Lauren Herskovic from Moda Group with Compass talks about how she made a career change from consulting to real estate. Lauren discusses the importance of mentorship and systems for your business. She emphasizes the impact of systems in planning for the future of your business. Lauren talks about her daily routine and how she plans the week ahead every Sunday. Lauren also shares some tips on inbox maintenance and text management. Last, Lauren discusses prospecting and how she keeps in touch with people from her sphere of influence.
If you’d prefer to watch this interview, click here to view on YouTube!
Lauren Herskovic can be reached at 248-396-8953 and lauren@modagrp.com.
Transcript
D.J. Paris 0:00
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Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with Lauren Herskovits from the motor group with Compass before we get to learn just a few quick reminders. First, please follow us on Facebook. We post all of our episodes there and we actually even as we’re recording them in real time, broadcast them live so you can find us@facebook.com forward slash keeping it real pod and also, please tell a friend think of one other real estate agent that could benefit from hearing from interviews with top producers like Lauren that we’re about to chat with and send them a link to our show. The easiest way to do that find us on our website, which is keeping it real pod.com You can stream every episode we’ve ever done right from the browser. You don’t need a podcast app and help us spread the word. Well thank you for continuing to listen and support our show. We love our audience and now on to our interview with Lauren Hurst Quebec.
Today on the show, we have Lauren Herskovits. From Motor Group at Compass here in Chicago, Illinois. Let me tell you a little bit about Lauren. She is the founding member of Motor Group at compass that she specializes in helping first time homebuyers in the Chicagoland area. Lauren’s focus is on educating her clients with constant communication and utilizing tired and true systems making the home buying process a seamless and dare we say fun experience for her clients. Lauren grew up in suburban Detroit now lives in Logan Square here in Chicago. She has a she has a BA in English and secondary education from the University of Michigan. She also served as the editor in chief for an online women’s magazine in New York City before working as the chief operating officer for a consulting company based in Chicago. She took that company from a three person operation to a team of over 100 With offices in the US and China. When she’s not working. She’s most likely at home binge watching Bravo with her dog, Harvey, please visit Lauren at her team’s website, which is Moto G rp.com MODAG rp.com. Lauren, welcome to welcome to the show. Thank you for being on it.
Lauren Herskovic 3:07
I’m so excited to be on this podcast. I can’t even tell you.
D.J. Paris 3:12
No, please tell us we love Don, I’m teasing you do you, Lord Lauren, reveal that she’s been a listener for some time, which we greatly, greatly appreciate. And we’re excited to have a listener turn top producer here on the show. But tell us a little bit about So you came from a very different world before you got into real estate.
Lauren Herskovic 3:32
Yeah, so I have done pretty much everything to the chagrin of my parents who just were like hoping that I would figure something out at some point. But when I bought my I was living in Lincoln Park, I had been working from home for years for my company, we were fully remote, and I needed more space. So I moved west to Logan Square about seven years ago. And then after I closed on my condo, I just kept going to open houses like a creeper because I was just kind of missing the experience of shopping for a home. So I sort of always knew I was you know, it was running, I was helping to run this consulting company. And I was sort of waiting for the company to sell because I was like, oh, when the company sells I’ll have money and then I can go into real estate. Since I knew so many people, you know, takes a little bit while to get takes a little while to get going. But the schedule of my previous jobs burned me out before the business sold. So I sort of hit a wall and one day I just quit and reached out to the agent who had helped me find my home to get some advice and just took the plunge. It was just it was time and I have not looked back. It has been way more fun in this job than in my last one.
D.J. Paris 4:44
Yeah, I can imagine. There’s certainly a lot more freedom, I’m guessing and the ability to sort of grow grow your own thing which which you have helped do. So tell us a little bit about sort of when you got into real estate, you know you didn’t come necessarily from that background. You had a corporate background, how did you go about starting to build your business considering this was a totally different industry for you.
Lauren Herskovic 5:07
So I knew from my real estate agent that he wanted to build a team and sort of build his systems out, he was a top producing agent, but he had never really like formalized anything. And I also knew for myself that I didn’t want to get into real estate and go from having a nice salary to having no money. So I decided, for me, I don’t like to do anything until I feel really, really confident about it, especially something as big as helping someone buy a home. So I approached him and said, hey, I’ll work for you for eight months, let me build your entire back end system for you and build up your business. And in exchange, I’m going to mentor I’m going to follow you, you’re going to mentor me, and then I’ll become an agent, once I get the whole business set up. So I was really learning the business not only from being able to be mentored, and following along, but to build someone’s operation, you’d have to learn the business from the inside out. And so it allowed me to learn every step of the back end of the process, you know, I got to learn all the vendors, I got to figure out how to communicate with people, I got to help run deals, I was just learning it as I went. And so when I finally became a producing agent on my own on, you know, the day that I started, they kicked me out of the nest. I was, you know, a year ahead of other people. And I’d also use that time to start, you know, monthly communication with people make sure everybody knew that I was in the business. And so when I did finally switch, I was able to hit the ground running. And I already had, like, you know, 10 months behind me of learning this business and marketing to people.
D.J. Paris 6:42
How important is that mentorship? And I know, understand you were also working and building systems for the team. But just being able to shadow a top producer, like how critical was that for you to then take that into the real world, once you were, you know, like you said, kicked out of the nest.
Lauren Herskovic 6:58
I truly do not know how this is not a judgement, I just don’t I cannot wrap my head around how people can get a license and become an agent on their own without that mentorship. You know, it’s I just I to this day, I mean, I haven’t been in the business that long. And I’m far from a top producer at this point. But I have learned, I still go to James, my team leader every day with questions and you know, into the team, we collaborate and we were always bouncing ideas, but there’s so much about this business, every deal that you do, you’re learning and, you know, and and you don’t know what you don’t know. But if you’re mentored by someone, or you’re following along, and shadowing, you’re learning from them, not just about, you know, like, what is a good shingle versus a you know, a used up shingle look like or, you know, the difference between different things to look for in different kinds of buildings, but also how to communicate things, how to have the inspection conversation, how to coach your clients, how to work with other agents, there’s so many pieces. And if you don’t have a mentor, you you’re gonna look inexperience not only to your clients, but the other agents. And it’s just, I would it just makes me nervous to go out there and do that without having some mentorship and guidance ahead of time.
D.J. Paris 8:10
Yeah, I agree. And, you know, I think agents oftentimes will their I don’t even necessarily think agents are to blame for this because an agent gets their license. And then they’re approached by pretty much every firm in town, who says, Hey, we have great training, great support, we’re going to take good coaching, we’re going to take care of you, and maybe they do. But the mentorship piece of it is often missing, even from firms that have excellent training. And that’s the part that that I think is is been really pretty universal, with most of the people that we’ve interviewed on the show over the years is, yeah, maybe they had decent training at their office, maybe they had no training, but they almost everyone had a mentor. So for everyone listening out there, you know, Lauren’s a perfect example of somebody that, you know, really got to learn from a top producer for almost a year before actually going into practice. And I can’t imagine what that experience translates to with your clients. But it’s got to be a huge, huge benefit.
Lauren Herskovic 9:09
Yeah, and I think a lot of people and I get it, it’s like you don’t everyone says, like, I don’t want to come in and be someone’s assistant, and I get that. But you know, I was somebody, you know, I was running a company before this. And I came in and I was like laying at the feet of every agent who would give me advice because you have to sort of swallow your pride a little bit and realize that you don’t know everything. But I’m telling you like that experience was invaluable to me. And we have someone else on our team who is sort of stepped into that role right now. She’s she’s an agent. She’s licensed, she’s doing her own deals, but she’s working behind the scenes for us and helping us with our transactions. And she even said she’s only been doing it for a couple of months and she’s like, I’ve learned so much more by watching you and watch them James and watching other people on the team, that it’s going to make her a better agent. So if there’s an opportunity, you know, did I miss out on potential for income in that first year maybe but I had solid coming in every two weeks while I learned, and that allowed me to hit, like, exceed my year one goal when I was actually a producing agent.
D.J. Paris 10:10
It’s incredible. And, you know, I know that you one of the biggest things for you is, is organization and discipline habit systems would love to talk about, you know, your thoughts around, you know, process, you know, as agents, of course, agents have to wear so many different hats, they’re basically running, unless they are on a team where there’s defined roles. A lot of, you know, people are individual practitioners, they are in charge of all the marketing, all the operations, the customer support, you know, really everything. And then, of course, every part of a transaction, which of course, it can be difficult, and systems help, you know, of course, create that structure to get things done and not let things fall through the cracks. But I know that’s really important to CC, can you talk a little bit about what systems mean to you and how they’ve helped you in your business?
Lauren Herskovic 10:58
Yeah, I just want to say that my grandma, who passed away years ago, she like, I didn’t realize it until I got into this business. But when I was younger, we’d go visit her in Florida, and we would go to the flea market. And she’d always be like, we can’t just go like, we have to have a system like how are we going to navigate this flea market? And I feel like that should be tattooed somewhere on my body, because that has been my approach to life. Like I have a system for everything, which maybe is annoying to the people around me. But yeah, I mean, I learned the last job I had was, you know, running this, this consulting company. It was grueling, you know, I’d be in the US, I’d be running our US operations all day. And then I have to run our China operations at night. So it was kind of just like this endless thing. And you, you can’t grow a business. And you can’t really do that unless you build systems. So, you know, at the end of the day, where I am now is 100%. Because of what I learned from that grueling, grueling time of my life, where I had no personal life, I was like, stuck in my house, I felt like this year in the pandemic, like, I’ve been training for this moment, for years for my previous career, because I had been doing that. But I think the thing about real estate agents is that a lot of people who net don’t necessarily have this background in corporate or background in operations, you come in and you become an agent, and you’re really good at it. And then you get so good at it, that you have to grow your business, you have to hire someone, you have to bring on help, but you’ve never actually memorialized any of the stuff that you do, it’s all in your head, and it works for you. But it’s not going to work if you want to grow and scale. And so I think a lot of people end up you know, I there’s an agent at Compass, she’s like, tippity, top agent in the state. And we were talking once and she said, you know, she still runs all of her deals on a clipboard. And it like blew my mind, because I was like, how do you do that much business with your, you know, a paper and a pen. It’s just crazy to me, which more power to her. But I think the mistakes that people make is they build our business for today. And they’re not building their business for what it’s going to be. And I think that just makes it harder to catch up later, when you’re so busy, you’re overwhelmed with clients. And now you have to like write down your systems and train someone on how to do stuff that’s only in your brain. And I also think systems are just valuable because when you have a most of us, our goals for the year are usually based on a number of transactions or $1 amount. And that is very disheartening, when that number feels so big, and like grueling, and it’s hanging over your head for the whole year. And it’s without, like steps that you’re going to take to get there. It’s just this target. That’s it seems impossible to get to. So, you know, we when we were building Motor Group, you know, James is the founder and I came on as you know, doing operations in the background, but we were really focused on not focusing on the goal, but focusing on the steps to get you to the goal. So you talk about this a lot like winning the day. And that’s really how we approach it. Because every day, I’m not going to have clients calling me and being like, helped me buy a house every single day. And I don’t want to go to bed feeling really bad about myself if that doesn’t happen. But if you have steps and you have systems and you’ve got your whole biocide, process down your whole sales process down, and you just know what you have to do every day, if you just keep doing those things. And you figure out how to organize your life to make those things happen. It’s going to make you better at your business. It’s going to give you work life balance, which obviously did not have in my last career. And it’s just going to make this all so much more sustainable and scalable.
D.J. Paris 14:32
Yeah, I think we’re talking about being proactive versus reactive. Because I know that as a real estate agent, of course client if you’re working if you have clients are currently working with, you know, they’re messaging you whenever they have a question which could be at anytime, day or night, there’s emails coming in, there’s coordinating with other agents for showings. There’s a lot of just reactive stuff that comes into your inbox or into your phone. You know, of course and then all the non real estate stuff that’s coming at us at all moments of the day as well. So we’re always having to be reactive. And that can often feel busy, and it can often feel productive. But if we don’t have systems in place to like, make sure Okay, winning the day is as you were referencing, like, Well, okay, so maybe I spent most of my day servicing ex client, did I also do a few of the other more proactive things to keep my business going? And the answer is sometimes is No, I just didn’t have time to do that. But knowing what those activities are, allows you to go to bed and going well, I at least had a somewhat of around a day, or at least I knew what I was supposed to do today that didn’t get done that I can pick up tomorrow.
Lauren Herskovic 15:38
Yeah, I think it’s also when I was interviewing agents, before I got into real estate, like a call everyone I knew who was in the business to find out, should I do this, there was an agent that I know who’s out in California, and like, he literally could not commit to a time to have a 15 minute call with me, he’s just like, I don’t know what my schedule, I don’t know. And I’m just like, I can’t live that way. You know, and it’s like, we all want to be there for our clients, you know, I, you know, I’m texting with my clients at 10 o’clock, sometimes at night, I get that. But I think the more rigid you are about structure and systems and processes, the more freedom you actually have. Because, you know, I every day, we have some training at Compass, and the person in charge of training is just everyday, she just makes me smarter and better. And she just had this moment where she was like, put down a list of the things that you need to do to have a good day and put down a list of things that you that sort of detract from like take away from your ability to have a good day. And it just really helped me figure out like the things that I need to be doing every single day for myself and for my business. And then I you know, I am pretty rigid about scheduling out my week. And of course, we know things are going to change. But I know that there’s things that I have to do every single week for myself and for growing my business and for servicing my clients. And so I’m just putting those I’m time blocking and putting them all in my calendar. So they’re there. So I know that so it’s not like I forget, if they’re not there, they’re all there. And if I have to move them around, great, but that’s, you know, like, prospecting, you know, I’m always doing that we’re spending time on that every single day, you know, time for myself or working out or you know, personal time. You know, I will on Sundays I’ll plug in my workouts, I will talk to all my clients on Monday to see when they want to go out and I’ll schedule those blocks of time. So that way, it’s like, Oh, I know, I want to do an open house this weekend. So I’m going to make sure that I put that in. Because if you’re servicing your clients, and you’re just waiting for them, then you’re missing out on so many other things, whether again, it’s for your business, or for any semblance of a personal life that you would like to maintain, especially during this time.
D.J. Paris 17:45
Let’s um, uh, yeah, that was all really great. I want to hear your specific thoughts on email, may inbox maintenance, because we’ve never really talked about this on the show. And real Realtors get more emails than anybody I know. Because of course, lots of realtors are sending out just listed just sold, you know, whatever. Lots of back and forth. How do you manage the huge influx of of emails to your inbox? Like, what is your what is your structure around that?
Lauren Herskovic 18:14
TJ, I’m so glad you asked because I literally sat down with two people on my team yesterday to help them clean their inboxes because, you know, now that we’re on Zoom calls, and people are sharing their screens all the time, I get so much anxiety when I see people’s inboxes have like 17,000 unread emails. Me too. It makes me like Hoarders Buried Alive. I am an inbox zero proponent. And I am very obsessive about my inbox. Because I think that if you have all this email, whether it’s Read or Unread, if it’s sitting in your inbox, you are going to lose things that come in, and you’re not gonna be able to find them. So I use Gmail has at my use Gmail, and they have a tool where it’s called multiple inboxes. So you can have like separate inboxes in your inbox. And so I have all my email that comes in to one. And then when I have one that a separate email, a separate inbox right below that. It’s called Lauren’s to do list. And all the emails that I actually need to read and respond to and deal with, I’ll go and I’ll move them into Lauren’s to do list. And then I just delete spam. You know, when I even like showing requests, once they’re confirmed, I delete all that because I just don’t want it in there. And then, you know, my Lauren’s to do list might have 15 emails in it, it might have four but then that’s where I’m living out of, and, you know, getting in trying to empty that out over the course of the day, you know, or as soon as I can, but it’s just, you know, because so much correspondence like I prefer if clients email me versus text me like, of course, we’re going to text all the time, but you can’t mark a text as unread. You can’t star a text, you know, once you read it, it’s gone. So the inbox I use it as a chance to, you know, as a place to do my work, but also like if I for example, send something to An attorney and I’m waiting for the attorney to do something with the client. I’ll star it. So I remember when I see it later, I’m like, Oh, wait, let’s check back in on that and make sure that he or she did that. But yeah, I mean, I think if you just have a full inbox, when your clients email you, it might get pushed to the bottom really quickly, and then you’re never going to find it again. And I don’t want to miss any correspondence, like I want my clients, you know, because usually this stuff, a lot of it needs to be responded to quickly because it’s very timely once the deal is in motion.
D.J. Paris 20:29
Yeah, this sounds very similar to like the Getting Things Done methodology that David Allen put together, which is basically, when something comes in, whether it’s an email or anything that comes across your desk, it gets filed immediately into the next action. So it’s you know, is it in a in your case, your sort of to do list within that your your, your G Suite, email account, and that way, you know, and I’m the same way, I can’t actually get to inbox zero, because there’s a few things I keep. So I, my philosophy, for me, I say, if I can keep less than 10 emails in my inbox, then I can see everything on one screen, which is very helpful as well. So for everyone out there, who does have 1000s, and 1000s, and 1000s of emails, first of all, probably go through and yeah, just or just delete the last 95% of them, and then go through the last couple of weeks of stuff. And and get it out of there. Because you know, nobody is is that organized in their mind to be able to keep track of. And it sounds like a simple thing. We’re talking about email. But this is where things get lost. I have another question for you. So now let’s go to text messages. So when you when you get a text, that’s an action item, you can’t really star it, you can’t mark it unread. You can’t easily drag it into your into your Gmail inbox. So what do you do with that so that you don’t forget about that in your text thread.
Lauren Herskovic 21:46
So I have actually sat for a focus group begging, like Google and Apple products to allow you to organize your text messages and mark things unread. I don’t know why that hasn’t happened yet. And it’s apple, if you’re listening to this podcast, can you please like, you have $150 billion? Like, can you do something with it? But for me, so first of all, the other thing, what text is, like, when you’re a real when you’re in this business, you’re getting texts from a lot of people whose numbers aren’t stored in your phone. Right? You know, and you got clients you got, you know, everybody’s texting you. And then you know, over the if you’re doing a bunch of showings, and people are texting with requests for risk or feedback or anything, texts get pushed down. And then like, obviously, like the ones I’m usually focusing on first, or the clients, and then my friends don’t get out. You know, three weeks later, my friends, like yo, I asked you to go out to dinner for you know, before the pandemic, and I still haven’t heard from you. So I have a reminder on my phone every day at three o’clock to check my texts and just go through, make sure, because by three o’clock usually that’s like the bulk of the stuff has come through. And it’s just forces me to go in so I don’t have anything on read. And at least I know I’ve gotten to everything. And then I also at the text comes through and I’m reading it and then I realized I’m gonna forget about it. I asked Siri to remind me later to go back. And like with the action item, or I put it into my I used to do list, which I love. And I’ll just throw it into Todoist
D.J. Paris 23:09
I am a huge Todoist person. So there’s a cool thing for this. We’re getting probably a little bit too into stuff talking about to do us. But if you’re looking for a great to do list management tool to do list, I’ve been a client of theirs for years. It’s like 100 bucks a year. I don’t even think it’s 100 bucks here. It’s I think
Lauren Herskovic 23:26
it’s like 40 because I use Wunderlist went away. So I had to switch to Todoist last year. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 23:31
Microsoft bought Wunderlist. And then I think yeah, so so to do is to school, but whatever to do system you use it. So there is there is an integration with Todoist and Siri, if you didn’t know. So you can ask Siri Yes, so you can ask Siri to then. So anyway, you can just tell it to put it into us. But for everyone else out there listening who either you have an Android or an Apple phone, all you have to do is if it’s Android just say, you know, say to Google remind you at you know about this particular thing. So you just can speak it right into your phone. Obviously, you know that that’s somewhat obvious, but it’s easy to forget that so you see this text, you know, with an action item, and you’re like oh, and just immediately grab your phone, use the voice command and set up a reminder, whether it’s through to do list, or just through the native, you know, reminding system through the app, or through the phone itself. That’s
Lauren Herskovic 24:19
those reminders, stay on your phone until you make them go away. So it’s like even if you know you said to do it at seven, but now you’re on a showing at seven, you just keep it there until you get home. I live you know, because we’re always in the car, you know, driving around or doing things so I live I talk to Siri probably more than any actual person in my life. I’m telling her all day long to remind me to do things.
D.J. Paris 24:41
Yeah, you know, and it’s it’s funny because I’ve done so many of these episodes. And we talk a lot about big picture strategy. We very rarely get this sort of, well, we talk a lot about strategy. We don’t always talk about tactics. So this is an actual like, super helpful tactic. So I know I know we’ll we’ll move on from that but But having systems in places is really the what we’re talking about. So we talked about text systems, we talked about, of course, email systems. What about here’s one that I always am curious to know what what agents are doing, staying in touch with either people that are not yet a client, or maybe a client that you know, already did a transaction, and you don’t anticipate maybe they even having additional business for years and years. So let’s first start with your, your, your sphere of influence, or the people in your contact list. What are you doing to stay in touch? Or what advice do you have for agents to stay in touch with those people so that when they are ready, that of course, they think about you.
Lauren Herskovic 25:38
So we subscribed on our team to the 33 touch program, through Keller Williams, that was the first book I read when I got licensed was the key the million dollar millionaire
D.J. Paris 25:50
read back. Yeah.
Lauren Herskovic 25:52
I, so we use the CRM, compass as a CRM, but we built our CRM before we got to compass and our CRM also is a transaction management tool and how we run all of our deals. So we’re still using that. But so it’s like, part of the team being on our team is, you know, we’re going to do 12 emails a month we’re going to do or a year we’re going to do 12, like mailers we do, you know, it’s just part of our business planning at the Bing every year is sort of mapping out what that’s going to look like. And I have to say, like, I don’t like to spam people. But so our focus is really on providing content that people actually want to read. And I think there’s other there’s more layers and levels that we could go where it’s like renters get one and buyers get another and but for now, this is what we can do. And I think if you’re gonna build a system, you got to build the one that you can actually use. Because if you build a system that you’re not going to use, like, what’s the point? So that’s, we do that, and then I prospect every month to a different segment of my database, you know, texting them reaching out, you know, we even talk about this a lot, you know, I follow all of my clients and sphere on social media and just to interact with them, and just to, you know, know what they’re doing in their lives, just to stay in touch with people, because my focus is a real estate agent, I really am not a salesy person, like, I don’t like to be like, oh, you know, please send me your referrals, like, it just makes me uncomfortable, a little bit itchy. And there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just, that’s just me, I don’t like to do that. So the way that I sort of focus on my lead generation and my contact list, and just staying in touch with people is just being in their lives. And then just like making sure they see they just think of my face, whenever they think about real estate. I have a system where every time somebody refers me a client, like, even if I haven’t talked to that client, yet, I send them something in the mail. You know, I send out birthday cards, I’m really big on handwritten notes, because I think people just really love that. And, you know, there’s so many amazing stores in the city of Chicago where you can get really cute cards, and people just love them. So, but it’s all in our CRM, you know, we’ve got birthdays, we’ve got home anniversaries, everything is built out so that if I don’t remember that it’s coming, I will be reminded. And that’s the same reason why I like to use to do lists and these task management systems, because if I write a note down the reminder on a piece of paper, that piece of paper is not going to text me to remind me to do it. And I want I need systems reminding me, you know, it’s like even my niece and nephews birthdays. If my calendar doesn’t tell me, there’s no way. So it’s like, oh, go ahead. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 28:32
no, no, I was gonna say the exact same thing. I do this with all of my friends birthdays, their kids birthdays, and I’m not I’m not a real estate agent, I just do it because I want to be a good a better friend. But the same thing with with birthdays, anniversaries, you know, it’s one thing to collect all that data, but then you have to have it to remind you because, you know, for me, I know, every morning I can look at my calendar, and I can see everyone’s birthdays, and I can see the anniversaries. And then I know you know if I need to send a text or or whatever. But it’s really easy. I only have to set that up once. And then I never have to think about it again. All I have to do is remember for 15 seconds every morning, I just have to look to see if anyone’s birthday or anniversary is there and
Lauren Herskovic 29:10
reminds us a week before their birthday. So you can actually send something in the mail. Like if you send it the day of everyone’s getting a text on their birthday, but I want my clients to get like the card on their birthday, you know, yeah, and my friends. But I think people who don’t use a CRM, I just think you’re holding yourself back. Because why do everything for yourself if you can have an automated system help you but to do it, like I don’t want to automate my emails. I don’t want my emails to think to feel disingenuous, because they’re not like I truly do want to reach out to people. But I need someone to remind me to do that. And I’m not going to pay an assistant, you know, to just remind me of things. I’m going to use a system that will do that for me. And then there was one other thing which I can’t remember now about systems but maybe it will come to me
D.J. Paris 30:00
Yeah, I mean, I just think you’re just so right about about systems. I mean, I used to struggle to even remember, I mean, this is when when I first became an adult, like, when am I supposed to pay my credit card bill, this is before you could just set it up automatically. And I used to remember every month, I was never, it was never that I didn’t have the money to pay the bill. I just sometimes I’d even forget that I’d have to call the credit card company and say, Hey, I know I’m two days late. Can I pay this right now? Can you reverse the fee, and it just my life was just more chaotic. And then thankfully, now, of course, you know, we all most of us probably just do automatic payments to all of our bills, but you can really do a lot of that for your business as well. So if you you know, if you’re somebody who, who needs to be reminded to comment on 10 people’s social media posts just to keep your name in front of them. Well, don’t leave that up to just being mentally or just allowing your brain to remind you naturally, because you’re gonna forget, you know, and so you just want to set up systems. So get it, get it to do manage a to do list manager, get a CRM, that reminds you, hey, so and so’s anniversaries coming up, so and so’s birthday. And you know, remember to check things like LinkedIn as well. I talked about this a lot. LinkedIn tells you when people celebrate work anniversaries, they tell you when people get a new job or a new position. And I’m gonna go back to handwritten notes just for a moment, because this is kind of funny. We, we I’ll give just it’s not even a secret. But I’ll give one of the reasons why the firm I met we’ve grown to from like, I think we had five brokers 10 years ago, now we have 700. And it’s not because I’m particularly effective at persuading people to join our firm, I am not. And I’m and that’s not really kind of the way we’re not very salesy, just like Lauren, you were saying, but one of the ways in which we have attracted a lot of people is through personal notes, handwritten notes, nobody else does that in the recruiting world. So if anyone out there is listening, and is looking to recruit agents, write personal handwritten notes, whether it’s to somebody who just passed their exam, if you want new recruits, or if you want somebody who’s a top producer, write them a personal note and say, I am so impressed with blah, blah, blah, I just wanted to let you know, we’d love to have you or whatever you want to say. And I probably that’s the one of two personal notes, that person will get the entire year outside of their birthday. And major holidays.
Lauren Herskovic 32:13
Yeah, and I just, I think that, you know, I just people want to feel, and this is just in life, like, we want to feel special, and we want to feel like someone knows, recognizes that we exist, you know, and cares about us. And it’s just so nice to just, you know, to get my mail and and not be you know, you know, some spam or whatever they call, what do you call real mail, that’s not junk mail. Yeah, it’s just, but you know, and it’s, it’s just, I want my, I want to be really authentic with, you know, it’s like I become friends with the people that I work with, I think a lot of us do, and I just want to make sure that they know that like, it’s especially when you’re working with actual friends like that, I don’t see you as just like a transaction, like, I really do care about you. And, and, you know, maybe they’ll send me a birthday card, because I like them too. You just never, you never know. But I feel like by creating systems, you know, like going back to your, you were talking about, you know, reminding yourself to do things like I was never really that good at social media. But I kind of made a goal that I wanted to be a little bit more active on social media and just try to mix up my personal and my work into and just get out there more, I set a recurring task for myself and Todoist, they should really sponsor this by the way. Every three days, it was just like post on social media. And it sort of after a year became muscle memory. And then it became part of my routine, but like I had to force myself and teach myself so you know, and then a lot of people aren’t naturally systems people, I feel very lucky that I am just because it does make my life easier. But it’s not something you can’t train yourself on. Like, if you find a tool that will is great for reminders and just set stuff up for yourself, you can really train yourself to be really good at this. And to just be more on top of things and to be, you know, more organized because I think once you realize how good your life can be when you’re not always feeling like anxious, the minute you wake up, because you don’t know what the day is going to bring. It’s just you’re gonna be a better real estate agent, you’re gonna grow your business faster. You know, it’s really, I truly think that between the mentorship and the systems, it’s why I’ve been able to be so successful in my first two years, and I have big goals to keep growing, but it’s just been really, you know, almost shocking. I did not expect to do this well on the first two years. And I think it’s because I’m just focused on the system and just the process every day.
D.J. Paris 34:32
And can you can you walk us through and you’ve sort of pieces together over over the conversation, but I’d love to hear and I know every day is different, but what does sort of an ideal day look for you a deal, you know, workday, like during the middle of the week, what would that normally look like for you?
Lauren Herskovic 34:50
So I am a morning person. But whether whatever time you get up doesn’t really matter. But I need like I like mornings because they’re quiet and I can like do my stuff that I need. To do so that’s cleaning up my personal inbox, cleaning out my work inbox and then getting all the low hanging fruit out of the way that I can do that I don’t need other people to be involved with. So like responding to emails, maybe setting up showings just all the stuff that once the day gets started, I won’t be able to get to, you know, projects for the team, things like that. I do, you know, we call it a Power Hour, mine’s actually half hour, because our Power Hour consists of doing some of the things I do in the morning, but I do prospecting every single weekday. And then, you know, I, you know, I will work out, I don’t work out every day, because I don’t feel like blow drying my hair every day. So every other, but I make sure that that is scheduled in because that’s the first thing to go when you get really busy. And I don’t want that to go from my life. And then, you know, obviously every day is different. But a lot of the days, you know, I’ve got like this afternoon, I have clients stuff starting at four and going to like eight. So I’m trying to get all the other stuff done for my day so that I’m ready for that, including, you know, making sure I have dinner for myself when I get home. You know, part of my planning and scheduling on Sundays is, is cooking foods, so I have something to eat for the entire week, you know, because that’s important to me. But there’s definitely time. For my, my own like work by myself. That’s always first and foremost. Like I used to play tennis really early in the mornings. And I realized that it made my day feel really chaotic, because I didn’t get that morning time. So I stopped Well, I stopped doing that because of the pandemic, but also because I couldn’t play that early because it would just ruin my schedule. And then I make sure that I block out time during the week for you know, it’s a little different now because of the pandemic. But, you know, I make sure that during real times that you know, I had two nights a week where I was like trying to give my friends or my personal life or my boyfriend like time where we had dinner and I wasn’t, you know, scheduling that. And so I did put showings over it and always forget for personal stuff to be fit in as well.
D.J. Paris 37:03
Well, yeah, you just you just said a lot. I only have I have one last question. And I’m just just curious, because you’re so your systems are so well defined. You talked about prospecting every morning. And you don’t have to share, you know, of course exactly what that looks like. But what does that mean to you when you say prospecting? Because I know probably a lot of people hearing this are like, Oh, what is what is what does she actually doing?
Lauren Herskovic 37:24
So I think at the edge person who is in charge of education at Compass, she likes to call it I think reconnecting because prospecting sounds so like sterile, but it basically you know, it’s like we take, we prophesized it and we take a quarter of the alphabet every quarter every month. And we’ll try to hit them three times throughout the year. And of course, people are gonna fall in and out of this, like, there’s people that I, if I talk to someone three months ago, and they tell me, Hey, I’m not ready to buy right now, I’ll set a reminder to check in a couple of months later just to check in on them and see how they’re doing. But for me, prospecting is just like going through the list and just reconnecting with people in the way that they’re the most comfortable. Maybe it’s phone call, maybe it’s text, maybe it’s, you know, a Facebook message or whatever. You know, sometimes back in, you know, when, when possible, it was about, hey, let’s get lunch, or let’s go grab a coffee, or you know, just try to see each other. Sometimes it’s just checking in sending them, you know, something, I just want to connect with people, because I don’t want people to feel like I forgot about them, once they purchased a home, or it’s just making sure that the people who maybe came to an event or I met or did open house, you know, just trying to gauge where they’re at and just stay on their radars, you know, and it makes me uncomfortable, real a lot to call people who don’t call back, or to keep emailing people who haven’t emailed back, but there’s an agent ones that I talked to, and he said, until they tell you to eff off, just keep calling people. So that’s just what I keep doing.
D.J. Paris 38:50
You’re also calling people or emailing or texting people that are in your contact list. These are not necessarily your
number, buddy, like I’m gonna tell you.
And these these kinds of calls aren’t calling for sale by owners or expireds, where you’re going to, you know, meet a lot of, you know, unhappy people. These are people that want to hear from you, or assuming they want to hear from you. And again until they tell you to eff off. Which, which, which again, isn’t that terrible of a thing either, because then you can remove that person from the process. Of course, I’m sure that never happens to you. But if it does happen, it’s not a big deal because it’s just part of the process it okay, I’ll remove that person from the process. Not a big deal.
Lauren Herskovic 39:30
Yeah. And if you call someone twice in a year, and they don’t answer the phone and don’t call you back, then I put them on the Do Not prospect list because it’s like staff wasting my time on people who, you know, they’ll still get my emails, but if they don’t want to hear from me, I’m not gonna keep calling them if, you know, eventually they want to call me back great, but I don’t you know, that’s part of the process as well as like when to remove people. So you’re focusing your time on the people and the things that matter.
D.J. Paris 39:54
Wow. Well, we are so so happy Lord to have you on the show. And we’re so grateful that you are Our listener and that it’s been helpful for you and we are my business DJ, this is all you well then I will I will be requesting a a spiff on every transaction. I don’t know if that’s illegal, but we’ll figure out a way around it but but being recorded, oh yeah, shoot for strike that there will be no spiff paid to me I abide by the rules by whichever governing body does those rules. But anyway, um, no, but thank you so much for being on the show. And for anyone out there, who is who’s maybe a buyer or a seller or renter or an investor who wants to work with a top team in the Chicagoland area, the Motor Group, or what’s the work with Lauren, specifically, who’s an up and comer and she’s she’s crushing it. What’s the best way someone should read it reach out to you?
Lauren Herskovic 40:45
Right, zeroed inbox, it’s a Lauren at mo D a grp.com. And also, you know, at companies, I’ve worked a lot of agents who have asked me to help them. So if there’s agents out there who need advice, you know, this is my passion is building systems, and helping people just like, be more efficient. So agents feel free to reach out like, I’m happy to help.
D.J. Paris 41:10
Yeah, and everyone should visit Lauren, and the Moto group at Moto G RP. So group without the overuse of Moto G rp.com. You can learn all about their team and what they offer. And also, if you’re an agent, and you need some assistance, reach out to Lauren, she was happy to share some of her systems with the audience. So thank you, Lauren, so much for being on the show. We’re so grateful to have you.
Lauren Herskovic 41:33
Thank you, I have one last thing that I forgot. We are looking I don’t know if anybody out there knows anyone. But we’re looking for someone to help us with our social media, on our team. So if anyone knows someone who’s really good at it, it’s part time right now. But yeah, reach out because we need help. Our social media is not that good. I mean, it’s better than it was. But we’re still we’re working on it. Yeah. So
D.J. Paris 41:53
anyone out there listening who either has a good social media person themselves, or is a good social media person. And you could be from anywhere, obviously, reach out to motor group and say, hey, I want to help you guys take it to the next level, because they’re already a top producing team. And they just need some help with their with their social content. So anyway, Lauren, thank you so much. I want to before we wrap up, I just want to tell everybody who is listening. First of all, thank you for continuing to listen and watch and support our show, please tell a friend think of one other agent that could benefit from hearing this great interview about systems with Lauren and send them a link to this episode. You can find us on our website, keeping it real pod.com. You can stream all of our episodes right from the website. If you’re not a podcast person, or just pull up a podcast app on your phone and search for keeping it real and subscribe, we’d appreciate it. But telephone and also follow us on Facebook. Think of one I’m sorry. For Facebook, we post every single day we find an article online written to help agents grow their business and that’s we post that we also post a funny like picture kind of meme thing. And the only other thing we post our interviews so it’s a great we try to keep it lean and really helpful for agents so far. Find us on Facebook facebook.com forward slash keeping it real pod, Lauren. It is was such a pleasure. We’re excited to continue to watch your growth in the industry and we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks Lauren.
Lauren Herskovic 43:14
Thank you
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