Mike Ferry: Welcome back, good morning to Mike Ferry TV. It is the week of February 28, the last day of a very short month. We hope January/February has been good and productive for you. Two weeks ago in Fort Lauderdale, I did a three-day Listing Seminar and we spent virtually one hundred percent of those three days on every aspect of what an agent needs to learn to do to list property and volume. And I talked about the fact that probably the hottest topic in Real Estate next to listings and low inventory is the fact that everybody today in Real Estate seems to believe that they should build a team. I get asked all the time, you know, if I’m going to build a team, what is the job responsibilities? What is the job function of the team leader, etc? So, I put together a list and I want you to consider watching this particular Mike Ferry TV. If building a team is on your agenda or you started a small team and a small team could be you and an assistant or a small team could be the proper use of the affiliates in your area to support what you’re doing. A team could be a couple of buyers agents working for you with an assistant or in some cases, a team can be virtually a mini Real Estate office that you are running and functioning inside of a Real Estate Company.
Mike Ferry: But in building a team, there are certain responsibilities that the team leader has, and in many cases, its very similar responsibilities to what so many of your great brokers have in common. So I want to go through them. There are 13 different job responsibilities that I’ve identified for a team. Now you’re going to say, well, I’m not going to watch Mike Ferry TV because I’m not building a team. Well, I think you should continue to watch because again, probably the biggest driving force in Real Estate today, which is often cases, is moving away from personal productivity to team building. So the more you know about the topic in the next five 10 minutes, the better off you’re going to be. So number one, I wrote down the continued personal production as a method of not only income, which everybody likes to hear, but to generate the Buyer’s leads to support the team that works for you. Going way back 30-35 years ago, I said to great agents all the time, what do you do with the buyer leads that come off the listings you take? And they said, I don’t know. I said we’ll consider having a little partnership with one agent in the office, and the partnership would consist nothing more of having an agent that you feel comfortable and confident that can do the job to pass off all the buyer leads that come off your sign calls, marketing, advertising, etc.
Mike Ferry: and then just take a small referral fee. 20-25 percent make it favorable to them to want to work your Buyer’s you can spend your time listing property. So continued personal production, as you’re looking at building a team is probably the number one responsibility. Number two, constant and continuous recruiting of both your admin staff and the salespeople you have on your team. For those of you that have committed to building a team and you have three or four or five Buyer’s agents that you’re working with and a couple of good assistants and you’re doing a good volume of business yourself, you know the challenge is the management of the people that is the biggest challenge. You face much more of a challenge than trying to take a listing in this incredibly competitive market we’re involved in today. So recruiting is the name of the game, and in many cases, that means you’re going to upgrade some of the people that work on your team with better qualified people. You’re never going to have everybody doing the same productivity, but you can upgrade through recruiting. And it is the most difficult job of a team leader as all the Broker, Managers will smile when they hear this and they understand what I’m saying. Number three, the constant, excuse me, number three, creating a strong retention program for those people that you want to maintain.
Mike Ferry: With building a team retention is critically important because in recruiting a team, the longer you can keep the ones you have and the more you can use those an example of why being on your team is a good idea. The better chance you have. Retention is keeping those that you have. And as I tell broker managers every day, the number one method of recruiting great salespeople is retaining the great salespeople you have. I’m always surprised when I talked to a team leader that says I’ve got three people on my team. What is the most productive one do about 15-16 deals a year? What are the number two and three do? 5-10 can’t make enough money to give up your personal production off a team that is doing that kind of productivity, even if they’re all on a very fair, which in most cases a very fair 50/50 split. So the retention of strong people is the name of the game. Number four, training sales skills versus technology and social media. You’ve got to train people how to sell. And often people that want to be on a team, and if you’re on a team, please don’t be offended. It’s a simple fact of life. Often the people that want to be on our team are people that do not enjoy the p word prospecting. So they want to be on a team where they can have distribution of leads come to them without having to go through the process of finding the leads themselves.
Mike Ferry: Knowing how to do Lead follow-up., knowing how to convert leads, knowing how to sell a Buyer lead is critically important. How do we do the sales training, teaching them whatever system you choose to use. Mike Ferry system preferably, but at the same time leading them any role play sessions you’re going to have meaning that you’re going to participate. Whether you do role play twice a week, three times a week or every day, like so many good team leaders do. Number five, Setting effective production standards. The most common thing I discovered in talking to teams in the last week and two weeks ago in Fort Lauderdale, we had two hundred and fifty or sixty people in the room, which was the most the room would hold, so that was a blessing in disguise. We probably had about half the people in the room that are organizing or running some type of a team, and I talked to them about production standards and they all gave me that blank look. I said, well, here’s what we have to understand. Without a minimum standard, we have nothing as a team player to produce towards. What standard would you like to have as a minimum standard? A lot of our top team leaders will have a standard of 20 transactions per person the first year.
Mike Ferry: 25 to 30 the second year and thirty six each year afterwards. Now some of you say, well, that is more business than I’ve ever done. Well, the purpose of building a team is to do more business than you’ve ever done. Number six is accountability, which is almost always the challenge for almost everybody. And that is the ability to hold people accountable to what they say they’re going to do, which leads to number seven confrontation. Which is very similar confrontation to accountability. But confrontation, as you’ve heard me say in the past, is not being angry, not getting upset because they didn’t do what you had asked them to do. It’s questioning what got in the way. You mentioned that you had two Buyers showings this week. You felt confident the one of the two was going to sign a contract, and neither one did. Help me understand what happened so I can help you close a higher percentage. That is the level of confrontation and holding them accountable to what they said they were going to do. Number eight is some form of Coaching. We introduce coaching 32 years ago, maybe a little longer now to the Real Estate industry. And of course, there’s a very common trend in Real Estate that everybody that thinks they do a training session, thinks they’re also a coach. Coaching is the ability to ask a lot of questions about the goals the people have to help them learn the direction and path they have to take to get there.
Mike Ferry: So Coaching people on your team becomes part of the job responsibilities of a team leader. The next one is the hard one developing cost-effective lead sources. Because in most cases, yes, there’s two types of leads buying them directly for your agents to use on your team, or second paying referral fees for those leads that you take and close. And there both can be very expensive if the conversion rate is not very strong. A good portion of our team leaders that are buying leads off the internet will have between eight and 11 percent conversion rate. So if they’re buying one hundred leads a month to be distributed to their team members, whatever they buy from or whoever they buy from, you know, 10 of those one hundred they can count on converting to a contract and a closing. So cost effective lead sources is critical. Number 10 continuing to learn leadership skills. I believe and I have believed this for years that the most important part of operating any type of a team, whether it be you and an assistant, full time, part time, whether it be you and two assistants or possibly a Buyer’s agent, is learning how to become a strong leader because they’re looking up to you for leadership direction. They’re looking up to you to learn what they have to do.
Mike Ferry: They’re looking up to you for the motivation that they need to become more productive. Number 11 on this list, and unfortunately, this list has 13 different responsibilities. Number 11 building and maintaining strong per person productivity. Easiest way to recruit outside of a good retention program is to maintain a high level per person productivity. I had a call from a Broker a couple of weeks ago and he said man we’re really doing great. We average about five transactions per person and we have three hundred agents in our company. And I said five is less than one every other month per person. Well, isn’t that good? I said, well, compared to what? Our industry standards are very low, as you know, we talk about it all the time to Real Estate professionals like yourself. So maintaining strong per person productivity is a retention tool. It allows the people on your team to make a good income. It also is a very strong recruiting tool because if other people see what you’re building, they want to be part of it. Number 12 Motivation of the staff and motivation, of course, is helping them understand that motivation is internal more than external. And last on this list is maintaining a fair profit margin for you as a team leader. Because in essence, in building a team, whether you have 5 or 10 agents and a couple of assistants or two assistants and two agents, there has to be a fair profit margin for the investment of the time in building and branding the image you’re trying to build in the community.
Mike Ferry: So I’m hoping that each of you watches this message at least three or four times this week, because whether you’re building a team on a team considering a team or have built a team. The hardest part of Real Estate today is understanding what the real job functions are of a great team builder, team leader or, in essence, yourself. So here we are, January, February are done. We are facing the 1st of March now. And of course, it’s again a new day, a new week, a new month and a new opportunity. I was having a great conversation with a great, great, great superstar production person in Fort Lauderdale two weeks ago and I said, what an opportunity we have today. And he’s a real smart guy and he goes, I’m not real bright. How do you spell opportunity? I said, M-O-N-E-Y. That’s opportunity. There’s a wonderful opportunity with prices rising. And with your opportunity to learn, to list property, your opportunity to build a small team. Let’s make sure that you’re on track for what you’re trying to accomplish and if we can be of help or of service. Give us a call. Look forward to talking to you next week.
