Zach shares the ups and downs of growing quickly, including the hard lessons learned about the need for solid systems and a strong team culture. “We thought we were on top of the world when we added 25 agents in two weeks,” Zach says, “but without a solid system, things fell apart fast.” This experience taught them that growth without structure isn’t sustainable.
Zach talks about his own journey, from making over 130,000 calls a year as an ISA to leading a team that has more than quadrupled in size. He jokes about his early days as a "cowboy," jumping from task to task without any real plan, and how that approach just didn’t cut it once the team started to grow.
They also chat about how the team is moving into the luxury market, using data to make smart decisions, and keeping agents motivated through friendly competition. Zach’s approach to training and accountability has made a big difference in their success. With Sisu, Zach says, “we’ve moved beyond spreadsheets and guesswork—it’s all about clear, actionable steps now.”
Top Takeaways:
(4:44) Why do team leaders with five agents often struggle?
(5:49) Can rapid growth really destroy your team?
(7:50) What’s the cost of being a ‘cowboy’ in business?
(9:28) How was a hot lead list created from cold contacts?
(13:03) The crash-and-burn after adding 30 agents.
(17:54) What’s the secret sauce in a 30-60-90 day plan?
(20:32) What happens when a whole team goes paperless?
(23:30) Turning leads into wins with the Sisu pipeline
(27:46) Roleplay, coaching, and conversions: a winning combo
(31:33) How did aggressive prospecting dominate the $5m market?
(36:42) What daily habits are driving massive success in sales?
(41:51) Turning accountability into a growth catalyst
If you’re looking to scale your real estate business or just want to hear how a team can grow and thrive, this episode is full of practical tips and insights you won’t want to miss.
About Zach Geisendorfer
Zach Geisendorfer is the Director of Client Relations at FAM Realty Group. With a strong background in sales, he began his career as an ISA, making over 130,000 calls a year before transitioning into his current leadership role. Zach has been instrumental in growing the real estate team from 5 to nearly 40 agents in Orange County, California, focusing on building solid systems and fostering a strong team culture.
Connect with Zach Geisendorfer Today!
Episode Transcript:
Brian Charlesworth 00:34
Hello everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the grit Podcast. I'm Brian Charlesworth. I'm the founder of sisu and the host of the show, as you all already know, and super excited for today, we have one of my favorite sisu customers here with us, and I have watched this team grow from, like, five agents to about 40 agents now, and like, they crush it. And when you have 40 agents in, call it Orange County, San Clemente, Dana, point, whatever, Laguna, all that area like that is a great area of this country, right? So, so anyway, today I have Zach and, you know, I want to say I don't know how to pronounce this last name, but because most of you probably don't, but it's Geisendorfer, right?
Zach Geisendorfer 01:22
Yep, nailed it.
Brian Charlesworth 01:23
So geisenorfer, I speak German, so you did not change your name. I'm happy to hear that. So anyway, grateful to have you on the show today. Zach, just so you guys know he has a tremendous sales background. He actually built an ISA business called loud profit, then turned into something else. We're going to dive into that today a little bit, but it has a tremendous amount of sales experience. He actually has on his LinkedIn and in other places that he's the Director of Client Relations for Fam, but I would say he is the sales leader for fam, like he drives revenue. And so if you guys want to drive revenue, you're going to want to listen to the show. Zach, welcome to the show.
Zach Geisendorfer 02:01
Thank you so much for having me. I'm super excited to be here.
Brian Charlesworth 02:04
Well, tell me what what did I miss? What did I miss about your background that everyone should know? I
Zach Geisendorfer 02:09
think one of the biggest things about my background is I was an ISA for many years. That's actually when I first partnered with Francis for the first three years together in the team, like I was the ISA and the frontline driving sales, you know. So I was doing about 130,000 calls a year my first years that I spent with her, which for me, quite frankly, I think was super important, because it let me have a crazy high level understanding of what the consumer wants to hear on the end of the phone. So that's the biggest gap that a lot of people either don't hear about or forget, you know, those three years of being an actual Isa, you know, before being sales manager, yeah? Like, if
Brian Charlesworth 02:46
you want to be able to teach people how to make calls, if you've made that many calls, you're going to be really good at teaching them that, right? Yep.
Zach Geisendorfer 02:53
And that's essentially what it is. We realize communication drives production, you know, which drives everything? Yeah, cool.
Brian Charlesworth 03:00
When you met us, our team along this journey, how long ago was that?
Zach Geisendorfer 03:05
I want to say it was probably about four years ago. Okay,
Brian Charlesworth 03:10
so four years ago, if I'm correct here, you had five agents at the time. You're an exp team. Were you already at exp at that time?
Zach Geisendorfer 03:17
We were not. We were actually with era which a lot of people don't even know still exists.
Brian Charlesworth 03:23
I hate to tell you guys, but like, that's a really good upgrade.
Zach Geisendorfer 03:27
Yeah, yeah.
Brian Charlesworth 03:31
Like, if you guys aren't part of the rev share model, you should probably check it out. But that's not a plug. That's just like, I know, like, my wife went from being at, really one of the brokerages to then starting her own brokerage, where she was a franchisee over brokerage, so it wasn't an independent brokerage, which a lot of people are going independent today as well. And if you're going independent, sisu is the perfect platform for you, like, it's the only platform you would need if you're an independent brokerage, anyway, but you guys made that move about four years ago, over to exp, which I saw for spring, when she made her move to real. It just like made her go from a little Davis County team to, like, some massive organization across the country. Yep, and I sense you guys have done some of that as well. But let's, let's talk about your business. So you guys had five agents back then. Well, tell me about your size today, and and so
Zach Geisendorfer 04:29
as of right now, we're currently sitting at about 32 as we were hovering 32 okay, you're at a path 40.
Brian Charlesworth 04:37
So get in the airport. So like, you're at five agents, and I know five agents, everybody that has five agents, you're frustrated. Team leaders still in production spring. Calls it the messy middle.
Zach Geisendorfer 04:50
Yeah, I just call, I just
Brian Charlesworth 04:52
call it a mess. Like, it's like most people, when they have five agents, have no systems. They really don't know how to. Business you in most cases, that's not always the case. I mean, some people come in and they start the business, you have to start somewhere, right? And they're great business owners, but many of these people go from power agent to team leader, and really, at that point, you don't know how to run a business, right? You don't have systems in place. You don't have and what do I mean by systems? So let's talk about that. Zach, like, what did you guys do when you were at five agents? How did you get from that small team? Because there's so many people that are in that road, in that place right now, that want to get to where you are. Like, what did you do? So the
Zach Geisendorfer 05:33
first thing we did was fail. We thought we had all the systems. We thought we had. The biggest word that we learned was replicatable, if you nailed it on the head. Frances was a powerhouse agent. She was number one buyer's agent for Carlsbad, and led her to want to bring some other agents with her. And we grew rapidly when we first joined exp, from five agents to about 30 agents in the matter of 14 days. So it was very quick. How did that happen like so we literally more detail how you reached out to sphere. We posted ads like on wise hire like, we just full blown, let's get everybody here, because we think we're the best. And we quickly learned we did not have a replicatable process. And so what it actually did was drive our production down. So it wasn't this big move that we thought it was going to be. So first we had to fail. So then we actually ended up bringing us back down to six agents, which is around where we were. And then we realized that's when actually our business partner Brett found sisu, because we realized we had no tracking, we didn't have accountability, we didn't have a replicatable process. So we kind of restarted from the ground up. And then, instead of bringing on 30 at once, that's when we started bringing in, like a hello week, our version of Hello week, a fam camp is what we call it, where we can get that initial test run with an agent to see if they're a good culture fit. They like our systems. They can thrive, you know, in our community that we have, and then we built much slower. So now, from then till now is where we're close to being 40. You know, one this year at 40, but we had to find that systematic approach to do it properly.
Brian Charlesworth 07:07
Okay? So I want you guys to take note of this, because so many times we think we can just grow. So we go out and we hire and if we don't have the systems in place, it's all going to fall apart. I remember once watching my wife lose a transaction coordinator, and I remember she broke down in tears because she knew she was going to have to take 90 days of her time to teach the new transaction coordinator everything. And now it's all in a system, right? It's all in a checklist. And if, if she was to lose a transaction coordinator, she could bring somebody else in, and they could check off the boxes, right? I think it was guessing. That's how your business is today as well. Much
Zach Geisendorfer 07:47
more luckily, because we used to try to remove me from being an ISA into being sales manager, and that was one of the biggest pickles we ran into, because I didn't have a process for my day. I quite literally would tell people, Oh, I'm just a cowboy. I jump in there and I shake the tree. I call these people, I text those leads like I was just kind of bouncing around everywhere. And so when we put somebody in my spot to do the same thing, it was impossible to replicate it, because there was no roadmap for them to replicate. And so that was first time that we witnessed having to write down my day for day, turning it into an actual system, a process for somebody to follow. And that's when we hired our first successful Isa. So once we saw that, we realized we needed it for agents, we needed it for TCS, we needed it for every other role. We realized we needed that same feasibility of bringing somebody else into the company. I've
Brian Charlesworth 08:37
watched so many people that when I say, hey, you need a system. Their eyes glaze over, and they're like, Okay, what is it? What do you mean? I mean, what's a system, right? So you just described a little bit of that, but as an ISA, you were doing all these things that you knew worked, because that's what you were good at. And then you try to bring somebody in to duplicate that, and that's difficult. They can't duplicate who you are, so you set up a system. So let's talk about it. You just talked about I mapped out what my entire day looks like, but give us more details around that
Zach Geisendorfer 09:10
definitely. So what my actual day realistically looked like was working the hot new leads to start, you know, so handling all the new buyer leads that came in, handling everything that came over from the night before. If it's a Monday, we have about 60 Open House leads. You know that are there isas also call open house leads as well. Then midday, I would move into text blasting and voicemail dropping. So what I was doing with those was creating my own hot list that I could then dial later in the day. So I would do around 1000 to 2000 voicemail drops, which, for anybody who doesn't know what a voicemail drop is, you can literally just drop a voicemail into people's phones so you don't need to dial them. So I drop 1000 to 2000 of those, and then I'd follow that up with a different data, with about 5000 to 6000 text messages. What I would then do later in the day was call through all the positive. Responses that we got from the text messages, from the voicemail drops, etc. So when I was dialing, I wasn't just dialing cold you were dialing warm leads. Essentially, I was creating my own warm lead list, which I learned from doing it set schedule, because they said, how about you just call a bunch of Realtors, you know, the realtor.com and I was like, this is a huge waste of my day right now. It's not really working, so I created a text blast. I'd send it out to 10 at a time, have my hot list, and I'd call those so I just repeated over here without knowing it was a process. So how did you
Brian Charlesworth 10:30
duplicate that now that you're no longer doing that? How did you get it to where the person who is doing that can do it effectively the same way you were
Zach Geisendorfer 10:37
doing Yep. So a lot of it was recording, because I had to quite literally hear and see what I was doing throughout the day. So one of the first things I did was just run a live zoom that nobody else was on, and I recorded it and just made it my whole day. So it was quite literally, like a nine hour zoom that would download to my computer, and I would skip through it, and I would find all the we call them DPAs, which would be $1 producing activity, yes, took all the items out of there that actually drove revenue into the business, and then left alone the items that maybe didn't, you know, work as well. Took it on a sheet of paper, wrote it out, made a Google sheet out of it, and then what I did was literally just do a day in the life with the new isas that came on to start, because I didn't have total trust, you know, and then just following everything. But once we found that somebody could, quite literally, just follow that system to a T using the proper scripting, actually being coached on what to say, how to say, it is usually the most important part. They could just disappointments out of nothing, out of free data from title, we could produce seller in house appointments. So that's when we finally got to see it function and work. Is when I could put some trust, you know, into the other person following it.
Brian Charlesworth 11:51
Okay, so you the first system you put in place was how to train an ISA, Yes, I heard you talk about having a program you called it similar to Hello week. Most people probably don't know what Hello week is, or listening to this podcast, but if you ever come to a sisu mastery or behind the scenes of a real estate machine with us, you will learn that. But that is basically like a one week. I'll call it hell week, personally, where the agents get to come in and see if they're a fit, right? They you bring them in to see if they are going to put down the 200 soI leads, right? I mean, their friends and family, put everybody in and then start making calls. Are you willing to make the dials, all the stuff that you're going to realize this person is a fit or they're not? There's no way to know that in an interview. So let's talk about your process now of that and getting an agent from because I know you guys have taken a little bit slower approach to getting agents onboarded after bringing 30 in, like that, yeah, and then having to let them all go, yep, or seeing them all go, I'm not sure why they all went, but maybe talk about that. Like, what have you guys done to make it so that you can bring agents in and have them become successful agents?
Zach Geisendorfer 13:09
Definitely. So one of the first thing we realized we had to look at, why did we crash and burn? Like, why did bringing on 30 agents crash and burn our business? And one of the big things we realized, one, we didn't have a proper onboarding system, so they didn't know what to do. But two, it really brought down our culture because we weren't really vetting who was coming in, and culture is one of the most important things. And one of my old sales directors told me one time he goes, I'm not responsible for your success, but I am responsible for the environment that you're successful in. And so I took that to heart and realized what we did was lower the environment that our agents could be successful in. So that's when fam camp, is what we call it, was born, and that's two weeks. So the first week is strictly training. So that's from 7am to 8am in the morning. They go through a systems training and sales training. So it's usually 30 minutes and 30 minutes, and then they bump into 30 minutes of role play with the rest of the team. And so it was an hour and a half for them to start their morning. Week two would come along, and that's strictly you just spend a week learning everything, go, take action. So they were starting off with about 100 calls a day, which would ramp up to around 400 calls a day, which would include appointments. Soi, we would give them lead pond, you know, like old buyer leads that they could call through. But the whole point was seeing if they'd even take action on the coaching that they were given. Our first fan camp, we kept one person out of 12 that went through fam camp. The first thing that showed us, wow, originally, we brought on all 12 who have brought down the environment. So that's where on average now we'll keep two to three for every 10 that come through, two
Brian Charlesworth 14:43
to three for every 10. So is it usually you pushing them out, or is it usually themself selecting to be out?
Zach Geisendorfer 14:50
So we get both honestly so we'll get one or two people that just disappear halfway through, no text, no email block, our phone number like just disappear. Yeah, they're literally just like, I don't want to deal with any of this anymore, yeah, which I'm thankful for because,
Brian Charlesworth 15:05
oh yeah, I don't want to make calls. Well, great. Please leave them exactly. This
Zach Geisendorfer 15:08
just isn't the right environment, you know, for you, is all it is. That's all I explained to them during fam camp, is this is to show you the environment that you're going to be winning it.
Brian Charlesworth 15:16
So what are the main things you look for that you want to see, and somebody that you're going to keep a
Zach Geisendorfer 15:23
big one is drive so someone that's willing just to push through all the little hurdles you know, to still get to their end of day goal. And honestly, one of the biggest ones we found is being a problem solver. That's what most of this industry is. So saying, like, hey, my system won't log me in, and then not telling us till the next day. All that did was just throw away a whole day of your fam camp. So you'll get the people that go, Oh, my God, my Wi Fi is down. Let me call him right now the second to try to fix this or solve it, or so I can get going again. Some people will go, oh well, my internet's out. I'll start dialing again tomorrow. Use it as an excuse. Yep, that's honestly the biggest one, right there is just open communication and being able to problem solve with someone on the other end, instead of feeling like you can't reach out to anybody and like everything is just burning
Brian Charlesworth 16:09
so do you intentionally take their dialer down to see how they'll solve that? Luckily, technology
Zach Geisendorfer 16:14
just tends to do that on its own, running into a few problems, you know, things of that nature. So we don't typically need to do like you just run into problem solving anyways, in this industry every day, you know, you run into little items. And so you'll see at the end of the day who hit their numbers and who didn't. And when you there's, it's not a bad thing or a good thing. I sit them down, I just go, hey, it looks like we're off track yesterday. Why did we fall off track? You know, and it usually will come back to, oh, well, my kid was really loud in the other room, so I had to, you know, kind of stop dialing, or my computer was going slow, so I figured I'd pick it up tomorrow.
Brian Charlesworth 16:51
Do you have them come in the office when they're in this so we have, do they
Zach Geisendorfer 16:55
or we've done zoom previously, the next one that we're running on, the second will be our first in office, fam.
Brian Charlesworth 17:01
I think when somebody's at that level, it's extremely valuable to make sure they're in office well. And
Zach Geisendorfer 17:07
we, actually, we just got a big enough office for us to do it, and we just opened our biggest office. It's on the lake of San Marcos, so we can finally hold about 40 people in one office building. Previously, we didn't have a big location like that, so we, like, we quite literally built our entire business off of zoom and like, little private offices to Regis, like, that's where our entire last five years have been. Until just a few months ago, we got our first big physical location where we can actually host all the agents.
Brian Charlesworth 17:36
Boom. Okay, so somebody now passes two, two to three out of 10, so 20 to 30% are going to make it through fam camp onboarding, and then at that point, it's you passed. Now we're going to truly onboard you. What is that process? How do you manage your onboarding?
Zach Geisendorfer 17:56
So we make it really simple. We have a 3060, 90, which I know I believe spring does something similar, but so a lot of their onboarding is done in their first 30 days, 60 days and 90 days, which should end up with them being in an escrow if they follow everything properly. So the first 30 days is really starting to get understand your system more, getting your initial dials out, getting soI on actual plans, not just getting them in the system, but getting them on actual plans that are running. And it's really just setting everything up for those first 30 days, getting inside of open houses. So now, when your first 60 days come, kind of like fam camp, it's time to take action, like you should be in full blown action during those next 30 days. You should be doing like we have an agent that averages five to six open houses a week right now, and he's in his first 60 days, he's the definition of really running with the tools, you know, that are put in front of you, yeah. And we have some agents that are doing, like, one a month, yeah. And very clear that they don't feel part of the environment, and they kind of phase themselves out, you know, dramatically. And then 90 days is where, actually, with a mentor on our team, and like, you're going on, you need to be in appointments. Like, if we're 90 days in and you're not in appointments, you know you're not meeting with homeowners showing by your home, something's off.
Brian Charlesworth 19:13
How do you manage that process? You know where they're at in the zero to 3030, 6090, whatever.
Zach Geisendorfer 19:21
So I actually meet with every single one of our agents on Mondays. And for our agents that are still in their onboarding, we spend our time going over their 3060, 90 checklist. They also have a once a week meeting with their mentor on the team, which really the mentor's main role here is to make sure they're on track on their 3060, 90, because that also gives the mentors a system that they can follow. You know, when mentoring the new agent? Yeah,
Brian Charlesworth 19:46
cool. Okay, so we've gone through somebody comes in. They're interested in coming into the business to Okay, we're gonna let them stay in the business. We're gonna onboard them in the business. How do you manage your sales organization? Yeah,
Zach Geisendorfer 20:01
that's a fun one. So we use two, two systems, mainly, which are two big ones. One would be slack. Okay, Slack is like our end all be all for all communication, everything goes in Slack. And the reason is because you can hold accountability to one conversation. You can't hold accountability to a conversation that's in five oh, well, I texted them this and I emailed them that it just doesn't work, you know. So everything stays in one place, and you know exactly when something's done and when it's not. We also run sisu as well as the big one. So when I'm going over our monthly numbers, like a leadership team, I'm going right out of sisu. You know, we don't really use our CRM reporting, or we've done Google sheets in the past, literally, a marking down red markdown agents hitting their numbers, you know, and not. Thankfully,
Brian Charlesworth 20:45
we're no longer in Google Sheets. Thankfully
Zach Geisendorfer 20:47
we're out of Google Sheets. Thank God that was an I can't even tell you how many Google Sheets I had bookmarked at the top. I can imagine, just for daily updates, they hit calls or they didn't. So now all I have to do is pull up sisu, you know. So we meet as a leadership team weekly and monthly, and I just simply have to report out of sisu. So that holds my whole department accountable, you know. So really, like sisu is my reporting from my accountability, because if our sisu is off, that means my department is off, you know. So that's the number one way that we hold production accountable and and keep everything in line.
Brian Charlesworth 21:20
So you're going through sisu and team meetings. What about your one on ones? Tell me what that looks like.
Zach Geisendorfer 21:36
Yeah. So one be ones. I'm actually I think it's one of the biggest boosts to our business that helped with a lot of everything, because the agents feel a lot agents feel a lot more comfortable and they know their numbers, which a lot of agents don't. So our Monday one v1 is quick and simple. It's 15 minutes. If they want to have extra support, they can book with me outside of this one v1 but if anybody shifts off track during a one v1 we're no longer in the one v1 like the one of you when it's only sisu, like that is all we cover here for this 15 minutes. So the first five minutes, they share with me what's called their personal dashboard, which is where they're at to hit their own personal goal, not the team goal. So I've gotten everybody's permission if I'm allowed to hold them accountable to their personal financial goal, and everybody has agreed, yes,
Brian Charlesworth 22:20
okay, that is cool. And one thing that I don't think you made is obvious, which I know you do. You said they show up and they present to you their dashboard. The thing that many of you may not hear and catch when he says this is they present their business to Zach. Zach doesn't pull up and present their business to them.
Zach Geisendorfer 22:39
Yeah, it makes it a whole different conversation, you know, because I didn't used to do it that way, until I got coached, you know, around a different way. And it was a whole different conversation. That was when you're presenting to somebody else their numbers. It doesn't hit the same way, yeah, Agent sits there and they have to bring you their report card, you know, their numbers. It's totally different. It's like the kid bringing the kid bringing the report card home to mom. They kind of hide it in their back pocket for a little bit and, you know. Okay, here you go, and you get a whole different reaction, you know. Okay, so
Brian Charlesworth 23:10
you said, I think you do three things in a one on one. One is their personal dashboard. What do they do after that?
Zach Geisendorfer 23:16
So after that, we move into agent accountability, which we do two things. One, it shows their numbers. Okay again, but we look at the entire year, opposed to just the month for personal dashboard. I'm mainly just focused on this month.
Brian Charlesworth 23:29
And you say, Agent accountability, are you looking at the agent accountability report in sisu?
Zach Geisendorfer 23:33
Exactly the agent accountability report. And the biggest thing that shows in there is their current sisu pipeline. So this is all the people that in our system. When somebody books an appointment, they click the SISU link, which makes them it means this relationship has started. Something happened here. So if I pull up sisu and somebody has 12 people like in their pipeline, there needs to be a next step for all 12 of those people, because they've taken the next step to work with us, which is book an appointment, you know? I mean, so the biggest thing we do during that last 10 minutes is, I quite literally look through every single person that is in their sisu pipeline, and I say, what are the next steps? And that's it. If there's this whole story that starts around, oh, well, they are moving from out of state and they're doing this. I go, Hey, it's all good. That's all they we can talk about another time. But what are the next steps with Joanna? And that's all we need to talk about now, and it helps them really dial down. And a lot of the times it's, I don't know, I go, Great. That's what we need to work on. Is like, what's the next steps? And then other agents are super calm. They Oh, well, she has an appointment book for Wednesday. They have a signed agreement now, right now, so you can see the difference in where you really need to coach with the agent, but that 10 minutes is spelled in their sisu pipeline, just showing them the physical people that have taken the next step with them.
Brian Charlesworth 24:54
What CRM are you guys using?
Zach Geisendorfer 24:56
We're using lofty. We've been with lofty for about four. Years now, back to when they were chime. Okay,
Brian Charlesworth 25:02
so when somebody comes in from lofty, is that at the point, do you guys do that, at the point of that first appointment being set, is that when you pull them into sisu,
Zach Geisendorfer 25:10
yep. So leads coming to lofty from all over the place, from isas, from title, from Facebook, Google, you name it, the agents will prospect call, enter communication with that lead once the lead has booked an appointment with the agent, that's when they go and click the SISU link, and it shoots it over into sisu. So quite literally, the SISU pipeline is like their top 10, top 20, you know that they should be focusing on in their business?
Brian Charlesworth 25:36
Yeah, I like to say anybody they think they can get under contract in the next 30 to 60 days, right? Yep,
Zach Geisendorfer 25:42
underrepresented somebody that's not going to transact for 10 years when their kid moves out. You want to have it in your database, but you don't need to have it in sisu. And putting your kids, they
Brian Charlesworth 25:50
bring an appointment into sisu, and they meet with them, and that person's not going anywhere. They should mark them lost, put it back in the CRM, follow up in the CRM, until like sisu is managing your business, yep. CRM is managing your leads, right? Yep.
Zach Geisendorfer 26:05
I like to almost say that this is the way I've explained in the past. Your CRM is, like your savings account. It's all the stuff that you know will come in the future. Like, sure, like, it's, you know, the potential, but like, your checkings account is sisu. Like, sisu, you're looking at your right now, money that's coming into your business, so that's like,
Brian Charlesworth 26:22
a great way to look at it. Yeah, I like that. Okay, so I think you said there were three things. So you go into their sisu personal dashboard, they go into their sisu personal dashboard, they then pull up their agent Accountability Report, and then what? So
Zach Geisendorfer 26:39
the biggest one for the last five minutes, depending on how many people they have in their pipeline, it actually switches directions. And I asked them, What is the number one thing that I can do for you this week that is going to boost your business? Because I put a lot of time on my calendar towards the agent's businesses, it also gives me a really good idea on where their head's at. So some agents will say, I just need more leads. I need you to give me more leads this week, which shows me kind of where they're at. You know what they're thinking? Some agents shows you their laziness, exactly their entitlement. I just want more leads. And usually the people who are asking for more leads are the people who've gotten the most leads and haven't converted the leads. Yeah. So they're typically saying more and more and more and
Brian Charlesworth 27:22
more. So as a sales leader, I mean, there are a lot of sales leaders listening to this right now. How do you handle that? What do you say? You know, they want more leads, but they haven't followed up on the leads you've given them. What do you say at that point?
Zach Geisendorfer 27:31
So my biggest thing is people need to see things, to believe Oh, okay, you can say a lot, you know. And of course, coach and do all these things, but unless they physically see it. That's where they typically will now start to go. Oh, and they have their kind of aha moment. So we have a few agents on our teams that convert leads on a higher level than I think anybody else, even in our market, let alone on our team. Like they just they have the right mindset for lead conversion, which realistically is aggressiveness, yeah, being super on top of it. So I'll quite literally just take a lead, a success story from beginning to close, and I'll put it in front of them, and it's the same exact type of leads that they're receiving and say, Hey, this is not a call out. This is not me putting you down, but this person's on role play five days a week. They book with me three times a week, and they have five active escrows right now with the same leads that you're getting. So I go, is it possible that you don't need more leads and we actually just need a higher conversion on the leads that you already have?
Brian Charlesworth 28:30
Have you ever pulled out the SISU ROI report and walk them through that?
Zach Geisendorfer 28:35
I haven't, yeah, that's one that we're actually just getting into. Is starting to use a few of the other reportings okay,
Brian Charlesworth 28:41
because I've seen a lot of people have success with that. If you're, what's, what's your biggest lead source?
Zach Geisendorfer 28:47
Our biggest one is an outside company. We'll call it great media. Essentially, they're, they're high level Facebook leads
Brian Charlesworth 28:53
great media. And how much does a lead on great media? So we
Zach Geisendorfer 28:58
average, after they make it through qualification and everything. After we drop off a bunch, we average around eight
Brian Charlesworth 29:03
to $9 okay, so, so anyway, I don't know how many leads you're giving them, and those are much less expensive leads than, say, Zillow or something like that, but I've seen a lot of team leaders be able to pull out an ROI report and say, Hey, I've given you $3,000 of leads in the last 30 or 60 days of this lead source. This is how many leads that is. This is the status of all these leads. And as you can see here, you haven't converted any of those. So I've lost $3,000 on you at this point, or maybe they converted on one of those. And but the reality is, you can actually show them I've lost money by investing in you. Would you continue to do that as a business owner? Well,
Zach Geisendorfer 29:52
and you, I think you nailed it, because we just did that with our CEO dashboard. Now the next says the CEO dashboard we went through. With our accountant and filled out all of the month's metrics, and we shared it with the whole team, going, Hey guys, just so you're well aware, like, this is where we're at. Like, this is absolute clarity on everything that goes on behind the scenes. Because it's not like, they just just don't know, like, just don't know that. Like, it costs, like, $2,000 a month worth of systems that have an agent, you know, depending on what you're providing them, and a lot of them just don't know. They think it's like a few $100 they see that realization. It really opens up their eyes a little bit. So I think that's super smart. That'd be really smart to use the ROI dashboard.
Brian Charlesworth 30:33
Yeah, yeah. So, so anyway, is there anything else on the sell side you want to hit on Zach, and I don't know if you want to jump into other systems you guys are using and on the operation side, or maybe that's just not you, so we don't go there today. Yeah.
Zach Geisendorfer 30:46
So I've had a trouble with dipping my fingers in other departments in the past. I'm really good at that, and over the last six months, I've been really honing in my skill of staying in my department strictly, but really Brian, the number one thing that I can really say about our team and where we thrive, because we're not a Zillow team, we're not a realtor.com team. We don't use any of the big lead companies that a lot of people in our market use. We have Zillow flex teams, and they're the three biggest teams here in Southern California, and they're our neighbors. You know, they're right next door, and we actually get a lot of agents that come over from Zillow flex to join our team, kind of moving away from it. No, there's anything wrong with Zillow leads, don't get me wrong, but our personal ROI on a Zillow lead was not good. It just wasn't good for us. So when we found such success with prospecting in our market, because a lot of agents don't want to cold call a $5 million neighborhood, for some reason, that's really where we thrive as a team, is not in the passive marketing, but in more of the aggressive outreach. We're like, I want to get somebody before they even get on Zillow, yeah. Like, that's our goal. So our database to 2 million local homeowners inside of it, let alone all the way down to absentee landlords, to vacant properties, to expires is to cancel to just plain old blanket neighborhoods, you know, homeowners. So really, data is really our game that we thrive in, because most agents don't want to hang out in the data world, you know, and deal with sifting through it. So sisu played a huge part in that, because we could actually see how many expireds do we need to call to lead to an appointment. How many appointments do we need to lead into a closing before we were kind of just blanket hitting everybody all the time and hoping that it went through?
Brian Charlesworth 32:29
Isn't it cool to be able I think it makes a massive difference for a sales leader to be able to talk to an agent and say, Hey, we both know that if you make 65 calls, you will get a closing, yep, right? Like, that's pretty cool, right? The feeling,
Zach Geisendorfer 32:46
the big word I attached to is empowerment. Like it really is, like it should be empowering for somebody to know their numbers. A lot of people know a baseline number. They go, I did, you know, a few 100 calls that year, and I got, you know, 10 closings, and they kind of just have this, this guesstimate in their head when you can quite literally go, I made 300 calls last month that brought me 35 conversations, which led me to this many appointments, which gave me an 80% show rate, which led me sign five agreements, which gave me two closings. Yeah, that's a whole different feeling of power in your business than it is to just Yes, you know, and
Brian Charlesworth 33:23
especially if you can see attached to that a conversion rate that lets you see where you can improve your skills, right? Yeah,
Zach Geisendorfer 33:32
our agents are competing right now, without me even having to try on, their conversion from conversations to appointment set, because some of our agents are all over the board. I mean, we have agents that, you know, will quite literally get like, a crazy conversion from conversation to set, because all they work is soI, yeah, they have this huge conversion. We have other agents who like, strictly door knock, and they're obviously, you know, their conversions a lot lower, you know, because just having a different conversation. So we quite literally have people who are like, door knocking and cold calling, trying to get their conversion to where, like an soI agent is, which makes it really cool that they can kind of compare and gamify is the best word for that.
Brian Charlesworth 34:13
Do you have any numbers for people of like, what is it? What is a door knocker or cold caller conversion compared to an SLI conversion,
Zach Geisendorfer 34:22
totally. So a cold call conversion that we're seeing on average is we're hitting about a 9% call to Conversation rate, just kind of averaged, you know, across the board. So every 100 calls they make, they'll have around nine two minute plus conversations. Is how we gage our conversation. Something that's two minutes plus, okay, they have a 32nd call that just turns into No, we don't want to sound it hangs up. That wasn't really a conversation. It was just a call. Now, from our conversation to appointment set, which is really our big one, that matters there, our soI agents will literally hang out. Around like 30% Wow.
Brian Charlesworth 35:02
I've never seen that high. That's amazing.
Zach Geisendorfer 35:05
Now we have one agent who thrives with Soi, and the reason being, she can do so well with her conversion. She's in their face weekly, like they're not just getting a mail report every single month. Send out. They get invited to an event. Every single month, they get two to three text messages every single month. They get a call from her every single month, like she, like runs her soI on, like anybody other and a past client to her is considered Soi, if you're a pet client, like you're now in my sphere and you're my Soi. So I've seen her do three events in a month to invite like her soI to so she has this like crazy, you know, conversion, where cold calling be much lower. What would cold calling me cold calling, you'd see a much closer depending on the quality of the rep, like five to 10 somewhere around there, you know, it's what about for a brand new agent. For a brand new agent, surprisingly enough, we actually get really high conversions for them, and it's because they don't have the past track record of no's, you know, or with that, so we'll actually see him hang around, right around that same pocket. That's right. Yeah, I
Brian Charlesworth 36:05
see a lot. I see a lot that are down in the 1% range. So we've been there even at that I know if I make 100 calls, then I'll get an appointment, right? Yep, that's it. Or in the case of your team, they know if they make 100 calls, they're going to get five appointments if they're cold calling, or if they're doing their soI up to 30 appointments for 100 calls, which is right,
Zach Geisendorfer 36:30
I think the biggest thing to highlight on there is the time it takes to get to that point. And I don't mean as an agent, I mean as a team like as a business. So I coach our agents every single day, like every single day, every morning, they have 8am to 830 role play. You know you're you're minimum to be on our team, you have to do three of those a week. At minimum. Most agents are on for five, the one that have a bunch of escrows and are really running. We then have Monday, Friday coaching with Justin, where they're on with 11 to 12 with him for an hour, and then I'm talking about just in time, just in time, yeah, and has been huge for us, because it lets they need to hear from other people as well. And that's honestly one thing that Justin showed me, was I can repeat the same exact thing Justin said, and they'll take it differently from somebody else than hearing it from me every single day being repetitive, and then I do a Wednesday hour sales training with them on Wednesdays, which is with me and the agents. So almost like, literally, every single day, they're mastering their craft. You know, I'm being good on the phones. And so that's where we had to remove me as an ISA and put me as a sales manager so I could spend all this time with the agents like I've never missed a role play, and we've been doing it for about five months now. I don't think a single role play, because I understand what that little 30 minutes,
Brian Charlesworth 37:51
did you start that when you came to sisu mastery? Is that when you started that, no,
Zach Geisendorfer 37:55
we actually did it right before then, that we've been aligned in a lot of ways. And what sisu master did was hone it in, because I got to talk with Ben from place. He had an amazing section with you guys there, and he got me to structure out the Monday through Friday. We were just hopping on and role playing five days a week. Now Monday is intro, so we're just practicing our intros of the call. Tuesday, we do discovery questions. Wednesday, we do closes. Thursdays, objections and Fridays, Open House Day, where we practice talking to the neighbors and talking to buyers that are inside the open house.
Brian Charlesworth 38:30
Cool. So was it a value to come to the CC mastery? I
Zach Geisendorfer 38:34
would say it's one of the biggest values that we've actually had in a long time. And I'll talk on that just for a second, because I know it's kind of a vague statement. We've gone to a lot of events. We highly know that we need to coach ourselves to be able to continue coaching our agents. So we've been to a lot of EXP events, and not to put down any other events that are out there. But a lot of them was a lot more show off of like, this is what's possible, where behind the scenes of a real estate machine that we did with you guys, with sisu and with spring partnered, we left with tangible items. Like in a I filled up a whole notebook, which I've never done before. I'm not really a note taker, and I filled up literally almost a whole notebook on our third day there. And what we left was we were on the plane calling our business partner and our transaction team saying, hey, we need to start doing this. This needs to be starting to get implemented tomorrow, like so it left us with actual implementable, that's a word, items that we could put into our business. So that was the big difference. There's like, learning goals, and then there's like, actually having tangible things that you could implement, you know, into your business, which was huge for us.
Brian Charlesworth 39:41
That's awesome. Well, I can tell you this, Zach, if I were an agent, I would love to be on your team, because you're doing things right. So keep that up. I do have one last question. What is your average price point? So
Zach Geisendorfer 39:54
our average price point right now is at 862, which I'm going to give a. Out to one of our few of our agents. They really wanted to push the luxury market, so we sat down and gamified with them. So last week, we signed our first $9 million listing, everything ready to go. And then another agent just signed like a 4 million. So we're hoping to end the year, not hoping we will end the year with a median price point of a million dollars,
Brian Charlesworth 40:20
right? So by knowing and intentionally going after that, you're going from 800,000 to a million dollar average price point, that is one easy way to increase your closed volume, right? I represent
Zach Geisendorfer 40:33
that was honest. That was one of the biggest things we took from a behind the scenes event. Was like, was our profitability of a business? Like, we need to be profitable to be able to give the agents what it is that they need to be able to grow their businesses, aka grow the whole business as a whole. And so we sat down and just really looked at what are the few ways that we can boost our profitability, which you guys happen to just randomly cover behind the scenes of a real estate machine. And boosting your price point was one of the easiest ways. And since we're such big data workers, all we had to do was swap the data, you know, out, because the same,
Brian Charlesworth 41:07
yeah, very cool. Well, it's, it's been fun to see you guys just grow and to see your success. And I have no doubt you guys are just going to continue to crush it every year with all the stuff you're doing. So it's fun to watch. It's fun to be a part of. We're grateful to have you guys as a sisu customer and to see you guys really leveraging the things that we bring to you at the highest level. So thank you for that. And if anybody wants to reach you, Zach, what's the best way for them to get a hold of you?
Zach Geisendorfer 41:35
Easiest way is going to be on my Instagram is just Zach Z, A, C, H, Zen, real estate. So Zach Zen real estate, that's my main page that we do, you know, for answering any questions and making contact. One thing I want to leave you with, though, before you go, is, we had a big team meeting the other day where we brought everybody. And I thought, what is the best way for the agents to understand the power of sisu? Because a lot of them just saw it as, like the bright colors on the board, you know, which was cool, but they didn't fully understand it. So to kind of backtrack it a little bit, I went through this whole thing on what is accountability? And we asked everybody, what does accountability mean to an agent? Quite simply, it all comes down to one thing, which is the highest form of self love that you can have, is being accountable to yourself. And I think a lot of very successful individuals would agree with that. And so I think sisu is that form of self accountability where you can literally just hold yourself accountable to your goal, which means sisu really is a form of like self love is being able to follow your sisu. And so just wanted to really highlight that, like that was the big shift for us and our team was them realizing, like accountability is self love, sisu is accountability, and that really kind of like, bam, eye open, moment where they could really see, like, the power that sisu was bringing to their business.
Brian Charlesworth 42:54
Wow, that is powerful. That is powerful. Thank you for sharing that again. Guys, keep Zach. Follow Zach on social, reach out to him if you're like challenged with something, because Zach is a powerhouse sales leader in this industry. So again, Zach, congratulations and all your success. Thanks for joining us on the show. To all of our listeners. Thanks for joining us on another episode. And if you have not yet done this, go click the subscribe button so that we can continue to get more listeners and more great guests and people that are going to bring you value so Zach, thanks again. We'll talk to you soon.
Zach Geisendorfer 43:28
Thank you so much for having me. I had an absolute blast.
