Nineteen of you answered, and while I was able to address many of your questions during our time together, I promised I would answer each of them and deliver those answers back to you.
So that’s exactly what we’ve done here.
I’ve included each question as it was asked, and I provided additional thoughts, strategies and exercises to help you move from insight to action.
My hope is that you don’t simply read through these pages. Find the questions that sound like yours. Spend some time with them. Do the exercises. And most importantly, choose something you can put into action.
Because the goal of our time together wasn’t simply to have a great conversation. It was to help you solve something in your business.
I don’t know who this is from, so I’m just going to tell you I love you for asking the question. There are four things that could be going on. You don’t have a goal big enough to push you back into lead generation. You don’t have any leads, so you are protecting the one deal you do have. You haven’t made the time to find talent, true talent, not people, so you don’t believe anyone can do what you need done. Or it may be that you don’t know how to be anything but busy. One of the biggest things I learned from Gary is that I don’t have to be busy ten hours a day.
So do one thing. Write down the thing you would never like to do again in your daily routine, then take fifteen minutes and think about who could do it for five days.
I hired someone for five days. I said follow me along, watch me do everything that I do. If I go to Jamba Juice for a protein shake, follow me. They did it for a week. Then I asked them to tell me the thing they thought I didn’t like doing, and they told me exactly what it was. Ordering inspections, logistics, getting things orchestrated.
So I hired a person to run that play for five days. A hundred dollars a day. It was the best five hundred dollars I have spent, I think, in my life. And in week two I told them: now when you are doing that and I have an extra hour, tell me to go do this, hold me accountable to that, to get me to the goal I want to get to. It took that level of trust to get me out of the routine.
You are simply an extension of the people who care about you, and your team members are an extension of you. So if everything still runs back through you, the question is not how hard you are working. It is these three, in this order. What do you think you want to leverage? Why is that leverage important to you? And do you have someone in your world who can actually handle the leverage you need done?
Most people answer the first one instantly, have never written down the second, and quietly know the answer to the third. You have to make sure the people around you are going to deliver the standards in a system your consumers understand.
If you are going to leverage certain things, the question is whether you are the right person to explain how the leverage should be done. That comes before any tool. What matters is that your people deliver the standards in a system your consumer understands.
So write it down before you automate it. The five days of shadowing give you the list. The list becomes a standard. The standard is the thing a person, or a piece of software, can finally run. Automate before that and all you have done is make a broken process faster and more expensive.
Everyone on my team was selected from outside real estate except for one person. Our last showing agent, Cynthia, was selling jewelry at Tiffany’s. Her training was how you prepare a store before the doors open at nine, and that is how you prepare a house.
Some of you have met Chip, our concierge. He was the lead guest service agent at the Ritz-Carlton. I drove up the mountain, had a nice tea, and asked the bartender who he liked the most. He said Chip. I walked out to the pool bar and asked who they liked the most. Chip. I found him in the lobby, played on my phone, and just listened to him and watched him. I drove down the mountain and messaged him that afternoon. We met the next day and I selected him on the spot. Why not select him?
So it is three things. Core values, and ours are ASPIRE. Selecting talent, which means finding people already living those values in another role. And meeting with them every day. In nine years of leading this group we have never had a conversation about compensation.
Here’s the formula, and it’s tough at first. I have a conversation with every team member and I encourage you to do the same. I have it with our paid team members. I have it with our photographers. Our cleaners. Our stagers. Our contractors. At the end of every thirty days I have one conversation: how are you? I care about them, I’m curious about them, I might consult them through something I need them to think differently about, and we gain a commitment. It’s a fifteen-minute conversation, but that is the first thing to do.
If you are struggling with them doing it the right way, or struggling because you keep taking things back, have the conversation. Ask where the business seems difficult. Most of my team is under thirty-five and they have not been through a market like this, where buyers are so selective and sellers are so sensitive.
Right now, as we are talking, my team is meeting. They do it every day at nine o’clock Pacific, and they’re in there talking about gratitude, goals, and grit. Fifteen minutes, Monday through Friday.
We stopped doing that in July. They decided they didn’t need it on a daily basis. I said I didn’t really like that idea, but I would let them make the decision. Our little team of seven typically does about twenty to twenty-five million every month. In July we did eight. We started the daily lineup again on August first and we are back on track. Brad did the math on the call: five hours of meetings, fifteen million dollars of difference.
When we don’t have those daily conversations, we create stories. We are really good storytellers, and sometimes the stories are not accurate.
I get it. I’ve been there. Before you go looking for a replacement, run the thirty-day conversation with everyone still standing. A resignation is usually the last step of a conversation nobody had.
Then ask the harder ones. Do you have the right people in your world? Do you have the right people who need to be trained to the world you are trying to build? Do you maybe not have the right people in the right seat doing the right things? Or are there some people you just can’t let go of?
On getting experienced agents to stay, sell them the culture and then live it. We had a team member come from another company and on her first day she said she had made a mistake, then asked when we would have the meeting about it. At her last job a mistake meant an hour with the whole office. I told her what you focus on expands, so if you talk about mistakes you will make more of them. Then she asked when I start yelling at people. In our culture, when something goes wrong, they fix it. Service recovery is good.
The value I want you to work on for the rest of the year is your ability to solve problems people have in their business. Play doctor. Not their relationship problems. Business problems. Is your brand positioning you as the person who can solve their problem?
Not too long ago we ran a radio ad. I spent two thousand six hundred dollars for thirty days, and all I said was: if you’re like me, you probably have questions about the market that are keeping you up at night, would you email me the questions you have? Would it surprise you to learn we had over nine hundred people? Not nine hundred people saying list my house. Nine hundred saying I can’t do this, I don’t know how to do that.
They don’t need to know you just sold another house. They don’t care that you’re walking through a four-bedroom listing. People are only doing anything right now if there is a problem they need solved.
Start with the goal. This is where the work actually begins. I need you to be clear, or more clear, on the goal you have for the next ninety days. September, October, November, you can even add December. And be very clear on what you can do to achieve that goal. When I need to make money for the company, I know exactly what I need to do. I need to pick up the phone. I need to ask questions and solve problems.
Then leverage exists for one reason: so the hours you spend doing that never get taken. If the person you selected does not give those hours back, that is not leverage, that is payroll.
For fourteen years I was an individual agent, and I did everything, because I did everything. I was out one day in my little white Range Rover, putting up my own sign, because I thought I was the only person who could put a sign up straight. A guy pulled up and asked why I would do that. I said because I’m the only one who can put it in right. He started laughing and said, you’re not straight, so what makes you think you can put a sign up straighter than anyone else? He said it with love.
I remember pausing and thinking, why am I doing this? And here is the reality, and it might strike a nerve. I was so scared of not having anything to do. I was scared of not knowing what I would do when I didn’t have anything to do. I took the two hours I spent putting in signs and forced myself to work on a bigger world for the people I care about.
So there is no passive version of this. There is a protected hour, and the thing that protects it is the person you have not selected yet.
I did not get to this one live, so here it is. An open house is a listing appointment for the neighbors. Everybody walking through is doing research on their own house, and they will tell you so if you let them.
So do the thing I asked on customer experience: ask what they need. Then answer it, provide it, or deliver what they need before they realize they need it. And do not let the name fall out of the system afterward. The open house converts on the follow-up, not on the afternoon.
I get it. Your qualifying is working. That is exactly why you can tell they are stalled. What is missing at the end of a great conversation is the recommendation.
Use the sequence I run in my own head, because it ends somewhere. I care about the goal. I’m curious about the reality. I consult through the obstacle. I close the way forward. I am always processing forward. A pipeline in flux is usually a pipeline stuck between curious and consult, which is a very pleasant place where nothing moves.
A fifteen-minute conversation, Monday through Friday, is often the difference between the world you want to have and the world you don’t want to have. That is the whole answer, and July is my own case study. Nothing about the market changed. We stopped meeting and a twenty to twenty-five million dollar month became an eight million dollar month.
Predictability was never a property of the market. It was a property of the morning. So get back to being disciplined about the daily lineup, and be clear on the goal you have for the next ninety days, because a goal you cannot state is a month you cannot predict.
Ask what they need. Then answer it, provide it, or deliver what they need before they realize they need it. That is all I am going to ask on customer experience. I think we spend maybe a little bit too much time on jewelry and glitter, and that may not be what they need right now.
The standard we run to is ASPIRE. Anticipate, serve, perform, inspire, response, exceed. And exceed is not the client’s expectation. It is exceeding your own potential. When something goes wrong they fix it, and they are encouraged to fix it. Service recovery is good.
What matters is that you can find a buyer for the property they need to sell. At a higher price point you are not selling more house, you are answering better questions. What lifestyle does this unlock? What makes this property different? Why this one instead of everything else available?
On the showing protocol, you are the host and not the escort. Confirm in writing, get there first, set the house, leave something the buyer’s agent can carry out, let the buyer move through without you narrating it, and call the agent inside twenty-four hours. And make sure your people deliver those standards in a system your consumer understands, because at this price point they are the experience.
I did not get to this one live either. The gap is rarely about the number. Two positions that far apart are protecting two different things, so find out what each side is actually defending before you trade figures again. Replace opinion with a licensed bid, because most standoffs are two guesses arguing. Separate the safety and system items from the cosmetic ones and negotiate them as two conversations.
Then do the thing both sides are waiting for and make a recommendation. Play doctor. Solve the problem in front of you. There is no problem too big that we can’t solve.
I’m going to let you have a bad moment, but not a bad day. When you have a bad moment you have to replace that thought with something incredibly positive. We are great at this. We just have to think about it more frequently than we do. Because if we cross that line into stress and anxiety and fatigue, things start to fall down.
Then there is how you respond, which is the number one leadership skill right now, because how you respond sets the weather in your world. Last night a property manager told our seller the beds were unmade and she came at me hard. I could have handled that a completely different way. Instead I messaged the team: I know all of you adhere to the standards. Can you help me solve a mystery? Every bed was made. There was one towel hanging on a hook in the casita. She said, I’m so sorry I came at you so strong.
And I never worry. I think all the time, but I never worry, because I’m really clear on solving problems. Every twenty-one days I get on a plane where I don’t have wifi, usually to Hawaii, read a book, jump in the ocean, and fly back having solved one problem.
“How you respond sets the weather in your world.”
I saw this one go by on the screen and did not get to it. The word is unforgiving, not unforgivable, and the difference is the whole point. Unforgivable is a complaint about the market. Unforgiving is a standard, and the standard is what sells.
This market is less forgiving of overpriced listings. Less forgiving of mediocre marketing. Less forgiving of agents who confuse access with expertise. And increasingly less forgiving of a customer experience that feels ordinary.
Said to a seller, that is not a warning. It is a compliment to the one who is willing to meet the standard.
People are only doing anything right now if there is a problem they need solved. So lead with the problem you can solve, not the listing you just took. And trade adjectives for numbers and a next step, because telling an anxious client the market is tricky gives them nothing to hold on to.
Then run the sequence. Care about the goal. Be curious about the reality. Consult through the obstacle. Close the way forward. Most scripts fail because they stop at curious.
The best gift you can give someone is your presence. People need a presence right now. We are so good at swiping and scrolling and switching. Be the one who is there.