Make your Real Estate Agents Successful

Find out what actually makes your agent successful and then weave that into your onboarding, your recruiting and your systems and benchmarks of your real estate team. When I did this, I was amazed at how big of an impact it made across the entire company. When I made this change originally, we took the company since then. We have doubled the company from a revenue standpoint from agent activation, all metrics were up since we did this. So in this episode, I'm going to talk about activating the agents. How do you activate them on purpose versus it just happening on accident? And this podcast is specifically for team leaders, broker owners, who are looking to grow their business faster and more profitably. And I share this and this is kind of my process of sharing what we're doing with our company from start to finish. If you want to see the closest possible look at this, you can join our community to be have. There's a ton of information in there, but you can go to onuxhomes.com/school. It'll be in the description. And anywhere else, it'll be easy to see onuxhomes.com/school. Now let's dive into the episode. So the first thing that I'm going to talk about is what is agent activation. So the whole concept here is there are things that make your agent successful. And early on, I thought our agents were successful because we were just so wonderful. And that might be true in the very beginning when you have a very small group of agents and the only ones that can survive are the ones that they are actually the reason that they're successful. They're not, they're successful because of you to some extent, you as the team leader, but they're successful because they work hard. They do what they're supposed to do and they listen to your advice. Now as you grow larger, you're going to realize that there are two totally different types of agents. They're the agents that are going to be successful no matter what. And on the other side of that, they're agents that are only successful because they're in a environment that makes them successful. And then there's agents that are just not going to do the work that needs to be done and they won't be successful, right? Those are the kind of three different camps. So this idea around activation is, and I have a simple framework that I'm going to walk through what we do and we constantly do this with their team. So let's talk about activation first. Then I'm going to go into the framework and then I'm going to talk and I'll loop in some stories of how we are literally just right now doing this with our team, which is why we're talking about it today. So again, originally, early with the team, we just, we thought agents on our team were just successful because we were so wonderful. And the reason we felt like that was because every agent that joined us was doing very well. And as the company grew, this is about the 12-ish agent mark, 10 to 12 agents. Then we started realizing, hey, wait a second, we're not that wonderful because not everybody is successful. And we blame the agents and all that. But once you get past that and you realize that we need to find out what made the successful agent successful so that we can replicate that over and over and over. And that's what activation is. You find the one, two, three, five points, whatever it is that had to happen in order for that agent to become successful. And I have a lot of real life examples that I'm going to share with you here, but I want to explain what is activation activation is making the things happen that create success, making that happen on purpose versus that just happening by accident. When I say we just felt like we were so wonderful, I say that jokingly in the sense of we kind of did feel like that, but there were things we were doing that were creating successful agents. We were just doing it by accident, not on purpose. And we want to make it on purpose so that it happens more often to make more agent successful as they sell more, make more money and your team grows faster or profitable. Okay, so this is the whole concept of activation. Now the, the, here's the framework. Now in the beginning, usually most small teams, it'll, all these things will happen, but they will happen by accident. So here's the exact framework that we have used that we use right now to make sure that we're doing this on purpose. It's very simple as three steps. And I'm going to walk, I'll explain each one, or I'll say what they are, and then I'm going to go way more into detail for each one. So step number one is that you want to take all of your agents and write down what makes them successful. So if you have 10 or 150, whatever, you take each of your agents and you write down like one or two bullet points of what, why that person is successful. Everybody has a different definition of success. I would literally just write down the agents that are selling, right? If they are selling, if you have agents on a team that aren't selling anything, don't, don't use them as examples. But if you have an agent that you know is going to sell something, maybe they just joined, you can include them in a, in, in, we'll talk about more of that in a minute. But write down the bullet, the two to three bullet points maximum, like one to two really, for each agent of why they're successful. Just drop a go, like an Excel spreadsheet, write their name, call them next to it, just put the reason. And then if you want a second reason, do the next call, whatever, but how have you want to do this? So document each of your agents and why they're successful. That is step number one. Step number two is you look at all of the answers and you figure out what do they have in common. Now you might have, let's say you have 20 agents on your team, you might have written down 35 different things that make all of those, like the different bullet points of why agents are successful. But I would venture to say there's probably five to 10 that all of them have in common, probably closer to five. And what you'll see is wait a second, all of our successful agents or almost all of our successful agents, they all do these five things. And that is what you're looking for. You're looking for those five things. You're not looking for the outliers here or there. You want the thing that every single one of your agents do makes them successful. And we'll be every single one most likely, but it'll be most. Now number three is you're going to really build your, your recruiting, your onboarding in your, I'll say retention, which is like your benchmarks and standards all around these different numbers. Okay. Now the, the bonus step is what act to this is step number four is the bonus is what activities are keeping your bottom performers. This is where you look at the ones that aren't selling. You also do the same practice, but you with the ones that aren't selling or aren't successful by your definition, you want to document what keeps them at the bottom. And then one or two below points each. And then what you do with this one is you will actually, this will be your, how you get fired benchmarks, the kind of the opposite of what you want, right? If you see these red flags, this is how agents get removed from your company or team, whatever. Okay. So that's that into each of these individually and I will share how we just did this. Let me start with that story is we feel like we have a very solid onboarding process. We have, and if I was to compare to other teams in the industry that I know of, I would say we're in the, like we have a very good onboarding process for our agents and it does a very good job of making agents successful. So I would say ours is five to 10 times better than the average for most teams before we'd made any changes. Okay. And I want to make that point clear. Before we made any changes, we felt like our onboarding experience was probably five to 10 times better than most teams out there, like the average. So we have a better onboarding experience. Our agents that join our team are more successful more often and part of it's because of our onboarding process. Now when we looked at our onboarding process and we said, Hey, we're growing the company. We do have more agents coming on. How can we make the onboarding process make our agents more successful faster? This is the process that we followed. So step number one is we looked at every agent on the team and we said, Why are these agents successful? And then what we found was there's really only a handful of things for us. They, we use follow up boss was tracks their productivity, all of their activities phone calls, emails, text messages, appointments, all that. And what we found was all of all of them, all of the agents that are successful for us hit 20,000 points every single month, which that number doesn't mean anything. But we were able to measure that all of the successful agents hit 20,000 points a month. We were also able to measure that all of the successful agents generated a certain number of leads, right? Or like more than a certain number of leads that number is irrelevant. So I won't share it. We also found that almost all of the agents that are successful show up to company events, meetings, all of that stuff, not every training. It was more for us the successful agent show up to our team meeting. The, and that is something that almost all have in common with the exception of maybe one or two. So these three things. I'll just use those as examples. We found, well, let me, let me give another one. This is more on the line of onboarding. But we found that for an agent to be successful in like, let's talk about onboarding within the first 90 days, we usually have a very good idea, which is why our probation periods 90 days, but we have a very good idea of an agent's going to be successful or not within that time frame. Then we asked ourselves why or what are the green flags that, hey, early indicators, we know this agent's going to be successful. Well for us, a huge part of it is that they actually know how to use the CRM. So we can, we can find out in the first week or two weeks that if they don't know how to use the CRM right off the bat, there's a very high likelihood that it's going to take them a really long time to learn it. It's because they didn't take it very serious in the onboarding, maybe they're not very tech-enabled, whatever it might be. But frankly, if an agent on our team doesn't know how to use the CRM, there's no chance they're successful. So we underline that. If I'm taking notes for myself, we underline that as a a huge activation point was making sure that the agents know how to use follow up boss. Okay, that's number one. Activation point number two was the hitting the certain amount of points that if for like a certain amount of overall activity for you, it might be phone calls, it might be doors knocked. I don't know, but for us, it was points. And then the other thing might be that they generate a certain number of leads, right? So maybe we have these three major things that are huge activation points for our team. And the fourth thing is that they actually show up to our team meeting. So in here, and when I say actually show up, let me preface that by saying we have like at 80 to 90% attendance rate to our team meetings every single week in person only. So that is a huge point for us. And I'll say they actually show up, but meaning that that is a big one. If they don't show up huge red flag. So okay, if those are our four major points, the question is, how do we layer this in? Okay. So all the different things now in our onboarding process, we can actually go in and make sure these four things are happening. So number one, how do we make sure that people know how to use this year? Well, in our onboarding process, what we added, this was new to the onboarding process, was we did a off boarding to the onboarding, if that makes any sense. What we call us onboarding one call, we added two calls with our admin after onboarding. The first one is, hey, what was your feedback of the university so that we can make it better. And second, number two, what do you feel like you don't understand? And we don't sit there and train them on the things they don't understand. We give them the resources so that they can go back and relearn. And a lot of the times it was CRM, they felt somewhat comfortable, but not really. Maybe they didn't really understand how important it is to know the CRM through and through while getting started. So we send them some resources. That's number one. Number two is we actually added to the onboarding process, right after that onboarding call, part of that is setting the expectation for the next seven days. Because what we found was we wanted to kind of break and find out what they don't understand with the CRM right away. So what we did was we put it very simply, we reassigned them leads so that they had a certain massive leads in their database to start using the CRM with. We also added them to new inbound lead sources so that they got used to claiming new leads, picking up the phone, responding within five minutes, all of the different things that also create successful agents. And then we put a seven day game plan that I put together that said, hey, on day one, do this day to do this. And we email that game like what here's what to do today, every single day for the first seven days. So in the whole reason we do all of this is to activate them on knowing how to use the CRM. Because the number one thing was we have to make sure they know how to use it. We also want to see that they're actually willing to work, right? If you're sending new leads to a brand new agent and they're not claiming them, they're not doing whatever they're not using the CRM correctly, huge red flag. So all of these things and on the onboarding call number two, this is really where we're screened. This is after the seven days. This is really where we're screening for, okay, now that you've had leads, you've filtered some new leads through the system. We follow in the sales process, which leads me to another point is what now do you not understand? So we want to kind of break it in the first seven days so that we can make sure within the first month for sure, but really within the first two or three weeks that they really know how to use the CRM. So that is one of our major activation points. So again, this is still all under step number one was we found out that the faster they learn the CRM, the faster they can move to be successful. So we made in our onboarding process a huge activation point around using this year and correctly. Now on top of this kind of a pro tip, on top of this, we want to reward what we want to see. So if we see an agent in the first seven days, they goes through and they hit 5,000 points. And again, if the points are irrelevant, other than that's one of our benchmarks. So because the 20,000 points in a month is our company benchmark because that's something we found years ago is a major activation point of an agent hitting 20,000 points in a month. We said, Hey, why don't we reward them after seven days? So if an agent goes through that seven day kind of boot camp, if you will, of learning the CRM, they hit 5,000 points. Boom, we automatically give them a fun little bonus. Maybe it's swag. Maybe it's a gift card. Maybe it's marketing dollars. Whatever it is, give them, Hey, awesome job. Your goal was to hit 5,000 points. You hit 5,200 points. You did the thing. They've activated huge bonus. Give them a reward and then set next steps for what it looks like to move forward, meaning that congratulations. You hit your benchmarks. Now we're going to get you on more lead flow or new lead flow. We're going to get you on the open house roster. We're going to get you on the whatever your thing is for your team. I'm just sharing what we do, right? That's what we ended up doing. This and we implemented this week. I mean weeks ago. And we've seen a massive, massive uptick on the speed of activation for our agents. And I can guarantee you that's going to lead to them making more money and us making more money overall, which is everybody's goal. So that's one example for activation. The other thing that happens at the same time is what we found that makes our agent successful is that they're willing to follow our proven process and they're willing to put in the work. What I just talked about was they have to know how to use the CRM in order to feel confident using it and doing the work. Now we want to make sure they're actually willing to follow our process. So then what we start to look for is if you are like we have heavy buyer lead flow. So the first activation, another, I should say another activation point. So if you're writing notes for me, I'm not, let me grab my notebook real quick. I am, I'm writing down a huge activation point is for us, number one is FUB. Number two, the next thing is are they actually willing to work, right? So now we have two major activation points literally in the first week. Now the next one is are they willing to follow our sales process? And inside of this first week did they show up to our team meeting, right? Those are the four things that I mentioned. So I have those four notes and that's kind of a sub just the easiest way to do this, pro tip is intro them, make it a big deal and tell them they need to be there. So like remind them. Very simple, very straightforward. And this is the, this is the words that I say everybody shows up to this. Right. That's how we do that. Or like nine to five in the office type team, you don't have to really worry about that so much. But if you're like most teams and you're not that way, this is a big one for us. Okay. So we talked about FUB. We talked about getting into actually work. Now the third thing is we want them to actually follow our sales process. So for us, this is where we have them record themselves doing a buyer strategy session. In order for them to do it and record themselves doing it, they have to know how to do a few different things, right? They have to know how to get on Google meets or zoom, whatever you use, they have to know how to record. They have to know how to do the actual buyer strategy session itself. So we have like a real clear, obviously training around that, but we have like benchmarks around what that's supposed to look like. So that's number one is send us a recording of you doing the buyer strategy session, which means they kind of have to know how at least to do the sales process. And on top of that, we have another. So that's another activation point. Once they do the strategy session, we can say, hey, that's fantastic. Good job. Here's the reward, right? Bench, whether it's marketing dollars, gift card, cash, whatever, more leads, something. There is a activation point there. And if you're catching on to a trend, this is something we learned going to Alex Ramosey's work acquisition.com, the workshops was the faster you can reward the behavior that you want, the more that the more effective it's going to be. So for example, here, if you were training, if you were training a dog and obviously dogs aren't people, but training is very similar. So if you were to train a dog, how to sit and you had a treat in your hand and you asked the dog to sit and he sat. And then an hour later, you give him the treat, there's no way they know what that thing, what that treat was for. The, oh, it was random. Or it was just whatever they had happened to do right before. But if you listen to dog trainers, they say the second that he sits, give him the treat. And you ask him again and you do it repeatedly, repeatedly again and again and again. And at some point, the dog just sits when you say sit, right? But if you, if you waited a month before you gave him the treat, there would be no training happening ever or would take absolutely forever, right? So the faster you can make those feedback loops, the better. So what we do is in the sales process, there's a lot that happens up until by like getting a desk grow. So we want to reward the steps. So the first one is we reward, we reward them doing the buyer strategy session. The next thing we do is this is after we've already rewarded them from actually doing the work that leads to getting a buyer strategy session. But when they do one with a customer and they get a buyer agreement signed, that's another huge activation point. If an agent can get a buyer strategy session done in the second week, then they go out and with the leads that they're getting or whatever, then they get a buyer agreement signed. You can do so the listing agreement to whatever it's the same thing. Then you have another activation point. You want to have a reward cycle there as well too. Let me be clear. When I say reward cycle, our agents get amped over a $25 gas card. They like a $5 the opportunity of it. The biggest thing we give out to our agents for rewards like this is marketing credit. Like $500 marketing credit is like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. And but like $25 gift cards go almost the same distance if you if you know what I'm saying. So the buyer agreement is another reward cycle. Right. And then obviously when they close their first deal, there's another huge reward cycle. That one's pretty standard straight forward as well too. Right. So the major four activation points for us are that they know how to use follow bosses are actually willing to work that they follow our sales process and that they show up to team meetings. They understand they're supposed to do that every single week. Right. Those are four massive activation points for us. So in our onboarding process, all we did was figured out, okay, how do we get them to use follow boss or how do we get them to know how to do it even better faster? How do we get them to actually work more faster? How do we get them to follow our sales process faster? And then how do we get them to make sure that they actually show up to our team meeting? This entire thing is how you implement your activation points. Right. So the process of to figure out the four is the hard part. How do you get somebody to show up to the team meeting? Is easy. You ask them to come. You remind them the day before. Right. You make sure they know where the office is at. They've got the address plugged in right all the stuff. That part's easy. It's figuring out what the activation points are. That is a little bit more difficult. Right. So that's again, where you step number one, you take your list of however many agents you have, remove the ones that aren't doing anything at all. And you look at the ones that are like, I'll say minimally successful, if that makes any sense. And then you look at that and you just write one or two bullet points for each person. And then what you're looking for is not how many bullet points are there, but how many of the same thing are there? So you're going to put tally marks next to the one that has the most. So for us, it was all of our six 100% of our successful agents know how to use follow boss very well. Number two, all of our successful agents actually work and hit the benchmarks. Number three, almost all of our successful agents follow our exact sales process. And then almost all of our successful agents show up to the team meeting every two week. So that's how we found those four activation points. Now, there are other things we would like them to do. Of course, there are, but those are the biggest levers, the most important activation points. So that's how you pick them, how you implement them. What I talked about was implementing it in the onboarding process, right? Now you can also, this is step number three now. So again, step number one is list out what makes a successful agent successful. Number two is to narrow it down to like the two to four things that all of them have in common or most of them have in common. Step number three is to create the benchmarks standards around this. So what I talked about was onboarding the other part of step number three is to create the benchmarks and standards around this. So let me give another story that goes farther back. So if I went back to 2020, the end of 2021, we had no vision, no structure, no, no, like no systems around this or especially around recruiting. And we recruited a lot of agents under the pretense of like, oh, you're 100% guaranteed to be successful here. Obviously, we didn't say that, but it was like, oh, you get up, we do all this for you. It was a big sales pitch. And we recruited a lot of agents. And no, go figure. We recruited a lot of agents that were lazy, wanted just deals handed to them, weren't willing to work, weren't full time, all the things, right? It was lovely. It was horrible. And what ended up happening was we did this exercise the first time where we looked at, okay, we have 45 agents on the team, something like that. And like 12 are successful. It's like, okay, well, what are the 12 all doing? They all hit 20,000 points. They all know how to use follow-up boss. They all show up. Okay, cool. And those were the, that was the three things at the time. So what we did is we implemented standards at this point. And we just said, hey guys, as I literally stood up in front of the team in a team meeting. And I said, hey guys, I screwed up. We're we screwed up. What we're doing is not working for most of us in the room. So we're going to make some changes. This isn't going to affect any of the people that are successful. This is just going to make your life easier. And it's kind of almost a reward for you guys that are already successful. It's going to be really uncomfortable for everybody that we brought in that we did not have any of these standards. So here's what we did. And I just explained. I said we looked at all the agents that are successful. All of them hit 20,000 points and follow-up boss every single month. So that's going to be our new standard. And guess what? Everybody cried. And we slowly ramped up to that being the benchmark. And in hindsight, I would have just ripped the bandaid off and made it the standard right there. It would have saved me probably six months. But basically in the next 30 days, 34 of the 35 agents that were, let's just say not successful, they just quit. And it was fine. I said, hey, there's no hard feelings. This was totally our fault. 34 of them quit. I had to fire one of them. And of those 35 agents that left the team. So we went from 40, and it was from 46 down to 12. So whatever that math is, I had to fire one. None of them. I don't think a single one of them have sold a house since then. This was three years later. So we didn't lose anything. We lost no production, at all. And the company was a million times better after we implemented these systems. Now fast forward. And I talked about this in an episode a couple weeks ago was fast forward. Now we were bringing people on saying, hey, here are our standards. You hit 20,000 points per month. And the reason it's 20,000 points per month is because that's what we found is the minimum standard to be successful. So now we recruit people into those standards. And guess what? Everybody is expecting those standards. They hit the agents that do hit those standards are successful. The ones that don't hit those standards are never successful. Still to this day. And that is how you take what makes your agent successful and make that a benchmark in a standard. And if you don't have this in your organization already, you're going to have a lot of crying. And that's part of it. I would highly recommend. I got advice once that you are and again, we had 45 agents. So like, it was a large team. But I got advice once that I'm glad I got at the time. But if I gave it, if I was in the same position now, I would do it different is Christian, you're turning a large ship. It's going to take time. And I'm very, I used to be very impatient. I'm not so much anymore. Still definitely impatient, but not as bad as I was before. And the advice that I would give now is just fix the problem. Like it doesn't need to take nine months to solve the, I don't have standards problem. Like if your standards make sense and are good for the agents that are good for the team, just do it. And I would have just ripped the band. They'd often made it happen. Maybe I have a grace period of whatever, but don't make it take nine months to fix this. So that's my, that's like, that's me talking to myself three years ago is it's gonna, like you're gonna have crying. And it's okay. And like that's part of business. So rip that band it off and make the change right away. I'm speaking to you. If you're in that position of like, oh my god, if I implemented the five agents, I have on my team that are successful. If I asked my other 15 to do that, they would all cry and they would leave. And it's like, yeah, but like those five are probably the only ones doing deals anyway. So why not make their life better by getting rid of the 15, put the resources back into the five. And now grow back to 15 with more of the five. I hope that made sense. So that's my advice to do that right away. So the process for this, and this is something you constantly can do. You can always go back and say, hey, what are making our successful agents successful? You can narrow it down to the ones that everybody's doing in common. And then you create your benchmarks and standards. Here's some, here's some advice. And then I'll get to the bonus step. Here's some advice around benchmarks and standards. You want to make them crystal crystal clear. You want to make it to where there is no if ands or buts about what the standards are, what the expectations are. So that's really what it is. What is the expectation of being a part of the company? So for us, this is what we do. The expectation is you hit 20,000 points every single month. And the other expectation is that you are up to date with your follow up. So for our team, we send a report out. We look at this. It's up at the team meetings every week. Like we talk about this all the time. Everybody knows the 20,000 points means with their team. There's a lot of marketing support that gets turned off if you don't. In the way that we look at this is everybody's eligible on our team for everything. Until they choose to not hit the benchmarks. Because for us, 20,000 points is it's like if you're working in every year full time, you're going to hit it. It's not like this is some crazy benchmark. Now, the second thing is that they're actually following up with with the leads, right? And the way that we look at this is we'll give you all the leads you can handle as long as one of your hitting the benchmarks in conversion. But two, that you're actually following up with them. If you're too busy to do your follow up, probably too busy for new leads. So those are our two major standards. And that is something that has allowed us to one convert as a team at a very high level. Two, it is allowed me as the sales manager at this point, I'm managing more than 50 agents as the sales manager and doing everything else that I'm doing. Because the culture and the systems do a lot of the managing. And an agent knows that if they're not doing their follow up and they're behind on follow up, they're not getting leads. And that's their like, that's a decision. Not doing your follow up equals no leads. If you're not willing to hit 20,000 points, we're not willing to invest more leads. Like everybody understands that. So you just need to find out what are the things for your team. My point here is make it crystal clear. Like if an agent has 19,999 points and they get paused, they're like one, they're like, oh my God, I should have sent one more email. But like, we know they're scraping by. They just forgot to pay attention last day of the month. And if they're not doing their follow up, like it's pretty black and white if the agent cares about their business or not. So anyway, those are our benchmarks very clear, very, very, very black and white. I would say pro tip under that is if you have a virtual assistant, make sure that or a sales manager assistant, whatever. If you have somebody else sending the reports or whatever, it just kind of makes them the bad guy instead of it being you. It's crazy as that is. If any of my agents happen to be watching this, they'll know like they get a report from Darren that says, hey, you're behind on your follow up. Here's where you need to get caught up, your pause for the week. Make sure you get caught up the next week and get back on lead. It's a nice reminder type email. But sometimes they'll be like, Darren, I was at a vacation. I'm behind on my follow up. Like don't pause me. Whatever. And they're like, they're mad at Darren as if it's his fault. Darren's my virtual assistant, which is always hilarious. But anyway, my point is if it doesn't come from you as the team leader, I think it's better. It's certainly been better for us. And that's kind of like kind of an easy pro tip if you have the support. You shouldn't be running these reports anyway. Something we talk about a lot in our team building master classes getting your time back. Virtual assistants are fantastic for this. So anyway, there's your three steps. Number, and I'll talk about the bonus here. Number one is take all your agents right down what makes them successful. Number two is see what they have in common, narrow it down to two to five things as you saw we had four. And step number three is to create the benchmarks. One in your onboarding process and then have that clear in your recruiting, but also in your, how you run your business, your benchmarks and your standards. Okay, so those are the three steps. Now, the bonus step is what are the activities that keep your bottom performers at the bottom? And this is kind of like doing the opposite of kind of of what makes your successful agents successful. And what you're gonna do here is you're gonna have your standard or benchmark, it's probably the wrong word. Your minimum expectations basically, you're gonna create your how you get fired list. So if you look at now, we're gonna take all the agents that aren't successful, you're gonna take that list of agents and you're gonna write down the same kind of process, the one or two bullet points for why they're not successful. Now, don't get too obvious with this, but try to find something other than they just don't work, which is going to be one, I promise, is going to be one of them that they just don't do anything. But why don't they do anything? So for us, here's a few examples, this isn't really necessary, well, this is definitely for us, that if they don't know how to use follow-up boss, I can guarantee they're not gonna be making calls in follow-up boss, right? So that is a huge, if we see somebody in the first week or whatever, not using follow-up boss at all, huge red flag and like, hey, we'll reach out right away and be like, hey, obviously you don't know how to use this. Let's fix the problem, or we can refer you to another team. And that's a very clear, easy conversation. This is one very easy way to get let go of our company is to not use the CRM, or if you're not using correctly, let's fix the problem, or let's, it's an off-boarding thing. Number two is if they're not showing up to anything, we're gonna reach out and be like, hey, if they're not using the CRM, and they're not showing up to anything, we're gonna reach out and say, hey, we haven't seen you in a while, what's going on? Are you okay, right? Did you follow the face of the earth? Oh, I didn't realize I needed to show up to the meetings and it's like, come on. That's a huge red flag for us at least. It might, that's probably not a red flag for most people, but for us it definitely is. The, what are the other things that make them not successful is that they're not generating leads and if they're not hitting, if they're not hitting, like, again, this is for us. If they're not using follow-up boss, they're definitely not getting leads. So if they're not getting leads from us and they're not generating their own huge red flag there as well too, it's just like, hey, what exactly is it that you're doing, right? And in all of these different circumstances, what we end up doing is we have, I'll use the Chep Black here. John Chep Black is, we use the Cliff Conversation. So what we basically do is we say, hey, well, obviously what we're doing for you is not working. And this is the script that I used with my team meeting to roll this out. Was, hey, obviously whatever we're doing for you's not working. So we want to make sure that we're doing whatever we can for you to be successful. And it might just be that we refer you to another team because what's going on here is not going to lead to any success. And they're either just going to agree and leave or they're going to say, they're going to start backpattling and say, hey, no, no, no, I really do want to be on the team. I want to be successful. And then basically what you're doing, you're going to have them recommit. And you're going to say, okay, well, if you're willing to kind of restart and take the company here, it like take your career seriously in real estate, here is what we'll kind of have as the expert. You tell me what you're willing to commit. You know our minimum standards. You tell me what you're willing to commit to. And here's what we're going to do is at the end of every week, you could do daily, at the end of every week, you're going to do your one, two, three commitment. So like, tell me, so let me back up. Ask them, what are the three things you're willing to commit to every single week? Knowing our standards, what are the three things you're willing to commit to every single week? And if they tell you something that's just ridiculous, I'm going to make two phone calls every single week, be like, yeah, that's not going to work for us. We'll refer you to somebody else and you just fire, refer whatever off board. But if they say, hey, I'm going to make this many phone calls. I'm going to do these open houses. I'm going to generate this many leads. You say, you know what, that's fantastic. So here's what we'll do every Friday, whatever, or you're going to send me a text message and or a Slack or whatever you use. And you're going to say, I did this many phone calls, which is more than they said they would do. I generated this many leads, which is more than they said they were going to do. And I did this other thing, right? ABC, pull points, one, two, three. What are the three things you're going to do? And then how you explain to them is you're going to send that to me every single week. And if any week you don't hit those benchmarks that you set for yourself just now, we'll just go ahead and take that as, hey, I'm not willing to stay on the team. Like we'll take that as your resignation. And then you off board them. And this is the cliff conversation. And I've done this a lot. Most of the time and shout out to John, this conversation works fantastic is most of the time they'll end up leaving the team either on their own or they'll realize, like, hey, this really isn't for me. Or they'll realize, hey, you suck. And I'm, they're going to go somewhere else and be more successful, which is good for them. That's fine. Or I've had plenty of agents. I've had enough agents that it's worth having the conversation where we had that conversation. And they do a total 180. And they just blow you away. And over the next six months, they're a whole new human being, at least for real estate goes, at least for the job. And it is really honestly, it's a very, very amazing to watch that turnaround happen. And anybody can do it. They have to really want to, right? So my point is, you need to have very clear, just like we want to have our standards very clear of what we expect them to do. We also want to make it very clear of how they get fired. So I'll give you what we do. For our team, if you don't use follow-up boss, we, like, that's a, that's an offboarding. If you don't show up to anything and you're not producing, that's an offboarding. If you are unethical in any way, shape or form, if we feel like shady, like offboarding, obviously, right? So like, those are really the two major bench, or like, bullet points that we have, is if you're not willing to work, if you're not willing to follow our process and you're not willing to put in the work, we'll just go ahead and offboard and like, here's the minimum of standards, which is the same as our actual standards. And if you're not selling, you know, $4 million a year in real estate, then we'll just go ahead and refer you to somewhere else, 'cause you're not able to make a living off that, right? So you wanna make very clear standards on each one of those. So to recap, the goal here is for you to activate your agents to make them more successful faster. You also wanna make sure you are trimming the tree, right? You wanna prune the dead weight. You wanna get rid of the bottom third. And in a very, I don't remember who said this, but a really good way to put this is you, you put your company in thirds and your top producers, you figure out how you can make their lives easier or help them sell more with less effort or help them sell more with more effort. The middle, you wanna find out do you wanna be in the middle or do you wanna be at the top? So you help keep them in the middle if they're fine being their middle producers or if they wanna be top producers, coach them up to the top. And on the bottom, you are either coaching them up to the top or you're removing them from the team. And that's the constant. So you're gonna add new agents, they're either gonna be top middle bottom, I promise. And you are going to do one of those three different things. So you can activate agents as you onboard. You can also re-activate agents as they're on the team, which how you reactivate agents on the team is the same, it's a cliff conversation that I just said. Now it's really easy to have that cliff conversation with agents that are just not doing anything. I will tell you from experience, it's harder to have that cliff conversation with agents that have produced in the past that maybe aren't producing anymore. And the way that I approached that conversation is, "Hey, I wanted to reach out 'cause you were doing this in the past and you're not anymore." My first question is, are you aware of that at all? Like, are they aware of that? Is the first thing I'm trying to understand? The second thing I'm trying to understand is that on purpose. 'Cause like maybe, I don't know, maybe the spouse got a raise and they don't need to make money anymore. There's a million different things that could be happening, or they might be drowning and just not asking for help. I think of no lifeguard on duty, just drowning, when you need to be the lifeguard making sure that they don't drown, assuming they don't wanna drown. Sounds terrible. Terrible analogy. But you get the point. I hope. And that's really what we're looking for. And that's how you reactivate. And then you honestly just bring back, like, "Hey, here's the reason why our standards, the way they are, how can we put you on a path to getting back to these standards so we can get you back to where you wanted to be in the middle or the top, wherever they wanted." So that's the conversation that I have there. So here's my takeaway advice for you. Grab a whiteboard, grab a sheet of paper, and write out and find the things, the two to four things that are your activation points. And then in your onboarding process, figure out how you can activate in the onboarding process. I would also say, figure out how you can activate, reactivate for the existing agents as well too. So that is the activation lesson, if you will, with a few stories written in for me as well too. Now, if you want the closest possible look at how we're doing this growing our business, highly recommend joining our community, totally free. There's a lot of free stuff in there. And if you are a team leader, we have a team community as well too. You can check out the financial model inside the team building masterclass. I unlocked two things for free is the scaling frameworks, as well as figuring out your financial model. So those are totally for free as well too. And the entire rest of the thing is in the upgraded community. So if you wanna check that out, go to onuxhomes.com/school, in the description or wherever. And if you also enjoy, if you like this stuff, like the video, subscribe, go wherever, if you like it, if you're listening to audio, like it wherever you're on. And I honestly, I just make this content 'cause I wish I would have had this stuff earlier while building my team so that I could have built it faster more profitably, which is what I want to do for you. And also, this is another episode down in the story of me building onuxhomes from start to finish. And I'll see you in the next one. - Brad.