Welcome to our quarterly feature, Social Bootcamp With Gogo Bethke!
In this episode, Gogo and DJ discuss the importance of determining your hourly rate. Gogo also discusses listing side hourly rate vs buyer side hourly rate. Gogo and DJ guide you on how to start hiring people to help you out when you’re just starting your business in real estate. Last, Gogo talks about the importance of outsourcing your work.
If you’d prefer to watch this interview, click here to view on YouTube!
Gogo Bethke can be reached at gogosrealestate@gmail.com and at her Instagram account.
Purchase Gogo’s Bootcamp by clicking here – Keeping It Real Podcast listeners get a discount!
This episode is brought to you by Real Geeks and FollowUpBoss.
Transcript
D.J. Paris 0:00
Do you know your hourly rate? We discussed that today and why knowing this will help take your business to the next level. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now onto our show.
Welcome to Real the largest podcast made for real estate agents and by real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show and today is our monthly series called Social bootcamp with gogo Beth key. Let me tell you more about GO GO GO GO came to the goal. Let me let me back up go go back he came to the United States in 2003. To build her American dream, she was broke. She had no real estate experience and no sphere of influence barely spoke English and only $6 to her name, which left her with nothing other than Facebook to help build her business which is where she started. She created gogos real estate and began her real estate career. Now with the power of social media gogo has sold over oh gosh, these are old numbers. It’s well over 100 million in real estate transactions. She shares the good the bad and the ugly of real estate and her honest snippets into her daily life is earned her 10s of 1000s of social media followers in the real estate community and as she’s earned the nickname The Queen of social media she’s actually even been presenting at conferences and events with realtors and she’s She even has built her own social media Bootcamp for realtors called Go Go’s bootcamp. Today she has a team of of 800 agents nationwide and her goal is to help as many agents as possible make a name for themselves in real estate utilizing social media. Now if she can do it, this girl from Transylvania, Romania with no formal United States education, no sphere of influence, no money, no experience and an accent. Anyone else can do it too. Please, please follow gogo on Instagram. You can find her at at gogos real estate that’s Gee, oh gee Oh s real estate. We also have a link to that in the show notes. And also please invest in her bootcamp. She has an amazing social media bootcamp if you want to learn how to do more on social to attract clients deepen relationships, and you can boy, if I don’t, every one of our listeners could probably use a little boost in their social media sort of acumen. So definitely sign up for Go Go’s social media bootcamp and you can find that we have a special link. If you go to Gogo podcast.com Gogo podcast.com That will take you right to the special keeping it real link we get a special discount. Gogo. Welcome to the show.
Gogo Bethke 3:57
Hello, thank you so much for having me.
D.J. Paris 4:00
I am I am your biggest fan and we I have not seen you in some time because you are so insanely busy. It is. I am so impressed with what you have accomplished. It was just a couple of years ago where you did not have a team. You had no agents. And now you have how many agents do you have now working with you?
Gogo Bethke 4:21
930
D.J. Paris 4:23
Oh my god. Oh my god, it took me in
Gogo Bethke 4:27
one month we’ll hit 1000 agents.
D.J. Paris 4:30
This is this is we should talk tell our audience about this. So what we’re talking about gogo works with EXP and she provides for her team. Incredible training support. She provides access to her programs. She is amazing. And she obviously is amazing because she has almost 1000 people on her team. And by the way, if you are out there listening if you want to join Go Go’s team or learn more about Her team, maybe you’re not getting the the training or the support or the coaching that you need. Go go if one of our listeners wants to consider joining you. And by the way you can be from any state in the country, you don’t have to be in Michigan where gogo is, you know, technically located right now. You can be from any state, um, how should they reach out to you to see if they want to join?
Gogo Bethke 5:23
Yeah, the easiest way is my name.com. So go go back to that calm. When you go to my website, you’re going to see a tab that’s called ESP partner with me. And then go there, watch the videos and see if you like what you see, when we call team gogo is not a team, as in most real estate teams in the nation, we do not take a cut. So I don’t become your team lead, I become your business partner, and you owe me absolutely nothing. So everything that the company has to offer on top of everything else, that we in the teamwork organization, bring to the table with the bootcamp and the weekly trainings and all that you get for free when you are business partners with us. And you’ll never have to give me a penny.
D.J. Paris 5:57
Yeah, it’s an awesome platform. I am a big fan. And I am somebody who recruits Realtors all day, and we only have you’ve actually surpassed me we only have about eight. You did? Yeah. So go Go is in she’s going to take over the show now. And I will be her guest and she is the No,
Gogo Bethke 6:14
I’m not competitive at all. I’m so excited. Because you’ve been you’ve been ahead of me all this time
D.J. Paris 6:22
I have I we only have 800 agents here. And now I feel like a big loser because you have 950 agents. So
Gogo Bethke 6:29
but in one location, oh, don’t forget to man like that’s insane to have in one local market that many agents like I could never do that in my neck. I don’t think we have 800 Each Well, I’m
D.J. Paris 6:41
glad you’re not in my local market, because I would not want to compete with you. Because that’s how amazing you are. But let’s talk to our audience today, which are from all over the country as well. And, you know, we You’re the queen of social media, but I think it would be really cool to talk about something, it’s one of those things that it’s a topic that we hear about. And then you sort of like, it’s not that important, but it really is important is determining your hourly rate. Let’s talk about that.
Gogo Bethke 7:12
So, you know, we are faced with so many different shiny objects and so many different things that can help you in so many different apps that you can buy and so many different things, right. But the thing is, you don’t know if you need that a number two, you don’t know if you can afford that. And what I mean by that is there’s there’s a break even point in your career at some point where for a while, you should be doing all of those activities because you cannot justify or afford to hire somebody to do those activities for you. Right. But the question is, at what point can you afford it? So in order to know that you need to know your hourly rate. So what I want you what I would like to talk to you about today is your hourly rate on the listing side, and on the buyer side, you need to figure that out because it’s different for most people. And then also to figure out how to hire a virtual assistant, a personal assistant, a transaction coordinator, should you hire that? Maybe a buyer’s agent? At what point should you hire that right? And what is that look like money wise. So I have also an exercise and I call the red light green light exercise. So we can go into that later, that will help you create the job description for that VA that you’re going to hire in the future. So let’s get started. You’re ready.
D.J. Paris 8:16
Let’s do it.
Gogo Bethke 8:17
So what do you think a nationwide commission is in average, on the listing side?
D.J. Paris 8:25
So I would think that
Gogo Bethke 8:28
5% Total something I mean, not in dollar amount. Oh, okay.
D.J. Paris 8:32
I $7,000 Maybe,
Gogo Bethke 8:35
oh, that’s I think that’s really low. I think it’s more like 12 Nowadays,
D.J. Paris 8:39
well shows you what I know. Let’s go with 12.
Gogo Bethke 8:41
So let’s meet you in the middle. Let’s say it’s 10,000. And let’s say tab. And then let’s say 7000 on the buy side. Okay, great. Usually buyers, you end up with less, you’re more buyers heavy than listing heavy. Okay, so if it’s $10,000 Think of it this way from the moment that you are on that initial phone consultation with that seller, then you go out to the appointment you and you’re gonna do some comps, maybe it’s gonna take you 20 minutes, right you’re gonna do some comps, then you’re gonna go out to the sellers house, you’re gonna have a little bit of a, a nice, meaty area to your conversation, then you are going to tell them how much is what then they’re going to tell you. Yep, they’re going to list with you, then you’re going to go home to the paperwork, they’re going to sign it with electronic signature, send it back to you, you’re going to plug it into your analyze, then you’re going to do a little bit of marketing a little bit of negotiations, you might drive out to the property a couple of times to do an open house or maybe you drive out to meet the appraiser and then you’re gonna go to the closing table. Alright, in average, if you want your sufficient if you’re really good at your job, I asked say we’ll take you about seven hours to work with the seller. Does that sound right? Yeah, that sounds about right. Okay. So if we take $10,000 And then we divided by seven hours, your listing side of hourly rate is $1,420. Wow. So every time you’re working with a seller, your hour is worth $1,400. Now that’s calculated on the buy side and the buy side, the sudden average commission would be about 7000. And the buyer side, in my opinion, you work about 12 hours with a buyer, you will work because you’re going to drive around, you’re going to show them how it says, in some cases, you might even move work more than 12 hours because the markets so hard, and you might have to, even though you work one out there, and they’re ready to make an offer on the first house, they see it might take you 237 offers before they actually buy one. So let’s say it’s 12 hours. But if your hourly is longer than that, then do the math separate, right? So take your average by side commission and divided by the 12 hours or how many hours you think you’ve worked with the buyer. In this case, the buy side commission per hour or hourly rate is $583. So just from this math, $1,420 versus 583. Were Who should I work with sellers or buyers? Sellers. Right? So now we know that I should be concentrating on sellers and listings, because that’s where I make most amount of my money for the same time spent, right, because we’re gonna spend an hour here make $583, you’re going to spend the same hour here make $1,400 When you hear, right, you make more money for the same time. Now the next thing is paperwork. That should be the first thing that every agent removes from their plate, there is this thing called a TC, a transaction coordinator, it’s going to change your life if you’re not using one of winters wait on to start using when you’re going to start loving real estate all over again. So yeah, go ahead. I
D.J. Paris 11:35
totally agree. This is something that agents oftentimes think I can’t afford to hire an assistant, I can’t afford to have a transaction coordinator. I’m new to the business. I can’t do that. So how can they do that? How can they hire somebody when they’re just starting out? They have no money.
Gogo Bethke 11:53
Okay, so I’m going to show you why you are losing money by not having one. You’re losing money. Because here’s the thing, right? Do you know how transaction coordinators get paid? They do transaction for you get paid off of when the transaction closes. So if the transaction doesn’t close, for whatever reason, your buyers got called fee, they no longer qualify, the seller no longer wants to sell whatever the basement flooded, and the buyer doesn’t want to buy it anymore. Whatever the reason is right? It doesn’t matter if you don’t get paid, they don’t get paid. So it is not a cost to you. You only pitching out that 350 bucks, $400 whatever they charge big are the only pitching that out if and when your transaction actually closed. In most states, you can actually charge what we call a broker fee or transaction fee. If you get to charge it like in Michigan, we get to charge it. So I charge 6% on my listings and a 495 transaction fee, my TC actually gets paid out of my transaction fee. Right, it’s not a cost to me, it’s already built into our model. Now I’m just using it for service. And now I’m going to show you how you are losing money by not having a TC. So number one, you’re not paying your TC is not an upfront cost. Only if and when the deal closes. Number two, think of it this way. Truly, if you thought about your listings and your biocides all of the people work, right. So on the listing side, you have to create the listing paperwork, then you have to plug it into the MLS, right? Then you have to negotiate back and forth and then you’re going to have some attendance, then you’re going to look at your closing CD and make sure everything’s on there. So me doing those, I would say you probably spend a good three hours through the lifetime of the file on paperwork. Okay, so now on the listing side, we know three hours for you on the listing side is 1428 times three is $4,314. Is what it’s costing you to push your own paper. Because if you took those three hours, and you went and got yourself one more seller, you do whatever you did to get that last seller for three hours and you got to yourself another seller, you’re gonna get yourself another $10,000 commission. So it’s costed you $4,314. Suppose you’re on paper, you try to say 400 or 350, or whatever it is he costs in your neck of the woods. Right? And you lost 4314?
D.J. Paris 14:12
Yeah, so let’s let’s pause for a moment because that’s really, really important. So what Google’s really saying is, we get excited, right? We go to a listing presentation, we win the deal, we win the listing, and then we come home and we send all the paperwork over via dot Luber or DocuSign or whatever system we’re using. And now we’re in the paperwork game. And guess what? Yes, it’s exciting. It’s fun. But is it the best use of your time? Well, we just proved that it isn’t. And wouldn’t it be cool if somebody could do that for three to $400 And oh, by the way, you only pay when it closes. So if it doesn’t close as gogo said, almost all Tec companies I’m aware of do not charge. So it is a total no brainer and we should also talk about what transaction coordinators actually do aside from paperwork?
Gogo Bethke 15:04
Well, depending if they’re licensed or unlicensed, right, but if they’re licensed, they can pretty much do everything you can. They’re not going to negotiate for you, right? They’re not going to show up at the inspection and negotiate the sellers concessions for you, right? That is your job. But when let’s say you did the home inspection, you call your TC on the way home and say, Hey, we did the inspection, everything was fine. We agreed on a $5,000 seller’s concession, can you please put together the addendum and just say all parties agree that salary has been 5000 seller’s concession that goes into the buyer, and then send it out to all parties? Done, it took me two seconds, right, I’ll give you a voice note on the phone. And then it’s done. She’s going to type it up, she’s going to send it out to all parties and all the signatures are and she’s going to read you know, resend it back to everybody. Again, make sure that it’s updated your file with your broker, and voila, it’s probably going to take this person an hour or two. And in the meantime, go get goes out of the house, go get another seller.
D.J. Paris 15:56
Yeah, and, and they can also help with important dates, right? Like all the important dates of a transaction, they are going to the transaction coordinator is going to know in advance what needs to be done when it needs to be done. And they will help keep you on track and they’ll just keep the paperwork out of your hands into their hands.
Gogo Bethke 16:17
So hire it out because you are losing money. And I’m by sight Okay, nice. Are you losing less because it’s $583? So 583 times the three hours so you’re losing 1749 Are you steal? Because if you promise yourself that those three hours that you just save for yourself, you’re going to spend it on lead generation, you’re going to easily make another at least another commission.
D.J. Paris 16:44
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Gogo Bethke 18:06
So don’t lose money. Make money, right? It’s just mad. The next thing is Okay, so who should be your next hire? Let’s say you already have a TC. Right? So like, I already got that go grab you using a DC for the last five years. Congratulations, you’re smart. Okay, the rest of you. If you don’t have us DC and you’re wondering where you should go, you can check out smooth dc.com It’s smooth DC that calm. The next hire should be a va, a virtual assistant. I have like 30 Plus, and I love it. Now in some different positions, right? Your first word. So your first virtual assistant should be your executive assistant. That should be the person that takes the everyday tasks off of your plate. So the reason when I realized finally dawned on me that this is stupid, it was LinkedIn. Not it’s not LinkedIn fault. I had 946 messages. I think when I logged in one day to LinkedIn, I’m like, oh my god, I have to check all these messages out of the 946. I had four. Then I truly needed to address the rest of them. Were all like, oh, so nice to me connected, or could you come on my podcast? Okay, blah, blah, right? Like no, not in and it was so important. Like I had four in there that I truly needed to address. And I was like, it took me like two and a half hours and I’m never going to get back. And I was like, do I don’t do these messages needs to be checked because I didn’t want to miss those four. Yes, they do need to be checked. But do they need to be checked by me?
D.J. Paris 19:30
Right? Do you need to sift through 950 messages to find the for No, not a good use of your time?
Gogo Bethke 19:36
Not a good use of my time somebody else can sift through them and then leave those for unopened. Right. So then I know when I log in, I only have to check those four because the rest was already checked and taking care of these four they couldn’t address on their own. So I can log in there take care of it. Maybe it was personal. Maybe it was like a big decision that they couldn’t make on my behalf or things like that. But other than that our virtual systems, checking all of my DMs the only social media do And then I personally check his my Instagram, everywhere else and every single email and every single DM on every single social media Facebook group or Facebook page, I have a virtual assistant. So let’s do this exercise so you can figure out what type of assistant do you need for in the first place. So there is an exercise called the red light green light exercise, I want you to take a piece of paper and clip it to your clipboard and draw a line in the middle and the left hand side you’re gonna see a red light on the right hand side, we’re gonna say green light. And you’re going to walk around with a clipboard for a straight week. It’s going to be attached to you by the hip. And every motion you take every action you take every call you make every email you answer every open house you hold, when you brush your teeth manual, do your when you run a load of laundry, when you show houses, right, everything that you do is going to be on that spreadsheet. Red light means you can stop doing it. Stop it right now, because you can hire it out. Those are your DMS, your emails, those kind of stuff, right? The green light is brushing your teeth. Can you hire somebody to brush your teeth? I mean, if you probably could, coming to America, right? You probably could. But other than that, you could probably brush your teeth for the rest of your life, right? walking your dog? Do you? Does your dog need to be walking? As does he or she needs to be walked by? You know, that’s red light. Right? I have somebody in our house assistant. And that is her job she wants Charlie now on the weekends. Don’t get me wrong. I work, Charlie, right? So you have to separate the things of like red light, green light green light for me is social media, my posts, I will always make the post, could I hire it out? Absolutely. I choose not to, because I will lose my brand. I built a brand around my own self, I built a brand around my knowledge, I built a brand about my work ethic and united in my mindset. So I can’t hire that portion out. Because there’s somebody else that are typing up things that I usually want. If I would, it wouldn’t be me anymore. Because it’d be in your voice, it needs to be my voice. So that’s not something I can hire out. But I only make one post and it’s on Instagram. And I do have a social media virtual assistant who takes it from Instagram and then plaster it everywhere else. She takes that post and I wrote and I posted on Instagram and puts it on LinkedIn, she takes the same post and puts it on all the different Facebook groups, she takes their posts and puts it right. So she helps me spread the world everywhere else, but I make the initial post. Right, so there’s a million ways how you can do that. So walk around with a clipboard red light green light exercise. And in the end of the week, everything that you put in your red light is going to be able to be broken up into two different sections. Number one is going to be anything that can be done online. And number two section is going to be things that are going to have to be done in person. So like dropping off your dry cleaning, walking your dog doing a load of laundry, grocery shopping, right? That’s in person, my virtual assistant from Brazil cannot grocery shop for me, I guess she could like the Kroger app and shipping to my house like you know, there’s always a way with that. But like the in person physical stuff like walking your dog, you will have to hire somebody for that in person, right? So you’re gonna put those aside for a minute, because those are the ones that gonna cost you more, we’re gonna talk about the virtual stuff, that’s where you can get a virtual assistant, a virtual assistant in average is going to cost you about four bucks an hour. Yeah. So if your hourly rate is 14 128 hours, right or under $20, let’s see how many hours that is 1428 divided by four, a virtual assistant would work for 357 hours for the same amount of money. Or look at it this way. For one hour, you could hire 357 virtual assistants who would get paid the same amount as you get paid for that same hour.
D.J. Paris 23:41
So where do people go if they want to find these virtual assistants?
Gogo Bethke 23:46
So I started out, I’m going between myself and my business partner Sammy, we have about 10 years of experience now having hired virtual assistants, you can start out on Upwork. So Upwork up wo rk.com, you can go on there, make a job post and they’ll apply and then you interview them right? And then you have to give them access to things and then you have to train them and you have to have SOPs and yada yada, you can absolutely take the route. Or you can hire us we have a company that’s called V clone knew that calm because the goal is they have a bunch of many years, right? So it’s cloning you and for exactly what job capacity you need a virtual assistant for, they already come trained and they come with all the SOPs, so and we guarantee them for 90 days. So if they don’t work out in that certain position for whatever reason that we replace them for you with another one. And then also they come with the SOP so in the future, you don’t have to come back to us. Right and it’s a video based training as well we explain it from the high the employee and the employer side of things. Right so for the employer, we talk about things like you know what, what kind of pay structure, what kind of access you should give them, how to pay them, where to pay them, those kinds of things that and the virtual assisting side they don’t need on a day to day basis. So on the virtual assisting side, they will get SOPs and video based training on how to do their job right Right. On this side on the employer side, you get SOPs and video based trainings on how to maintain having virtual assistants as employees.
D.J. Paris 25:08
Can I tell you, I’m a huge fan of virtual assistants, I have a virtual assistant that I that I chat with every single morning. And she and I go through my two dues every day. And she says, Here’s what you’re doing today, DJ now. And she’s amazing. And she, we go through that we prioritize we, and then I have another virtual assistant that every Saturday after in the morning, she goes through all of my expenses with me. And she goes, Hey, I noticed the spending trends, I’d like you to save a little bit more. So it’s like,
Gogo Bethke 25:43
DJ, you went this week, three times.
D.J. Paris 25:49
My one of my virtual assistants, just this week went through the entire here’s where I live in Chicago, we have all these amazing festivals going on over the weekends. She said, You know, I bet you guys want to go to a bunch of festivals, my girlfriend and I this this summer? And I said yes, she goes, I’m gonna go through all of them. And I want you to tell me which ones you want to go to? And I’m gonna set them up for you. It’s like these are you can even have been doing other tasks. If
Gogo Bethke 26:17
you haven’t. Yes. Love it.
D.J. Paris 26:21
It’s amazing, I think because if I if I go through all of those festivals that will take me a couple of hours. It’s
Gogo Bethke 26:29
and then you can if you will say, Oh, yeah, I want to go on here. Oh, nevermind. We are in Florida at that time. Right. So. So not only do you have to go through it with the idea of like, Do I even want to go into it in the first place, then you have to match it up to your calendar. Right? And that’s the part. Okay, I’ll show you. That’s the part where it’s really hard for me.
D.J. Paris 26:48
Yeah, yeah. It’s it this is this is what what we’re really trying to do is tell every all of our listeners that this is a mindset that you can, you know, if you don’t have to control and do everything, right, and this is what we’re talking about is outsource some of this stuff. I might my virtual one of my virtual assistants even gives me date night ideas. She’s like, hey, this upcoming weekend, here’s five date night ideas. That’s really helpful for me, that’s super useful. Yeah,
Gogo Bethke 27:22
she makes you be the best boyfriend ever. That’s,
D.J. Paris 27:26
well, you know, here’s another thing a virtual assistant is doing for me. Now, I don’t practice real estate. But if I did, I would use this in a different way. I have all my friends and my and my close, you know, relationships. She went in and put everybody’s birthday and anniversary date in my calendar. So that I and a week before each of those events, she, we have a task. Okay, so and so’s birthday is coming up? Are we going to do something for that? Think about as an agent, of course, go go. I’m sure you’ve already done this. But you can do this for all of your clients. Right? You could say, here’s their home anniversary date. Here’s, you know, here’s what they purchased the home last here’s their actual wedding anniversary, here’s their birthday, here’s their kids birthdays. And now you have you can have all this information. And you can use that to then deepen relationships with people.
Gogo Bethke 28:17
Absolutely. So we have what’s called a favorites list. And we do we fill that out for every client. So that’s how we find out I mean, we know the closing date, that’s their home anniversary, right? But like, you know, what is your favorite sports team? What is your favorite coffee shop? What is their favorite restaurant? What is do they have any allergies? How many kids do they have? What are their ages? When is their wedding anniversary where other individual birthdays, we plug all that into one in our CRM program into the profile and then we set reminders, and then it’s our each of our agents responsibility and our team to keep in touch with those clients.
D.J. Paris 28:48
Yeah, it’s really the best way to reach out to somebody and not be salesy and go, Hey, you’re ready to buy a home. You want to call and say, Hey, I know it’s your child’s birthday today. I just wanted to call and say happy birthday to your child. Like that’s a huge thing. It was my friend’s 40th wedding anniversary today. I sent them a text and they said every year DJ you send this and you’re the only person aside from their closest family members that knows that and it’s only because my virtual assistant put it in my calendar.
Gogo Bethke 29:17
That’s amazing. Yeah, we do that for our agents everybody’s birthdays in my calendar we create a happy like Happy Birthday music or picture all that then we posted so yeah, we tried to do a lot of things and you definitely cannot do this on your own. Right. So if you want to if especially if you have a massive database, if you have like 10 clients Yeah, maybe you can remember on your own right. But if you want to grow this to the levels that where you are making multi millions, you know, you’re you can’t possibly do this alone. It takes a village.
D.J. Paris 29:45
It takes a village and the good news is the village is the entire world. We now are connected through technology. And we can hire people virtual assistants from other parts of the world where the cost of living is substantially different. And, and very cost effective for people to hire some of these these intelligent, wonderful workers to you know, you’re you’re helping them by giving them income, and they’re helping you by making your life a lot easier. So if someone wants to sort of explore hiring some people to help with with tasks, you know, whether their business tasks or home tasks, what what what do you recommend?
Gogo Bethke 30:27
I mean, you can ask, I always go to YouTube for everything right. So first go to, you know, maybe just start watching some videos to even understand how people use virtual assistants. But I can walk you through a few different job titles that we have, right. So on my local team, we have a virtual assistant, and her job duty is to take care of all the leads, right and keep the database maintained. So when the Favorites list comes in, update everybody’s profile, set those reminders like those kinds of things right when a lead comes in, respond to them right away before an agent can respond to them. So we don’t lose them. Because our agents our market is crazy, right? They’re out on the market, they don’t necessarily have the ability to get back within five minutes, every single lead. So then this way, we earn ourselves some time by the virtual assistant responding to them. Then we have a numbers guy on our team and his name is Saeed. He runs all of our like, I’m the biggest nerd you’ll ever meet. i My trackers have trackers, right. So I drove on track everything from every angle you could possibly track it from. So he runs all of these reports. And then once a week, we have a kind of like a reports meeting, we go to everybody’s tabs right on our spreadsheets. And then once a month, we have like an overall to see what money came in what’s going out. What’s our retention, only those kinds of things, right. So that’s our numbers guy, then we have a few tech guys. So technology, I think it’s very important, especially if you start running a team, right? Because you’re going to have issues with like not all agents are created equal, right. So some of your agents are going to need more hand holding than other agents, some agents might not even know how to access the Google Calendar on their phone, right? They never use the calendar, and suddenly all of their appointments are going to be set up in a calendar, they don’t even know how to access right. So then you’re gonna have what we realize is even though I gave my Google Drive and all of my trackers and all of my apps and systems and contracts, and you name it to my overall downline, right, we realize that when they open my lead tracker, it’s 17 tabs, they’re like, but how do I use it? And what things go go, but how do I use it right? So then we do trainings on that. So have yourself a technology person, even if it comes easy to you, if you want to grow a team, right, you’re not gonna have time to show Joe Schmo How to Download Google app, right, you’re not gonna be able to do that. So have a tech person who can help your people. The next one is you of course, you should always start with an executive assistant like that should be the first thing you remove from your calendar, all the emails, the DMS, the nonsense that is just clogging your phones and your databases. And then we have a design assistant. And her job is we celebrate birthdays, and top agent attractors and top producers and icon agents and all of the celebratory things, right, all of those things have to be designed, all of those posts need to be made, right. So we have a design girl. And her job is to make things pretty. So if it’s somebody’s birthday, she creates a as these icon pictures, right? Or does birthday pictures, and then we post it. So that is her job, her job is designed, make things pretty. And then we have social media girl, her job is to take my posts from Instagram and plaster it everywhere. And then respond to those DNS and respond to those posts. And, you know, keep all of those accounts live because I am everywhere, but I can’t possibly be everywhere, right. So if I just think of it this way, if I make a post, my account reaches over 2 million accounts a month, if I make a post on Instagram, and let’s say 200 People respond. And I’m going to make that same post on Facebook, and let’s say 200 People respond, and I’m going to make that same post on LinkedIn and 200 people respond that is 600 people. Right? And I don’t want to take I mean, it’s impossible to respond to everybody. But there are some really, really good meaningful comments in there, that I would like to get back to them. So they know that it meant something. Right. So then now I’ll get back to them, maybe if I can uninstall them, but everywhere else, everybody else gonna get back to them. Right. And then same with DMS, like all of these accounts, if you want to play the social media game, all of your accounts have to stay alive. In order to stay alive, you have to go you have to have the back and forth the communications the posts, the people actually taking time out of their day to watch it to come in to like to share to follow right so in order for those things to happen, you have to keep your accounts alive and for that to happen you have to post and if you want to do it all it’s impossible.
D.J. Paris 34:33
It isn’t it is impossible and and that’s so what do you so you were talking about when you post your social media content. That’s what you really enjoy. That’s the thing that that it’s uniquely you. And so that’s what you enjoy the most to right?
Gogo Bethke 34:52
Yeah, that is like it’s always been like I don’t like to say it’s my job, but it’s my job in the sense of when I decided to take an avenue Real Estate should not be a broker agent right to actually make money in real estate. I went through the process of cold calling, buying Zillow leads like I’ve never done those but I interviewed others right and they formed areas they bought leads, they cold, call their door knock their, you know all that. And I was like, I’m not doing that. So when I decided to do social media, that is my job, just like a cold caller takes their job seriously, in a cold call form eight to 11 every single morning, I do social media every single day, because that is my job. When because I love it, it doesn’t feel like a job. I truly enjoy doing that. But it’s still a job, I have to stay consistent. And I did for 11 years.
D.J. Paris 35:35
Yeah, it’s amazing. So what we’re really talking about our systems, right, so this is a conversation about having systems. So the first thing is go go said, you get the clipboard, you make the line down the middle red light, green light. First, let’s figure out what parts of your life we can delegate, we can take off your plate. And, and some of those things we’re gonna have to do in person, we just can’t avoid it. Other things, digital things, invisible things, we can do that we can hire that out for people all over the world who would be happy to do it for you at a very reasonable price. And then you just have to give them access and like you said, and then all of a sudden, your time now opens up. It’s a bit of a shift. And it takes it there’s a little bit of a barrier there to break through. Once you do it. I mean, I started doing it years ago, it was a total game changer for me as well. And it’s not that I don’t want to do things for myself. It’s not like I sit around now with all this extra time and just stare at the sky. Yeah, I know, I’m busy. But this there’s so life is really hard. And this is a way to make life just a little bit less hard. Like if you know, every single month, you should be writing. Like Brian Buffini would say, you know, these personal notes, right, Brian Buffini is all about personal notes. But if you if you say well, I know I should be writing 100 personal notes a month, but I’m not doing it, then maybe it’s time to hire somebody to help you do that. It doesn’t mean you don’t write them, it means that somebody can help you make that faster and easier and better. There’s all sorts of things that we can hire out for. And remember, we’re running a business. So let’s
Gogo Bethke 37:25
see, I mean, even like not to create yourself more work to, you know, for a while you’re going to create yourself more work. But eventually you’re going to get to the point where you’re like, I just want to gain an hour back with my kids. Yeah, I just want to sit on the beach for an hour and everybody lose my number. Right? At some point you just gonna have some one to do some time freedom stuff.
D.J. Paris 37:49
I think it’s great. And anyone who even if you’re not on a team, even if it’s just you and you’re the only one practicing, get yourself some help. It’s really it this is the job is too hard without it don’t be an island, right? They say, you know, be be get other. It takes a village as gogo says, so get your tribe. And the good news is we live in a time where we can get our tribe from all over the world and for reasonable prices. So tell us about the the the TC and the virtual assistant platform that you have.
Gogo Bethke 38:26
Yeah, so the TC one is mu TC and that started with the idea that people I go and you know, speak all the time. And I talk about these kinds of things like you know how to make more money and remove things from your plate and grow and yada, yada. And I would get asked all the time about like what TC company do I recommend and I really the TC company that I used for my local team was not taking on any more clients and I was like, I don’t know, I don’t like to recommend companies or systems and processes that I don’t personally use. So it was like okay, I guess it’s time for me to open one. So we do have a company called Smooth TC, you’re more than welcome to check us out. It’s smooth TC, that calm smooth came from the idea of smooth sailing all the way to the closing table right. So just check us out go to smooth tc.com and see if we will be a good fit. And then the the week one you kind of came the same thing we already have the boot camp right so we have the agent attraction boot camp and the social media boot camp. And even in the in both of the boot camps we have a lot of virtual assistant that helps us run it right and so our clients are used to seeing all kinds of or correspondence with all kinds of virtual assistants to the program and so they were always asking us so how can I get my own VA? Can you recommend a VA? How about every company and we would always send everybody back to Upwork because that’s how ours came originally right? And eventually people were just like can you just get me one trained like I don’t want to go through all the trouble of finding them and training them and a cultural differences and an hourly differences and how do I pay them and they were all coming back to us with a million other questions. So we created we clone you and we call you is very similar to all of my other boot camps where it’s a video based training right so I share my knowledge on the employer side of things and all of my ways share Are their knowledge on what they do for me, every single VA has their SOPs written out step by step instructions for every step that they take for me. So then the person who’s going to buy the program, if they decide to, they can literally buy it, own it forever and never have to come back to us to hire another VA, the next VA that they get, they could just go out on the market and say, Oh, you’re an executive assistant. Hey, log in here, watch all these videos. Here’s your SOP two weeks from now start working your job.
D.J. Paris 40:25
I love it. I mean, SOP for everyone listening to standard operating procedure? Yes, sorry. Yeah. So basically, you’re you’re creating videos so that if the virtual assistant doesn’t work out, you can plug somebody new into it. But I think that’s a great place to wrap up. So what we’re really just to recap what we talked about, first, we talked about how much are you worth per hour? What is your rates? What are you worth? And then where should you spend your time? Well, if you don’t have enough time, we just created a way to get you more time by hiring virtual assistants to help I guarantee you can earn back, I would say, at least an hour or two a day, wouldn’t you say?
Gogo Bethke 41:05
Easy? Um, depending on the help you have, right? If you have one person helping you for now, then yeah, it’s an hour. But imagine the growth that you can create for yourself when you have multiple of them right in different positions. Because at first the mistake I made is I hired one and I wanted her to do everything that I do is only one crazy person like me, right? So it’s like imagine creating a bunch of you that they specialize in that one thing, right? Because for example, nowadays, you can start doing things for you that you’re not good at. Like how about trackers that you want but you hate numbers, right? Well hire that person who’s gonna plug all those numbers in there for you. I’m gonna tell you in the end of the month, if you’re positive or negative, where are you blowing money? What are you not making revenue, right? So it’s like, they can do things for you. Not only they can do things for you that you already doing, but now they can start doing things for you that you never had the time to do. Or the talent.
D.J. Paris 42:02
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. This is a great opportunity, everyone go out and consider hiring every single person who’s listening can afford to hire a virtual assistant, I promise you can. And if you if you can, so you just can and think about tasks that are dragging you down and just start slow, come up with a couple of tasks, have them do that. Even if it’s just one hour a day, even if they’re you’re just paying one hour a day wage, that’s an hour a day that you’re gonna get back. So it’s a total no brainer. I’m a huge fan. Gogo. Also, let’s talk about your boot camp. Tell us about your boot camp.
Gogo Bethke 42:40
So go goes with kim.com It started with the social media which we are updating right now actually we are stopped sales for a hot minute until we are updating everything then we start over. Then we have the agent attraction bootcamp. So that one is regarding that one is for agents or teams or team leaders or broker owners that want to grow their teams, right, or downline depending what brokerage they are with. And then we added on the TC company and the VA company so you can actually find everything that I do undergo was with Kim that calm, but also in the same time they each have their own individual company. So those websites and I said this new TC that we clone you they all pretty much need the you know, or what do they say All roads lead to Rome? Yeah, they all lead back to go was was given that karma eventually. Yeah.
D.J. Paris 43:25
I love it. So everyone, go visit Gogo podcast.com, because you get it actually a special discount for listeners of keeping it real podcast. So visit Gogo podcast.com, I promise this will be the incredible investment into your business. Everybody could use a boost in social media. And gogo has already paved the way so you don’t have to try and fail. And you just can learn from all of her trials and tribulations and she already knows what works. And she updates it all the time. I mean, gosh, I don’t know how many iterations of the bootcamp have already happened. But you have added dozens and dozens and dozens of hours since it launched. Just tons and tons of content there. So go visit go go podcast.com And also please follow gogo at on Instagram at gogos real estate that’s Gio, Gio s real estate. And also you can find her on our website, go go Beth key.com BETHKE, so Gog OBIEE thke.com. And check out everything related to go go. And if you want to join her team, if you think that she would be a great mentor to have and she would definitely go to gogo, Beth key.com. And you can find out more about joining her real estate team and she’ll help take your business to the next level. Gogo, thank you so much. Once again. You’ve been with us since the very beginning. We’re honored to have you and we were so thrilled to have you. Thanks for being such a supporter of our show, and we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks. Go go.
Gogo Bethke 45:01
Thank you. Thank you
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