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From Pentagon to Probate: Andrew Becker on Building 7-Figure Systems in Real Estate · The Elite Real Estate Podcast

0:03
SPEAKER_01: What's up, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Elite Real Estate Podcast.
0:08
SPEAKER_01: Real estate meets mindset, marketing, and momentum.
0:10
SPEAKER_01: I'm your host, Jimmy Nelson, and today we are coming to you live from the Royal Oath Insurance Group right here in Clinton Township, Michigan.
0:16
SPEAKER_01: Big shout out to the entire team here.
0:19
SPEAKER_01: Royal Oath is more than just an insurance agent.
0:21
SPEAKER_01: They're your promise keepers.
0:22
SPEAKER_01: Whether it's auto, home, business, life, or health insurance, they're here to protect what matters to you most.
0:27
SPEAKER_01: You can check them out at RoyalOathInsurance.com or give them a call at 586-238-3535.
0:33
SPEAKER_01: And of course, today's episode is brought to you in part by our friends at Connection, the CRM built for closers.
0:38
SPEAKER_01: If you're a real estate agent, entrepreneur, or small business owner looking to automate, follow up, and close more deals and stay top of mind, then Connection is your secret weapon.
0:46
SPEAKER_01: Go to yourconnection.com and take control of your pipeline today.
0:50
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0:59
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1:06
SPEAKER_01: All right, guys, let's get locked in.
1:07
SPEAKER_01: We've got a powerhouse show lined up today.
1:09
SPEAKER_01: And if you're in business of real estate or just building something big, this one is for you.
1:14
SPEAKER_01: Good morning, good morning, good morning, everybody.
1:16
SPEAKER_01: Welcome back into the Elite Real Estate Podcast, uh, where we go live every Friday morning, dive deep into the business of real estate, entrepreneurship, and all those kind of things.
1:26
SPEAKER_01: You can find us eliteedge network.com, uh, where everything is built inside of that.
1:31
SPEAKER_01: And uh find old episodes, find us on the Elite Real Estate Podcast again, wherever you find podcasts, whether you're listening now or later.
1:38
SPEAKER_01: So I'm super excited to be joined in today.
1:40
SPEAKER_01: Um uh our guest today is going to bring some some fire to everybody, and we are excited to have him on, and I'm gonna bring him on right now, Mr.
1:49
SPEAKER_01: Andrew Becker.
1:50
SPEAKER_01: How are you, my friend?
1:51
SPEAKER_04: What's up, man?
1:52
SPEAKER_04: How are you?
1:54
SPEAKER_01: Oh man, I'm excited to have you on.
1:56
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, we kind of linked up social media-wise, trying to figure some things out, what we should be doing, what we shouldn't be doing.
2:02
SPEAKER_01: And uh man, it uh we it we have a lot in common.
2:05
SPEAKER_01: It was like, oh, we gotta get you on for sure.
2:07
SPEAKER_01: Like we have to we had to do this.
2:09
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I think the end result of that connection that we had earlier was uh we should be doing everything together.
2:15
SPEAKER_04: So this is the the one of many, right?
2:17
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
2:18
SPEAKER_01: And it's you know, it's funny you say that.
2:19
SPEAKER_01: It's it's one of those things in our business that we get away from.
2:22
SPEAKER_01: Um, everybody wants to protect their own stuff and not do everything together.
2:26
SPEAKER_01: And um, you know, you've been in real estate for a long time too.
2:28
SPEAKER_01: And it's like, why can't we all just do get along and like just do the right things, right?
2:33
SPEAKER_04: Dude, here's uh here's one thing that uh I heard somebody say in a mastermind that I was at in Nashville a while back, and she said, those at the bottom compete, those at the top collaborate.
2:44
SPEAKER_04: So ever since I heard that, I was like, I'm gonna just try to partner, collaborate, and do cool stuff with cool people from now on and not hide anything, share everything I can, make everybody's lives better, as best as we can possibly do that with each other.
2:59
SPEAKER_04: So that's my new mantra moving forward.
3:02
SPEAKER_01: Oh man, I love that.
3:03
SPEAKER_01: So those at the bottom compete, those at the top collaborate.
3:07
SPEAKER_01: Yep.
3:08
SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's deep.
3:09
SPEAKER_01: Think about that.
3:10
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and it's true.
3:11
SPEAKER_01: Like, if you know, again, the more people I know and I'm surrounded with, like, when you look at like top producers in Iran, people that are building big businesses and doing all the right things, they're like, you you ask questions and they'll give you the answer.
3:24
SPEAKER_01: They're not they're like, Yeah, here's how I did this.
3:26
SPEAKER_01: You know, and it's like there's no hiding it.
3:28
SPEAKER_04: Well, here's the thing, man.
3:30
SPEAKER_04: All this information that we ever talk about, it's available somewhere, right?
3:34
SPEAKER_04: Like, you could now go out and find it online.
3:37
SPEAKER_04: It's the collaboration, sharing, partnering, making it fun, in my opinion, that's the most important with people that you know, like, and trust and want to be around.
3:47
SPEAKER_04: But I could tell 10 people my exact recipe for exactly how I did X, Y, and Z and made$10 million, and they could do nothing with it.
3:58
SPEAKER_04: Right?
3:58
SPEAKER_04: Right.
3:58
SPEAKER_04: And then there's the ones that I could tell, and they can execute on day one and and build and work really hard, and then everyone else in between.
4:07
SPEAKER_04: So that's that's the the kind of takeaway.
4:10
SPEAKER_04: Like this information is out there, you can learn from so many different people, but at the end of the day, what are you gonna do with the information?
4:18
SPEAKER_04: That's on you, it's on the person that you're sharing with and doing the stuff with.
4:21
SPEAKER_01: Oh, I love that.
4:22
SPEAKER_01: And you're it's so right.
4:24
SPEAKER_01: You're so right.
4:25
SPEAKER_01: It's um because you're right, there is information out there, right?
4:29
SPEAKER_01: But but am I am I doing it most the most efficient way, or are you doing it the most efficient way?
4:34
SPEAKER_01: And you can show me how to be more efficient with my time.
4:36
SPEAKER_04: That's also part of the key, right there.
4:38
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
4:39
SPEAKER_01: Like I, you know, again, the with social media or or your CRM or what whatever it is, like you you can say, uh, well, I'm using this but uh, but and you're using it better than I am, right?
4:51
SPEAKER_01: It just how do I share the system and how is it working better?
4:53
SPEAKER_01: And why don't I help you be more efficient with your time?
4:56
SPEAKER_01: Not that it's gonna take away anything from my business.
4:58
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, there it's like it's the what that's important, but then the how.
5:03
SPEAKER_04: How do you actually go and do it?
5:05
SPEAKER_04: Uh that I think you're alluding to.
5:07
SPEAKER_04: So yeah, I 100% agree, man.
5:08
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
5:09
SPEAKER_01: So so now, Andrew, um, you're in the DC area, right?
5:13
SPEAKER_01: Um, how long have you been in the business?
5:16
SPEAKER_04: So I started back in real estate in 2013.
5:19
SPEAKER_04: So for about 13, crazy for me to say that, 13 years now.
5:24
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but you have an interesting past before that.
5:27
SPEAKER_04: I do, I do.
5:28
SPEAKER_01: I um tell everybody where you worked before that.
5:31
SPEAKER_04: Such a weird past.
5:32
SPEAKER_04: Um, I worked at the Pentagon for seven years, uh, supporting the men and women in uniform uh for the Air Force nuclear enterprise.
5:41
SPEAKER_04: So nuclear weapons and human capital and everything related to our stockpile.
5:46
SPEAKER_04: Um so it was quite interesting, but I like I told you before, I learned so much and I took away so much from the people that I worked with.
5:55
SPEAKER_04: I used everything that I learned working uh there for almost a decade and brought that into my real estate world and my real estate journey.
6:04
SPEAKER_04: So um it was a fun time, man.
6:06
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
6:07
SPEAKER_04: To travel around and see a lot of cool stuff.
6:09
SPEAKER_01: I'm sure you did.
6:10
SPEAKER_01: And now, so did you have were you like top secret access?
6:13
SPEAKER_01: Like, were you we like is there stuff you can talk you can't talk about?
6:16
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I mean, I worked in a SCIF if you're familiar with that.
6:19
SPEAKER_04: It's like no cell phones, no windows, no recording, like that kind of thing.
6:24
SPEAKER_04: Okay.
6:24
SPEAKER_04: Um, it was a TS SCI.
6:27
SPEAKER_04: Um, I forget what that stands for, the SCI part, but top secret something.
6:32
SPEAKER_04: It was uh a couple levels short of you know White House Yankee uh security clearance type of stuff, but it was cool.
6:40
SPEAKER_04: And yeah, definitely there are things that I learned that they uh didn't want me sharing.
6:45
SPEAKER_01: Oh man, that's so cool.
6:47
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's really cool.
6:49
SPEAKER_01: It's so cool because I I think I think a movie, right?
6:51
SPEAKER_01: Like like you you have all these top secret things and then you have to watch your back all the time because somebody might take you out at any moment.
6:57
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, that wasn't that important, but I appreciate the confidence.
7:00
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I'll sell I'll tell you the one of the coolest things walking around the Pentagon is there's a lot of people that work there.
7:08
SPEAKER_04: It's the biggest office building in the world, and I'd be walking down the hallway and be like, oh, that's the Secretary of Defense.
7:12
SPEAKER_04: Hey, and he's like, Hey, how you doing?
7:15
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's probably did you knock his books out of his hand or anything?
7:20
SPEAKER_04: He had security guards around him, so that would not have been good for my career at that point.
7:24
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
7:25
SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's that it's so cool, though.
7:26
SPEAKER_01: Like, how to cool you you walked around in the Pentagon, you know what I mean?
7:29
SPEAKER_01: Like you had to go in places where you couldn't take your cell phone or nothing.
7:32
SPEAKER_01: You had to, you had to it's yeah, you know.
7:35
SPEAKER_04: Let me just tell you real real quick.
7:37
SPEAKER_04: This is a side little story.
7:39
SPEAKER_04: But my dad worked at the Pentagon for about 40, 45 years.
7:43
SPEAKER_04: My older brother worked at the Pentagon, my mom met my dad at the Pentagon, my aunt and my grandpa both worked at the Pentagon.
7:51
SPEAKER_04: My little brother and I during high school delivered papers to all the secretaries of the Air Force, Marines, uh, Navy, Army, Defense uh for the Gannett Times.
8:03
SPEAKER_04: Uh, I don't even know if that's a newspaper anymore.
8:05
SPEAKER_04: Right, right.
8:05
SPEAKER_04: When we were in high school, we would pick up newspapers in Springfield, Virginia, drive them to the Pentagon and deliver them to those high-level guys every Sunday morning.
8:14
SPEAKER_04: So I actually got to work in the Pentagon when I was 15, 16 years old as well.
8:19
SPEAKER_01: How cool is that?
8:20
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I you know, it's it's you know, it's weird.
8:22
SPEAKER_01: Like, so I've been to DC a couple times.
8:24
SPEAKER_01: Um, and if you guys have never been to DC, you need to go to DC and just walk around.
8:27
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's you it's like, you know, it's to me, I'm a history guy too, though, right?
8:31
SPEAKER_01: Like I the movie National Treasure, like I think that's real.
8:34
SPEAKER_04: I love that movie.
8:35
SPEAKER_04: I I hope it's real.
8:38
SPEAKER_04: I hope that's real too.
8:39
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm like, I love that.
8:40
SPEAKER_01: Like, I I want to be Nicolas Cage in that movie and what and go around and try to find the treasure, you know.
8:45
SPEAKER_04: Me too.
8:45
SPEAKER_04: That's one of my top favorite movies.
8:47
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, me too.
8:48
SPEAKER_01: And everybody's like, that movie's dumb.
8:49
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, no, it's the one of the greatest movies ever.
8:52
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
8:52
SPEAKER_04: We have a bit more in common, Jimmy.
8:55
SPEAKER_04: I know, I know.
8:56
SPEAKER_04: Let's talk about movies.
8:57
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
8:59
SPEAKER_01: Um, yeah, but so you've been in real estate for you know about 13 years, right?
9:03
SPEAKER_01: You made this transition.
9:04
SPEAKER_01: You said I'm gonna go, you know, made this transition into real estate from the Pentagon, which might be the most interesting story ever in real estate.
9:12
SPEAKER_01: Um, but talk to me about your business.
9:13
SPEAKER_01: Like you you started off a little bit different too, and doing some different things, um, not traditional real estate in a sense.
9:20
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I'll also tell you, I overlapped two careers for about a year, two years.
9:26
SPEAKER_04: So I remember taking real estate phone calls from the staircase in one of the back staircases that I found that was quiet in the Pentagon, which is really weird to think back.
9:36
SPEAKER_04: I'd have conversations with buyers and sellers and my team, you know, my partners as we were going the team from a hallway, uh, hoping that you know my bosses didn't walk by and hear me talking about real estate.
9:48
SPEAKER_04: So that was that was super interesting.
9:50
SPEAKER_04: But I made the transition.
9:52
SPEAKER_04: Uh I resigned my my position uh with the Air Force um uh in 2014, 2015 while doing we started the team in 2013, so did that for about a year or two overlapping.
10:05
SPEAKER_04: Um so I essentially had two jobs, but we started in retail um uh at KW actually, and started helping buyers and sellers, but then we figured out about this thing called wholesaling.
10:19
SPEAKER_04: Um, and that's when kind of like our exit strategy started to change a little bit as we started to get really good at numbers and data.
10:27
SPEAKER_04: That's also another thing that I'm super into, is like data-driven decisions are probably the most important thing you could do as a team owner and an operator.
10:36
SPEAKER_04: Uh, but when we started to look at what was actually producing, is when we actually started to start optimize and get really calibrated and strategic with all of our approaches, uh, writ large as we tried to build a better and bigger operation.
10:52
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
10:52
SPEAKER_01: And and that, so and it's funny how you say that because that's where we lose, that's where we lose you and I's you know connectivity is when you get into the numbers.
11:02
SPEAKER_01: Um but no, it but it is, but I but I've learned that over time, right?
11:05
SPEAKER_01: Like that it you have to be data driven to to run a you know a a blossoming organization, right?
11:11
SPEAKER_01: Like to you know, to really turn the screws and figure out which ones you need to turn, which ones you need to loosen, right?
11:16
SPEAKER_01: Turn left, turn right, get everybody going on the right page.
11:18
SPEAKER_01: You gotta really know what your numbers are.
11:20
SPEAKER_01: So that's you know, it becomes very important on that end.
11:23
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, and I will add, just in case um, you know, anyone listening is not thinking about about numbers this way.
11:29
SPEAKER_04: We not only did that for operations, so like lead sources, revenue by lead source, leads, all that good stuff by lead source, we did it for people as well.
11:39
SPEAKER_04: So when you think about it, Jimmy, there's a return on investment.
11:42
SPEAKER_04: If you put you know a thousand dollars into a website every month and it returns 10, that's pretty good.
11:48
SPEAKER_04: We also had to track that because we had a lot of moving parts and a lot of moving people and team members and compartmentalized departments within our operation.
11:56
SPEAKER_04: So we wanted to know if I'm paying Jimmy five thousand dollars a month to answer the phones and set appointments, what am I what is he returning in the form of revenue coming in from appointments that he was erring cause of?
12:54
SPEAKER_04: And you know, kind of moving way ahead here, when it came time to have like a difficult conversation or just a really awesome conversation about how somebody was performing, it wasn't like, hey man, I I don't think you're doing that great, or I think you're doing amazing.
13:10
SPEAKER_04: It was like pull up your dashboard, let me see your numbers.
13:14
SPEAKER_04: Um, you understand that you're only bringing in 2500 a month.
13:17
SPEAKER_04: Like, what's happening?
13:18
SPEAKER_03: Right.
13:18
SPEAKER_04: What's going on?
13:19
SPEAKER_04: But the way we collected this data and the uh analytics with our system was in real time.
13:26
SPEAKER_04: So our system would kind of like we never had to go and look, it would just email us, you know.
13:31
SPEAKER_04: Every day I got a uh what the reports that I was responsible for overseeing got emailed to me at 8 p.m.
13:37
SPEAKER_04: Okay, and I would just look for trends and I'd be like, okay, Jimmy, your role is to set two appointments a day, 10 a week, right?
13:43
SPEAKER_04: Monday through Friday.
13:45
SPEAKER_04: Report would come out 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 1, 1.
13:49
SPEAKER_04: And I'd be like, wait, wait, wait, what happened?
13:50
SPEAKER_04: Like, are you okay?
13:52
SPEAKER_04: Are you sick?
13:53
SPEAKER_04: Did you get another like what's going on?
13:55
SPEAKER_04: So we caught that.
13:56
SPEAKER_04: Instead of having to react, we were able to proactively catch things early on to make pivots quicker.
14:03
SPEAKER_04: Uh, because in this game, it's all about numbers.
14:06
SPEAKER_04: Marketing's just a math game to us at this point.
14:09
SPEAKER_04: And the quicker you can you can uh you know see what's working and most importantly what's not, you pivot, you optimize, and you you know, you gain that one percent of uh getting better every single day.
14:21
SPEAKER_01: Right, right.
14:22
SPEAKER_01: No, and it it's true.
14:23
SPEAKER_01: If you get it, this is the thing I really find that interesting because you know, if you're not if you're not keeping up with it and you say, all right, I'm gonna do a you know a check-in every 30 days, well man, you could have three bad weeks by the time 30 days rolls around, you know, and you could be totally off track.
14:38
SPEAKER_04: And this is a cyclical world that we live in in this real estate industry where you can go like this with like your closings and your and your money and your revenue that's coming in, and that's very dangerous.
14:50
SPEAKER_04: So the more you can get out in front of avoiding that collapse of like good month, bad month, good month, bad month kind of thing, uh, the better your your stress levels are gonna be, the better your team is gonna feel, the better you're gonna feel about your team, and the better the operation is gonna run.
15:06
SPEAKER_04: Um, but it's very important to do to not do what you just said and wait till the end of the month or the end of the quarter to check in or to know.
15:15
SPEAKER_04: Um can I share a really quick story about why kind of this came.
15:20
SPEAKER_04: This was an aha moment.
15:21
SPEAKER_04: So very early on, a few years into our operation, we hired a coach and that coach was twenty thousand dollars like upfront to come from Florida to fly to our office in Arlington, Virginia, and meet with us for one day, right?
15:37
SPEAKER_04: So we had him for like 10 hours.
15:39
SPEAKER_04: So super important, right?
15:40
SPEAKER_04: That's like$2,000 an hour.
15:43
SPEAKER_04: He was like, Hey Andrew, I'm gonna be up there in two weeks.
15:46
SPEAKER_04: I want to know every single lead by source, which ones you set appointments for, which ones you held appointments for, the drop-off rate for each, the ones you held, what were the conversion rates, what were the overall conversion rates for your team, what were the conversion rates by individual agents, how many did you sign?
16:06
SPEAKER_04: How many did you close?
16:07
SPEAKER_04: What was the closing average at both uh you know gross commission top line all the way through cost of goods sold to bottom net profit or revenue um or loss, right?
16:18
SPEAKER_04: Or everything.
16:19
SPEAKER_04: And Jimmy, like I didn't have any of this organized.
16:22
SPEAKER_04: So I was like, Gary, Keith, do you Dan, like what did you set that appointment?
16:27
SPEAKER_04: Did you sign?
16:28
SPEAKER_04: Like, I was looking at emails, I was looking at text, I was looking at spreadsheets, I was looking everywhere.
16:32
SPEAKER_04: Stress beyond belief, working like hours just to try to get this data together.
16:37
SPEAKER_04: So he comes at 7 a.m.
16:40
SPEAKER_04: He's like, show me the spreadsheet.
16:42
SPEAKER_04: He goes, asked me three questions and goes, This data is crap, I can't trust it.
16:48
SPEAKER_04: Just like basically turn it off.
16:49
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, and I was like, Oh my god.
16:51
SPEAKER_04: And it was in front of people.
16:53
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, like it wasn't a good feeling.
16:55
SPEAKER_04: So it's like, how do I avoid this?
16:57
SPEAKER_04: So every time stuff like that happened, man, I was like, okay, that was horrible.
17:02
SPEAKER_04: How can I automate this now?
17:04
SPEAKER_04: How can I use technology to help me produce what whatever it is that we need to produce?
17:10
SPEAKER_04: So in our company, just real quick, we built our own system where there's one way to submit like an appointment, one way to submit a close in every, you know, every phase.
17:21
SPEAKER_04: By doing that the same predictable, repeatable way, we were collecting mandatory fields, and those fields informed all of our dashboards and our reports.
17:31
SPEAKER_04: So as soon as you said, you know, hey, I set an appointment with Jimmy, it's a PPC lead, click, all the reports would update in real time and then get emailed to the leadership team later that day or early in the morning.
17:43
SPEAKER_04: And that's how we solved the data collection and integrity issue that we had on our team.
17:49
SPEAKER_04: We we got rid of every other way, you know, you were submitting an appointment with 10 pieces of information, I was submitting an appointment with two.
17:55
SPEAKER_04: So our data was all jacked.
17:57
SPEAKER_04: So we made it 10 from you, 10 from me every single time.
18:00
SPEAKER_04: The same thing over and over and over again.
18:03
SPEAKER_04: It was boring, yeah, but it was it was the right thing to do.
18:06
SPEAKER_04: And that's what we basically learned if you want to grow and scale, it has to be kind of boring, or else it's chaos, it's gonna be chaotic.
18:15
SPEAKER_01: I'm glad I hope everybody can hear that because I I say that all the time.
18:19
SPEAKER_01: Like you it it you if the more boring you get, the more money you're gonna make.
18:23
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
18:23
SPEAKER_01: And the more time you get back.
18:25
SPEAKER_04: Dude, here's the thing: it's not only an operational perspective of efficiency gain, but think about when you bring in a new uh we call them ISAs inside sales agents, basically, like phone, you know, phone people, they they call people, they set appointments, they answer the phones.
18:43
SPEAKER_04: When you have a boring, predictable, repeatable process that everybody is following the same way.
18:48
SPEAKER_04: How easy is it to train that person?
18:50
SPEAKER_04: What do I do when I set an appointment?
18:52
SPEAKER_04: You click this, you fill in this field, you hit submit.
18:54
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, but what else?
18:55
SPEAKER_04: No, that's it.
18:56
SPEAKER_04: Then the calendar gets sent, an email goes out, this happens, that happens, this happens.
19:00
SPEAKER_04: All the low-hanging fruit administrative tasks that need to happen were triggered via that automation of just having a person on our team submit a form.
19:10
SPEAKER_04: And we had that for every single form from a new lead all the way through closed.
19:14
SPEAKER_04: So it just made training that much better.
19:17
SPEAKER_04: And it made people appreciate the organizational effort that our team had versus like other teams that they may have worked on that they're like, Well, what happens when it's like this?
19:27
SPEAKER_04: We're like, Well, you kind of do this and it's not really that, like, uh, and they're like, Oh, I'm not really sure like what I should be doing.
19:33
SPEAKER_04: So it just made bringing someone on that much better and easier because they didn't have to worry about learning anything difficult, right?
19:40
SPEAKER_01: And as a coach, right, from a coach's heart, that it's it's easier for me to coat to drop in and coach that too.
19:47
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, right, because it's the well, I gotta coach you up because you why you you so you didn't click the button?
19:51
SPEAKER_01: That's the you've got to click the button, right?
19:53
SPEAKER_01: Like that's like why it's twofold.
19:55
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, we gained two two things here, dude.
19:58
SPEAKER_04: Number one, that like what did you do or you didn't do, but we we call um standard operating procedures SOPs playbooks.
20:07
SPEAKER_04: So we have playbooks for everything that we did down to like the coffee machine, right?
20:12
SPEAKER_04: So not only did we make it as easy on the team members as possible to execute on hey, I signed a listing agreement, what do I do?
20:19
SPEAKER_04: You click the listing agreement sign button, a form pops up and you submit it, but the playbook itself was auditable, right?
20:27
SPEAKER_04: Right because you're supposed to follow it, and most of it was automated via tech, anyways.
20:32
SPEAKER_04: But when someone screwed up, and it was very rare when you're updating our CRM if someone screwed up, but if someone screwed up on the execution of let's say a listing signed form gets submitted and the photos don't get scheduled, you bring up the listing signed form playbook, and at the bottom it's like, did you do A?
20:52
SPEAKER_04: Did you do B?
20:52
SPEAKER_04: Did you do C?
20:53
SPEAKER_04: Did you do uh D?
20:55
SPEAKER_04: And you're like, Oh, I didn't do C.
20:57
SPEAKER_04: And I'm like, Cool, that was the problem.
20:59
SPEAKER_04: Well, let's go to the C part.
21:00
SPEAKER_04: What did you not understand?
21:02
SPEAKER_04: So and they're all live documents in our Google workspace so you can edit them in real time if like the website from the you know the the scheduling tool changes, but then I'm not like, well, walk me through, Jimmy.
21:14
SPEAKER_04: What did you do?
21:14
SPEAKER_04: And you're like, well, I I called them and then I did this, and I'm like, wait, wait, like, I don't call them, I just go to the why do you go to the website?
21:22
SPEAKER_04: So you're auditing a process that's set in stone.
21:25
SPEAKER_04: Oh and then you're making you're making real-time updates as needed.
21:31
SPEAKER_04: Every every playbook also has a primary owner, but they're all available to all the teams uh organized by department, like sales and uh, you know, coordination team, marketing, that kind of thing.
21:44
SPEAKER_04: So it's very easy and accessible.
21:46
SPEAKER_04: But then when things do go awry, you're like, Well, did you do these four things?
21:50
SPEAKER_04: No, you didn't do three.
21:51
SPEAKER_04: Okay, let's fix that.
21:52
SPEAKER_04: Okay, boom.
21:52
SPEAKER_04: Now everyone's up to speed again, and it's it's back to let's not screw it up.
21:57
SPEAKER_01: That's so good.
21:58
SPEAKER_01: That's so good.
21:59
SPEAKER_01: And and you guys developed that all on your own, just be just out of after after you had this coach come in, right?
22:05
SPEAKER_01: And kind of call you out a little bit, which is that's what coaches' jobs are, is to come in and call you out a little bit, right?
22:10
SPEAKER_01: Like you pay me a lot of money, you can pay me a lot of money, I'll fly out there, and I'm gonna tell you you're we're screwed up on.
22:15
SPEAKER_04: So let me tell you this.
22:16
SPEAKER_04: Uh we we borrowed ideas, we model and then modify, Jimmy.
22:21
SPEAKER_04: Love it.
22:22
SPEAKER_04: So I didn't come up with the idea of an SOP, obviously.
22:25
SPEAKER_04: Those have been in in use by people for like the last 200 years.
22:29
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
22:30
SPEAKER_04: But we model and say, okay, how do we get better organized around this topic?
22:34
SPEAKER_04: What are other people doing?
22:36
SPEAKER_04: Okay, cool.
22:36
SPEAKER_04: Let's go do that and then modify it for how we want to run things.
22:40
SPEAKER_04: So I I got the idea of the playbook.
22:44
SPEAKER_04: Library from um you've probably heard of um a coach, uh uh Dan Martell.
22:49
SPEAKER_04: He has an awesome book.
22:51
SPEAKER_04: If you haven't read it, buy back your time is a game, it was a game changer for me.
22:57
SPEAKER_04: Okay.
22:57
SPEAKER_04: But I got hyper-organized around a living, breathing playbook library, again, divided by department.
23:06
SPEAKER_04: So everyone on the team that has access to it doesn't have to bother me.
23:10
SPEAKER_04: Not saying that they bother me, but they don't have to take my time away from working on the business.
23:17
SPEAKER_04: They can just go access it themselves.
23:19
SPEAKER_04: And if they're in the marketing department, every single marketing playbook is right there.
23:23
SPEAKER_04: How to host social media, how to do the podcast, how to do this, how to do that.
23:28
SPEAKER_04: The idea, Jimmy, is and this is from Dan's book, getting somebody to do 80% of something is 100% awesome.
23:38
SPEAKER_04: They should, if you have the right person in the right seat, be able to critically think enough to get it to 100%.
23:46
SPEAKER_04: If they are not able to do that and follow the playbook, then potentially you've hired the wrong person for the for that seat.
23:53
SPEAKER_04: So that is another way to kind of audit.
23:55
SPEAKER_04: But the idea is someone comes into your marketing department as head of whatever or social media person, you're not spending time for two weeks showing them everything by yourself.
24:07
SPEAKER_04: And then that's two weeks of my time that I just got taken away from doing higher-level revenue generating activities, partnerships, things like that, bigger picture items.
24:16
SPEAKER_04: So you're like, hey, Jimmy, here's the marketing department playbooks, read through them.
24:20
SPEAKER_04: And inside of a playbook, we do a camcorder method where we're walking through a screen record of ordering pictures online or whatever it is, right?
24:29
SPEAKER_04: We're talking through it.
24:31
SPEAKER_04: We also use Loom and um Scribe, if you've heard of those simultaneously.
24:36
SPEAKER_04: Okay.
24:36
SPEAKER_04: So as we're clicking, Scribe is snapshotting pictures and putting it into a step-by-step screenshot where you can then go in and edit, which makes it incredibly efficient.
24:47
SPEAKER_04: It costs like$10 a month.
24:49
SPEAKER_04: So if you have not used Scribe yet, go out and get it.
24:52
SPEAKER_04: And then there's the high level.
24:54
SPEAKER_04: So we have a camcorder method of me talking through doing something.
24:58
SPEAKER_04: We have a scribe PDF attached to the playbook where if someone doesn't want to learn via video, they can learn via a step-by-step.
25:05
SPEAKER_04: And then we have a checklist at the back at the uh bottom of it that says, Hey, did you do one, two, three, four, five?
25:11
SPEAKER_04: Those are the critical things that you have to check off in order for this playbook to get executed successfully.
25:17
SPEAKER_04: And then we just say, Go bring yourself up to speed.
25:20
SPEAKER_01: You say, Here, don't screw this up.
25:22
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
25:23
SPEAKER_04: Just go do this.
25:24
SPEAKER_04: This is what you have to do.
25:25
SPEAKER_04: If it doesn't make sense, find the primary owner of the playbook and ask them questions about it.
25:29
SPEAKER_04: Right.
25:29
SPEAKER_04: But I don't need to sit with every single new person that we brought on our team anymore, which I did before.
25:34
SPEAKER_04: I'd be like, oh my god, Jimmy's gonna be a new agent.
25:37
SPEAKER_04: What do we do?
25:38
SPEAKER_04: Oh, 50 things to do in your first 90 days.
25:41
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, let's let's create the wheel new every single time.
25:44
SPEAKER_04: I was like, let's stop doing that.
25:46
SPEAKER_04: That's awful use of my right, right.
25:48
SPEAKER_04: So here's another thing, and then I can I'll stop ranting about playbooks.
25:52
SPEAKER_04: I'm I'm OCD, so if you're not get picking up on this, you guys here's another thing that I try to do with all my companies that I have.
26:00
SPEAKER_04: The first question I always want people to ask either aloud or in their mind is when we're doing anything, do we have a playbook for this already?
26:10
SPEAKER_04: If the answer is no, you go get the playbook template, you delete the blank and you put the podcast playbook, and then you start a freaking playbook and you put it in the marketing section or wherever you think it makes sense.
26:24
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, if you do it in real time as things pop up and literally do it for every single minuscule task that you can potentially think of.
26:33
SPEAKER_04: If you put in the time to do this one off as they are come up, I promise you it will the juice will be worth the squeeze as you if you if you're if your goals are to grow and scale, I should mention that.
26:45
SPEAKER_04: Or do what what I started off doing is every Saturday morning at 9 a.m.
26:51
SPEAKER_04: Before I had all my kids, I have four kids now, but I was able to do this before from 9 a.m.
26:56
SPEAKER_04: to 10 a.m.
26:57
SPEAKER_04: I would make one playbook for an entire 52-week schedule that is 52 playbooks that I did not have 52 weeks ago.
27:06
SPEAKER_04: And I would also try to come up with playbooks as we needed to, right?
27:10
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so how do you add a new user to the CRM?
27:12
SPEAKER_04: Do we have a playbook?
27:13
SPEAKER_04: No.
27:14
SPEAKER_04: Okay, the add a new user to the CRM playbook.
27:17
SPEAKER_04: Cool, that's done.
27:19
SPEAKER_04: Do this in real time, save time over the length of your career by putting in that level of administrative work first, and then guess what?
27:30
SPEAKER_04: Like what we were talking about on our um our, you know, before we started shooting, there came a time in my business, Jimmy, where I was like, I don't want to answer the phones anymore.
27:39
SPEAKER_04: So let's hire people to do that.
27:41
SPEAKER_04: Then we started leveraging people at every single step and every single phase in our company.
27:47
SPEAKER_04: And guess what?
27:47
SPEAKER_04: I was telling you, I'm not even in my company anymore.
27:51
SPEAKER_04: It's still running, it's still going, but my awesome partners are running it, and we're completely leveraged out.
27:58
SPEAKER_04: And I I took my system and framework for that company, the team, and I plugged it into billions.
28:04
SPEAKER_04: I plugged it into Brighter, I plugged it into probate engineers, I plugged it into my podcast, Team League Talks Podcast.
28:09
SPEAKER_04: Just the same thing over and over again.
28:11
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, that's what I teach now.
28:12
SPEAKER_04: That framework, because it's so important to growth and scale.
28:15
SPEAKER_01: It's so important.
28:16
SPEAKER_01: And again, it it again it can be in any part of the business, right?
28:20
SPEAKER_01: Like it could be in anything.
28:22
SPEAKER_01: And that's you know, one of the things I we we talked about, and I really want to get to you is the is the probate engineers, right?
28:27
SPEAKER_01: Because what how you're scaling that out, and again, I'm an I'm a playbook nerd too.
28:32
SPEAKER_01: Like I have, I have, and then I I usually have a slide deck for the for the with for the workbook.
28:39
SPEAKER_01: Like I have a if I have a slide deck, then I have a workbook.
28:43
SPEAKER_04: I love how you said that.
28:44
SPEAKER_04: I have a playbook on building playbooks.
28:47
SPEAKER_01: I because you said the one about the podcast.
28:49
SPEAKER_01: I built the play I built a workbook on podcast on how to podcast.
28:53
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah, me too.
28:54
SPEAKER_04: We have a very regimen thing like process for our podcast.
28:59
SPEAKER_04: It's the same thing every day.
29:00
SPEAKER_04: Outreach, messaging, connection call, episode, post-production, the same thing over and over to publication, obviously.
29:08
SPEAKER_04: But yeah, I'm I'm very nerdy.
29:10
SPEAKER_04: We could probably nerd out on like just playbooks alone for the next hour.
29:14
SPEAKER_01: We probably could because I have enough.
29:15
SPEAKER_01: I I even showed this to other my you know, my my and my Google my Google Drive, right?
29:20
SPEAKER_01: And people are like, there's so much stuff here.
29:22
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, I know, because I just keep doing this same thing.
29:25
SPEAKER_01: But now what's cool, this is an interesting piece too, is with AI, right?
29:30
SPEAKER_01: I can take the PDF of the playbook, put it into AI, it builds out a landing page off of that workbook.
29:38
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, that's awesome.
29:40
SPEAKER_04: We're we're doing something similar, a little different, not to you know turn the whole conversation to this, but we're building out for the probate stuff, instead of having to follow a playbook and have like a VA do it offshore or a team member, we're building agents to just go and do uh and extract and execute on those playbooks for the probate stuff.
30:01
SPEAKER_04: So technology is getting crazy the last three to four weeks, man.
30:07
SPEAKER_04: It's been nuts.
30:08
SPEAKER_04: There's like this gold rush, like a California gold rush for like AI real estate bots.
30:14
SPEAKER_04: If you're if you're listening right now and you are not messing with clawed, you know, AI, clawed code, all this new agentic, agentic stuff, um, you're you're gonna get left behind.
30:25
SPEAKER_04: Not saying that to scare anyone, but efficiencies are being built out where I'm gonna be able to do production level wise so much more than the person who's just continuing to do it in a you know, in whatever CRM you're using, right?
30:41
SPEAKER_04: Without this, you know, AI uh terminal or however you want to call it connection.
30:47
SPEAKER_04: Um so it's it's pretty crazy, dude.
30:50
SPEAKER_04: We can probably talk a whole episode about what we're doing with AI too.
30:53
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
30:53
SPEAKER_01: Well, we just had a question come in.
30:55
SPEAKER_01: It said, What do your playbooks look like?
30:57
SPEAKER_01: Is there a certain system for building the playbook?
30:59
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, uh from Jen.
31:01
SPEAKER_04: Um, I am happy to, by the way, I will share my playbook on playbooks and my playbook library with anyone and everyone listening, uh, and my playbook library template.
31:11
SPEAKER_04: So um, I don't know, I'll get it to you.
31:14
SPEAKER_04: Okay.
31:14
SPEAKER_04: Um, and you could you can get it out.
31:16
SPEAKER_04: But um, our playbooks are uh Jen, our playbooks are built on Google Workspace, and it's really simple, quite simple.
31:24
SPEAKER_04: We have a spreadsheet that says the playbook library at the top, and then it's marketing, it's sales, it's product, it's whatever for like whatever we're doing, right?
31:33
SPEAKER_04: And then GNA.
31:34
SPEAKER_04: And then as we create these playbooks, and it's just a document that says the social media playbook, the creating a user in your CRM playbook, the ordering signpost playbook, whatever the lowest, least common denominator uh task that you are doing, that's what we make a playbook around.
31:53
SPEAKER_04: Um, it's the same template every single time.
31:56
SPEAKER_04: So it's repetition, and people are used to seeing these playbooks as well.
32:00
SPEAKER_04: So I will share it with anyone who wants it.
32:04
SPEAKER_04: You can then model it and modify it for Jen, how you do things at your real estate operation.
32:09
SPEAKER_04: But at least you won't have to start from uh from ground zero.
32:12
SPEAKER_01: Oh, I love that, man.
32:13
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
32:14
SPEAKER_01: Um, but it's big, it is.
32:15
SPEAKER_01: It's it's where it's because again, where do you start?
32:18
SPEAKER_01: How do you do this thing?
32:18
SPEAKER_01: I think it was a great question.
32:20
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, I think it's a great question.
32:22
SPEAKER_01: So then how did this how did you build out probate engineers?
32:26
SPEAKER_01: Now I you know, you have your systems, you have your playbooks, your processes, all those things.
32:30
SPEAKER_01: Where did the probate engineers come from?
32:32
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, well, that that was really easy.
32:34
SPEAKER_04: So going back to our data and our analytics, I read a lot and I I knew about the 8020 Pareto principle, but I didn't realize how important it actually was.
32:47
SPEAKER_04: But as we started to collect data to see what was working from a lead source perspective, we had our 8020.
32:54
SPEAKER_04: And this was another aha moment where it's like, man, we're running 50, 75, however many freaking lead sources that we had, but not all were the same, right?
33:06
SPEAKER_04: So as we got a little bit more clear picture of like what was actually returning revenue, we started to have that 8020.
33:14
SPEAKER_04: And for us, it was PPC, Google Ads, yeah, uh-per-click, uh, cash offer type of leads.
33:21
SPEAKER_04: It was joint venturing with other people in our area, it was probate.
33:25
SPEAKER_04: We had a developer letter that we would send out on like a super fancy, like very expensive uh mail piece, and then some other mailers that we did, and then you know, different, different little ones, but probates were always like really high up there.
33:40
SPEAKER_04: And we did probates for seven, eight years.
33:43
SPEAKER_04: What we decided to do, uh Jimmy, was instead of going a mile wide and an inch deep in lead sources, we were like, why don't we just get really good at a few of these?
33:55
SPEAKER_04: We went a mile deep and educated ourselves, probate specific.
33:59
SPEAKER_04: I can also talk about PPC if you if you'd like, but we'll stick on probate for now.
34:04
SPEAKER_04: We were like, okay, what's this probate thing?
34:06
SPEAKER_04: Everyone's always talking about probates.
34:08
SPEAKER_04: I know about probates, but I very quickly realized that I didn't really know about probates.
34:13
SPEAKER_04: So we went all in.
34:15
SPEAKER_04: We educated ourselves on the terminology, the people, the processes, the timeline, the court system, everything that you as a real estate professional today, I'm assuming you do, just like you want to be able to talk about a property, right?
34:30
SPEAKER_04: And articulate different uh, you know, words and terms and make the homeowner be like, man, Andrew really knows what he's talking about when he's gonna market my house for sale.
34:42
SPEAKER_04: I'm gonna go with him.
34:43
SPEAKER_04: We said, how can we position ourselves to a personal representative in a probate file?
34:50
SPEAKER_04: The PR is the person legally responsible and the one that has authority, Jimmy, to have to go under, you know, go into a contract and sell the property.
35:01
SPEAKER_04: How can we position ourselves as a probate specialist in this niche?
35:05
SPEAKER_04: So when everybody else hits up a probate file and says, hey man, I can buy your house, I can list your house.
35:12
SPEAKER_04: We're not talking about the property.
35:14
SPEAKER_04: We're like, hey, Jimmy, I realize you're going through um this Jackson family estate, and I I believe you're the PR.
35:22
SPEAKER_04: I just want to let you know I'm so sorry that you're going through this.
35:24
SPEAKER_04: Um, I actually specialize in probate.
35:27
SPEAKER_04: I know all the ins and outs in you know, Arlington County, Virginia, where we operate.
35:32
SPEAKER_04: Um there's gonna be a lot of moving parts.
35:35
SPEAKER_04: Can I send you this checklist?
35:37
SPEAKER_04: It's it's called like the probate minor.
35:39
SPEAKER_04: There's just gonna be a lot of people, a lot of dates to track, a lot of this, a lot of that.
35:43
SPEAKER_04: Would that be helpful?
35:44
SPEAKER_04: So instead of focusing on the property element, you're focusing on the probate element.
35:49
SPEAKER_03: Right.
35:49
SPEAKER_04: And I'll tell you this there's a really good reason for this.
35:52
SPEAKER_04: Not only are you providing value, if you don't think you're providing value to the PR, then this is not the niche that you should get into.
35:59
SPEAKER_04: You have to really believe that you're providing value just like you do to a homeowner when you're selling their house or you're buying their house from them.
36:08
SPEAKER_04: If your exit strategy is say wholesaling, right?
36:12
SPEAKER_04: Or buying and flipping, you're an investor, I'll I'll paint two scenarios and you can kind of come to your own conclusion and and give me the answer.
36:20
SPEAKER_04: But scenario A.
36:22
SPEAKER_04: Hey Jimmy, you're the PR for the Jackson family estate.
36:26
SPEAKER_04: I'll buy 10 Main Street from you for 250.
36:29
SPEAKER_04: You agree?
36:29
SPEAKER_04: Cool.
36:30
SPEAKER_04: All right, let me know when like you're you can do it.
36:33
SPEAKER_04: Like with I know it's in probate, but let me know when you're ready.
36:36
SPEAKER_04: Talk to you later.
36:37
SPEAKER_04: And then you're checking in.
36:38
SPEAKER_04: Hey Jimmy, you ready?
36:39
SPEAKER_04: Oh no, I can't figure it out.
36:40
SPEAKER_04: Hey Jimmy, you ready?
36:41
SPEAKER_04: Oh no, well, this got pushed.
36:42
SPEAKER_04: Hey Jimmy, are you ready?
36:43
SPEAKER_04: No, and then you have no freaking clue if that's ever gonna change, right?
36:46
SPEAKER_04: And we bucketed projected revenue, pending revenue, and closed revenue.
36:51
SPEAKER_04: Projected meaning we have a contract, but it hasn't yet gone into escrow or found the buyer or the end buyer or whatever.
36:58
SPEAKER_04: So we wanted to move that projected to pending to close because that's how you get revenue.
37:02
SPEAKER_04: So that's scenario A.
37:04
SPEAKER_04: I'll buy your house, let me know when you're ready to sell.
37:07
SPEAKER_04: Scenario B, hey, I can actually bring in my probate attorney.
37:12
SPEAKER_04: His firm does 98% probate, so they're very well nuanced in everything that could potentially happen.
37:18
SPEAKER_04: By the way, he'll work for free.
37:20
SPEAKER_04: He or she will work for free and then get paid on the back end, but they will help expedite this process.
37:24
SPEAKER_04: Oh, by the way, do you have your letters testamentary yet or your letters of administration?
37:29
SPEAKER_04: Have you done inventory?
37:30
SPEAKER_04: Have you noticed uh done the notice to creditors?
37:33
SPEAKER_04: Have you notified the heirs and beneficiaries?
37:35
SPEAKER_04: You have your uh family tree.
37:37
SPEAKER_04: Have you done this?
37:38
SPEAKER_04: Have you done that?
37:38
SPEAKER_04: Have you done this?
37:39
SPEAKER_04: Oh, you haven't?
37:40
SPEAKER_04: Okay, here's how you do that.
37:41
SPEAKER_04: Now, instead of me leaving it up to you in that scenario A, scenario B, I have inserted myself into the entire process and helped them expedite it so I can get that projected revenue to pending revenue to closed revenue.
37:55
SPEAKER_04: And I'm not leaving anything to chance.
37:58
SPEAKER_04: I'm gonna bring in who I need to bring in, act as a head coach, just like a you know, we need tall people to rebound at a critical juncture in the game.
38:06
SPEAKER_04: I'm gonna bring in our seven footers.
38:07
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
38:08
SPEAKER_04: When you need something, you want to do an estate sale.
38:10
SPEAKER_04: I have someone who does an estate sale.
38:13
SPEAKER_04: Here, you know, here's an introduction.
38:15
SPEAKER_04: So you're saving them stress, the chaos, the overwhelming feeling, number one.
38:21
SPEAKER_04: But number two, you're legitimately helping them accomplish accomplish the goal that they set out to achieve of liquidating that property, if that is their goal, right?
38:30
SPEAKER_04: In a faster way.
38:32
SPEAKER_04: Because what's gonna happen?
38:34
SPEAKER_04: I sell the average American sells a house or buys a house maybe never in their entire life, or maybe once, right?
38:40
SPEAKER_04: Like on average.
38:42
SPEAKER_04: How many times does an average American do probate that also has to sell a home?
38:47
SPEAKER_04: And they're like Googling, I'm the PR.
38:50
SPEAKER_04: What in the world do I do?
38:51
SPEAKER_04: I'm so scared.
38:52
SPEAKER_04: Like, I don't know.
38:53
SPEAKER_04: All my family's counting on me.
38:54
SPEAKER_04: My brother's, you know, calling me every day saying, I need this money, I need, I need this, like, what are you doing?
39:00
SPEAKER_04: I can't believe it's taking so long.
39:02
SPEAKER_04: But then they get a letter from me that says, Relax, I can help you.
39:06
SPEAKER_04: Here's a timeline, here's this, here's that.
39:09
SPEAKER_04: Let's do this together.
39:10
SPEAKER_04: And then nine other people are just saying, I'll buy your house, I'll buy your house, I'll buy your house.
39:13
SPEAKER_04: But Andrew's the one that said, I'll help you with probate.
39:16
SPEAKER_04: And naturally, the property element of that becomes the secondary, tertiary thing that you're helping them get through.
39:22
SPEAKER_01: Oh man, you're so this is the thing, and I I want everybody to kind of understand where he went here.
39:27
SPEAKER_01: Like, this is providing a level of service too, right?
39:31
SPEAKER_01: Like, this is not just I I'll sell your house, right?
39:34
SPEAKER_01: To your point.
39:34
SPEAKER_01: I can call you, I can say I can sell your house.
39:36
SPEAKER_01: Can I?
39:36
SPEAKER_01: Sure.
39:37
SPEAKER_01: Can anybody come sell their house?
39:39
SPEAKER_01: Sure.
39:39
SPEAKER_01: Any any real estate agent can do the same thing as any other real estate agent that can plant a flag in your front yard and sell your house.
39:44
SPEAKER_01: No big deal.
39:45
SPEAKER_01: Um, but what you're doing is you're providing a service that people need that again, which makes technology, like we spoke a little bit about, is making that worse now because they're not going to Google anymore to look for the information, they're going to ChatGPT.
40:00
SPEAKER_01: And ChatGPT is telling them here, just do this.
40:03
SPEAKER_01: It's not telling them the right things to do, it's just telling them what ChatGPT thinks is the right thing, right?
40:08
SPEAKER_01: And so it makes it worse because now they're getting wrong information faster.
40:12
SPEAKER_01: You know, and what you're doing with this probate engineers is you're leveling up the agent because this is what it really is about.
40:19
SPEAKER_01: The agent is now leveled up because now I can come in and speak to you and I can talk to you about getting this attorney involved, and I can get you to this attorney, and I can get your things sold and do whatever.
40:29
SPEAKER_01: But instead of going, call me back in two weeks, I'll talk to you then.
40:32
SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
40:33
SPEAKER_04: Hey, how's probate coming?
40:35
SPEAKER_04: Oh, I haven't even done X, Y, and Z.
40:37
SPEAKER_04: And there's very subtle nuances that you have to know.
40:41
SPEAKER_04: I'll mention one, like notice to creditors is a timeline where you have to notify them certain way which ways, and that starts a clock.
40:49
SPEAKER_04: So if you don't start that for six months and it's a four-month window, that's four months, ten months, ten months now, yeah.
40:57
SPEAKER_04: Because you didn't know what to do, and it's not their fault.
41:00
SPEAKER_04: No, like I didn't know anything about probate when I first started started getting into probate, but we just started getting uh it just happened by chance that we would get probate leads, and they were like, another one, like what wait, what is this?
41:12
SPEAKER_04: Like, I know probate's when someone passes away, but like how can we get even better?
41:17
SPEAKER_04: So, long story short, there is instead of broadening our skill set across 50 different lead sources and having to you know bounce back and forth, we decided to go all in on a handful, get really, really good.
41:31
SPEAKER_04: And for the probate engineer stuff, I teach the A to Z, basically my playbook of probates.
41:39
SPEAKER_04: So, how to set up a probate department to turn on that seven-figure single line of revenue source, lead source, into an operation.
41:48
SPEAKER_04: Um the uh there's two things here.
41:51
SPEAKER_04: It's fortunate and unfortunate at the same time.
41:54
SPEAKER_04: It's unfortunate because obviously when a probate case opens, somebody had to pass away, Jimmy.
42:00
SPEAKER_04: But it's fortunate because probates come out every day.
42:04
SPEAKER_03: Yep.
42:05
SPEAKER_04: If you figure out how to go directly to the horse's mouth or the source of truth and pull them yourselves, stop being dependent on list service providers, uh, playbook that, make it insanely efficient and effective, pull those every day, hit them two, three, four, six weeks prior to all the aggregate lead source people who pay for that with a different line of messaging.
42:30
SPEAKER_04: That is how you're gonna start to get the reputation of the probate specialist.
42:34
SPEAKER_04: And you're gonna start closing deals and talking to people weeks before everyone else who just bought the list starts hitting them up.
42:41
SPEAKER_04: Right.
42:42
SPEAKER_04: And then the people who buy the list are gonna be like, Man, none of all these probate things are already under contract.
42:47
SPEAKER_04: Like, what's happening?
42:48
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so that's another thing that we got really good at is we said, hell no, we're not gonna ever for for as much as we can, we're not gonna ever be dependent on the lead source provider.
43:00
SPEAKER_04: We're gonna own our own lead source.
43:02
SPEAKER_04: So we paid for PPC once upon a time, but then we just started doing our own PPC and we controlled that and we got really good at PPC like we did for probate.
43:11
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, we bought probate lists once upon a time, but then we found our own and we optimized those probate lists, and we had runners going to the courthouses, we had VAs pulling the online portals, all on a playbook, the same thing over and over, and then we hit them with different messaging, and that's how we turn that into an operation.
43:29
SPEAKER_04: And the exciting thing is once you know your numbers per county, because in America there's about 3,200 different counties, each county does it a little bit different.
43:39
SPEAKER_04: Generally it's the same, but a little, you know, little nuances here and there with what has to happen.
43:44
SPEAKER_04: But you franchise it in one county, you create that framework, and then you say, Okay, I now know that in Arlington County, 46.7 probate case files come out every week, about 200 a month of those.
43:59
SPEAKER_04: Then you start doing percentages, set appointment, eld appointment, sign, close, revenue.
44:04
SPEAKER_04: Okay, I know that 200 come out, we're closing five a month, and we're making$22,500.
44:12
SPEAKER_04: So this is$100K just in Arlington.
44:15
SPEAKER_04: Well, I can't create these new files.
44:18
SPEAKER_04: Now let's go to Fairfax County, do the exact same thing.
44:21
SPEAKER_04: Now let's go to City of Alexandria, adjacent to Arlington County, do the same thing.
44:26
SPEAKER_04: Aggregate the probate department to say writ large, we're doing X, but each individual county is producing YXZ or whatever it is.
44:34
SPEAKER_01: Right.
44:35
SPEAKER_04: Now, why don't we go to Virginia statewide and learn virtual wholesaling?
44:39
SPEAKER_04: Now we're getting another exit strategy skill set under our Neurobelt instead of going to Chase the next shining lead object.
44:45
SPEAKER_04: So that's what our approach was, and that's what we teach.
44:49
SPEAKER_01: Man, there's a lot to unpack there.
44:52
SPEAKER_01: There is.
44:53
SPEAKER_01: But it's it's so good.
44:55
SPEAKER_01: But again, it goes it goes back to the basics, the playbook, right?
44:58
SPEAKER_01: The process, the streamlined of that, um, those things.
45:01
SPEAKER_01: And um it's uh what everybody wants to know what your Instagram is.
45:07
SPEAKER_01: Um, but we'll get we'll get to all his information.
45:09
SPEAKER_01: Um, but yeah, the the idea of this probate plan, it it was it just strictly you found out this, you just saw this little niche and were like, or did you do a couple probate deals and then figure out like, all right, I have to figure this thing out?
45:22
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it was the um I think I mentioned this earlier, but I knew about probate, but I didn't know about probate.
45:28
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
45:28
SPEAKER_04: We kept seeing probates because we also another you know rabbit hole conversation we can go down is list stacking probates to even further strategize and optimize which ones we would even try to get, like above seven figures on five or more lists.
45:46
SPEAKER_04: That's when we got really dialed in.
45:48
SPEAKER_04: But to answer your question, we started doing deals and we list stacked, we had list stack um software.
45:54
SPEAKER_04: Now we we have our own version of it, but we're like, man, probate, man, another probate.
45:59
SPEAKER_04: Like this is really weird.
46:00
SPEAKER_04: And this was not in real time at the at this point.
46:02
SPEAKER_04: This was in a spreadsheet where we had a VA kind of put together what closed and where the lead sources and what list they were on, right?
46:10
SPEAKER_04: And it was like highlight probate, probate, probate.
46:12
SPEAKER_04: We're like, what the heck?
46:13
SPEAKER_04: Like, why don't we try to figure this out?
46:15
SPEAKER_04: Because there's something to this.
46:17
SPEAKER_04: And then we figured out over time this is a gold mine of leads coming out every day.
46:25
SPEAKER_04: Legal process of most of the time there's property that needs to get liquidated and they have no emotional tie to the property, and they had to do it within a time frame.
46:39
SPEAKER_04: That is like those are three crucial uh data points to be going after, right?
46:47
SPEAKER_04: As a lead source to say, hey, I I as a real estate professional need someone who's motivated.
46:52
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, they're they don't even care about the property sometimes.
46:55
SPEAKER_04: Sometimes obviously they do, but most of the time they're like, I can't.
46:58
SPEAKER_04: I live in California.
46:59
SPEAKER_04: Can you be my boots in the ground in DC?
47:02
SPEAKER_04: Like, I don't want to fly across the country.
47:04
SPEAKER_04: Oh, by the way, I can't afford the house that I'm responsible for.
47:08
SPEAKER_04: I need to liquidate it to satisfy the debts, to pay off the collectors, and then distribute to heirs and beneficiaries.
47:14
SPEAKER_04: So there was like a built-in urgent motivation, period.
47:20
SPEAKER_04: And we're like, why are we messing with like this lead source or that lead source or doing like when they're not even motivated and we're trying to like talk them into it?
47:29
SPEAKER_03: Right.
47:30
SPEAKER_04: So we said, again, what's our 8020?
47:33
SPEAKER_04: Probate was up there, and we we just went all in and never looked back.
47:37
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
47:38
SPEAKER_01: Now, for everybody else, I want you to explain what you that 8020.
47:42
SPEAKER_01: Like, what are you looking at for that?
47:43
SPEAKER_04: So 8020 Paretto principle.
47:46
SPEAKER_04: Um, I forget the dude's first name, but somebody Paretto came up with this way back in the day.
47:51
SPEAKER_04: And it's basically 80% of your output, or in this case, let's say closed transactions comes from 20% of your efforts.
47:57
SPEAKER_04: So in this case, it was 20% of our lead sources were producing the bulk or majority of our revenue.
48:04
SPEAKER_04: So as we started to collect this data and actually looked at facts and not just like my gut feeling, I think Zillow's doing really good.
48:13
SPEAKER_04: Well, is it?
48:13
SPEAKER_04: I don't know.
48:14
SPEAKER_04: I think probates are doing really good.
48:16
SPEAKER_04: It was like, no, probates, we've closed 40 of them this year.
48:20
SPEAKER_04: We brought in 800K in gross revenue year to date.
48:25
SPEAKER_04: It is actually producing revenue.
48:27
SPEAKER_04: Why don't we look at this?
48:28
SPEAKER_04: So it's we went from I don't even know how many at the peak, but 75, 100 lead sources.
48:35
SPEAKER_04: The list just kept going on and on and on and getting bigger and bigger, and got rid of all that noise and said, What are the 20% of lead sources that produce 80%?
48:45
SPEAKER_04: Let's just focus on that.
48:46
SPEAKER_04: So it made our lives a little bit easier too, Jimmy, by not having to manage 50 lead sources or even 40 lead sources or even 30.
48:53
SPEAKER_04: Now we just quietly manage about five to 10.
48:57
SPEAKER_04: But the top five, like I mentioned before, were PR PPC joint venture probate.
49:02
SPEAKER_04: We had a letter and a postcard campaign that we do on repeat and a few other ones that do produce, but not as often that we just keep to keep.
49:11
SPEAKER_04: So you know, one of those closes that keeps our light on, lights on for the next six months, kind of thing.
49:16
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
49:17
SPEAKER_04: Probates were in that 80-20.
49:19
SPEAKER_01: I love it.
49:20
SPEAKER_01: And again, because it's you dialed into your numbers so so well and found out what works, what doesn't work, got rid of the stuff that doesn't work, honed in on the stuff that does, and built processes and workbooks and uh a thing around it.
49:33
SPEAKER_01: So now literally anybody can pick it up and run with it.
49:36
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, and now flash forward to 2026.
49:39
SPEAKER_04: Now we're building agents to do stuff even better and more efficient, 24-7, 365.
49:45
SPEAKER_04: So I'll give you one example of that.
49:47
SPEAKER_04: In probate, if you're thinking about getting into probate, control the source.
49:52
SPEAKER_04: We call them day one probates in the probate engineers.
49:54
SPEAKER_04: So don't buy a list, control the source.
49:57
SPEAKER_04: If you're lucky, you can pull them online.
49:59
SPEAKER_04: We're creating agents that every 15 minutes will go into County XYZ, read through all the files in a matter of 30 seconds, pull and extract the four key pieces of information you need to market to it effectively and efficiently, organize it in a spreadsheet, skip trace it, get phone numbers, get emails, organize it and get a phone number.
50:21
SPEAKER_04: Because we track, we can talk about this too if you'd like, we track each campaign with an individual unique phone number for organizational purposes that feed right into our CRM as probate April kind of thing.
50:32
SPEAKER_04: And then it also sends it to our direct mailhouse company.
50:36
SPEAKER_04: I don't do anything.
50:37
SPEAKER_04: Like that is what we're building right now.
50:38
SPEAKER_04: So eventually we'll hit go and then I'm just gonna get phone calls.
50:42
SPEAKER_04: It'll say probate April.
50:44
SPEAKER_04: And I'm by the way, at 8 a.m.
50:46
SPEAKER_04: our telegram daily intelligence brief will say, Hey Jimmy, last night I pulled 58 new Arlington County probate leads.
50:53
SPEAKER_04: Here's the new phone number, plug it in your phone, have a great day automatically for you.
50:58
SPEAKER_04: Crazy and then you get a phone call.
51:00
SPEAKER_04: What we do, Jimmy, is instead of having our phones ring and have like your name, we do a tracking ID number.
51:07
SPEAKER_04: So as if probate April uh mail uh was like a person, right?
51:13
SPEAKER_04: We have it come into our phone as probate April 2026 or however you want to organize yourself.
51:19
SPEAKER_04: So I know it's a business call, it's a different ringtone.
51:22
SPEAKER_04: It automatically gets recorded the call, it gets put into our CRM.
51:26
SPEAKER_04: If you exist in our CRM, it'll add the recording and the call summary with AI summary notes to that lead profile.
51:32
SPEAKER_04: If you don't exist, it'll add you as a lead profile.
51:35
SPEAKER_04: It'll email me new seller lead Jimmy, whatever.
51:38
SPEAKER_04: Here's the recording, click here.
51:39
SPEAKER_04: Now boom, your entire team knows what's up and you're working it.
51:43
SPEAKER_04: That's the efficiency level that we're gonna use to beat out everyone else and get get to those leads better and faster and more efficiently.
51:51
SPEAKER_01: And you the other piece to that too is not only are is that the efficiency you're getting all the information about, but but you also have your agents trained up on probate.
51:59
SPEAKER_01: So when they do call in, you they have or they have a conversation about not just you want me to come over and list your house.
52:04
SPEAKER_01: It's like, have you talked to the attorney?
52:05
SPEAKER_01: Did you get this document?
52:06
SPEAKER_01: Do you have this?
52:07
SPEAKER_04: Like, yeah, here's another thing I'll add.
52:09
SPEAKER_04: So not all agents and not all team members are created equally, also or as well.
52:14
SPEAKER_04: So we also track in our data who is better with buyers, who is better with sellers, who's better with wholesalers by lead source.
52:23
SPEAKER_04: Who's the best PPC guy?
52:25
SPEAKER_04: PPC are expensive, dude.
52:27
SPEAKER_04: They're in the DC market, we're paying 200, 280, depending on the competition level at any given point.
52:32
SPEAKER_04: But it's call it$300 per getting someone's information, not even talking to them, right?
52:38
SPEAKER_04: So we don't give that to everyone.
52:39
SPEAKER_01: And hopefully it's the right information.
52:41
SPEAKER_04: We say, yeah, exactly.
52:43
SPEAKER_04: But it is doing PPC and our marketing budget injustice if I say anyone on the team can work PPC.
52:52
SPEAKER_04: Well, what about me?
52:53
SPEAKER_04: Who I've done one deal this year, I don't have a good work ethic, and I answer one of those phone calls and I have no clue what I'm doing.
53:01
SPEAKER_04: I just lost a lot of money.
53:03
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
53:04
SPEAKER_04: So we look at that data and say, Andrew and Jimmy, you're the top two team members who have closed PPC deals.
53:12
SPEAKER_04: You brought in Jimmy, 475k.
53:16
SPEAKER_04: Andrew, 375k.
53:18
SPEAKER_04: You're the only two people on the team that are gonna get PPC leads.
53:20
SPEAKER_04: How about that?
53:21
SPEAKER_04: Just get really good at PPC leads.
53:23
SPEAKER_04: Same thing for probate.
53:25
SPEAKER_04: Who's the best at having these conversations?
53:27
SPEAKER_04: Our appointment setters, we don't let everybody talk to probate leads.
53:32
SPEAKER_04: We let our top two people and we let our top two people answer the PPC phone calls as well.
53:39
SPEAKER_04: Not all lead sources are created equal, not all team members are created equal.
53:42
SPEAKER_04: It's a competition.
53:43
SPEAKER_04: You have to prove that you can convert to bring in money.
53:47
SPEAKER_04: If you do, you get the best lead sources, if you don't, you have to work your way up and convert on your own to get your your conversion rates high enough for the team to trust you with this level of important lead source.
53:58
SPEAKER_04: So keep that in mind as well.
54:01
SPEAKER_04: Uh, you do not buy lead source, you want to really think about who's the best person on the team to convert at the highest potential level to bring in money and bring in revenue.
54:13
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and again, you're making the job so much easier for the agent because it's something they they like and know like they like they obviously like it if they know that much about it.
54:20
SPEAKER_01: If they're converting it at a high level, they like it.
54:23
SPEAKER_01: Because if they didn't like it, they wouldn't be converting it at a high level.
54:26
SPEAKER_01: We already know that part, right?
54:27
SPEAKER_01: That mental hurdle.
54:29
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, all that stuff.
54:30
SPEAKER_04: I'll tell you the opposite.
54:31
SPEAKER_04: So we used to do a, I won't name it, but we did a lead source.
54:34
SPEAKER_04: We got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of leads.
54:36
SPEAKER_04: We're like, oh man, this is awesome.
54:38
SPEAKER_04: Each lead is six bucks, we're gonna kill it.
54:40
SPEAKER_04: Our ISAs were like, we can never get people to answer.
54:44
SPEAKER_04: Those that do have no clue, they never submitted anything.
54:48
SPEAKER_04: Those appointments that we even set, we have to sift through thousands of leads to get maybe one appointment that our agents didn't even want to go on.
54:55
SPEAKER_03: Yep.
54:55
SPEAKER_04: We're like, why in the world are we even doing this?
54:58
SPEAKER_04: Because it's a six dollar lead.
54:59
SPEAKER_04: I'd rather pay ten thousand dollars a lead, honestly.
55:02
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, if I know my average assignment fee is thirty thousand dollars, that's a an extreme, right?
55:08
SPEAKER_04: But I'd rather work less higher quality leads than sift through the garbage because it's gonna kill your morale, no one's gonna trust it, and it's gonna lead to burnout, and people are gonna dip and go do something.
55:19
SPEAKER_01: Or I'll just you know, I can go back to calling expireds and visbos, you know what I mean?
55:23
SPEAKER_01: Like that's the same deal.
55:24
SPEAKER_01: If I'm not but and I I probably on the expired and visbo side, I probably get better information than that lead source you were talking about.
55:31
SPEAKER_04: Dude, you know that they were at one point willing to sell their property because it was online and on the market.
55:36
SPEAKER_01: Yep, exactly, exactly.
55:38
SPEAKER_01: So it's interesting, man.
55:40
SPEAKER_01: And um, we got about five minutes left.
55:42
SPEAKER_01: So where can everybody find you?
55:45
SPEAKER_04: The easiest right now is my handle.
55:47
SPEAKER_04: Here's another playbook uh strategy.
55:50
SPEAKER_04: My handle across every single social platform is I am Andrew Becker.
55:55
SPEAKER_04: It's the same across the board.
55:57
SPEAKER_04: So I am very active the most on Instagram and Facebook, um, but I'm also on LinkedIn, we're on X, we're on um, you know, all the social platforms.
56:07
SPEAKER_04: But reach out if you're interested in chatting.
56:10
SPEAKER_04: Um and I will I'll make time for you.
56:15
SPEAKER_01: Oh, I love it, man.
56:16
SPEAKER_01: I love it, I love it.
56:18
SPEAKER_01: I love it, I love it.
56:19
SPEAKER_01: And uh again, I appreciate you coming on, sharing all this information.
56:22
SPEAKER_01: I know everybody got a lot out of it.
56:24
SPEAKER_01: Um Jen just said this is a this is amazing, so glad I can what can watch a replay.
56:29
SPEAKER_01: So so you're gonna have some stalkers, my man.
56:32
SPEAKER_01: I uh we'll see what happens out there.
56:35
SPEAKER_01: Um but it's uh this is amazing because I think what you're doing is you're helping people streamline their business and taking it to another level just by doing the things they're doing already, but they're just doing it more efficiently.
56:51
SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
56:51
SPEAKER_01: Like I if I you know we I know people that were on the call that do a lot of probate.
56:55
SPEAKER_01: You know, Al Adala was on here and uh and he just dropped off, but and I know he does a lot of probate.
57:00
SPEAKER_01: You're helping people do something they're already doing, but taking it to a next level, and I appreciate you for doing that, my man.
57:07
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
57:07
SPEAKER_04: If you put in the effort to do that and you don't quit and you don't give up, there's no reason you won't be successful as well.
57:14
SPEAKER_04: Doesn't even have to be about probate or PPC, right?
57:17
SPEAKER_04: Just any lead source.
57:18
SPEAKER_04: Any but efficiency in business operations is doing predictable, repeatable, boring stuff over and over again so you can focus on the business and not in the business.
57:28
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
57:29
SPEAKER_01: Focus on the right.
57:30
SPEAKER_01: Oh man.
57:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we got to get you back on, and then uh we're we're gonna cross pawn it because what's your podcast too?
57:36
SPEAKER_04: I have a podcast and uh uh I'm happy to on it.
57:40
SPEAKER_04: I apologize for not feeling well enough.
57:41
SPEAKER_04: Oh no, man, you're good.
57:42
SPEAKER_04: You get but uh it's the Team Lead Talks podcast.
57:45
SPEAKER_04: Okay.
57:45
SPEAKER_04: Um, like the name ensues, I interview team leaders across the world now where we've gone international, Jimmy.
57:52
SPEAKER_04: We just uh we went into Europe and UK and Mexico and Canada, so that's pretty cool.
57:58
SPEAKER_04: Um, but I interview people and talk to them about their real estate journey and their problems and how they solved them.
58:04
SPEAKER_04: The the key there is if we can, you know, if anybody listening to our podcast can take away just one thing that will better their life, their community, or their business, then we've achieved our goals.
58:15
SPEAKER_04: Um, so that's uh that's the team lead pop the team lead talks podcast.
58:20
SPEAKER_01: I love it.
58:20
SPEAKER_01: I love it.
58:21
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I can't wait to get us some time on there um and uh and get together.
58:24
SPEAKER_01: But I, you know, we'll I put all those in the chat so everybody can see those.
58:27
SPEAKER_01: Um where to find my man Andrew Becker at.
58:30
SPEAKER_01: And you and I need to stay close because again, this coaching training stuff, man, I think is uh what you're building.
58:35
SPEAKER_01: I think is we I think we're doing a lot of similar things, so why not see who we can how we can again leverage each other and do some better things for each other.
58:41
SPEAKER_04: Love to collaborate with you, man, like we talked about at the beginning.
58:44
SPEAKER_04: Let's collaborate and do fun stuff together.
58:47
SPEAKER_04: So uh I'm open to any and all uh, you know, in that and and excited to see where that conversation can take us to.
58:54
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, man, for sure.
58:55
SPEAKER_01: For sure.
58:56
SPEAKER_01: So all right, guys, I appreciate you coming on, my friend.
58:59
SPEAKER_01: Thank you very much for joining us again, the Elite Real Estate Podcast, Elite Edge Network.
59:03
SPEAKER_01: Go find out, go look at eliteedge network.com, look at all your coaching and uh coaching platform and go from there.
59:09
SPEAKER_01: The elite real estate podcast, like, follow us, look at the Instagram on uh YouTube is the Elite Elite Edge Network.
59:15
SPEAKER_01: So, all right, guys, Andrew, thanks for joining me, my friend.
59:17
SPEAKER_01: Guys, I'll see you next week.
59:21
SPEAKER_00: Don't faster, no time, it's gotta take.
59:24
SPEAKER_00: The lead for climate state will work and follow the dreams we keep and sharing, collaborating, making the mark, light lights in our eyes, night is far.