Welcome to our quarterly feature, Social Bootcamp With Gogo Bethke!
In this episode, Gogo goes through the process of starting and building a team based on her own experience. Gogo also discusses what positions you need to hire first when deciding to start the team. Next, Gogo describes how she runs her own team from distance and what her expectations are from her team-members. Last, Gogo and D.J. discuss Gogo’s bootcamp and what it offers.
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
Thinking of building your own real estate team. Where do you start? We’re going to talk about that today. 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 on to our show.
Welcome to get real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show and today is our regular series called Social bootcamp with gogo Beth key. Now gogo Beth key came to the United States in 2003. To build her American dream she was broke, she had no real estate experience no sphere of influence barely spoke English and only $6 to her name. So that left her with nothing else but Facebook to help build her real estate business which is where she started and she created gogos real estate began her and began her real estate career now with the power of social media gogo has sold and I this number is old and it’s I know she’s gonna correct me because this is way low, but has sold at least 75 million in real estate. It’s hundreds more at this point. But she shares the good the bad, the ugly of real estate and her honest snippets into her daily life has earned her 10s of 1000s of social media followers. And in the real estate community. She’s earned the nickname The Queen of social media and after being asked to present at various conferences and events with realtors. She built her own social media bootcamp, which is called Go Go’s bootcamp. Now today she has a team of Gosh, eight 900, maybe 1000 agents we’ll find out less than 1000 agents nationwide. She has 1000 agents on her team. 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 US education, no sphere of influence, no money, no experience, and an Eastern European accent that anyone can do it as well. Please follow gogo on Instagram. That’s the best place to learn about gogo as she is at gogos real estate. And please also consider investing in the bootcamp I just mentioned, which is called gogos boot camp. It has dozens of hours of instruction to help transform your social media into a lead generation machine. And for a special discount just for our audience, our listeners or viewers. Please go to Gogo podcast.com and go go podcast.com By doing that, it helps support our show and also you get to Go Go’s unbelievable program Coco Welcome once again to the show. Oh, thank
Gogo Bethke 3:43
you for having me. I missed you.
D.J. Paris 3:45
I miss you as well. And I this is this is funny. If you’re watching me you’re seeing me in the shadows because my blinds I have these super fancy blinds that are electric, except the battery ran out so I can’t shut them and I’m staring at the sun. So I’m in the corner. So if you’re looking at me, you can’t really see me but you can focus your eyes on Gogo. She’s the guest anyway. And she’s probably more interesting to look at than me anyway but it is it is good to see you. And so what tell us what’s going on what do we want to talk about today?
Gogo Bethke 4:18
Well I was thinking you know, usually get bring social media but I feel like social media is just the basics right? It’s how you you start building your business and continue building whatever business that you decide today I will not in companies right? But I also feel like that’s also false like the umbrella of technology and leveraging your time and building systems and processes so that you can have time freedom, location freedom and financial freedom is pretty much what all builds off alright, initially all started with social media and all works in social media for me. So I figured today I run a small local business or a small local team in Michigan, but I live in Florida. So I thought that we could talk about what it’s like running a team and not even living in the same state like what says And then processes and weekly meetings and things like that we have in places in order to make sure it’s all working properly and and you can have your cake and eat it too.
D.J. Paris 5:07
I think that’s a really great topic because we’re seeing it, you know, this trend towards teams, the last couple of years teams are becoming more and more powerful, more and more than norm. I think, you know, it’ll be interesting to see in like five years what that looks like, I think I, my guess is a lot more agents will be on teams, or now is the time to maybe think about even creating a team. So this is really interesting, because I have now talked to people like gogo, of course, which we’re talking to you today. But I’ve also talked to other agents who work in other states, and, and literally don’t live in those states anymore. So it’s very, very interesting. So yeah, let’s talk about it. So I
Gogo Bethke 5:47
started out as a as an agent, right, like everybody else selling real estate. I started with social media. And that’s why today out of necessity, right? Today, people know me as a social media cleaner real estate. But the idea is not for you to be on the hamster wheel for the rest of your life. Right? When you were trading time for money, you’re going to hit a ceiling. And when I hit my personal ceiling, I was like, Okay, I have a couple options. I can sell more homes, which requires more time, which I already didn’t have. Right? Or I could sell more expensive homes, which was also not necessarily an option because guys at the time I was in an area called Pinckney, Michigan, good luck finding it on the map. They have a population of like 9000, I was already selling in the low four, hundreds, average price range locally was 275. So my next option was to like break into the gated community. And we had like two of them in like a 20 mile radius. So it was like, Oh, that’s not gonna be an option, right? Because yeah, you can break into the communities, but the turnover rate is much less because your pool, the pool of buyers that you have, you know, the top 1% You’re talking 1% of the buyers, how many of them are on the market, those homes usually sit on the market longer, yada, yada, long story? Yes, I would make higher Commission’s but less often. Right, so that wasn’t an option for me either. So I was like, Okay, the next option is I have to create a bunch of enemies. So since there’s only one of me and only 124 hours, then how can I make possibly more money without trading more of my time that I already don’t have is by creating a bunch of other Minimes, then I can leverage their time to make commission. This is where comes in a team, right? You can also do it, you can start off with referrals, if you don’t have enough transactions, right, where you can justify hiring someone full time and to your team. And also depending on what brokerage you are, what their qualifications, what you need to hit in order to qualify to start a team, right? So at our brokerage, it’s a $6 million production to start a standard team. Right. So if you don’t have that, you might say, Okay, I’m not I don’t qualify to start a team just yet, but I don’t want to work as much as I’m already working. So then what you can potentially do is go into corner, just go
D.J. Paris 7:45
just go go saying that because she’s seen me slinking away from
Gogo Bethke 7:50
his winking at me and going to shake
D.J. Paris 7:55
up. My girlfriend’s listening, I am not winking.
Gogo Bethke 8:00
He does have one eye closed, because that’s what the,
D.J. Paris 8:03
if your husband is listening, I’m not waiting. I’m sorry, go ahead.
Gogo Bethke 8:07
I closed that. You know, what is that. So then what you want to do right is multiply yourself so it’s time for you to create a bunch of meaning use, if you don’t qualify to start a team, you can join it with an agent and just say, Hey, listen, the overflow that I have, I’m going to give them to you at a 5050 transaction fee. So now think of it this way every listing that you have, especially I want to look at your production. Right and look at let’s say the 20 deals last year, I want to see out of the 20 deals, how many were listings. If you are more than listing heavy, right, and it’s time for you to to hire a buyer’s agent for multiple reasons a because if your listing heavy, you do not have the time that it takes to babysit those listings. Each listing should bring you two buyers, one is going to buy the house one is going to buy something else in the same price range. So every time you have a listing and you didn’t get yourself to buyers off of that listing, you wasted your own time, which means if you’re a listing heavy agent, you can go ahead and hire yourself a buyer’s agent and their job is to hold your listings open and follow up with those potential buyers so you can close a salad and double dipping and V get another buyer for your team right and yourself to then go ahead and you know buy something else in the area for the same price range. So let’s assume that you had a $300,000 listing, right that should bring you to $300,000 buyers, and a commission commission on 300,000 If you charge 3% is nine grand even if you have a 5050 split that $4,500 for the buyer that’s going to buy the house and another $4,500 when a buyer is going to buy something else in the similar price range. So now you are the one listing you created yourself a $9,000 commission on the listing side and 240 $500 Commission’s on the buyer side by splitting the opportunity with the buyer’s agent. So now you turn that $9,000 Commission into $18,000 and you created someone an opportunity they just close two deals they would have not been able to close otherwise.
D.J. Paris 9:53
And you know I think you you’ve said this I just want to make this a point to is these are people that can hold open houses for you for your listings if they’re in the same area.
Gogo Bethke 10:02
Exactly, exactly. So you got it. So now that you understand the math right, now the next thing you want to get done, actually, let me just do something very quick. The next thing you want to get done is work yourself up to a team. Because when you work yourself up to a team, right, now, you’re going to be able to give an opportunity to the agent with a reduced commission versus a full commission. Think of it from the agent perspective, if the agent can go ahead and have a reduced commission or half cap, right in our case, why would they give you 50% of their commission if they don’t get a reduced cap, right, because they still have to reach a full PCAP. So the idea of starting the team is not only going is unofficial to you, but it’s also beneficial to the agent, because now they’re going to be able to sorry, now they’re going to be able to pay less into the company and make more money and take home. So the likeliness that they’re going to stay on your team for a long time is much higher.
D.J. Paris 10:56
Yeah, we’re talking about creating stickiness by giving opportunities at a reduced Commission, which makes perfect sense, because you’re providing so much incredible value to the team member. And it’s really what most the reason most people leave the industry in the first couple of years is because they don’t have enough opportunities, they can’t find enough opportunities on their own. And so this idea of even finding somebody who might be struggling in their first year or two and saying, hey, I can help get you out of the struggle. And you workout in arrangement, it creates incredible stickiness, they get to learn from you, and everyone wins.
Gogo Bethke 11:27
Exactly, you got it. So that’s the idea of starting it right. And then eventually you’re going to but before you get yourself a buyer’s agent, though, I strongly recommend to get a transaction coordination coordinator first, right? Because that is your lowest data entry is the lowest return on your investment for your time. Right. So that needs to be the first one hired out. If you can’t afford to have an assistant, that should be your second hire. And the third one should be a buyer’s agent. And eventually, if you’re really good at social media, and advertising, and you have more leads that can come in and if your buyer’s agents are not good at turning them into clients that you need to get an ISA, an internal sales associate, in case you don’t know what an ISA Yes, because I didn’t know what an ISA was right? It’s pretty much a call it’s calling center, they call on your behalf, they create opportunity, they plug that opportunity into your team’s calendar. And in return, they usually get paid a small percentage and maybe a small hourly rate.
D.J. Paris 12:21
Yeah, and let’s talk about you mentioned transaction coordinator and I we so rarely talk about that on the show. And I think it’s really important thing for people to understand. You don’t have to input everything yourself into the MLS, you don’t have to input, you want to review everything, of course to make sure it’s accurate. But you don’t have to go around chasing signatures through you know, dot loop or DocuSign, or whatever e signature platform you’re using, you don’t have to worry about setting up important dates related to the transaction that are coming up. You can hire somebody to do that. And it’s ridiculously inexpensive. You know, what, what are you seeing for prices for transaction coordinators these days,
Gogo Bethke 12:58
I mean, it’s a little different nationwide, right? Someone in Alabama is gonna pay different pricing than someone in California, right, just because the price per transaction, the regulations, and there’s way more work in California, there is in Alabama, but I would say somewhere from 250, all the way up to 500 per deal. Now in most states, you can also charge what’s called the transaction fee, right. So if you can charge a transaction fee, you pretty much justify your transaction coordinators cost by collecting a transaction fee plus commission, right, so I collect 3% on each side, plus a 595 transaction fee, which also covers our TC, our photography, all of the additional marketing costs, the broker opens all of those things that we do for our clients. Now think of it this way a TC only gets paid different that paid meaning if your deal falls apart, let’s say you have an accepted offer. And for whatever reason, buyers get cold feet, they walk away, right? Whatever reason that your deal is not going to close, you don’t owe the transaction coordinator anything. So you will lose absolutely nothing. You work for the same deal that they work for the same deal. If the deal doesn’t closes, you don’t get paid, they don’t get paid, they get paid pretty much when you get paid. So it’s an absolute no brainer. For us realtors, that should be your first hire. I mean, you should have got it done in the last few minutes when I was talking.
D.J. Paris 14:10
And it’s it I want to make this point there are not too many services in this world that I’m aware of that. If if something doesn’t happen, even though they’ve done all the work, then then they don’t get paid. But that is how the transaction coordinator services work. I don’t know what magic they have to where they can do that. But every service is kind of that way. So it there it goes at not much risk. And do you really want to spend hours chasing things your time is worth more than $300? Even if you if you spend, let’s just say I don’t know, three hours total on paperwork over the course of a transaction is probably more than that. Isn’t that worth 300 bucks? I think it is.
Gogo Bethke 14:49
i The easiest way to do it is by calculating your hourly rate. So most agents have no idea what their hourly rate is and that’s where they go wrong. That’s because they don’t know how much money they make in the hour too. Damn. Spending $300. It’s an expense versus realizing that if your hourly rate is $1,200, and here’s how you’re going to calculate it. Let’s say you made $250,000. Last year, let’s see, what, 40 hours a week, that’s 2080 hours a year, divided 250,000 by 2080 hours, and you realize that your hourly rate is 400 bucks. Now, if you’re making $1,200 an hour, should you be doing data entry, even if it’s only taking you three hours, that’s $3,600, you will be paying 300 versus saving yourself that 3600. Because that’s what it’s costing you if you do the work, right. Not only that, but if you hire that out, and you pay 300, which by the way, charge a transaction fee, so it’s not even a cost, right? But let’s say you hire it out. Now you create it yourself three hours to go get yourself more clients. So let’s say you get one client per hour. That’s three clients, what’s your average commission? Let’s say it’s 10. Grand, you created $30,000 worth of opportunity here in those three hours, and you paid out 300? If I told you give me 380,000, would you do it?
D.J. Paris 16:06
Every every I give you every penny I had?
Gogo Bethke 16:09
Exactly. I’m like, Can I do it again? How about? I want to wait, can I do it again, right? Like, of course anybody in the right minds, but people don’t start to understand what their hours worth. So because they don’t know what the how much money they can make. Everything is a cost.
D.J. Paris 16:24
Yeah, and I think to getting over this hurdle of, well, they’re not going to do it as well as I can do it. That’s, that’s, that’s what stopped me from getting virtual assistants over the years. And I wish I would have given that thought up years ago, because you can absolutely find great help. And you can coach and train them and teach them. That’s what you’re supposed to do when you hire somebody as coach and train them. And by the way, maybe they won’t do it 100% of the way that you would do it. Okay, but maybe they’ll do it 95% If 95% is acceptable, and it should be in most cases. Now, when it comes to paperwork, obviously, everything needs to be perfect. But if they can do 95% of the work for you, and you can just give them $300. And then you go off and go to a networking event or host a client appreciation event, or just call your database and say how’s everything going and trying to get leads that way? Boy, you’re gonna make money instead of wasting time, you know, making everything absolutely pixel perfect.
Gogo Bethke 17:20
You got it. I have like 40 of them. I don’t even know who does what anymore.
D.J. Paris 17:26
It is it is remarkable.
Gogo Bethke 17:27
What do I care as long as the work is done? What do I care, right and I full freedom to my, my VAs, they can do whatever they want from whatever they wanted. As long as the work is done, I always tell them, I don’t care if you’re on the beach or in the club. As long as when I message you get back to me and the work is done. You have Wi Fi and cell service. I’m good. Do it from wherever you can, right. And the other issue people have is like they have accents, right? And so it occurred to me one day, because I felt the same thing. And I occurred to me one day, I’m like, hold on a minute, I have an accent sounds like Ah, okay, so that is not an objection anymore. Because if I can build an empire here, right? With an Eastern European accent, they can certainly handle whatever job they got hired into.
D.J. Paris 18:12
Yeah, and it’s funny we’ve had we have six virtual assistants at our company who helped do administrative tasks for us. And they are constantly calling our Realtors at our firm. And they’re such a lovely people are our virtual assistants, that I don’t believe anyone has a problem with the fact that they live in the Philippines. And their accents are very minor anyway, but they’re just lovely, wonderful people. And I don’t think people care that much anymore about hearing an American voice versus a you know, a foreign voice.
Gogo Bethke 18:41
Yeah, I mean, we’re getting we’re getting used to it. I think I think COVID taught us a lot, right.
D.J. Paris 18:46
Yeah, yeah. Well, let’s talk about also like doing deals in other what when you live in another state, so let’s talk about that.
Gogo Bethke 18:55
So I moved to Florida originally, and my son is in Michigan, right? And we decided to one day, about two years ago, we were at a local mastermind, right? And I never forget and Jake, John kitchens, the coach said, go go and do it. Why are you guys still living in Michigan? You know, you’re not a tree you can move. And I was like, Oh, why do we live in Michigan? Like you only have one life? Why don’t you just go and live it wherever you want to live? Right? Yeah. And we love Florida. We love the seasons. We were kind of sick. I’m sick of the winters. We love Michigan in the summer where we were sick of the winters. So we decided to move so we came down during COVID We rented an Airbnb, we really loved it. I decided to make a purchase new construction took us 14 months. But then we moved down here. In the meantime, we built a team in Michigan, right? So I was like okay, I have two years to build the team remove myself 100% from production. And while I get to move my team stays the same transaction stays the same actually, they didn’t stay the same. They almost doubled which is amazing. Right? And that shows you that you can get it done from absolutely anywhere if you have the right systems and people in the places right. So we still do everything the same like if I was in Michigan. So we have a very structured, I have a contract with my team, I have a standard team. So the different forms of teams I’ve been the brokerage that I am with right mine is called the Center team, which means I’m a full capper. My agents are half cappers, just so you understand that. And then we have expectations. So the size of how everybody else likes to run their business, I have expectations since I built my business on social media. So they have to post they have to do analysis, they have to do all the things that I’ve done. When I was a full active agent, I’m no longer in production, I removed myself 100%. First, I stayed on the listing side, then and I gave all of my buyers away. And then one of my agents became really good, she became my listing specialist. So now all of my listings go to her, the buyers go to another agent. And that’s pretty much how we do it. We have a meeting once a week. With me, they have multiple meetings with me, they only have one meeting a week. So every Monday with all of my nine companies, I have a meeting. So I’m back to back to back on Zoom calls on Mondays. But in one day, I can get it all done. I have my meeting with everybody needs to have my meeting with for the week and I can go on with my week. Everybody knows what they need to be doing. So Mondays we have our team meeting and the team meeting, we kind of do it, we kind of have a flow to the meeting, right? We chitchat for a second, how was everybody’s weekend? How many open houses? Did you guys do, you know, do you write offers, and then what’s going on in the week, the deal is, and then we go into what we call the lead tracker. And if anybody wants a copy of my lead tracker, you can go to my Instagram, and go to my link. So if you go to Google’s real estate on Instagram, go to my bio, and in my bio, you find the links and in the links, you can find the free lead tracker, it’s my lead tracker. Now it’s a few pages long, and I walk you through it. It’s an Excel sheet. So I walk you through exactly how we use that. So an initial page is everybody that comes in there any lead no matter what source they came from, it’s a manual entry from the agents, right, I want them to get into the motion of tracking and knowing who they’re working with, right? Even though everything we collect automatically goes into our CRM program that we use Cavey core from there, the manual, one is where they actually had a conversation, and they are communicating with that person, right. So that’s our lead tracker is the first page everybody goes in there. And then all of our agents have the little drop down. So we know which lead was assigned to each agent. As soon as you assign it to that, in general, it automatically puts it over to their tab as well. So in the bottom, we have each agents has their own tab. So from the big screen, right on the very initial first stage, I want to see that we have $17 million worth of leads in our queue right now. Right, that’s our that’s our initial page. And then from there, it breaks it down to the agents. So I see that Clancy has 7 million of the 17, Kerry has 5 million of the 17. Josh has 1 million of the 17. Right. So it’s like it breaks it up. And then from there after everybody and then they also color coordinate there’s green means that they’re under contract. Right. So when you’re looking at there’s everybody that’s white on their own sheet means is that they are in communication in some shape or form. Green means that they are pending, they actually have an accepted offer. Red means they told us to fuck off. Can I say that on your show worse, and beep it out. So they pretty much tell us to go pound sand, we make them rad because that means that we are not allowed to contact them anymore. But other than that, if they are just not talking to us for whatever reason, we consider them that they are a future client at some point, right? So we stay in touch with them. So when they go pending, they all go green under the under on their tab as well. But it automatically goes over to the pending tab as well. So when I open up my initial lead tracker, it shows 17 million, but then I open up the pending tab, which was 5 million. I know that we closed about what 30% Right, so we have a 30% closing
rate. Now we have a little bit higher closing rate than nationwide average, I would say because we really only target warm audiences, meaning I don’t run ads, right. So the leads that come in organically come in, they pretty much raised their hand and they want to do business with us. They contacted us they went on their website, they went on Facebook, they commented on something that we posted. So it’s not like cold audiences when I’m running $5,000 ads a month and Joe Schmo was bored on Zillow and somehow found his way to the right, we don’t do that. So with that being said, Now, in the pending tab, I’ve see what’s going on what we are closing how many we have, what are the closing dates, who was the lender? Where did the leads come from yada yada? Now where the leads come from we also track because I want to pi? I want to see in the end of the year, where should we be spending our time? Where’s our referring partner? Who is our cheerleader? Right? That Where’s if I was to spend marketing dollars, where should I spend it? Which I don’t have to spend marketing dollars? Well, if I was to spend, where should I spend it right? You want to see where your leads are coming from? Is it your sphere of influence? Is it open houses? Is it a lender partner sending you new leads? Is it your ability to get it from your book club yoga man to man sales, whatever that is, right? So you have to create those categories, literally where those leads are coming from. So then you know in the end of the year where you need to be spending your time or your marketing efforts. Okay, so from the pending tab now goes to the clothes tab. Why do I have a separate tab for that? Here’s the reason why. How many leads we generate. How many are we able to put on contract and how many are able to actually save and close? Some deals are going to fall apart? Right? And I want to see what is our closing rate? Not our pending rate, what is our closing rate? Right? And from those mistakes that are there when pending, but we didn’t close we that means you need to learn a lesson and what is that lesson that we need to learn? Right, so then your closing rate can get higher? Because do we get paid for pending? We get paid for it almost.
D.J. Paris 25:25
Right. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, we’re talking about tracking, we’re talking about making sure that you know, not you go go, but our listeners know exactly what they’re okay, from, from warm to pending, we need to know what that close ratio is just to get depending. And then we need to know the the close ratio from pending to closed, and not only to be able to forecast. But as gogo just said, a really important thing is maybe my pending to closed, close ratio is only 60%, which means 40 of my pet 40% of my pending deals fall through. Okay, what’s going on? What skill do I need to develop to figure out a better strategy to get that up?
Gogo Bethke 26:03
Exactly. You got it? You got it? Yes. What? How
D.J. Paris 26:09
much of coaching in real estate is about teaching people. There’s two things I think I’m curious to get your thoughts on this. I’ve always thought, Look, it’s very difficult to go out and be a successful agent. I truly believe it’s not an easy job. It’s doable, absolutely doable. But it’s not easy. Most things in life that are worthwhile aren’t easy. So that’s not a big
Gogo Bethke 26:29
Hey, I always say if it was easy, everybody would be a realtor.
D.J. Paris 26:31
That’s right. And a lot of people try and a lot of people don’t make it. But I think it’s it’s really a couple of things. I think discipline, of course, and that’s something that, you know, everyone’s got to figure out how to find their own their routines, their discipline, what works for them. But then, this idea of tracking everything, it seems daunting at first, if you’re somebody who just kind of flies by the seat of their pants, and you’re aren’t used to really having a good awareness of what your numbers are, but it is actually freeing once you get in the habit, I
Gogo Bethke 27:01
love it. I love it because you can grow something you don’t track. Right? Nor can you learn a lesson. If it’s not literally staring at you in the eye on the spreadsheet of like, shit, like two out of 10 deals fall apart. Like what? And that’s not okay. Right? So I’m attract that I like to joke and say my trackers have trackers. Yeah, I’m the biggest numbers nerd you’ll ever meet. It’s so to me. It’s so exciting. Okay, so then actually have your trackers which you should have your trackers and I’m giving mine for free. So go and download it and make it your own right? Then what you want to do is you have to one your team lead right? People will drag you by the nose if you let them. I actually had to fire my nephew. Oh, no. Because I only want to work with people that have the work ethic you can work 12 years for building your reputation and someone can run it in three seconds. And I’m not allowing not allowing that no matter who they are even if their family right. So you have to honor the business how you want to build it, they have to, they have to agree to build it with you. Right and your way. So our team contract, first of all, you have to have a team contract. And in that team contract, it has to spell out what is expected of them that the leads have to be answered within five minutes. If they don’t answer the within five minutes, they’ll never get another lead again. Yeah, they have to do two open houses every single week, hour, out of four weekends in a month, they have to do two weekends, open houses, right. Our listings always have to be held open until they sell every single weekend, if they can’t have the open houses, and it is their responsibility to find a replacement. Right. So all of these things my agents have to post we have a posting schedule, which means it’s from my Cavey core, right that in Cavey core, they’re going to take the lanes Mondays, we do a listing Tuesday, we do all of our listings Wednesday, we do search for homes, Thursday, we do open houses and Fridays we do how much your home is worth. Now, because we have multiple agents, they take turns weekly, one agent one week, the other agent next week. So I don’t care how they divided up. But as long as we made a post every single day with featuring one of these properties, right? Because that’s how you’re going to generate those leads back to you. Because Cavey core has a lead capturing ability. That’s the whole point you’re doing it, you’re not doing it because we have nothing else to do. Right You’re doing it because I want more clients, right? Then those leads come in to our Cavey core from their first one who jumps on it, they put their initials on it, that lead becomes theirs, they have five minutes to contact them in some shape or form. We do a lot of video based, so they send them video style, selfie style video, right introducing who they are, they would love to under business, yada, yada. And then kind of they go from there every Friday. So the team actually one more thing. Wednesday’s is our team meeting our organizational mindset and production training, I should say, and it’s mandatory for them. So it’s mandatory for them to come to everyone’s a one o’clock training. It’s mandatory for them to go to the contract training, which our brokers do contract training, I think every Thursday at 930 and they have to go to them until they want to do all of the trainings. I’m not I’m going to teach you the contracts because guess what is it my time was spent? DJ, no, no, somebody else already doing it. So me as the leader, it’s my responsibility to make sure that you know where to go to get the education and to hold you accountable for it. But I don’t have to be teaching you the contracts. I’m not the broker they are, like, so we send you to contracts training, and they only have to go until they get to all of the contracts. And then every Friday, they have a meeting with my operations manager on Fridays is one they have another spreadsheet, right? And that check sheet is mostly like, Did you hold an open house this weekend? Which property? How many people walk through? How many did you contact? How many buyers? Did you get out of that open house? Did you send 10 messages to your fear of influence? Did you have face to faces? Or did you have face to faces, they supposed to we have this rule of Never Eat Alone. So they have to take someone out for coffee or lunch every single day. And that could be a local vendor, it could be a title, company or lender, like anybody that you need to form a relationship with. But also your sphere of influence the cousin that you haven’t seen in three years that a high school friend that just had a baby, and you’re thinking they have to upsize, right. Like all of those things. So Christie goes through that, that that spreadsheet, so we hold them accountable, make sure that they’re doing the actual thing that is expected of them. Did you make all of your posts all these things? So all this guess what I can only through Wi Fi? Or cell service?
D.J. Paris 31:20
Yeah, you don’t have to physically be present. And I was just thinking about everything you expect from your agents. It sounds like a lot. And for those of you that there are anxiety went up with thinking about all this activity, it’s actually anxiety reducing, because once you know, at least for me, it would be I don’t want as much as I like to say, I don’t like to be told what to do, I absolutely need to be told what to do in my life. I just do. And I think a lot of us are that way. And it’s not a bad thing. It’s just knowing where, you know, look, I’m a creative person. So I don’t like structure, which is why I totally need structure, which is why I need every single day I have every just about every moment of my workday is completely planned out. And it doesn’t mean that I’m always proactive, I’m always active, but from like three to four today, I have blocked out, I just wrote busy and I’m going to relax for that hour because I am doing all these other things. But the point is, I know at three o’clock, from three to four, I’m shutting everything down. And I’ll come back online at four o’clock and finish up my day. But the point is, is I have to have everything structured, and it has been so freeing, and it actually has made my life a lot easier. And you just
Gogo Bethke 32:29
get it done. Right? Because when you don’t like people telling you what to do you also have this thing inside of you. I’m not gonna do it. Yeah. And guess who is going to not reap the benefits? Yeah, you. Right, so even my executive assistant who’s in Brazil, and she’s my assistant, I tell her all the time you’re my boss, because you can attack me where I need to be tomorrow. I love it. Yep. Right, you’re gonna make sure that five minutes before love, and you’re gonna compound to make sure I’m showing up. You can count on me, by the way, but they always still call to make sure that I’m showing up right. So they’ll absolutely structure will free you up. Because then I know that by 11 o’clock on Tuesday, I actually got it all done. Because this is what was on my calendar is good. As long as I’m doing all this, I’m going to continuously grow because one of my biggest fear is to stay at the same level. I actually got a board of directors because I’m not your typical agent. I’m not the person who’s going to make another 150,000 Next year, right? Like I literally did the math last week I was at an event in two of my businesses. Let me see if I wrote it in my notebook. Yes. So from 2019 to 2020 2021. Yes. So from 2019 to 20. I grew 89%. But from 2020 to 21. I grew 238%. Amazing, right? So it’s like and by the way prior to that every year, I doubled my business Double, double, double double. But now I want two and a half times because now I leverage. Right now I have a bunch of mini knees to do the things that you cannot possibly finish alone in the 24 hours. Do you think Tony Robbins is building? Like everything that he has today? Like he’s sending out that email that you got today? Stop it.
D.J. Paris 34:16
Yeah, he’s leveraging people you’re leveraging. And by the way, it’s never been more affordable, to be able to leverage help. It’s it used to be really cost prohibitive because we didn’t have access to people all over the globe who wanted to work. We had access maybe to just what was in our local market. And we all know if we’ve ever tried to hire locally, it can be challenging sometimes to find good help. And so now we have the whole world’s competing for your business. And so you have the opportunity to meet other people from other places who you know, like you said with a cell phone connection or Wi Fi can essentially do what it’s really it’s made us all step up our game because it means we’re all a little bit replaceable. So we really have to Step Up if we want to continue to thrive, but you can leverage some of these technological advances that we’ve had in recent years to make the make your life a lot. It’s not that it’s going to be necessarily easier. It’s going to be more efficient. And I think that’s,
Gogo Bethke 35:15
I think it’s removing things from your play that you suck at it. But you have, you’ve been doing it anyway because it needs to get done. It also it’s freeing you up and giving you time to do things that you love and you really good and it comes natural to you, right? Because I don’t work a day in my life. I feel like when you love what you do, you don’t work a day in your life. I get to do this. And the crazy part they pay me for it, they pay me to be me.
D.J. Paris 35:45
I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast, do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course, it is a follow up boss. And let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Do not take my word for Robert slack, who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems, so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part they have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else and oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free. But only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode. Yeah, it’s really cool. I it’s funny. I’m I have the same thing like with this podcast, which started out as a passion project about five years ago, maybe six years ago now. And I was doing everything because number one, it was not a revenue generating sort of project. And also, I didn’t know, I didn’t even know who to ask for anything. Well, and so Okay, so I got to a place where I was able to eventually get some help. And I wish I would have done it years before even if it would have put me in debt a little bit. If even if I didn’t have the money to do it, I really should have knowing what I know now because and I never suggest people go into debt if if they can avoid it, of course. But I looked at our numbers for our podcast and our growth in the last two or three years has been exponential. I don’t even know what the number is because I’d have to calculate it. It’s so high because I hired somebody to basically do everything producing the episode casting it, you know, doing all of the production. And then also I have a marketing person from Bangladesh of all places Bangladesh, who is so incredibly good. I don’t know what he does. I don’t know how he does it. But our numbers are skyrocketing. It’s not because I’ve gotten that much better. It’s because I’ve leveraged people who know what they’re doing. And I wasn’t very good at promotion and marketing. That’s not what I’m good at. I’m good at hosting a show. So didn’t make sense for me. And now we have more sponsors we have we actually turn away sponsors and I’m not saying that to brag because I wish I didn’t turn any sponsor away but we only have so many sponsor sponsorship opportunities. Well I have somebody looking for sponsorship opportunities for me so now I have more sponsorships it pays for all my staff these are things that anybody could do it I’m not special GO GO GO GO would probably say she’s not special. She just has systems
Gogo Bethke 38:49
yes I’m just a little girl from Romania with no college education I didn’t even speak English you couldn’t pronounce my name if you tried my real name right with no sphere of influence no money, right I’m five foot two and they were like you need to do and I’m like I’m African. I’m this little blandy like no stranger danger. Have no right so if I can do it, consider that.
D.J. Paris 39:10
Well, this is a great place I want to talk let’s talk a little bit about about about your your boot camp. Tell us about Go Go’s boot camp for those of us who are new to it.
Gogo Bethke 39:19
So go was boot camp came about kind of necessity, right? Because figuring out social media and systems and why and algorithms and how to do things and posting and CRM programs and automated drip campaigns and Zapier integrations and you know, all of those things that social media might sound like it’s simple, right? But the goal is that you want to be able to generate use traffic from one platform, right? Like the Instagram, tic tac, Facebook, being able to take them over to something else, a website or a funnel or something that you have built where you can capture the information. But after you capture their information needs to dump into a CRM program, right? And then the CRM program needs to be automated to follow up on your behalf or you have to have people that follow up right away because if you don’t follow Put the lead within five minutes, guess what another agent already did and you lost them, or they forgot all together that they just messaged you, right? So you need to have the systems in place. So over time, I would go in and speak and people would ask me, Hey, can you come and speak and so that, and I felt like they asked me all the same questions. And I was like a broken record or a parrot repeating it just answering the same question over and over again. So I figured it would be easier if I record myself. And then I can just say, Oh, just go here, watch everything, implement everything you learn into your business, and you have the same results. So we created goggles bootcamp, initially, we had social media only. And then after I switched over to exp, I bought over 1000 agents and designed and built 1000 Agent organization. And then I built a course it’s called the agent attraction for people with the idea that if they want to build teams, right, and organizations or depending on whichever brokerage they are at, if they own their own brokerage, right, and I help them agent attract to their brokerage, because I don’t know the nationwide average for agents retention, but when you’re a broker or a team lead, you’re constantly losing agents because or they’re not good. And they’re going to leave the industry altogether, because they’re not hungry enough. And they don’t have the work ethic, right? Or they’re okay, and they’ll stay with you for a while or they’re really good. And then after they became really good, then they’re gonna go out to be an individual agent. And here you’re back in the hamster wheel getting the next agent, right. So agent attraction, we are doing that we are helping agents or team leads or broker owners to build their own teams and brokerages. So that’s that the next one we came out with, it’s called V conium. And that is virtual assistant. Right? So since I talk a lot about virtual assisting people ask me all the time, can you help in getting a virtual assistant, so we built a course around that, and I can give you a link on that in a little bit as well. And then we had a TC company as well, now I realized that I can’t really put my brand with other people’s work ethic. So if it requires other people’s work ethic, I have to be very careful of what and how I’m promoting, right. So then the transaction coordination company, they actually decided to shut it down. And now the white label that to a company who has been in the industry for a very long time with a very good reputation. So if you guys need a transaction coordination company, we can also going to my links on Instagram, Google’s gonna see that calm and go ahead and use them. Those are the ones that I was able to research and I trust them, they did a great job. And right now what we are going to do, which I haven’t told you yet, we are working on through the years, the social media bootcamp, for example, it was created for agents in mind, right? So it’s very real, that very it is real estate based. Now through the years going to all of the entrepreneurial events and things like that. I’m getting asked all the time. Can you help me? I’m a lender, can you help me on a title company? Can you help me have a yoga studio? candle shop? Right? So what we are going to do now we are going to create what’s called the Small Business boot camp and social media marketing. So then everybody can use it. That’s going to be more generalized, right explaining the Google My Business, the you know, all of the different platforms and how to generate leads, what’s your programs to use all of those things for pretty much any type of business. So right now we actually retired, the current goggles, we can social media is going to get a facelift. And when that’s ready, you’re going to have a brand new link. And then you can start promoting it to all of our listeners. It’s just going to be brought up to 2022.
D.J. Paris 43:11
Awesome. Well, we’re excited. As soon as that is, is ready to go live, we’ll definitely make sure we announce it. Well, what a great place to wrap up. So go go through a lot at us in this conversation. So if you need to go back and listen to it again, grab a pen and pencil because she speaks fast. But everything she says is absolutely valuable. And it’s what exactly what she did to grow her business. There’s no secrets here. But you need to know what to do. So go back and listen to this again. And also maybe you know, somebody who’s trying to grow a team or wants to maybe consider joining a team or maybe instead of joining a team, they could create one. This is a great blueprint. And gogo is the person to follow because she when I met her, she was just an individual practitioner. She didn’t have a team. And all these years later now she has 1000 agent, and it’s not that many years later what it’s like three years later, maybe in half. Yep. Three and a half. It took me. I’ve been in the business. 12 years, 12 years, about 12 years. I have barely I have barely 800 agents. So Google is crushing it. And I have a lot that I’m
Gogo Bethke 44:11
sorry to celebrate.
D.J. Paris 44:12
Yeah.
Gogo Bethke 44:16
I don’t have 800. Local like 800 Local is amazing, like beyond amazing goal that you guys have achieved that 1000s and 45 different states and in four different countries, right? It’s very, it’s a very different it’s much easier when your pool is 1.6 million to get 1000
D.J. Paris 44:35
Well, it’s still impressive regardless, and we’re both we’re both impressive. How about that. But we love Gogo. She’s been an amazing partner for us since the beginning and she came on here when we had no listeners and we are so grateful to be able to help support her but also to learn from her. She really the only reason she has 1000 agents is because her whole value proposition is really what most firms don’t do. Do which is like I’m actually going to show you exactly what to do to grow your business, not the skills to learn, although she does that to not how to be a good realtor legitimately, here’s what you do Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and she and then you get her results. It’s really incredible. I’m so I hate to say proud of you, because I’m just in awe of you, I guess I should say in awe. I’m proud to be to be your friend, for sure. But I so
Gogo Bethke 45:26
I wanted to say on my camera, the friend, you know, through this, it’s like you took me on to your podcast, the same thing. Yeah, you didn’t have listener, but I was just an individual agent to write with a little bit of understanding of social media marketing, we have grown together,
D.J. Paris 45:38
we have grown together and and we want our audience to grow together as well. So when students Go Go’s new boot camp comes out, you can take a little bit of a preview at Gogo podcast.com, just to get an idea of what the previous version looks like the new version is coming soon, but you can at least go check it out. And also just tell a friend about our show. That’s the only thing we ever asked him to think of one other realtor that needs that is struggling with structure. That’s really what we were talking about today structure, struggling with structure, have them listen to this episode. By the way, they’re probably not getting structure from their current managing broker. And that’s not a knock at managing brokers. They
Gogo Bethke 46:15
grow them. That it is, by the way
D.J. Paris 46:18
we have it. We have an agent that just recently outgrew our firm. And she had been with us about 10 years. And the reality of it was we could not meet her needs anymore. And she’s the loveliest person and she was she was so upset. She goes, I feel like I’m betraying you guys. And we said, No, you have graduated to another company and we wouldn’t have been able to support her anymore. It was actually the greatest compliment. And so So anyway, the point is, is you can grow to right and maybe you’ll outgrow your existing firm. Go go by the way you can go you can join her company and her firm as well. Right. So unless you live in the Chicagoland area then join my company. I’m only I’m only teasing, join checkout Gogo. She does some really cool things, but she’s not just hey, look at me. I’m cool on social media. She’s like, here’s exactly what I do every single day to run my business. She’s incredible. She’s a powerhouse and you know exp is very lucky to have her so go go thank you once again for being on our show. Please tell everyone listening about this episode. And we will see you on next one. Thanks. Go go.
Gogo Bethke 47:21
And if I didn’t if I talked too funny, funny and too fast. You can always DM me on Instagram. That’s the only place that I personally answer messages. It’s Google’s real estate on Instagram everywhere else I have vas. Sorry, I know I did just dump some reason. And I don’t really bet so you can
D.J. Paris 47:38
you can Yes, go go go go to it’s go go real estate. Go goes real. Go go real estate or go goes goes. Go go. So go goes plural. Gio gos real estate on Instagram. We’ll have a link to that. By the way in the show notes you don’t have I didn’t even think about that. Just click on the show notes. Once this episode, once you’re listening to this episode, and it’ll be right there. So alright, go go. Have a wonderful day. It was great to see you and everyone else. Have a wonderful day too. We’ll see you on the next episode.
Gogo Bethke 48:07
Thank you guys. Bye
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