Top 1% Business Tactics

Hey, this is Shiran Shrivatsa. Welcome back to the Business School podcast. And in this episode, I'm going to do something a little different. I'm going to play for you this massive interview that I did with Andrew Flakner, the CEO of Real Scott on his Playmakers podcast. And I rarely do this because this episode was able to compress business lessons, sales tactics, marketing tactics, even though it's a little estate focus, you will be able to see the absolute strategies and tactics that you can utilize right now in your life and in your business. Andrew does an insane job of pulling things that I didn't even know possible out of me. And I'm super excited to share them with you. So this is a rerun of the special interview that I had with Andrew Flakner from the Playmakers podcast. And you're going to hear it all right here right now. One thing is for certain, just because it's tried and true doesn't mean it's working right now. So the big question is this, where can you learn what is working right now, the strategies, the tactics, the psychology and the exact how to, how to grow your business, how to blow up your personal brand and supercharge your personal growth? That is the question. And this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Sharon Shrivatsa and welcome to Business School. Welcome back to the Playmakers podcast. I'm your host Andrew Flakner and today I'm joined by Sharon Shrivatsa. Sharon, thanks for being here. Awesome. Thanks for having me. Sharon is one of these rare operators and executives who opens up his entire playbook step by step to help entrepreneurs grow their business, scale and operate with more clarity. He's the president and managing partner of acquisition.com, more ACQ for short. We're here at ACQ headquarters at ACQ. Sharon and his business partners, Alex and Leila Hermosi invest in companies and help entrepreneurs of all types scale their businesses. Recently, Sharon worked with the ACQ team to launch the book entitled $100 million money models, which instantly became the fastest selling nonfiction book of all time, grossing over $100 million in 72 hours. Before ACQ, Sharon scaled multiple real estate brokerages to the tune of billions of dollars in sales volume. He's a four-time Inc. 500 entrepreneur, a former Goldman Sachs banker, and of course he was made famous by his early investment in Real Scout. If you're listening right now, whether you're an agent, a team, a brokerage executive or an entrepreneur in any industry, I have a feeling you're going to walk away after this conversation with something that you can add to your business this week to generate more revenue and make smarter decisions. So let's dive in. I think that you are the king of frameworks and process. So talk to me about what that means for you and also what's like a process that you have in your business or your life that maybe would surprise some people. I think a lot of people don't realize that good process and good process alone drives good results. And the reason is that if you take anything in life, you have three big pieces to the puzzle. You have some kind of goal. And to get that some kind of goal, you need some kind of plan. And that some kind of plan needs to be driven by some kind of behavior. So if you tie all of those together, that is a process. If something that is repeatable that you can do over and over again. And I think as soon as you know that something is a process, something is a recipe, that's when it wins. Ana, I'll tell you the story where this all kind of came together for me. My mom used to make these amazing chocolate chip cookies. And every single one of her friends, our family, all wanted my mom's recipe, but she would never give it. And she would say, hey, I'll give you the recipe, but I've got the secret ingredient. And that secret ingredient is what made my mom's cookies. And to this day, I don't know what that secret ingredient is. But if you think about it, there is a sequence of steps that generates that cookie that has been legendary in this Revatsa family. And I realized that if she can repeat that over and over again, she can create that delight. Why is that not available to the rest of us? And if she can do that with some cookies, that recipe can be made for growing a real estate business, that recipe can be made for selling more stuff, that recipe can be made for building a brand. And understanding and believing that dramatically reduces your stress. And so that has been the big switch for me is, hey, I want to go figure out what the framework, what the process is for someone. Because then once I get the process, I can then figure out how to put my spin onto it. Right. And is there one process that you think about or leverage every week? Yeah, so the single most important process that I leverage every single week in my life is called a review preview. So every single Friday, I spend the time reviewing the past week, and then previewing two weeks ahead. So I'll give you the exact kind of playbook for this. I believe that every single entrepreneur should do a review preview. I look at my calendar for the past week on on a Friday, and I look at every single appointment that I had. And I ask myself, is there any follow up from this? And if there is, I just write it down. So I just go through every single appointment. And then I look forward two weeks, because you need two weeks to kind of prep. And I say, do I need to prep for that? Hey, I got a trip coming up to Las Vegas, do I need to prep for that? I got a meeting with Andrew, do I need to prep for that? Then I put that down as a to do. So now I have a very clear understanding of what follow up I need to do and what prep I need to do. And that becomes my to do list for the next week. And if you do that every single week, you never drop. Nothing falls through the cracks. And you show up to every meeting prepared. And how you prepare shows just how much you care. And so that if anyone can install, this is free, if anyone can install the review preview in their lives, they just win super big review preview every Friday, every Friday. Yeah, awesome. So you've had success after success with tell us and real and acquisition.com. What is the through line of the how you can be so successful and have these outsized results in so many different arenas? People won't believe it, because they think it doesn't work. And I will tell you this, and Alex talks about this often, which is volume negates luck. I was born in an average family, in average surroundings, with me personally with average intelligence, and you just realize that what is the one thing that you can do to make it all better? And that is reps. And people don't realize that more reps actually makes you win, because no one can beat more reps. I'll give you a crazy example. I am a night owl, I don't know, you know, I just, I do better at night. And there was one time when I got really sick and my doctor told me, he said, Hey, when we do tests for you and they're in the morning, you seem to have better data. Why don't you wake up earlier? And I'm like, I'm a night owl, I can't, I don't want to wake up early. He's like, just shift your day up a little bit. So instead of going from 7am to 11pm, go 5am to 9pm. So I kind of shifted my day up. And so I started waking up at 5am. And I knew that I would not be able to wake up at 5am. So I texted three of my best friends and I was like, Hey, the doctor told me to wake up at 5am. Can you help me? Can you be my accountability partners in this? And they said, Sure, well, what do you want us to do? I said, Well, I'm going to do this call at 5am. I'm going to call you at 5am in the morning tomorrow. I don't need you to say anything. I just need you to get on this conference call. And I will probably make some, make some joke or be funny or what have you. And then you can get off and that'll get me up. And they said, fine. So I have this conference call number they dial in. And the first day I get, I hear a ding, ding, ding. So three people came on the call, my three friends. And I said whatever I said on that call. And I was up at 5am. The next day, I get back on the call and I hear ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. So I was like, there's five people on the call. That's weird. Is there a ghost on this call? But I kept going. And the next day I heard ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. I had multiple people on the call. And I realized that they were giving out that number to other people. And that is how the 5am club was born where that started 14 years ago. And from a reps perspective, I've been up at 5am doing this call for 14 years in a row. And almost every single morning at 5am. And how many dings now? And we have thousands of people on the call now. And it's crazy because I let the dings stay live. And you can hear, if you ever come on the call, it's free, it's five minutes at 5am Pacific time, and you will hear every ding. And the key part of that is, I have more reps than anyone else doing that thing. The thing that I want to share is that that may be my reps, but most people don't realize that what can be your reps. I don't think people can put in reps and the things that they're not good at. So you have to find something that you're good at that you can put a lot of reps into it. I call that unreasonable endurance. What can you have unreasonable endurance in? I can just put in a lot of work from working hours perspective. And if I said if I can just put in a lot of reps, I win. And I will tell you, it's just everything that through line and all of this has been the reps. Because if you see what Alex and Layla do for reps, they are my biggest competition on reps. Because they are on all the time. It's all reps. And I really believe that volume negates luck. Right. So here we are at ACQ. What does it mean to be managing partner and president? So the back story was that when Alex and Layla started, kind of we're growing their last company, I got introduced to them before the world knew Alex and Layla. And I had a chance to be their advisor to sell their last business. And so they have been my friends for five plus six, five, six, seven years now. And the original ACQ model was what we all designed together. And so I've seen acquisition.com be kind of phase one to phase two to phase three. And our mission right now is to bring business education, real business education to everyone in the world. And that's what we do with our books, with our content, with our programs, with our workshops that we that you get to see in this building. Everything that we do is centered around business owners to give them real world business education from all our personal experience. And how does that vantage point help sharpen your advice to real estate agents? So what people don't realize is that most of our companies are service based. It is, you have some product, but somebody is actually waking up in the morning selling something and then delivering that thing in some way. And I believe that almost all businesses that are being built in America is somebody's wake up in the morning, selling something and turning around and delivering that right. And there's only three things to that puzzle. Number one, you need some kind of marketing. And that marketing is to generate some appointments. Number two, you need to sell something, which is you sell something to generate a contract. And the third thing you need to deliver something, you deliver it to get paid. And if you take a real estate agent's business, there are only three parts of the puzzle, you do marketing, to, you know, get to get an appointment, you sell, which is you get in the living room and you actually sell something, you get a contract, and then you deliver so you can get paid. Almost every single business has those three parts. And we use that as a diagnostic. You overlay that diagnostic on most businesses and you say, all right, do we have a marketing program? Do we have a sales problem? Or do we have a delivery problem? And once you figure that out, you have, we call that a constraint. Oh, you have a marketing constraint between you're not getting enough appointments, let's put all our effort into delivering more appointments. There is a few things that you can do in each person's business to like solve that constraint, which is what gives us the superpower to help businesses. Gotcha. And speaking of constraints, a lot has changed in the market, especially for real estate agents. And so talk to me about the realities of today, today's market when agents are walking into a listing appointment or a meeting for a buyer consultation, what's changed in the last 12 months? I think what's changed in the last 12 months is that buyers and sellers know more about the market than we do. And we think that us as real estate agents or real estate professionals know more about the market, but we don't. My wife is the perfect consumer, right? Because I see her email and she has seven e-alerts. Like she's got some kind, she has a Royal Scout e-alert, she has a Zillow e-alert, she has a Redfin e-alert from some other idx site, she has an e-alert. She does not care about a just listed from a community. She knew about it three days ago, right? And I think that that is extremely important from a market structural perspective because information flows to a consumer way faster than we ever thought it did. So that's number one. The second is all these lawsuits that have happened in the real estate industry have shown a very strange light on what an agent does or does not do. And so I really don't think the average consumer knows what an agent does or does not do, which is why what an agent communicates to a client in their messaging is so important. If you show up and say just sold, they think you didn't do anything. They think it's just the household itself. But the messaging of what did you actually do to get that sold is way more important these days. And so the third thing is what part of advice can you actually give them that they don't know? I think if we can change our kind of marketing and messaging to things that a consumer does not know, that's what's going to kind of peak their curiosity because they can get new listings and pictures and whatever else, anywhere else, they're automatically getting that. And so if agents could change their messaging to what a client does not know or what's happening in the market and what it means to them, that's probably way more important. Yeah, so therein lies the reason why you want to get serious about content, right? So what does a content strategy look like today? In the early days of social media, it was a social graph, meaning it was no better than a glorified email list. Whoever you had on your email list would get your email. Whoever you had as followers on your social media would get your messages. Well, today, we've moved from a social graph to an interest graph. Therefore, whoever has better content is going to do better. Now the question is, what makes content better? Without deconstructing any of that, I'll give you the answer to that, which is probably the most helpful thing. So here's what makes content viral. There are a few sets of frameworks in which content goes viral and we call that packaging. There's a certain hook that goes viral. There's a certain body that goes viral. There's a certain way in which the video is done or the content is written that goes viral. I think every single real estate agent watching this should study the packaging of the things that are going viral and then take their content and put it inside of that packaging. What the platforms have shown us is that we are very packaging dependent in the platform right now and not just content dependent. So you don't want to wake up and make a video on earnest money. No one cares about earnest money, but still you have agents that are saying, let me make a video about earnest money. We have coaches saying you're only as good as your last seven videos, which is tremendously false because you could make seven really crappy videos and it will go nowhere. Nowhere. The key is finding really good packaging and then putting your content and your themes inside of that packaging. That's what gives you outsized results right away. And then you start to realize whether your stuff worked or not. Today, I believe that every single content creator should be a student of packaging. Hey, that video from Andrew did really well. Why? Oh, cool. It had a really good hook. It had a visual thing. He explained the concept this way. Can I take that and just remake that in with my content, but keep the packaging the same. The fastest way to get insane results on your content is to just replicate the packaging with your material. So once you get past the marketing and you're in the service delivery segment, talk to me about how agents should talk about commissions because I think that you have some clever ways on how to frame value without sounding desperate or defensive. The interesting part is that when the absence of value, it always comes down to the fee that you pay. And the consumer is naturally comparing options and just know that they are. How you actually frame that value is extremely important. The thing that I found in appointments is why does somebody hire us? Is asking that question over and over again is why does somebody hire us? And I believe in a lot of ways, we are not selling a product, we are selling a plan, right? If you walk into McDonald's, there's only 18 scripted talk tracks. You're only doing four things at McDonald's. You're selling food, drink, customizations, and an upsell. That's it, right? You're only selling four things. The only way you can get scripting right is if you have only three to four determined paths. That's all they're selling. So that's why it's easy to teach a script to a McDonald's service person or a sales person because they know exactly what order they're taking. No matter what, you're walking in there and you're ordering only a food, a drink, some customization, or some upsells. That's all you're ordering. But when you're in a real estate transaction, you're not ordering the same thing. It's a different house, it's a different market, it's a different price point, it's a different clientele, everything is different. So you're not selling a product, you're selling a plan. And when you're selling a plan, there's three things that are the most important. You're selling advice, perspective, and implementation. They need to realize that you're selling advice, perspective, and implementation. When you're selling advice, what is advice? Advice is how do you get sequentially from point A to point B? Hey, you're here today. Here's my advice on doing these 13 steps to get to point B. What is perspective? While you're doing those 13 steps, here's where the things can break. And therefore, let me dramatically reduce the risk of how those things can break. And then implementation. By the way, I'm going to do all of it for you. If you don't show the advice, the perspective on the implementation, you don't sell the plan, then you can't command the fee. So what a lot of agents do right now is they'll say, well, here's my 13 point marketing plan. No one wants your 13 point marketing plan because someone else can come in with a 72 point marketing plan, right? So the plan that you want is to really show the advice perspective on the implementation. Because what you're doing in every part of it is you're reducing their stress. When you say, here's a plan, you reduce their stress, they'll pay you more. When you say here, I can help you look around corners and save you risk, they'll pay you more. When you say, I'm going to do all of this for you, they end up paying you more because you're saying there's so much effort that is needed to do this thing. And I'm going to take all the effort off your plate. That's when it really becomes important. I'll give you like a crazy example. I've been working on my pilot's license. I mean, I've shared with you. And there's a saying when you're flying, which is called pilot in command, PIC. A pilot is always in command. So I think the client in the situation in the real estate world is the pilot. It's pilots in command. And the real estate agent is the air traffic controller, right? The air traffic controller is going to see all the other planes, all the other homes coming on market, where you should land, when you should start, do all of that. The real estate agent is literally sitting there and figuring out how to bring all of these resources together and coordinate that entire process, which is why most people don't know what a real estate agent does in a lot of ways. They're like, well, it's my house. Yes, you're pilot in command, you can choose to do whatever you want, you can choose to land the plane however you want. But I will tell you which runway I will tell you at what time I will tell you when to take off, I will tell you how much fuel you need. I will tell you at what altitude I will tell you what your ultimate internet needs to say. And I think that that is why a real estate agent is going to be very, very hard to disrupt and displace. Because the day we can replace an air traffic controller is the day we can replace a real estate agent. The real estate agent sits in the middle of coordinating so many resources, right? And all those resources are people. But the problem is the client doesn't know that. And it's our job to kind of explain that. So I always say, hey, you're not selling a product, you're selling a plan. And the more you could show what the plan is, it'll reduce the stress for them. And when they get stress feeling reduced, it's easier to kind of ask for the fee. I was going to say it probably reduces the anxiety of the agent when they know that they are not the pilot and they are air traffic control. That's exactly right. And I will tell you this, if you're a real estate agent and watching this, you should not, you should stop using the word I and my, right? You should not say my listing, right? You should say our listing, because it is yours and your client's listing. Shorts, technically, it's not even technically the agent's listing, it is the broker's listing. So you can't say my listing. I'll show you the craziest story, Andrew. I was, it was my partner, Peter Lowey, who you know, and I, and we were driving through Los Angeles. And the agent that helped my partner buy a lot of his, like a lot of the home said he was selling. And he drove, he was driving by and he said, oh yeah, I sold that. I sold that. I sold that one. I sold that one. And it was all Peter's homes. And then he's like, hey, man, I sold it. It was my house. And it's very interesting because an agent says, I sold that. And we've been accustomed to the use of that phrasing where sure, you were in the process of selling that, that makes sense. But don't forget that you're in partnership with the client. And you're selling the partnership. When you sell the partnership is when you actually make the fee. And that's super, super important. If you're a real estate agent, just stop saying this, right? Which is, don't say my clients use me because I'm really good. They don't use you. You're not a doormat or toothbrush or, you know, like, they don't use you. The fact that we say, oh, he used me to buy that house, like, what are you a Ziploc? Like, that's insane, right? And you, this is a, we say, we want a client, we say we have fiduciary responsibility and representation. But then we say, Oh, use me like a doormat. Like that's just the limits of our language or the limits of our world. What's the proper framing there? I represent my client, you know, I work with my client that the word representation is the truth. That's what the contract actually says, you are representing your client. There are three agreements that govern a real estate transaction. This is a listing agreement. This is between the seller of the home, which is you, and the listing agent, which is me, I represent you as a part of this contract. This is a buyer representation agreement. This is between the buyer of the home and a buyer's agent that represents them. The third is a purchase agreement. The purchase agreement actually represents the contract. It says what the buyer and the seller are going to do to bring all this together. Our job is to get more purchase agreements. So now I don't say this is because we have this contract so you can use me. Like, you know, it sounds small, but it's not super, super important. And that changes how they perceive you because they stop you use a commodity, right? But you don't use your attorney, your attorney represents you, right? And small words like that are really important. And if you can use that use commodity in a very thoughtful way, I think it completely changes how you think about the world. So before we move on from client conversations, I want you to tell my audience a little bit about this notion of a buyer universe because I thought this was a really clever way to frame how you truly earn your commission and also why you're the best agent for the job. Yeah. A lot of times when if you're an agent and you walk in a listing appointment, you've been taught to talk about marketing. The phrase you want to use is, Mr. and Mr. Client, most agents will talk to you about marketing. It's not about the marketing. It's who you're going to market to. Let me explain who we're going to market to. And for that, we call it the buyer universe. And the buyer universe has four big categories. Essentially, there's just two groups of people, people that we know and people that we don't know, right? If there's people that we know and people that we don't know, those are two groups. But those, I need to figure out how to reach both those groups. But out of those two groups, they're active buyers and passive buyers. So our job is to figure out how to reach each form of these buyers. So if there's people that we know and they're active, how do you reach them? If there are people that we don't know and they're active, how do we reach them? If there are people that we know and they're passive, how do we reach them? The people that we don't know and they're passive, how do we reach them? And I actually draw out these four squares in the appointment and I take them through each box as to how I reach each person. And then the client knows that I have the ability to reach every single person in this buyer universe. Therefore, now when I talk about all the things that I'm going to do in marketing, now they know that I can actually do that in service of reaching the person in that buyer universe. That single thing when you do it allows the client to know that you can reach every buyer. I call it the outlier buyer. How do you find the outlier buyer? You'd do it by actually mapping the buyer universe. So, I just saw last week, Zilla put out some data showing that one out of every four active listings has had a price reduction. And in some markets like Houston or Phoenix, it's actually one in every three. So, this is happening in select markets. It's happening more often. And I wanted you to talk about the 1010 zero rule. The single most important conversation that no agent wants to have with their client is to reduce the price. I always recommend agents to have the price adjustment conversation before you ever need the price adjustment because that conversation becomes really messy to have. The recommendation that I have is to have the what we call the 1010 zero rule conversation with clients. You say, and by the way, you can change this based on your market. You say, Mr. and Mrs. client, we utilize the 1010 zero rule when we're actually bringing a property to market. In the first 10 days, if you have no showings or in the first 10 showings, if you have no offers, then it's probably time to think about a price adjustment. And the client is like, oh, okay, that makes sense. You reframe when you're going to ask for the price adjustment, not just the fact that it's been 90 days, right? So again, it is a in the first 10 days, if you have no showings on the first 10 showings, if you have no offers, then we should think about a price adjustment. There's something very crucial there, because let's just say the home is roughly worth a million dollars. And the client says they want to list it for 1.8 million. Then you can say, Mr. and Mrs. client, I'm happy to list the home for 1.8 million. I want to explain the 1010 zero rule. In the first 10 days, if we have no showings on the first 10 showings, if we have no offers, we should make an adjustment. I'm going to I'm going to tell you that with a $1.8 million price, if we go out to market, the first 10 days, we probably won't get any more showings. Are you looking to test the $1.8 million price? Now you get their feeling on whether they want to test that price or not. And they say, no, yeah, we actually want to test it. It would break my heart if I didn't even put that number out there. I just want to know that, you know, if the market reacts negatively, no problem, I'll reduce it. Then you say, Mr. and Mrs. client, maybe there's a different way of doing this, right? Maybe for the first 10 days, while we're getting the home ready for market, I will try to market it in my private network to test the price. And in our in our world, we call it, how do we cheat the market? We go to our current active buyer pool, and we actually show them that this home is coming to market while we're prepping the home for sale. It gives us a way to recalibrate this pricing. Now you show the client that they can still get the value of their pricing, but instead of actually putting it out there and affecting what that would look like from a days on market or adjustment of price perspective, the client doesn't know the client doesn't know how days on market affects what they're listing is shown on the portals. The client doesn't know how other agents and buyers see a listing as shop worn or not. A client doesn't know that sales pressure list price ratio and the number of adjustments that I had dramatically affects your negotiability and negotiators. They just don't know. And so explaining that 1010 zero upfront is really good because when that 1010 zero happens, you can go back and say, Hey, Andrew, remember, we talked about our 1010 zero framework. Let me actually explain this to you again. In the first 10 days, we actually got three showing. So you're okay there. But in the first 10 showings, we got no offers. And based on our 1010 zero formula, we should probably think about a recalibration strategy. Can we talk through that now that makes for a much better way to have that conversation. The reason most agents struggle is that they think that a client has a price in mind. And they just if they don't hit that price, they're going to lose the list. They're going to lose the listing. And there's a reason for that. And the reason is the average seller takes their pricing as a personal identity problem. So they're like, man, I put this home on the market for $1.3 million. I am personally worth $1.3 million. It's a reflection of their personal net worth in a lot of ways. And so when you adjust the price down, you almost are affecting their integrity with themselves. So our job is to disassociate list price and sales price. And how do you do that? You do it exactly. The best way to do that is to say, Mr. and Mrs. Klein, if it were me, how do you think the market would react if we listed the home for $1? So I'm just immediately breaking their feeling away from that. And you can say, well, we would get a lot of interest and a lot of offers, right? Great. Well, how do you think the market would react if we came into the into the market at $10 million? Yeah, disassociated. Completely disassociated. Because then they're like, Oh, okay, this has got nothing to do with my value. And then I always tell clients, it is almost, I've never gone through a transaction where the list price and the sales price ever match up. The sales price is what we care about. Yes, that's what you're actually taking away. We use this list price as a marketing tool. And let me tell you what it is, because the list price is just an invitation. I always tell the if you're a real estate agent, learn these words. Mr. and Mrs. Klein, the list price is just an invitation. And if you invite them at $10 million, you're going to get fewer people. If you invite them at a dollar, you're going to get a lot of people. I just need to calibrate the right, the right pricing for us so that we can get a much better sales price outcome. And once they see that once you can disassociate sales price and list price, then you remove all the safety issues that they have with kind of the personal integrity of the pricing itself. On this topic, I saw some webinars you did with Andrew Undum and they were phenomenal. If anyone wants like a crash course 90 minute deep dive into pricing strategies and listing appointments, I highly recommend you check it out. But I found that this framework you had, the show flow demo was insanely powerful. Talk about that. Whenever agents walk into a living room or to a buyer consult, they talk about the things that they are going to do. And which is Mr. and Mrs. Klein, when you list with me, I will do these 12 things. Mr. and Mrs. Klein, when clients work with us, we do these six things. What that is is called a promise. Hey, when you do this, when you list with me, I promise to do that. But no one wants to hire us on our promise. They want to hire us on proof because the proof is what helps them feel safe that they're making the right decision. So I call it proof of a promise. And a lot of people will say, well, what is proof? Like, how do you show evidence that you are actually good? And I came up with this framework called show flow demo. You show them something, you show the things that you've done. So if you say, we're going to build a marketing plan, when we start working together, we're going to build a marketing plan to bring your home to market. And this is what we do in the first 10 days. For example, here's what we did for Andrew. And then you show them the plan. And when you show them something, they're like, wow, okay, I see what this would look like. So that's called a show. The second thing is a flow. Whenever you're describing a sequence of things, don't say, well, this happens, then this happens, then this happens. If you show them a flow chart of how it actually happens, now you have mechanical expertise that you know what the next step is that they don't. So you're showing them a flow chart of what happens. But my favorite is the demo. You've been in the technology world, you know this, you get on investor presentation, the deck is irrelevant, the demo is everything. And my favorite demo is by explaining to a client, not telling them what you're going to do, but showing them what you're going to do. And I'll give you two examples of an amazing demo. The first one is one of my friends had started put these QR codes on signs. And so he would say, Mr. Mr. client, have you seen signs with QR codes on them? He's like, yeah, well, the average agent has a QR code on a sign that when you click it, it automatically calls them, which makes sense. But let me tell you what our QR code does. When you actually scan the QR code, you go to a landing page. And on that landing page, we automatically pixel leave. And that pixeling, it then triggers an AI chatbot would ask you questions about the home. And if the chatbot can't answer the question, it automatically notifies one of our agents on duty. So you can actually have the conversation. And then since we've already pixeled you, it starts remarketing with things about the home. By the way, here is one of our listings, do you have your phone right now? Why don't you scan that? And they scan it and they see that process happening live. And then they start to believe, right? The craziest thing that happened was we were in a listing appointment, me and one of our agents. And I said to the, it was a very high price listing. And the client's like, well, do you have any buyers from my home? Which is a very standard question that they ask. And the same listing agent had a home that he had done an open house on, like around the corner. So I said to him, I was like, hey, Andy, do you have the, didn't you do an open house on that home? Like over the weekend, he's like, yeah, I'm like, how many groups did you have come through the open house of 14? I said, do you have the open house registry by any chance? Which I asked him to bring. So he brought the open house registry, he put it on the table. I took the open house registry, which is a sign-in sheet. I handed it to the client. I said, pick a name. I don't know where this is going. She picked a name. And I said, I pulled up my phone and put on speaker. I said, can you read me the number? I punched in the number. I hit call. And then I called and I said, it went to, you know, it went to voicemail. I said, pick another number. I called. I pick another number. I call. I got the third person. I got them on the phone. I said, hi, my name is Sharron. I'm actually sitting here with Andy. You know, you visited a home on one, two, three, you know, Rockefeller Street or around the corner. We're actually with a client right now that's around the corner of the very similar home. It's a four bedroom, four bath, and thinking about bringing him to market. If this came on the market in the next three weeks, would you be interested in seeing this? Oh my gosh, I would love to see this. Well, great. Why don't as soon as I get done with this appointment, why don't I send you some pictures and we'll see if we can schedule you an early showing. Now the client believes that I actually have a live buyer for the home because I demoed the fact that I was able to do that, right? I will tell you, if you're an agent and you believe that you have the skills to do that, that stuff live, you should do it live in the appointment because you give the client's insane confidence that you have the skill to deliver what you say you're going to deliver. So if there's a framework that you would take from this, if you are making a claim about something, you should have some proof. If you say, hey, we are number one in this marketplace, show them something. Hey, we have a great process, show them your process. Hey, we do amazing AI, show them your AI or show the flow of the AI. The way to show proof is show, flow or demo. So what are you seeing right now, the top 1% of agents do when it comes to lead gen that the 99% are not doing? The top 1% of lead gen is lead conversion. The top 1% lead gen is middle of funnel. The top 1% lead gen is not in generating new leads. The 99% that the bottom 99% of agents believe that the best leads are yet to be found. The top 1% of agents believe that the best leads are already in their data. This is why we're friends. But it's 100% true. It is actually significantly easier converting the 30 leads that you already have than buying 300 leads that you know. I read this random stat which was one out of 40 paid Zillow leads get called in the first 48 hours or something crazy like that. That is insane. Somebody paid for a lead to a lead gen platform that probably sent it to three to eight people and you didn't call in the first 48 hours when the client has already moved on so that you can feel better about yourself that you paid for leads. It's insane. However, so if you're not in the in the top 1% where you're called and you have a database to call, what do you what do you actually do? My favorite strategy right now to generate leads for anyone is what I call a list swap. And I believe that every single real estate agent has a small database, it could be 100 to a couple thousand people. That's like the average real estate agent databases are 2000, 2000 prospects. My recommendation would be to find a partner where you can cross pollinate your list. So I always give this example, which I seen done in Laguna Beach, a real estate agent and a pool contractor swap their list. So a real estate agent essentially wrote an email saying to everybody in her database and she said, I want to introduce I want to introduce you to Jimmy, the best pool contractor in Laguna Beach. This is because every time my clients want to put in a pool or have a pool in their home, they talk to Jimmy and when they do that, I get to come in and see how much the how much the value of the home is actually increased. So if you have a pool, Jimmy should probably look at, you know, the integrity of the pool. If you don't have a pool, you're thinking about a pool and the process of how all of this works and how it could increase the value of your home. Jimmy said that he would be happy to do a consult just for my clients, which he generally charges for. Here's a link to Jimmy's consult calendar, just tell him that Sharon sent you. And so I sent an email sending all the lead traffic to Jimmy. Jimmy sends an email and says to all this pool clients and saying, hey, I want to introduce you to the best real estate agent Laguna Beach, Sharon. Every time my clients want to put in a pool in their house, the first thing that I do is I call Sharon because we do a prevaluation and then I give them the idea of the pool and then we do a post valuation to see the delta that it actually added to the pool overall. If you just want, if you want to see, if you already have a pool and you want to see what your home is worth and how it could be marketed in the near future because you probably have not done one, Sharon said he would do it for you. Or if you're ever thinking about a pool in the future, this may be a good idea for you. Click here and Sharon will do it for you. Now, it is a perfect email to a perfect database that what I call an endorsed introduction. If you do one of those every quarter, you're getting just a personal introduction, highly validated, highly specific without you having to sell your services. And opt in. You get the perfect opt in, which is the person read your stuff and said, "Okay, cool. It's endorsed." So you have this warm introduction. The second is you're going to get this opt in, you're going to email them, "Well, you get perfect email readers." Sometimes if you get a lead from Facebook, you have no idea if they're an email reader. This is an email reader that read the stuff and clicked and went to your stuff, went to the other person's site. So it also makes it so powerful that both partners now are connected to each other from an integrity perspective. That pool contractor is not referring to anybody else but me. And every time that pool contractor now gets a job, he's always saying, "Hey, wait a minute. Before we do something, Sharon needs to do evaluation here." So I always get more valuations. And so if you have a small database and the fastest way to grow your database with endorsed leads and endorsed introductions, is to do a list swap. It sort of works all types of trades, HVAC, landscaping, contractors. It also worked with general transaction services like mortgage, title to put your trust in a living home and a living trust, home warranty. It works with almost anything where if anybody is trying to reach a home owner, post sale, the job of your real estate agent is to have as many home owner contacts in their database as possible. You should know if you have a farm and there's 500 homes in your farm, you should have all 500 people in your database. And if you don't, it should be your mission to go figure out how to get every single of the 500 people in your database. If you get those 500 people, it is unreasonable to assume that you don't get called on the appointment. Okay. So once you have all these people in your database, how do you figure out who is a five-star prospect? The five-star prospect is the best way to sort your database to make money from it. And how this works is most people label their database ABC or hot, medium, cold. But if I look at my database and I have a medium, well, what does that mean? Should I call them? Is it a six-month lead? If I call them and they have an investment property, like what is it? You have no idea whether they're in ABC or hot, medium, cold. And so the, this five-star prospect is a really great framework. And I believe that every single agent should structure their database using a five-star prospect method. So they're one star if they're willing to engage in a dialogue with you. They're two stars if they're friendly and collaborative. They're three stars if they know what they want. They're four stars if they know when they want it. And they're five stars if they want you to help them. Now, the key part in all of this is why does this matter? So if I've labeled 10 people as a one star, and I'm like, all right, they're willing to engage in a dialogue, meaning they went back and forth one time on a conversation, or you saw them at an open house one time, they're willing to engage in a dialogue. They're only a one star, right? Well, how do you get all the one stars to be friendly and collaborative? You send them an email saying, hey, are you still interested in buying a home in Laguna Beach? Now if they respond, now you're in a dialogue with them. So now you're like, okay, cool, they're being friendly and collaborative. They're actually talking to me about this. Well, if you have two stars, if they're friendly and collaborative, now you need to figure out you do know what they want. So you can go to all your two stars. And you can send them a property says, hey, I have a, I have a client is bringing their home to market. That is a three bedroom, three bath at Bluebird Canyon in Laguna Beach. Is this something that you're interested in? Question mark, send. If they respond, they're like, no, that's not what I'm interested in. Oh, well, what are you interested in? Now I know what they want. So now I have a way to get people from each star to move forward. So if I'm ever stuck, what should I do? I should go to all my four stars. Right? Because I know what and the I know when they want it. Now I know that's a timing based thing. The fastest way to print money is to know all your four star prospects and constantly work work them. And that's what don't people don't realize is, because you don't have a database that is wired to get you money, you don't have a lot of money. You just need to structure your database in such a way that is wired to get you money. And so anytime you put somebody in your database, you ask the question, are they willing to engage in a dialogue? Are they friendly and collaborative? Do I know what they want? Great. Now they're three star. I just label them as three star. And my job is to take make all the three stars, four stars, make all the four stars, five stars. When I know that the database gets structured beautifully. And the craziest part about this, Andrew, is that now you have the ability to sell your database. Now you have the ability to sell your business because your database is an asset, just because you have a real scout, or just because you have some other serum system, you can't sell it. But if you organize it well, and you can show that you can generate money from it, that's when you can actually sell your database. I've never met anyone with so many frameworks. It's really helpful. Well, let's think about that, right? If you don't have a framework to do something, right, then you're going to fly blind, flying blind. And the craziest part, the number one reason why someone doesn't do something is because they don't know how to do it. The number one reason why an agent doesn't make calls is because they don't know what to say. And the number one reason why an agent doesn't know what to say is because they've been in the business 10 years, and they believe that they should already know what to say. And they feel too embarrassed to stop to learn what to say. And if you just learned what to say, you would just do better. Do you have a systematic approach for addressing problem solving in general? Like, for instance, if you could walk us through how you would tackle a specific challenge, like your pipeline is shrinking in size, 40% quarter over quarter. The key to diagnosing any problem is trying to figure out the constraint. And if you, the way to figure out a constraint is zoom out and say, what does success look like? Success looks like, I'm going to do some marketing to generate some appointments. I'm going to get on those appointments and sell to get a contract. I'm going to get on this contract and deliver and get a deal. Great. Now, where's my problem? Why is my business stuck? Okay, where's my constraint? And the constraint is figuring out where there's a problem in the business. Everybody assumes that the lead generation is a constraint, but where's the problem in my business? And then you say, well, okay, assume that was not a problem. Is everything else work fine? And the way to do that is to pressure test it. Well, I think the lead generation is a constraint. Great. If I give you 100 more leads, will you make more money? Sure, show me. Our number one job is to figure out the constraint of a business. And once you figure out the constraint of your business is to put unreasonable effort into solving that constraint. And once you solve it, you're going to know there's another constraint is going to pop up. And then you're going to put unreasonable effort into solving that constraint, then you're going to know another constraint is going to pop up. Welcome to business. It's always in the problem of dynamically solving constraints. I'll tell you the craziest story. At acquisition.com, we have a memo culture, and we write memos to discuss our ideas. So we don't show up to a meeting and say, let's talk about what's broken. We show up to a meeting with multiple people writing a memo on why they think something is working or not working in some way. We recently had a meeting and the entire job of the meeting was to figure out what a constraint was. And so each of the people that came to the meeting wrote a memo on what they thought was the constraint. The Bezos where? Yeah. And but we do it before you get there. We don't do it while you actually read it to me. So you write the memo, you send it in advance, you read the memo in advance. And when you show up at the meeting, you're there to discuss. You have all the background to discuss the meeting. And the thing that I'm sharing is that the entire point of the meeting was to only determine the constraint, nothing else to agree on the constraint that we were working with. And it took our entire executive team, a 90 minute meeting to just agree on the constraint. And most people are in problem solving mode, and they don't spend time agreeing on the constraint. And if you can find a way to agree on the constraint, then it's very easy to ask for advice. So if someone asks you for advice saying, hey, I have 10,000 leads in my database, and I'm not able to actually get more appointments, you're like, okay, are you sure that that's your constraint? Great, let me give you five ways to solve that. But sometimes the reason why most people don't take good advice, well, is because they come up, they ask a question, they give they're given some advice, they go implement that advice and that has that that does not move the needle at all. That doesn't mean the advice is bad. That means your constraint identification was wrong. Oh, I want to try something totally different and do rapid fire objection handling. Yeah, sure. Okay, I think we touched on this one earlier about pricing. Seller wants the price high. If this was in the first five minutes of the appointment, I would handle it completely differently for this in the last five minutes I handled differently. And then you may say, well, as a default, how would you answer this? So I'll tell you as a default, I would answer this. So let's say the home, the home is a million dollars and you say, well, I want to listen to it for one three. And what I would say is, how do you mean? What am I trying to do? I'm trying to get you to explain to me why you want to do that. Right. Right. And so that also means and I say, well, then you may say something like, well, I just don't want to leave any money on the table. That's generally what happens. You say, I'll say, Andrew, we use three pricing strategies to actually get us the most ultimate and most optimal selling price. Is it okay if I walk you through those? See, the first one is what we call aspirational pricing. And aspirational pricing is where we list the home a little bit above the current market conditions. And the number one reason we do that is if the home is extremely unique or it has celebrity factor. Have you been in the movies or anything? So now what am I doing? I'm breaking the celebrity factor out. Right. And then I say, well, and now I just have to determine whether the home is unique or not. I'm never telling you that your pricing is off. If every other home was just the same and we're a track home, selling it at 1.3 doesn't doesn't actually make sense. Right. So what I'm trying to do here is what you want to respond with is you want to get the information out and then you want to respond with the framework so that it's not like you are saying no to this. So I probably say, how do you mean an appointment? One, it's bad grammar. How do you mean it's not even English because it pattern interrupts them. And it allows them to respond and tell me why they're thinking that way. So I actually give them some analysis around or a framework to think differently. So maybe your next question will help. Discovery show flow demo. Correct. Exactly right. All right. For sale by owner on your first call to a fizzbo, they ask, are you just trying to get my listing? This is amazing. By the way, this is an amazing question. What you say is, sorry to bother you. I'm not looking for your listing at all. The only reason I'm calling is because I promised my client that I would call every single home that was even listed on the market, even for sale by owners to see if they would still consider selling because the last six homes we made offers on, they missed out on this opportunity. I know you listed your home at 1.3 million. If you got something in that range, would you still be open to an offer? And that gets the conversation going, the relationship started. But what you want to say is you want to say, I don't want your listing. Now you may say, well, Sean, you're lying. No, I'm not lying. If you are calling a fizzbo just to get a listing, that is a really bad way to get a fizzbo listing. What you want to do is you want to have a legit buyer to call so that you can be truthful and honest. And then you can do all the other things around it. But if they say, what does a fizzbo want? They want a buyer. If you can't call with a buyer, you shouldn't call a fizzbo. So the number one reason why this breaks, the number one reason most people have bad scripts on this is because the fizzbo wants a buyer, you want the listing. You're fundamentally in disagreement on what you both want. Right? So if the fizzbo wants a buyer, call with the buyer. And then you can back into getting the listing. So I'm not saying you should be circuitous in how you get it, but I'm saying you should call and give them what they want and then sell them what they need. All right. Buyer agency objection. I don't need a buyer's agent. I'm going to work directly with the listing agent. Yeah. So this is perfect. So you can say, have you ever bought a home before? Yeah. So did you happen to work with the buyer agent at that time? Okay. Was there a reason why you did that? I thought that's what I was supposed to do. Oh, okay. Gotcha. Every single real estate transaction is governed by three agreements. This is a listing agreement. This is seller signed an agreement with a listing agent. It is a job of the listing agent to represent the seller. And that's what they do. This is the buyer agency agreement. It is a job of me, your buyer agent to represent you in this transaction. Would you like the listing agent representing you as well? What I did was I made it about the contract, right, right? You want to get it off you and why your services are good, why your process is good, you wanted to make it about the framework and the contract and how the process works and representation. The things that are important here are not about why I am good. The things that are important are why the system works that way and how I can represent you in the system. And a buyer or a seller thinks they pay you. You want to take it away from that. Right. You want them to pay for the process. Like, I'll give you a really interesting example. The number one question a lot of agents or clients will ask is, well, you know, why, why should I, why should I pay you? Like, why should I pay you 3%? Mr. and Mrs. Client, I really don't think you should. Like, what do you mean? The reason I say that is that you're not paying me, you're, you're paying for our process. The process that we have built over 120 listings that we have done beforehand. The process that we built working with 120 clients to perfect this process where we know exactly that launching a listing at 9.33 p.m. the night before on Thursday is what gets you an extra 10% in sales price to list price ratio. The process that actually gets you 10, 10 buyers and 10 seller, like you're walking them through that. So you're like, you're not paying for me, you're actually paying for the process. And I will tell you selfishly, you're actually not just paying for your process to get all that results. You're paying for the 121st buyer. The next time you refer me to your friend, what you have done is all that we have done together and getting you that best result helps that person too. What did I do? I framed this and I framed that he was going to give me a referral simultaneously. In your training, you preach this idea of give it all away. Talk about what that means. The way you think about giving everything away is assume that your entire business model was free. So if I were to work with a client on, say, listing a home, what would I do in that process if I was getting paid? And I would tell them everything. The crazy part is people hoard information. Our job and content creation, the easiest way to do it is to give away information and sell implementation. So when I say implementation in our world, it's advice, perspective and implementation. The crazy part is unless you give everything away, you can't give away good stuff. So people are like, well, I'm not giving them away. Give everything away, because then you will be known for the good stuff. There is this thinking that says, well, if his free stuff is good, I'll bet what his paid stuff will be like. Imagine if it's the same. Right. Your job is to make your free stuff and paid stuff exactly the same. When you do that, that is when you have hit true product market fit. So think about the last transaction that you did, anonymize that transaction and literally give all the advice, all the perspective away, because it now allows the client to audit working with you without having to pay for you. All right, lightning round. What's one belief about real estate or business that you believe that most people disagree with you on? That real estate is a transactional business and you have past clients. You don't have past clients in the business. You only have private clients. Those clients are the entire core of your business because they've already experienced working with you and they can be your best clients because your best clients come from your best clients. A book or article that you reread annually. The founder of Wired magazine wrote this piece on the 1000 true fans. He talked about how you only need 1000 people to love you, to adore you, to obsess with you, to give you all their love, all their care, all their passion, all their money, and you can build an insane business and an insane life just by taking care of just 1000 people. Most underrated lead source of 2025. Hyperlocal Instagram. A time you changed your mind about something in the last year. I thought that my parents would live forever. I realized that as my children are getting older, how much that impacts my parents too and that I was pouring all my love into my children and I didn't do that to my parents. As a new father, I can feel that having kids reminds you that your parents won't be here forever. A question I ask all my guests, you can answer at any altitude you'd like. What does it look like to live your best life? When it seems like play for you and it looks like work to others, I think you're living your best life. Thank you so much, Ron. This has been a lot of fun. It's been tactical. It's been deep. If you liked this episode or got something out of it, please go ahead and take a screenshot. Tag me on social media so I know to make more content like this. This is the Playmakers podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Flackner, and we'll see you next time. Hey, this is Shiran. I have an awesome free gift for you just for listening to the podcast. As you may know, I've got a chance to build two billion dollar companies the hard way. So, if you liked this episode, you will love getting the exact playbooks from those wins. It's on my sub-stack called My Next Billion. It has the exact frameworks I wish someone had given me when I was figuring it all out. Now, you get the real lessons from the trenches as I go for a three-peat and build the next billion. So, everything's free at MyNextBillion.com. Please check it out, MyNextBillion.com.