybe 10. I would say,
Sisu 20:38
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Robert Conway 20:48
probably closer to like five, but more so it's going to be the inventory is going to significantly decrease because homes aren't staying on the market as long. So that statistics that lets you know, like the months of inventory is, that's what's going to come down.
Brian Charlesworth 21:05
Yeah, so more, more home sales. I mean, the average in the United States, and this is, this is the last thing I'll ask you about. The market average in the United States is 5 million homes per year. We went up to 6.8 in 2223 we dropped under four. We've been at about four for the last three years now, this year projected as well. What happens next year? How many homes are we going to sell?
Robert Conway 21:28
I'm thinking we're going to be we're going to be around, like, conservatively, I think 4.8 more. So, like, my estimation is five to five two. Yeah, great.
Brian Charlesworth 21:41
I'm going with five as well. We're going to, we're going to, we're going to connect at the end of next year, and we're going to see, did it were we right? Is it five? Is that the number? I think it is, which is great for anybody in the real estate business, especially with so many people being out of the real estate business now, those in the real estate business will really be able to reap the rewards and and really have massive growth, I think, as more home sell with less realtors. So let's talk about your business real quick. You've been on Sisu now for two years, right? You made that change when you came in. Yeah.
Robert Conway 22:12
So we are looking for a platform that allowed us to have like contracts stored within it, so that we could easily access documents and manage our tasks. But then the other side that Sisu brought was an even higher degree of knowing what our numbers are.
Brian Charlesworth 22:33
Yeah, okay, and so when you made that decision, were you just on the upside, or were you on the sell side
Robert Conway 22:38
as well back then? So I was just on the ops side at that point in time.
Brian Charlesworth 22:43
Okay, so from an operations perspective, you wanted to have make sure the documents were in the system all the time. You now have clients having access to those through the client portal as well. Correct you do? Okay, cool. And now I don't know. I'm just, I don't know if this is the case or not, but are you also having them sign documents in the client portal with Sisu signed today? No.
Robert Conway 23:06
So we're not utilizing that. We are still utilizing our MLS, okay, as a DocuSign type feature.
Brian Charlesworth 23:13
Okay, okay, so you're signing docs in the MLS is, is what you're doing. Okay, great. So how walk me through this evolution of how you went from ops to ops and sales, because I've never seen it before. It's very interesting to me.
Robert Conway 23:29
So I work at a Keller Williams team, and one of the things that they have is like a kPa. So when I took my kPa, operations was lower than director of sales, so my number one was legal, and then my number three was director of sales, and then actually operations was my number eight. So with how those align, I have prior sales experience in retail, as well as, like, car sales. So I have some background in that I enjoy sales. I The aspect that I enjoy more so than sales. It's helping people, like, achieve their goals. So because leadership, yeah, so because of that coaching piece, I've helped develop training metrics and methodologies and things at different companies that they've still implemented. And because of that kind of pathway, I've always geared towards helping people achieve whatever it is that they're setting out to achieve. So because of that, it kind of aligns with sales, especially when we're talking home ownership, where that's the flagship of the American dream. And then on top of that, helping people achieve their goals so that they can then, you know, create the life that they're wanting to create. With real estate.
Brian Charlesworth 25:03
Okay, awesome. So it's really fun for me to see this migration that you've done here. Let's talk a minute about how knowing your metrics, or how you've leveraged Sisu to to be a better sales leader. Because I know I mean, you talked about streamlining when we started this, Sisu is all about streamlining, eliminating duplicate entry. So from an ops perspective, you were attracted to it. But now from a sales perspective, how are you leveraging Sisu to be a better sales leader? Cuz when people come in, have you been into our I don't remember. Have you been into our behind the scenes real estate machine event? So yeah, so you saw we go so much into sales leadership and leadership in general. How have you guys been able to leverage Sisu to really enhance the sales leadership in your business?
Robert Conway 25:55
So I can't remember exactly where I heard it. I know that it was at some form of a seminar, but the saying was that accountability is the highest form of love that you can have, and we just utilize Sisu in order to live that motto where we've been more accountable to each other as well as to our clients and From an operations as well as, like, a leadership standpoint, to our agents, where we've been able to really goal plan with them and talk to them about the importance of, you know, data tracking and things, but also when you know your numbers, then it's easier To then plan accordingly. So when you're starting to falter or something, then you know, like, Okay, I need to make, you know, 30 more calls, or I need to convert, you know, two more of my appointments to getting the rep signed, or something of that nature. So because we know those numbers, and that's also been something that Jeremy kind of implemented when he first formed the team, is just knowledge of the market as well as your own conversions. Then it's just all came together cohesively and had Sisu at kind of the forefront where we're looking at that data and having those conversations around it.
Brian Charlesworth 27:27
Yeah, I love it. I like to say it this way, for a realtor like this is how they can build a predictable income, right? Most people in real estate don't know how much they're going to make. But if you're in real estate and you run your business like a business, and know your numbers, you can truly forecast and build a predictable business and and that's such an advantage for somebody like you guys who are leading this team in Idaho. You're probably one of the few teams in Idaho leveraging Sisu. You just told me, because we started, as started this call, Robert, that your agents, your 12 agents are all in the top 50, in your MLS, which, which, I think is amazing. Is that true?
Robert Conway 28:09
So our newer agents aren't directly in our top 50, but our senior agents
Brian Charlesworth 28:13
are, yeah. Okay, so you have newer agents that are not Yeah. Make sense?
Robert Conway 28:16
Every, every agent that has came on in the last six months, though, has some form of production. Yeah, that's closed already.
Brian Charlesworth 28:28
Yeah, okay, okay, love that. So you're able to get people into production faster as well, because you have systems in place for that. Let's talk about growth. You said you wanted to go from 12 to 20 agents. What's the cause for wanting to go to 20 agents? You're growing already because of agent productivity increasing, but now you're saying, hey, we want more agents. Tell me why?
Robert Conway 28:54
Because we want to plug people into a system that they can then have that predictability, right? So understanding and having that mindset. But the reason why 20 is to net 18, and the reason to net 18 is for our market here, which we're going to call like our hub center, which is the Magic Valley, which is basically the I 84 to i 86 corridor. That particular area with the 18 agents, then we can look at expansion. So it's not stopping at 20 or 18, it's stopping more so at 20 and 18, here at our hub and then expanding outwardly to surrounding areas. Or, you know, we have like Boise and Idaho Falls and Pocatello is like large metro areas that are around us that are less than two hours away. Yeah.
Brian Charlesworth 30:00
Yeah, makes sense. What is your timeline for getting to I'm going to call it 18 now, instead of 20, getting to 18, because people always leave, right? So you're always going to hire, and not everyone you hire is going to stay or is going to make it through your training, whatever it is. So what is your timeline for wanting to get to the 20 or 18 number?
Robert Conway 30:20
So the timeline to get to there is by May of next year. So May of 2026,
Brian Charlesworth 30:27
okay, so basically, three quarters in the next three quarters, yep, yep. Or actually, sooner than that. That's not a full three quarters. How did you guys come up with May?
Robert Conway 30:40
So it would have been sooner, but we're currently migrating our CRM. So that is a huge undertaking. When we have over 32,000 leads inside of the
Brian Charlesworth 30:51
database, what are you moving from and what are you moving to? So we're
Robert Conway 30:55
moving from Boomtown over to brevity. Okay,
Brian Charlesworth 30:58
okay, here's my question for you guys, and obviously, moving something like that takes some time, but you guys are accompanied with systems, right? I'm guessing you're leveraging Sisu onboarding and off boarding of agents. Is that right?
Robert Conway 31:16
So we're using some form of onboarding from Sisu. We're not doing any off boarding, which the main reason why is because we don't have a very high turnover rate. Okay? We we retain most of our agents. That's great that come on. It's if anybody leaves, it's more of a self like, Hey, I'm gonna go ahead and split from here kind of thing. Since I've been on the team, we've had three people leave in three years.
Brian Charlesworth 31:51
Yeah. Okay, okay. So on an onboarding front, when you guys build goals with your agents, which I know you do, and what activities it's going to take to hit those goals. That's how you're building a predictable income. Have you done the same thing around recruiting agents? How many agents do you need to recruit to hit that 20 by next May?
Robert Conway 32:14
So to hit 20, we need to recruit 23. To hit the 18, we need to recruit 20.
Brian Charlesworth 32:20
Okay, so to recruit 20 agents between now and then, that's recruiting 20 new agents between now and then. So you would actually
Robert Conway 32:29
no so to hit 20 altogether, you hit
Brian Charlesworth 32:31
20 altogether. Okay, so how many? How many new? How many new do you need to recruit a month?
Robert Conway 32:38
So in order to hit that, it's about, it's like two a quarter, roughly,
Brian Charlesworth 32:45
well, so let's call it one a month. Yeah. So, yeah, one a month. Let's call it one a month. So I, I'm going back into now. I remember when Justin had about the same size of you, there were 12 to 15 agents. And I remember they were like, Okay, we're going to recruit one a month. And I asked the question, why not five a month? So I'm going to ask you, why not five a month?
Robert Conway 33:11
Because I still run operations. So I have my operations hat plus my sales slash recruiting hat. So there is leverage to it, but there still is operational things that I have a pretty strong oversight into,
Brian Charlesworth 33:30
yeah, yeah. And this, this is why I'm drilling into this, Robert, because there is an operational factor. It takes work to onboard an agent, right?
Robert Conway 33:38
100 what is it? It's average 108 hours, yeah, in order to onboard somebody.
Brian Charlesworth 33:45
So the one thing that I know is that we set if we set systems up in place, just like we do for contract to close processes, we set systems in place for onboarding new agents, it ends up not being any more work to onboard five agents than one agent, if we do them all together. And so just have you guys thought about that we
Robert Conway 34:10
have, and just at our current growth rate, we didn't want to hold up people from like, joining the team, right? Because they're wanting to jump into real estate. We talk to people in all levels of their real estate career. So whether they're thinking about going to real estate school, they're in real estate school. They just graduated from real estate school. They just pass their test and background, and they're looking at brokerages. They've been in the industry, you know, one to two years. They've been in the industry, you know, five plus, yeah. So without wanting to like, hey, I need you to hold back so that we can get enough people for this particular. Class so that then we can train at the same time. So it's more staggered, like our our last hire came in when our hire before that was at nine weeks in, right? So there's still staggering. It's just when it makes sense for that particular agent to come on and then starting them at, you know, step zero, all the way through their onboarding, because we have a 12 week onboarding that we run, right?
Brian Charlesworth 35:32
Okay, so onboarding is 12 weeks. Okay, I got it cool. Well, you guys getting to 20 agents, and we'll talk more about this offline, Robert, because I want to, I want to run some things by you. But when you guys get to 20 agents or 18 agents, what is the production of the team next year by getting there in May?
Robert Conway 35:53
So by getting there in May, we're going to be right around 300 so my projection is like 292 to maybe like a 312 Okay, with where they come on at is really going to be a determining factor.
Brian Charlesworth 36:15
And my guess is that gets you guys to being over 100 million in close volume. Is that right?
Robert Conway 36:20
Yeah, that would get us over 100 million, yeah? Like, just over 100 million in close volume.
Brian Charlesworth 36:25
Yeah, very cool. All right. Well, congratulations. That's exciting. If you were to say, like, what is the most important thing that you've learned? Like, if you were giving advice, you're in you're an interesting personality, because you are an ops leader and you are a sales leader. There aren't many of you in the industry that I've come across, but thinking about that like, what is the most important advice you would give to an ops leader today? And then what is the most important advice you would give to a sales leader today in the real estate industry,
Robert Conway 36:56
for an ops leader, it is to know and understand your systems that you have in place and identify the areas that you might be lacking more so to audit things so that you don't become complacent and those small cracks start to really expand, because as you grow, or as you increase your production, your systems will be tested, and if you have small cracks in the system as you grow, those things will become canyons. So in order to avoid that, it's important to look at your systems and see where there might be cracks forming on the sales side of things. It goes back to that accountability is the highest form of love and understanding. What that means is crucial to helping anybody grow, and where your job as a sales leader is to help your sales people grow, it's to also be willing to have those tough conversations and have those accountability conversations of this is what you committed, not to me, but to yourself, especially where you're dealing with 1099, personnel, where you committed this to yourself. You said, This is what you wanted to achieve, and bringing it always back to that is going to significantly help not only your teammates grow their production, but also the culture within the organization.
Brian Charlesworth 38:59
Yeah, I love that it's focusing on them and their goals and what they want is so much more important, and that's what they care about, right? They want you to coach them to their goals and not focus on your goals, right? So the only way you can shift your goals, which, in your case, your goal, is to get to 100 million in closed volume. How do you do that? You get to 18 agents, right? So, so anyway, that's awesome. Thanks for that advice. If somebody wants to get a hold of you, Robert, what's the best way, whether they're an agent wanting to be look, wanting to take a look at joining your team because of the results you guys are getting, or if they're you know another sales leader or ops leader in the industry that want to talk to you about some stuff.
Robert Conway 39:39
So the best way to get a hold of me is through email. So Robert.ortongroup@gmail.com
Brian Charlesworth 39:48
Okay, well, everybody, thank you for listening to another episode of the grit podcast. Robert, grateful to have you on the show with us today. Love seeing your growth. Love cheering you guys on and we. Will continue to do that from the sidelines. And also, you know, we're here to support you if you ever need anything as well. So we're grateful to have you as a customer at Sisu, and thanks for being on
Robert Conway 40:09
the show. Thanks, Brian