A long time ago, a few people believed that teams were the future of the real estate industry. And now, the industry is starting to catch up and accept this as reality.
While everyone has their opinions on what teams are supposed to be, what team members should be looking for, or what issues they are experiencing, no one has really done a study on teams using actual data.
That’s why Workman Success Systems and Sisu have put together a study about real estate teams depending on the team size, generation, or positions to provide service and value to teams in the industry.
Brian Charlesworth joins Verl Workman, Workman Success Systems CEO, Business Consultant, and Master Coach, as they share some interesting insights and data about real estate teams and the different problems or issues they face today.
Top Takeaways:
(02:22) The history behind this study on real estate teams
(03:00) Why Verl loves Sisu so much
(07:42) Why now is the perfect opportunity for team leaders to scale up their team
(09:36) Why team owners should not be afraid to charge what they're worth
(14:44) What should team owners do to ensure they're taking their share in today's market?
(19:26) Why Verl thinks that accountability is love
(19:46) Why 76% of real estate professionals say being on a team earns them a higher income
(23:19) Why does the smallest team have the biggest conflict
(24:50) Things you should do if you want to grow your team
(30:18) The issue with great agents who now have team members working for them
(35:45) The importance of training your agents
(36:14) One of the problems with running a team
(45.47) Why great companies are losing great agents
(46:16) Why every single major brand should have a team solution that is real
(49:38) The biggest threats for teams
(52:16) How to make people in real estate stay in the business
Connect with Verl Workman
About the guest:
Verl Workman’s personal goal is to create world-class trainers. It requires extensive screening and rigorous training but being a superb coach himself and setting the bar high is where it all begins.
In every business engagement, Verl contributes extensive real estate, leadership, and coaching expertise. His clientele includes top agents, teams, and brokers in the world. However, they didn't necessarily begin that way. He is able to assist his clients in reaching greatness by determining the "why" behind each objective.
Verl is one of a select group of presenters who have achieved the Certified Speaking Professional (CSP) accreditation from the National Speakers Association. Verl is also a skilled speaker and presenter. He has educated and empowered professionals with his experience and knowledge of all facets of sales, marketing, promotion, management, and technology.
Episode Transcript:
Brian Charlesworth 0:35
Sisu and Workman men are both really, really focused on providing service and value to teams in the industry as we've both made the bet teams are the future of the industry. And we made that bet a long time ago. And I think now the industry is starting to catch up and understand that that is reality. And so we put together this study that we wanted to unveil today on this webinar, and I'm gonna let Verl lead this. And again, the topic is the unexpected impact of teams. And so, Verl, before we get started, can you just tell us a little bit more about Workman Success and what you guys are focused on over there?
Verl Workman 1:12
Yeah, thanks for having me, Brian. It's always fun to be with Sisu. And people that are like minded and stuff that we do. So I appreciate you having me on. So what workman success is based in Salt Lake City, Utah, where a team's focused coaching company? Well, we work with brands, we work with broker owners, we work with team leaders and team members. And we provide them everything you can possibly imagine from a resource perspective to grow successful teams. Basically, we use the wisdom of our crowd, and we crowdsource amazing content. And we have about 100 coaches, and we coach literally hundreds and hundreds of teams. And our culture is no other success can compensate for failure in the home. And people when you're good at the business, it creates more opportunities. And when it creates more opportunities, we build teams. And that's how we're able to have great lives while we continue to grow our businesses. So I'm excited to share this information today.
Brian Charlesworth 2:02
And although a lot of coaching companies in the industry use Sisu, you guys use us exclusively. And when I say that every one of your teams that comes in gets on Sisu right, so So anyway, I think it's been a fun partnership, fun to see you guys leveraging what we do and fun to see us leveraging what you do. So anyway, excited to share this with our teams. And let's go ahead and get started. Or oh, can you just give us kind of the history behind why that study? I know we got involved with you a little bit later as you started going down this road. But we'd love to hear just more about why this is so important. And why is nobody ever done this before?
Verl Workman 2:41
Yeah, it's interesting. Everybody has opinions, right? Everybody has opinions on teams or what they think about teams. And as we started coaching teams I started looking for, hey, is there really any data that talks about what teams want what team members are looking for? What issues teams have at different sizes, and we have our opinions and our experience, but there's no one that's really studying teams. And I'm a big numbers guy, I like to say that which gets measured gets done. That's part of why I love Sisu so much is because you know, they measure the things that get the results that we want, we're able to duplicate activities because of what we measure. So we wanted to measure it. So we hired a company, outside of real estate called the Center for generational kinetics. And they do studies for companies like Amazon, and many of the Fortune 100 companies that are featured on USA Today, that today's show different immediate, you know, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and their research is very, very deep. And so they came in, and we hired them to come in and do a deep study. And they studied teams and the impact of teams. And we had really interesting questions. And what was interesting about this is when we did this, neither one of us put our clients into the team database, meaning they reached out to the industry. And it's a random survey. And when we got the data back of the survey, it really looked like a snapshot of the real estate industry. And so we know that the data that we have is very, very good. And I won't show you the whole deck. But it's literally probably several 100 pages of research. We broke stuff down by generation by team size by team member team leader. Because those I started to share data with you, there's going to be some interesting insights. And we'll just kind of go through some of the slides and I'll share the data. And then we can talk about the insight. And you'll see how it's broken down by generation by team size. Because different generations and different sizes of teams, different positions on the team recognize different problems or issues. And it's kind of it's just kind of fascinating. So I think it'd be fun to share this with our audience today.
Brian Charlesworth 4:32
Yeah, I'm excited. Let's go ahead and dive in, bro.
Verl Workman 4:35
So this is the cover of the unexpected impact of teams in real estate. And so let's just start with one of the first one. So we had to grab, I don't know 15 or 20 of the insights. There's literally a more than 100 of this first one is that real estate professionals at every level and every size of teams credited being on a team as essential. Now think about that it's essential to their success in real estate As I give you some more data, you're gonna, you're gonna see they made more money even though they were on splits. And so if you look at the different sizes of teams, it's interesting as the teams get bigger, the more essential it was to their success, because what we found is the bigger teams have deeper training and development, they have more systematize, the onboarding and development process to team members. That's kind of a fun one.
Brian Charlesworth 5:24
So just to add a little bit to this one, and you're so right, because I'm obviously live with a team owner, right? I'm married to a team owner. And I've watched her team grow from, you know, five agents to 10, to 20, and now to 70. And as she's grown to 70, the amount of systems that are in place there, from the software systems to the leads to the admin team, to the training all of it, it's immense. And what I've found is a lot of the agents there, although they shouldn't be prospecting every day, a lot of them rely on the team leads to really generate their full business, right? So imagine Verl, being a brand new agent today, and coming in to the real estate industry. And just joining a brokerage and not a team, what would the chance of success be?
Verl Workman 6:12
Well, I think that NAR has that that's like at almost a it's like 78% don't renew their license in two years. So I think
Brian Charlesworth 6:19
I think NAR has that based on the history. But I think today, it's going I believe that stat is going to go through the roof. Because today without being on a team, if you're a new agent, you are really going to have a challenging time.
Verl Workman 6:32
So think about this, Brian. So 2008 was the big crash. Right? So how many years ago is that? 12?
Brian Charlesworth 6:38
Yup.
Verl Workman 6:39
Okay, so 12 years ago, any agent that has come into real estate in the last 12 years, has never had to learn how to prospect. They've never had to learn how to do really good open houses, they'd never learned how to really market open houses and actually market their listings. So agents that are even five to 10 years in the business have never been through it, we're about ready to as we go in into the shifting market. And so my prediction is, is there's going to be a massive shift where agents hang their licenses. And you're gonna see agents that are experienced that have been in the business five to 10 years, looking for teams to join, because they're a machine. And they can plug in quickly and get and have a much higher likelihood of success. It's also a great opportunity to grab market share. There's a lot of people sitting out there waiting and seeing what happens in the market. And our team leaders are like we know what's happening. And we're going to take market share while everybody else is trying to figure out what's going on. So this is
Brian Charlesworth 7:33
So Verl that is such great advice, what I want to pull out, what you just said is if you're a team leader, now's an opportunity for you to get experienced agents and get them quickly. So turn on the gas right now is the time to scale up your team. Don't settle for having five to 10 agents on your team who are all top producers, that is not a way to grow a team. Because ultimately, those top producers will end up leaving if you don't provide them growth opportunities.
Verl Workman 8:02
You know what you said something that was pretty interesting, you said that on your wife's team that's grown to 70, there's a certain percent of them that, you know, they want to be spoon fed leads. The cool thing about a team is there's a place for everybody. I can have hunters on the team, I can have people that want to do lead conversion. And I can have people just want to show homes because they love houses. And it's okay, I don't have to make everybody be like me, I can create an environment where they get to be who they are, and do the part of the business. They love the most to become really good at it. And that's probably what's the coolest part of being on a team is you get to do the part of the business that you like the most.
Okay, so tell me about this slide here.
So this is really, really different. You know, everybody talks about the millennials and the Gen Xers and the different generations of you know, who's going to want to work on a team and who's not going to work on a team. But across the board. We found that people in every age group from the younger millennials, all the way through the Gen X's all had a very positive or very positive experience working on a team. It's not just set out for the next generation coming into real estate, the youngest people, it's literally people who've been in the business for a long time that realize they don't want to do their own paperwork anymore, or they don't want to show houses anymore. And so for me, this stat says, a lot. A lot of people are saying I want to get into teams because I want to track the younger millennials. Well, the reality is the older millennials, and the Gen Xers want a team as well. And they have great experiences working on the teams.
Brian Charlesworth 9:28
Yeah. Now you said this in the last slide. And I just want to emphasize, it's not about the splits. It's about how much money they're making. How much money are they putting in their pocket. A solo agent coming into the business today would be lucky probably to sell five homes in a year. A solo agent coming into a team and I witnessed this on a regular basis. A lot of these brand new agents are selling five to 10 homes a month, like in their first few months, which is unbelievable to me. So again, it's not about as the team leader it's not about the split It says don't be afraid to charge what you're worth. It's about how much you're empowering these guys to make money.
Verl Workman 10:07
Yeah. So on a workman coached team, team member, a buyer's agent or listing partner has a minimum of 24 transactions a year. Like we don't even want you on the team unless you're doing 24 deals a year. And you'll make a lot more money on a 50% split doing 24 deals than you will 100% doing seven.
Brian Charlesworth 10:24
Yes.
Verl Workman 10:25
And so it's about the money you take home, not the split, you're on there actually have a stat on that. That's really interesting. We'll show that in just a minute. But so one of the things that you have on this slide, what I want everybody to recognize is Don't prejudge, based on somebody's age group, whether or not you think they want a team. There's a lot of broker owners and a lot of brands out there that think, Oh, I've got a bunch of older agents, they don't want teams. But the reality is, they want teams and they have better experiences with teams, and they actually love being part of a team. And so it's not just the younger millennials, it's really every generation is affected by it.
Brian Charlesworth 10:57
Yes, I had a meeting yesterday with someone who's just super well known in this industry, you know, building a multibillion dollar business. And he shared with me that the average team owner that he's seeing is making net in their pockets $150,000 a year. That being said, what that means to you guys is team owners, and this is average teams, right? This is not top teams. But the reason that's happening is they're not charging what they're worth, there are a lot of team owners out there that are not charging the full 50%. And let's just enroll I know you have statistics on what should people should charge when and I'm happy to let you share those right now. But let's assume you're charging 50-50 that agent that gets 50%, that 50% is their gross and their net, right? They don't have expenses, you get the 50%. And now by the time you get done paying all your expenses, you're probably down to 20%, possibly less. So if you're on a 30-70 split, giving the agent 70%. Guess what, you're not making any money. Like that's the way this business work. So I just wanted to point that out Rohan, if you want to share your recommendations, I'm happy to have you do that as well.
Verl Workman 12:11
Well, so we can do that. But I want you to think about the philosophy. So team leaders, they get busy, and they want to either exit the business or they want to slow down, and they don't want to work so hard. And so they hire people, but they create compensation that disincentivizes that behavior. So for example, if you owe us 7030, if and you can charge whatever you want to we're not dictating anything, but like So Brian, if you were my buyer's agent, and I paid you 70%, there's no way I can afford to give you my elites. And so it disincentivizes the behavior that you want from your team leader to overcompensate the team members. But if there's, there's also
Brian Charlesworth 12:49
no way that I can pay a staff to provide you the support that you deserve right now. Yeah,
Verl Workman 12:54
you know, I use the example of going into business together. And let's say you and I wanted to be partners, and you got a lot more money than me. So let's have you be the money guy. And I'll work in the store, and you put up the money, you sign the lease, you put up the sign, you fill the inventory, you fill the shelves with inventory, you do all the marketing, and then I'll come work at the cash register. And then what I'll do is because I'm really good with people, I'll just take 50% off the top and then out of your 50%, you can pay back all your investment, would you do that deal?
Brian Charlesworth 13:24
No, no, well,
Verl Workman 13:25
that's what a team leader does, that puts their agents on a 5050 split, they put them on a 5050 they spend all the expense, the person working, the cash register takes 50% off the top, and you're you're left to try and be profitable. And that's why there's that's why teams don't understand. A lot of team leaders don't understand how to create their job. And I can I'm just speaking to all my team leaders, your job is to create stability and security for your team. And you can't do that if you're not profitable. So we'll get more numbers and
Brian Charlesworth 13:51
77% of people who have been on a team report it they had a positive experience,
Verl Workman 13:57
right? The vast majority of people love it. They love it. Now, this is one of my favorite. This is one of my favorite stats, because it's gonna get a lot more competitive. And I'm gonna conference today and they gave a stat, there's 1.6 million realtors, and there's 1.3 million listings. What's the problem?
Brian Charlesworth 14:17
Well, there's not a problem. The thing is, what do you have to do to be the one that gets those listings? Right? I mean, a lot of these agents in the business today are either part time and my opinion is part timers are going to disappear in today's market. And then you have those who continue to take market share. And I think as we talk about this, what do I have to do verl to be the one that is capturing those listings, that is selling those homes in today's market versus because we all know the market is changing, right? So so you're going to have people who are actually taking market share today and you're going to have those who are basically leaving the business because they're not doing it Business. So what do I need to do as a team owner as an agent to make sure I'm the one on the upper hand, they're taking market share?
Verl Workman 15:08
Well, first of all, you have to, you know, every Cisco back to basics, I'm gonna say you have to do the basics better, you can't just be basic, you have to be exceptional. You have to be great at the business. According to this stat, it says that, the vast majority 85% say that being on a team gave him an unfair competitive advantage. And let me tell you why. So as we dig deeper into the research, what we found is, is that specialization gives you an advantage. So I always play like, we're role playing Brian, but if I'm gonna go sell your house, and all I do is listings, and I do it at times a year, and I'm better at marketing, I'm better at staging, I'm better at negotiating, I'm better at making sure that we make price corrections or course corrections during the process. Because I all I do is listings, and I'm a specialist at it. When the generalist comes in to compete, it really makes it hard for them to compete with me, because I have so many more resources and tools, I'm just better at the market. Same thing with as a buyer specialist, if all I do is work with buyers, and I do it 48 to 60 times a year, I understand what I have to do to get my offers accepted, I know what I have to do to get people pre approved, I know what I have to do to get buyer agreement signed. And so specialization creates the unfair competitive advantage. And so I'm going to say as a team, since we're doing a team session today, it's Don't let everybody be generalists allow your agents to specialize in areas of the business, I have buyer's agents, listing agents, support staff, and even commercial agents are specialists, i beta specialists that are specialists in just rental properties.
Brian Charlesworth 16:33
I think this applies to what you talked about earlier as well, as far as them getting more training. Yep, on a team. And I think there's a big culture factor as well, especially for those teams that are having a call themselves contest every month. But if you're running contests among your team, you're going to find that culture is going to drive an unfair advantage as well. So
Verl Workman 16:54
so every team has a culture. And that culture is either intentionally created, or it's accidentally created. And most teams have a culture that's accidental. Nobody actually thinks about what I want my culture to be. And so I like to when I'm coaching a team, the first thing we talk about is building a culture of productivity. And you talked about having fun with it, and gamification. Everybody likes to tell you what their GCI was, I like to track the activities that create the GCI. And so instead of instead of playing a game on whoever can sell the most, I want to have a game that says whoever can set the most appointments or have the most conversations. So I want to create the game around doing the activities that can give me the results that I want. One of the reasons we you see Sue for everything is it gives me the dashboards to be able to track all that and makes the gamification fun. So it's it's not just someone's opinion of whether or not it's working. I'm tracking it, and I'm tracking it with technology that makes it accurate, and it's transparent. So everybody can see how they're doing it, it makes people want to go harder, is they want to be able to win. We do great prizes when we gamify sales contests. I totally
Brian Charlesworth 17:58
agree with you virtual sales contests. And I've seen a lot of these now that we have, you know, we have over 3100 teams on our platform, and a lot of them are running sales contests with sales contests. Absolutely, you have to make sure that you're in the lead measure, not just the lag measure area, in fact, probably all in the lead measure area. And I would say if there's just one thing you could run a sales contests on the single most important thing would be appointments met, because appointments met, if you're going on appointments, you're closing real estate, like that's the fact. So if you want to drive your people to go on an appointment every day, have a sales contest based on the plan. Right. And
Verl Workman 18:35
like I do appointments set and appointments met, they're directly correlated with each other. And the other thing is, when you measure the right things, and you'll hear I'll say this 1000 times that which gets measured gets done. When you measure the right things, then we can coach to the gaps. So if you're making calls, but you're not having conversations, we changed the time of day, your calling, if you're having calls and having conversations, but you're not getting appointments, that we can focus on what you're saying on those calls. If you're getting appointments, but you're not getting listing signed, or buyer agreements signed, then we focus on your presentation skills. So we track everything. And that's why being on a team gives us such a competitive advantage because we're tracking the things that allow us to coach to those gaps. And really, tracking is not you know, people think accountability is a bad word. I think accountability is love. It's like we track things so that we can fix it. Not so that we can beat you up for not doing it right. It's like like I never like if you're making the calls and not having the conversations that well let's fix it. I love someone who just gets up and you know each rejection for breakfast. Let's just not eat as much of it.
Brian Charlesworth 19:39
Yeah, all right, that's a good 180 5% So moving on to this 170 6% of real estate professionals say being on a team earns them a greater income.
Verl Workman 19:49
Now I want you to look at this and I want you to think about it. It says 76% Earn a greater income and two thirds of the study or team members Not team leaders. So the majority of the people were on lower splits. But they made more money. How cool
Brian Charlesworth 20:07
is that? It doesn't surprise me I watch it every day, if somebody has left a team and I, you know, it's again, it's in my house, I've seen one agent leave my wife's team and actually make more money, not on the team, the rest of them that have left, most of them are out of the business. And if not, they're making you know, a fraction of what they used to.
Verl Workman 20:28
So one of the things when you cut this down by generations, Brian's kind of fun to talk about. So the youngest generation, they're barely knew in real estate, of course, they made more money. That's all they knew. So 82% high. As they get older, the younger millennials made, you know, a few or less, but the older millennials, 72% of them said they earn greater income, but it wasn't 82 or so 10%, fewer, the Gen Xers, the 45 to 50 sixes, that's the dead zone for a lot of realtors, these are people in the middle of their careers that haven't figured out real estate yet. They don't know how to hunt. And so they decided they would get on a team. And now all of a sudden, they're in their middle age, and they're finally making money in real estate. And it's such a cool thing, that they're able to make money here. What's interesting is the boomers are the people you talked about, or the team leaders are making less, because they're not structuring the team compensation correctly. And they'll actually tell you that they made more money when they were an individual agent than they did as a team. And that means they aren't doing it right. So the statistics on this give us kind of the same things we've been talking about, they just back it up statistically, I think it's just bad. It's just fascinating to me.
Brian Charlesworth 21:33
And that's an amazing, that's an amazing stat. And it lets us know that the agents recognize that being on a team, they're going to make more money. So don't hesitate as a team leader to to charge what you're worth.
Verl Workman 21:45
Perfect. So let's go next slide here. This talks about the size of teams and the income they earned. Now, look at this very small teams, it shows what their annual income is. And when we get into the seven figures, we have a lot of people on small teams earning seven figures see 23% on a small team 18% On medium sized team 20% of large teams. But on the Mega teams, we blow through the roof on the people over a million dollars of income. So size of Team matters when it gets to the amount of income or your total annual real estate income. And it seems to me like so I've got some really small teams in Hyde sells high dollar priced markets that earn seven figures. I've got people in California, in the middle of Calabasas that will tell you that, you know, they didn't believe that team members could do 20 million or 24 transactions. And now they've got several team members doing it. And we've watched them go from 100 million to 200 million to 300 million to 400 million to 500 million, because they started building a team and a market where they didn't believe it was possible. We've got these young millennials that are making really high six figures on great splits. And so this kind of shows you different size of teams and where their income flow is very small teams, a lot of times these are husband and wife teams or one to two people. They are the lowest income earners because they haven't figured out how to clearly define roles and responsibilities. And they don't know how to delegate. And oftentimes the smallest teams are where the biggest conflict is. So when we break this one down, and we start looking at who these teams are, that are small teams, the ones that had the biggest issues in communication, were the smallest teams, which is kind of funny, the bigger teams haven't figured out because they systematize things.
Brian Charlesworth 23:25
Yeah, they have their systems in place, the larger you get, the more you're going to build a team that's going to make sure you have your systems in place.
Verl Workman 23:33
The other thing that I want to say about this slide is I don't think anybody starts off and says, Oh, I want to build a mega team, like, like, I don't think your wife started out thinking oh, I'd like to have 70 agents on my team. She thought she just she was kicking butt in real estate. And because she's good at it, she just wanted some help. And as she got more help, she realized, oh my gosh, I love mentoring others and watching them be successful. And so she attracted more people that she could pour into and help be successful, and that it's like a drug when you're helping other people succeed. I don't know, I get more joy out of that than actually selling houses. So when I'm developing people, and I see them get to buy houses and investment properties, and they're my team members. To me, that's what makes it all worth it. teams start wanting to help, they want to just get help. But as they grow, they recognize that leverage is real. And so they become methodical about how they grow. So here's a couple of things that we do when we grow teams. First of all, if you're one to 10 agents, or your one to 10 transactions a year, you need a part time assistant or someone that can just do your transaction management. I think you should not do transaction management the day you get licensed, you should never do it. Like I can't ever take you to that place where you're making a million dollars a year. If you spent any of your day doing $20 An hour tasks. It doesn't make sense. So outsource it in that 20 to 30 transactions. That's when people start realizing oh my gosh, this is like I can make more money here than I could at a job. You've run out of friends and family and you're starting to do some deals. And so you add some help maybe a showing assistant or a buyer's agent. And then the way that we add buyer's agents is simply a formula. For every listing you generate, you should close 1.5 buyside transactions. For every listing you get, you should have six to eight leads a month coming in. And for every 25 leads you generate, we add a buyer's agent. So regardless of your lead sources, when I look at all your lead sources, if you have 100 leads coming in every month, I need four buyer's agents. And so it's a formula. It's not oh, I want to build a mega team, it's Do we have the business that supports adding another team member. And because we systemize and track everything, we just plug into the formula, and we just add as needed.
Brian Charlesworth 25:40
So Verl, we have a question, which is 45% of members on a larger team make over a million dollars a year? I think that's if you'll go back to that last slide. Yes, right there. So if we look it up, we're on the far right, we're seeing 45% on a mega team, making over a million dollars a year. You just talked about that. And I think price points come into play here as well. But you want to talk a little bit more on addressing that question.
Verl Workman 26:13
So what's the question?
Brian Charlesworth 26:14
The question is the worst showing 45% here make over a million dollars a year if they're on a mega team?
Verl Workman 26:20
That's a statement. So what's the question? So yes, that's true.
Brian Charlesworth 26:23
Yes. Is that Is that real?
Verl Workman 26:27
Yeah, that's real. I mean, they gave you their real numbers. And so now we didn't run that we didn't run the statistics through like MLS verification of data. In our next study that we do together, we're going to run all the data against MLS numbers, because Sisu will get involved earlier in the process. And so we'll have MLS data to back up the statistical data that comes out here. But you know, they just said, Yeah, we make more money. And so as I'm on a team of this size, and then in another question, it says income, and that it broke down the income by generation by team size. And that's a big number, I have a lot of teams that are teams of five and less that earn over a million dollars. So having a mega team is not a prerequisite to earning a million dollars of gross income. So I'm going to say where I want, I want you to double every year to hit seven figures. So if you're at 250, the next year, I want you to be at 500,000, the next year, I want you to be at a million. And once we get to a million gross closed income, then we'll focus on getting to a million net. And so there's a there's a very methodical process that we coach to to help you grow. And it's not about the number of people, there's a lot of factors, including average sales price, the number of transaction is done by the team leader. You know, the more deals done by the team leader, the higher the profitability, but the lower the lifestyle.
Brian Charlesworth 27:40
So I think the question, let me maybe rephrase that question. Are we talking agents on teams? Are we talking team leaders?
Verl Workman 27:47
Well, so this broke it down by size of team, not by team leader? So I have that Dad, I just don't have it on this slide. So I have to pull that up for you. Okay. And so yes, I'm saying that the owner can make over a million dollars. Yeah. Okay. And the answer is yes. But they get there by helping their team members succeed. Like, if you want to build a team, so that you can make a bunch of money off people, I am not the right coach. But if you want to build a team, so that you can help other people have great lives, you'll get everything you want in your life. And if you have, that's the mentality you want, then I'll help you like, I'll help you for sure. But a lot of people start teams because they want to make more money. I started teaching because I want to have a better lifestyle, I want to have a better time with my family, I want to be present. When my kids are playing sports. I don't want to be on my phone all the time when I'm at family gatherings. And so I have other people on the team that can take that off my plate. And then when they have a game, I want to take it off theirs and have them have a great life too. So it's not about the team leader building a great life and making a boatload of money. It's about how do we create an environment where everybody on the team gets to succeed? For me, that's the key leadership as a team leader.
Brian Charlesworth 28:58
Okay, thanks for the clarity there. Let's move on to the next one. I think we skipped over the last one. You're right.
Verl Workman 29:02
It says real estate professionals are more productive and successful being on a team. And so it kind of goes to all the things we've been talking about. But when you talked about culture, the culture of productivity says, Look, when we're on teams of different sizes, the team culture is we're productive. We show up every day, we do a daily huddle. We practice scripts and dialogue, we get on the phones and prospect and we do it as a team. And when you have that rhythm of success, it's really hard to fail. You know why people fail when they get on teams, because they don't show up and they don't do the work. It's not because the system's not working.
Brian Charlesworth 29:38
And if they don't show up and don't do the work, it might be because the leadership, right? So just make sure that you do have that culture that burl just spoke about on your team. Because if you do, you're going to have a much higher success rate with more of your agents.
Verl Workman 29:52
You know, every time you say something it makes me think about the the industry issues that we have and one of the issues we have is we have great real There's that now all of a sudden have team members working for them. But nobody's really developed them as leaders. And so because no one's teaching them how to be a good leader, they just wonder why everybody doesn't work as hard as they do, because they just do it naturally. Right? So we focus on that.
Brian Charlesworth 30:17
So overall, I got into this business about seven, eight years ago, I saw that exact thing in my wife's business. And it really built Sisu. As I went out and start going to these masterminds, the whole reason Sisa was built was to help turn these team owners, integrate leaders, help you manage yourselves business help you know, your numbers, help you put up systems for your admin team, all these things that you really need to do to be a great leader. And that's the key to having success in this business.
Verl Workman 30:46
It totally is. Nobody teaches leadership. And there's, I mean, I would say nobody we do. So I don't believe great team leaders are born, I believe they're developed. And if you're a team leader, and you don't have a coach, that means that you don't have somebody looking at the way you're performing, and giving you feedback, and your team members won't be honest with you. And so it's really injured and your competitors don't often give you the right feedback. So you need someone who like genuinely wants you to grow and be better as a leader, whether I mean, I don't care if you use workman or not as a coaching client, you know, find somebody who can help look at your business from a different perspective, and coach you through it, because having a coach has made all the difference to me and my business, you know, in, in real estate, we're a pretty good coaching culture, but you got to hire the right coach to understand teams. You know, a lot of people don't understand leadership, they're gonna coach you to make cold calls. And like we focus on teams and developing great leaders and things like that.
Brian Charlesworth 31:40
And I just want to emphasize, like, I don't ever talk to these team owners making the ones that we were just talking about that are making over a million dollars, and they don't have a coach, always. Yeah, I'll just back that up. I see it. I see it all the time.
Verl Workman 31:53
So you know, all the things we talked about. I'm gonna use this example of Brooke signs. And she's a Sisu user as well. Brooke, science gets into real estate in 2015. She sells 30 houses. What's funny about Brooke is she used to book motivational speakers, Brian, so she and you know why she got into real estate because she wanted more time with her kids. And which is actually fun.
Brian Charlesworth 32:11
And a lot of people who get into real estate for more time find they don't have any time with their kids now. So if they're not managing their time, right, and they're managing their schedule.
Verl Workman 32:19
That's right. And what she realized was, oh, my gosh, I have less time because she was good. She was good at the business. So she sold 30 houses and 5 million her first year. And then she she got a workman coach, about halfway through her first year in real estate. The very next year, we said let's start building a team so you can have leverage with your small children. So she went from 30 to 55, houses went from 5 million to 10 million, add an assistant to buyer's agents and she became a groupie, meaning, if we asked her to do it, she would do it. She's turned on lead generation with SYNC, who's a great partner of Sisu. And then she became a workman coach and she started coaching others it was really interesting to watch her go from 10 million to the very next year going to 20 million. So you can see the five and 1020 member I talked about doubling each year 2018, she sold 130 houses went to 25 million. And then she decided to move. Now imagine having that kind of a business and then just picking up your whole team and your whole family and moving from Michigan to North Carolina. Well, Brooke did that. And going into a brand new market in 2021, hit 53 million in sales and kept her other team. So she went over seven figures because we taught her how to do it in Michigan. She followed the systems went to North Carolina, and in just a year generated 35 million in sales in that and so between your two teams now she's got an unbelievable business. And she they huddled together they've coordinated client care services. So they work out of the same office. But the agents go out and they work. She does huddles, and it's really fun to watch a young mom take on becoming a great leader and then helping other people be successful in her business. And it's like she's the she's the example of her core values for her family are very similar to the core values she runs her team with. And she wants her people to have a great life. And so that's kind of a example of someone who fits into the study as we've been going through all those things that make it work.
Brian Charlesworth 34:12
Yeah, thanks for sharing Verl. For those of you guys looking at that saying, hey, doubling my business every year, I can tell you our average Sisu customer because they're running their business like a real business. And they know their numbers and they manage their sales team and they have systems in place. Our average team at Sisu grows 107% year over year, so exactly what Verl just showed here.
Verl Workman 34:36
It's fun when you see it in, you know my eye like I love when I see Brooke at a conference, she comes to coach training and there's so many people like her that have just they just do the work and it's been life changing. Like we're changing people's lives and it's such a cool thing. During COVID Brooke took off and she started driving with her kids to see all 50 states and she would take pictures on her wall of all the states you went to with their kids and She was running her teams virtually. And it was such a fun thing to see her as she was doing education with her children, because they're all on lockdown. She's like, you know what, let's go see the country, and was able to have a great business. While that was all happening during COVID.
Brian Charlesworth 35:12
So Verl on this slide right here, it's been three minutes, I think a lot of people have been looking at it. But I just wanted to say that now more than ever, it's important that you're training your agents. And here's the thing, so many of these agents have been in the business now less than five years. They don't know how to do open houses, they don't know how to prospect, they don't know how to do any of these things that you team leaders know how to do, it's time to make sure you're training them because they have to sharpen their, you know, quiver to be able to get the business in today's market. That's, that's a massive change that's happening.
Verl Workman 35:48
So one of the problems with running a team. So here you are as a good real estate agent, all sudden, now you have a team, everything you do well is in your head, and it's in your heart. And so I'm coaching teams all the time, and all sudden they hire a buyer's agent, but the team leader didn't have anything to train the buyer's agent on because they haven't ever created it. So we invest heavily in building training products. So when you come into coaching with Workman, you're gonna go through it, you're gonna get access to this training library that has specialty training for buyer's agents, like literally it's 10 weeks of buyer agent training. To get that agent two transactions a month, it's everything they need to do. When we built our listing agent Mastery program, or our slam program out. It was specifically built by agents who list over 200 houses a year. And we took everything they did what they do in a pre listing phase, what did they do in the home? What do they do? And they have multiple when you're competing against somebody else? How do you deal with multiple offers? What do you do in a premium marketing plan, all of the elements that these people that do 200 houses or more a year did we put into a program called slam, I tell people all the time, like I don't care if you use my training. But if you're not listing 200 houses a year, you should probably just copy these people because they do you know what I mean? Like, and not very many people do that much business. So just copy, do it my way for a while. And watch what happens because these people just rock. And then we built a program. For the admin, you know, the agent, I don't know how many of you that's listening to the call have hired an admin or have had a bad experience hiring someone on your support team. And it's because you don't have an operations manual, you don't have all your policies and procedures written out all of the things that you do. So we created a program called amp, which is admin mastery, which is literally 66 sessions on how to train a rockstar, administrative assistant or client care coordinator. So they wish they had specialty training. Look at 2% of those people in that 750 to a million dollars. That is their biggest need is they want specialty training, and it doesn't exist. Well guess what it exists. And that's why you know, our partnership is so strong is because you've got all the data and information. And then we've built all the specialty training for all the different roles and responsibilities on a team. And so this was one of the stats that when I got this back, I was like, Okay, so we're on the right track, we're building the right products, this is what they're asking for.
Brian Charlesworth 38:06
So if this is not a focal point of yours today, make sure you prioritize it.
Verl Workman 38:12
Big time. You're my systems guy. Look at this one. Like almost half of the teams don't have systems for things they do three times or more.
Brian Charlesworth 38:22
Yeah. So again, another reason that Sisu was started viral, but I remember the day of helping my wife build her business. And we were putting things into Google and take forms. And then we were taking that same data and putting it into Trello. Well, first it was whiteboards, then we moved to Trello. Putting that same data in into spreadsheets for commissions. Every time you have that duplicate entry. It takes 20 minutes of your admins time. So now you have you add up your admins hours in a day. I remember spring had back then she had three TCS doing 150 transactions a year, she now has one TC with a couple of VAs doing over 800 transactions a year. So if you think about that, get your systems in place, there should never be duplicate data entry and also automate as much as you can. What do I mean by that? Well, if somebody goes under contract, and that email that goes out with all of the data around a transaction can be generated automatically without a TC having to go do that and send it to five different people. The buyer, the seller, the other TC on the other side, the mortgage company, the title company, like don't make them manually do those things because there's ways to automate that kind of stuff. And that's why Sisu was built. So anyway, yeah, totally. I see this all the time, bro.
Verl Workman 39:53
Everyone needs to write this down. Systems first, Assistant second. There's no task too small to delegate. Like, just let it go. Team leaders struggle, having somebody else do something. We do lots of stuff on, like behavioral styles and things like that. And here's the thing, entrepreneurs are usually and I have successful people that are team leaders that are di, ss, and C. So it doesn't matter what your DISC profile is, I have seven figure income earners that are all dominant, and each of the four behavioral styles. But generally, my high DS and my high eye, you see a lot of those as team leaders, well, when they have to work in the details, they can do it, but it causes them to do it at a high level of anxiety and stress, because it's not their natural happy place. And so they have a hard time delegating, because they think everybody struggles as much as they do. And they really have to focus and concentrate. But the reality is, is if you hire someone who's happy in the spreadsheets, they actually have no stress when they're doing the detail oriented tasks. And so it's easier, and they do a better job at it, and you suck at it anyway. So just let it go. And that's the whole idea of creating systems. The other thing that I think and you tell me if this is consistent with the team's you see is that it seems like at different levels of business, all of your systems break and have to be rebuilt to scale to the next level, like what you're doing with Trello boards worked when you're a team of 10. But then all of a sudden, when you're 20, you're like, Ah, we're doing way too much duplicate entry for everything that we do. So I want to create my workflows in one place. So when a contract comes in, I set it and forget it. And it just happens, I don't have to go re enter it into two or three other different
Brian Charlesworth 41:41
And the problem with re entering and and all those platforms is you're not getting the data out of any of those platforms that you need to successfully run a business. That's right, so So I wanted to point out one thing here, and this is something I've learned from Spring, like since we got married eight years ago, like she drills this into me all the time, if she ever sees me doing anything that such as mowing the lawn, when we first got married, I would mow the lawn I thought I'd enjoy I enjoy getting outside. But the reality is, let's just say you make $1,000 an hour as a team leader, if you're making a million dollars a year, you're making $1,000 an hour. And now all of a sudden you're stepping in and doing those types of tasks like viral said that you're paying somebody 20 You could pay somebody $20 an hour to do. Are you ever gonna be able to scale your business and grow your business doing that? And the answer's no. So yeah, absolutely get your systems in place, single most important thing in a business in my opinion. And now's the time to do that.
Verl Workman 42:44
You know, it's funny, you talk about that. I say there's no test too small to delegate. Like I never enjoyed mowing my own lawn, your mow your lawn. Great. I want you to do whatever you love. One of the greatest things, you know, it's funny because I don't mow my own lawn. I don't change my own oil. I have someone that does that for me. And I was talking to
Brian Charlesworth 43:02
me too. Now Merle? I mean, I haven't I haven't been on in seven and a half years, right.
Verl Workman 43:07
I don't even have a lawn mower. Right. My older boys used to do it for me. And then I had a little lawn mowing company. But the next generation they're very different. Well, one of the greatest gifts and it's not just you having a better life, right? So I look at my wife. I've been married for 36 years. So we just had our 36th anniversary. And a couple of years ago for Christmas, I was thinking about what can I give my wife that would make her happy? Well, there's two things she hates. One is she hates shopping for food. And the second thing is she hates cooking it. So I gave her a home chest. And so two days a week the chef comes in and cooks Monday and Tuesday and then Wednesday they come in and cook Wednesday and Thursday. Those have been my greatest happiest years of marriage. It's not, you know, and it wasn't even that expensive. What was important is that it was a task or something she didn't like doing it caused her a lot of stress to always wondering what to feed the kids. And so when I took that off of her plate, it made her happier. Well, the same thing is true in our own businesses. What are the things that you're currently doing that you should let go of? Like, what are the things that you should delegate? You can delegate pretty much everything except probably your spouse, you shouldn't delegate that but anything else? You can that you can delegate it.
Brian Charlesworth 44:13
Yeah, well said, Girl, that's a great example. Thanks for sharing that.
Verl Workman 44:18
Here's a big one for brands. I'll tell you what, all the major brands need to see this. Because so many companies are team tolerant, but they're not team friendly, and they're not team proactive. They'll adjust the program because a team leader is getting ready to quit, which is very different than having solutions for the team. So brokers and owners and brands pay attention to this stat because 90% of real estate professionals believe that their major company should support the model. That's pretty much all of them. So you want to go after the What the 11% That don't or do you want the 89% the one a team model and look at your own business and say Do I have the resources, the training, the development, the coaching the systems, the content? tract? Do I have all of those things that if somebody wanted to build a team, they would come to me for answers? Because if you don't, they're gonna go to somebody else.
Brian Charlesworth 45:08
The other thing is team structure as far as pay, there are a lot of how to compensate. Yeah, there are a lot of brokerages that don't yet compensate differently for teams. And if they don't, these teams will be leaving very quickly.
Verl Workman 45:21
Okay, so there's great companies that are great brands that are losing great agents, because somebody else is messaging better to their team leaders. It's not that they have a better business model. And it's not that they have a better compensation plan. It's they have a better message. So the question you need to ask yourself, as a broker owner or brand is, what is the message that I'm giving to my people about whether or not they should create leverage in their life, like, I don't think it's my job to tell anybody, you should have a team or not have a team, my job as a coach is to say, tell me what you want your life to look like. And let me help you create a business that supports it. And if it means we need to have some leverage and create a team, great if it means you just need some broker related services to plug into that's great, too. But you got to have better messaging to your agents, I think that is one of the most important things that we talked about on this call, is that every single major brand needs to have a team solution that is real, not just lipstick on a pig. It's got to be legitimate and deep and authentic content.
Brian Charlesworth 46:25
And that's well said, bro, we have another question here. I'll address this asking about duplicate entry. And yes, absolutely duplicate entry is it's one of the biggest challenges in this industry. And one of the biggest reasons Sisu was founded and one of the biggest focuses of CCM. So, you know, if you're using a transaction management platform, or an intake form, I mean, Sisu is much more than transaction management, but it's part of what we are. But if you're using a system that doesn't take your intake forms, and turn those into task lists and automatically generate your task list, and then if you have a brokerage that needs something pushed into sky slope, that system should have, you know, an API connection that pushes that information into sky slope, so you're not having to re enter it and sky slope. So anyway, that's how I'll say a lot of you guys, many of you are on Sisu. But if you're not, you should get a demo if you're running into those problems, because we can solve those problems for you. So the same thing with a CRM, right? If you're connected to a CRM, or if you're pulling data from a CRM, there's a lot of data in your CRM, you have to pull into whatever that next step is, that should be done automatically, not manually.
Verl Workman 47:43
So that's actually one of the reasons that we partnered with Sisu is because the open source mentality of leadership, you know, Brian likes to make his content available to anybody that wants it. So that you can have the ability to have the dashboarding, and the tracking and all of those things without doing multiple entry. And that's, that was a big deal for us at work, then, because we have clients pretty much on every platform. And we wanted to make sure that when we plugged them in, that we had the ability to have consistency in the things that we were tracking and looking at, if
Brian Charlesworth 48:11
you want to have a better experience with your coach, open up Sisu to your coach as well, right, we can give them a free account where they can log in, log in and access your data and provide you with better results because they know they know where your breakdowns are. So.
Verl Workman 48:25
So this next step, Brian is a heartbreaking one for me. And it said that 55% believe that being on a team had the effect on their personal life that I hope that means 45% of the people that have are on teams aren't doing it right. And that means there's a lot of opportunity for us to help them. So if it's not having the effect on your personal life, and you're not growing financially, then you're not doing your team, right. And so this just tells me there's a lot of room in the industry for us to come in and support and to help and to coach more teams. It made me sad when I saw that first first, I looked at it as a bad stat like, oh my gosh, only 50%, like believed that the team had the effect. And that's because no one was training him. They started a team and nobody developed the leader. So it's very stuff that we talked about in the beginning. And this supports what both you and I have what you and I have been saying. Yeah. All right. So there's another one biggest threats for smaller and larger teams are challenges with communication. The the medium sized teams didn't have as bigger problems with communication, which I thought was really interesting, that really small teams husband or wife big problem. And the super big teams, the team leader got disconnected from the team members. And so we have to be really intentional I call you have to have a rhythm of meetings. So you have to have a rhythm of meetings where you're meeting with your people in order to keep communication. One of the things we do with our Sisu dashboards, is it gives us talking points for our meetings. So because we're tracking the matrix that moved the needle on our teams, it makes it really easy for us to have a rhythm of meetings and communicate. Are we on target? Are we not on target? What's our forecasting look like? What do we have in the hopper? I can do that with one click. So when you have the right data It puts meat and meaning into your meetings. And if you don't have the right data, then you're just a talking head and nobody wants to show up for the meetings. And so communication happens when you have a basis for that communication. And that's a challenge in teams of every size that
Brian Charlesworth 50:15
We have. We have five minutes to the hour, we're going to cut this off within five minutes. So how many how many do we have left here? And I guess I'm asking this question, because you're just getting a piece of this. So maybe we're going to cut this off. For all I know, you're going to talk to this even more at the rain event, September 26, through 28th. And so if there's anything else that you want to share, I'm going to let you share it will possibly answer a few more questions, but maybe just let's kind of wrap up. This data, this data is amazing. And I'm shocked that nobody in this industry has ever done this before. And we're super excited to be a part of this with you at Sisu because a lot of this data, I mean, you've gone out and done these outside studies. And the next iteration of this, we will be doing pulling generalized data from the CDC platform, which again, we have, you know, 3100 teams to provide you with some, some generalized data there that can have a significant impact on our knowledge of what we need to be doing to really be scaling and growing these teams. So yeah, I'm
Verl Workman 51:18
skipping through slides here. One of the things that's gonna be really cool is when we take the general data from the industry and compare it to people that are Sisu users, and then we'll compare it again that those are being coached by Workman, I think we're gonna find that there's going to the levels that happen. Like when you plug into the right tools and technology and you plug into the right coaches, you're gonna see a vast difference in the income earned in the average income by the team members. Culture is a huge thing. few case studies Josh made just went out incredible growth. Also a Sisu user and a workman success coaching client as well as a coach of the biggest difference is that the vast majority of people that joined a team say that they are more likely to stay in the industry because they got trained, right. And so 81% believe that being on a team makes it likely for them to stay in the business. So you want to keep people in real estate or you're a broker owner, or you're a team leader, you can bring new people in and they will stay in the business, if they get on a team. Like their likelihood of staying in the business goes just astronomically through the roof. If you put them on the right team on a well coached, well run team. And I think that everybody that let me go to a final slide here, I'll put that up for you. Okay, here's all the things we didn't get to talk about.
Brian Charlesworth 52:28
So in wrapping up, teams are the future of the industry and verl knows it, we know that Sisu workman is focused on that we're focused on that, like if there's anything you guys want and need, building your team's company, either of us will do you know anything and everything to help you guys grow, because that's what our focus is. So, again, we will be sharing this slide deck out with everyone who registered for today. So it's not like you're not going to get this. But if you want to get even more details behind this, join us at the rain event September 26 through 28th, where verl will be a keynote. And we have some other incredible speakers that are going to be there. And super, super excited about that event. So bro, thank you so much for joining today. And thank you all for joining. We're excited and hoping that this will make a difference in your business and let us know if there's anything else we can do for you.
Verl Workman 53:23
Thanks for having me. I'll see you all at Reign at Salt Lake.
Brian Charlesworth 53:27
All right, we'll see you later.