It was interesting, because on the second day, I had two young men, and I would say they were probably millennials under age 36. Their appearance somewhat gave them away in terms of how they dressed because this audience that I attract generally comes professionally dressed, and I think for those who have been to my events you’ll see that. These three guys walked up and said “You’re so out of touch with today based on what we’ve seen you doing for the last two days.” I said, “Regarding what?” They said, “We’re technology people and you’re not a technology person. We can tell that by the conversation and what you’re teaching.” And you know, I stopped and I smiled and said, “Well, I have to share with you I do have a cell phone, an iPhone that I use all the time, I have an iPad I use every day, I receive and send emails, so I guess I’m not a technology person in your eyes, but I think I have a basic understanding of technology.”

I have to share with you for the last couple years, and it’s partially because of my age, I’m 73 soon to be 74, I get asked all the time, “When are you going to stop? When will you retire? When are you going to quit?” The good news is I could stop, retire, quit because I’m financially able to do that. I collect things like social security, so you know my life is good, but the truth is, I’ve said to people for a long time, this industry is not very responsive to the public in terms of buyers and sellers and they’re not very responsive of understanding how people make the decision to buy and sell in terms of a real estate. There’s a thousand theories, we both know that. So I said, “I decided I’m going to keep on doing this for one reason, there’s a lot of agents, probably like some of you, that really are good and have the desire to be professional salespeople and for me not to continue would be a disservice to you. Granted, I only have a small percentage of the total market of clients following Mike Ferry versus anyone of my 600-800 competitors that are out there in the marketplace. Quite honestly, I’ve had these competitors call me the “dinosaur,” the “Fred Flintstone,” the “900 pound gorilla in the back of the room.”

One of these people actually said, “We don’t understand today how Mike Ferry, the 900 pound gorilla, attracts 3-5 thousand people to his big events?” Maybe the people want to learn how to sell real estate, instead of learn how to text or have a blog of some type? When these people approached me, it was kind of fun and we had a conversation that I’m going to share with you, but then the next morning, early, a young lady probably 30 years old, walked up and said, “do you know much about technology?” I said, “Well, I’m not a technology expert, but what are you referring to?” She responded, “Well, do you understand the things that I have to know to be good at selling real estate?” So I said, “Well, maybe not. Let me ask you a question, how long have you been in the business?” She said, “three years,” and I said, “Okay, and how many deals have you done this year? She told me she’s done four deals said it proudly, and I thought to myself, “Four all at once? My belief is if you’re going to do 4-5 deals a year, do them in January and take the year off.” We’re working to help people that want to be productive in this business. This year, as you know, 2018 I’m being told that 50-52% of all the agents in North America have not done a single deal this year and I do believe a lot of people hide behind technology.

I’ll give you an example. We had a customer send me an email, and this has been two years. He works for a large company in the Midwest and in this particular case, it’s a 600-person company so it’s a big real estate firm, and the broker took the top ten agents towards the end of the year to lunch to celebrate and that was nice. He asked the top ten agents, starting with ten, to stand up and say what you did to be here at this meeting of the top ten agents. So he pointed to number ten, who was a young 30 year old guy and he’s dressed in the jeans and designed t-shirt and the hair in the pyramid the normal millennial type of look, and he said proudly, “I did nine deals this year so far and I’ve done them all through social media. I text, tweet, blog, I’m on Facebook three or four hours a day. It is the answer to the problem in the real estate industry,” very proud and he sat down. Well then, of course, 9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2 and they get to 1. It’s a 31 year old man dressed in suit and tie, stands up and said, “Now I’ve done 91 deals this year and I did it because I have a coach named Mike Ferry, and he taught me how to manage my time, how to find people that want to buy and sell and taught me the scripts and dialogues,” and 10 yelled out loud, “yeah, but you’re so out of touch with today.” And number 1 smiled and said, “Well, you’ve done 9, I’ve done 91. You’re so out of touch with income and production.” Well, needless to say, that lunch stopped fast. The broker didn’t want that kind of response and I understand not wanting that kind of response.

A couple years ago, I was invited to one of the biggest real estate company’s convention. They told me we’re going to do something fun and as part of this plan we’re going to have a little debate on stage. And I love being in debates, and I’m pretty strong in my opinion, as most of you know, and the debate was going to be Mike Ferry vs. social media. So, they brought in a social media expert. I had not met the man, he has a wonderful reputation, so we debate on stage. Part of this debate was that at the end, the person running the convention, a very successful man running a very big company, asked the audience to all take their phones and to put in a code and to vote. And the vote was to be, did you understand and accept and think that Mike Ferry was right in his approach or did you understand, accept and think the social media guy was right in his approach? So when we finished the debate, we shook hands, walked off the stage and then this announcement, “Now is the time to vote.” Well I hung around for a couple hours and I didn’t hear the results, so later that afternoon I ran into the man in charge and I asked if I got out voted dramatically. I’m okay with that but tell me what the results were. He said, “Mike, we couldn’t announce the results publicly. They were so one-sided. They were 92% of the people in the audience voted for you that your methods, technology, your sales skills, your beliefs in social media were correct. Only 8% voted for the social media guy who said time and time again you don’t need to talk to people to know how to sell because that’s technology today.”
So as I talk to these couple of young guys and this gal, I started thinking, you know when you’re called a lot of names by a lot of people, and I’m called a lot of names by a lot of people, I have been for a long time, don’t get mad, you must be a leader. Because we don’t call losers by a lot of names, because we feel bad for them. But, we call people that are doing a lot or leading a lot of people a leader, and leaders are all very commonly called names so I started doing a little research.

For a non-technology guy …

1. We’ve had over 970 videos on YouTube over the years and we were one of the first to offer that. Many or any large amount of sales-oriented inspirational, motivational, educational videos on YouTube we were the first to do it. Why were we the first? Because, we’re the only ones that still have been standing for a long period of time. We’ve been doing this for over 40 years. One of our video series is called, “A Day in the Life.” We actually interviewed a series of top professional agents and we’ve had hundreds of thousands of views and we never even marketed the program. People go to our website and see this. It’s fascinating what they’ve learned from these top producers that we have helped become top producers.

2. We’re the first company to ever do a Mike Ferry TV. Almost every company today that’s a coaching company is copying what we do. And they all have a name for it, which I would assume they do. We’ve had millions of views on our Mike Ferry TV since we started doing this, millions of views. And yet, every coaching company is copying everything we do, but you know we’re the dinosaurs, we’re the ones that know nothing about technology.

3. We were the first company to introduce a Numbers Analyzer more than 30 years ago for an agent or broker, so you can chart the numbers of what you’re doing and start projecting and predicting what the response is going to be. It’s a powerful tool.

4. We were the first one to have, not one, but two apps for agents’ productivity. Our first app now has over 21,000 subscribers and listeners. Go to my website, or just go to app store and sign up for my app. 24 hours a day of continuous motivational training methods for you to listen to.

5. I’ve maxed out several years ago at 30,000 connections on LinkedIn. I can’t have any more. They only give you 30,000 and our postings today still get tens of thousands of views, not bad for a non-technology guy. I think you’d agree.

6. We have just under 50,000 friends on Facebook, and I don’t have a Facebook page, the company does. I don’t know how we get all those friends. I’m honored that we have that many people that follow us on Facebook, and it’s interesting these are real friends. Our competitors, and it’s easy to check this, they have 75,000-100,000. You can write a check and buy friends for Facebook. Isn’t that pathetic, you have to buy your friends? That’s not low-end technology, that’s just low-end people. What’s interesting, google analytics says our engagement on our friends on Facebook, our numbers are higher than any of our competition because our material we put out for people to read and use is good material on technology.

7. The power of the internet. We’re the most copied by far training and coaching company out there. There isn’t even anyone second place to that, just review all the scripts our competitors have online. Almost all of them have our scripts embedded somewhere in their scripts. They all deny it, but they all get letters from our attorneys because we keep reminding them that they’re copying our scripts. There’s a wonderful thing on the internet that comes out this time of year called, “The 12 Reasons to List for the Holidays,” and every company claims that they wrote it. We produced that over 20 years ago and it’s still being copied by all of our competitors today, but we’re the gorilla, the dinosaur. We understand.

8. If you come to any of our events, we have to put a watermark MFO on every page and we do that because it then keeps them from copying our scripts directly. They have to at least retype our workbook if they are going to copy what we do.

9. If you’ve been involved in our coaching programs, we’re the first to offer the placement interview. If you’re into coaching, the company should have done a placement interview. I hope they did. How else do they know who you are to help you? We were the first to do a placement interview online as well as a hard copy. Interestingly enough, the hard copies are actually favored 2:1 versus the online version.

10. We were the first company, and I think the only real estate company to use QR code registration systems for registering at a big event of ours. It speeds up registration by 90%. All you do is walk up with your cell phone, put it against a scanner and you’re registered. And you walk in and go to work with us, it’s exciting.

For all of you techies out there, and hopefully there aren’t too many of you out there I have the following for you:

1. Don’t tell me I’m out of touch. Maybe you should admit your productivity is not what it is because you’re not using professional sales skills that we teach and you’re hiding behind technology to get business. Example: buying leads off the internet. Since November 1, we’ve had 200+ people sign up for our coaching. Isn’t that interesting? For a company that is out of touch with reality, 200 people have signed up for coaching and why are they signing up today? The market is changing and we’re the company that is always ahead of the market and able to keep you in touch with the market. If you haven’t downloaded my market report for 2019, you better do it today and you better read those 12 points on why this is a normal market to deal with.

2. If you want to have some fun in January, come to our production retreat in Las Vegas. It’s a great program. There’ll be 2,000 of the top producers there. Interestingly enough, we’ll have 92 people at our production retreat that this year, in 2018, have earned over 1 million in income to them. Yes, a handful of them have teams, but most of them are mostly individual agents we’ve trained to make a lot of money. We’re going to have 350 people at this event that closed over 50 deals this year as well.
I know I’m out of touch. This morning I received an interesting text. We were driving back from Orange County, California and I looked and there was a text from one of the techies from yesterday. It said, “You probably don’t even know how to respond to this do you?” That’s all it said. As soon as that came, I wrote back, “Gotcha!” That’s all I had to say.

Folks, technology is important. It speeds up the process, it makes things instantaneous. We have millions of dollars in computers in our company today, and believe me, every 18 months they’re all taken out and new ones are put in because technology is advancing. It speeds up the process. What a way to accumulate information very, very fast, which anyone can do today. What a great way to store information. We don’t have to have boxes and files cabinets everywhere, we have technology. But, you and I are in the people business, our ability or inability to talk to people and technology people hide behind the fact they don’t have to talk to people. Come on all of you techies come out of the closet of technology and start talking to people every day. And guess what’s going to happen? you’re not only going to have more fun, you’re going to learn something maybe a little new, get much wider acceptance from the public, but your production will go up. We’re here to help, we’re not here to hurt.
So take it you from the dinosaur, the 900 pound gorilla, and Fred Flintstone. I’m just glad that in some of your eyes, I’m out of touch with reality, but I’m really glad for the hundreds of thousands of people we’ve touched within reality to help them be highly productive. We would like you to join us.
Have a happy Hanukkah. Have a merry Christmas. I’ll talk to you again next week, see you very soon.
Thanks for today.

Mike Ferry is the global leader in real estate coaching and training. Watch Mike each week as he discusses a variety of topics to help real estate agents and brokers. Grow your real estate business by improving your mindset, developing your skills and creating a plan of action to increase your production!

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