Garry Creath and Chris Scott: Episode 295

Transcript

[0:00:31] RW: Hi, everyone. It’s Rae Williams, host of Author Hour, where I interview authors about their new books. As a professional realtor, it’s easy to forget that you’re not just selling real estate, you’re running a business. Chances are, the training you’ve received has been focused on regulations and legal issues, but did nothing to increase your sales, marketing and financial savvy. Our next two authors and their book will change all that. Here to talk to us about why it’s time to start thinking like an entrepreneur are the authors of Blueprint, Garry Creath and Chris Scott.

[0:01:06] CS: You know, for a long time and because of our – the work that we do in helping people in the real estate community, we create training programs and we have lots of help in that area, is that we’ve always, for as long as I can remember have people asking us, “hey, what should we do in this situation?” I think one of the common themes, Garry, you see this all the time is that people are often in real estate, I think just anybody who is self-employed for that matter. We often think very myopically, we really think at the down at the weeds level because we’re taking care of customers, you know, we’re taking care of issues, we’re taking care of problems we’re trying to solve situations and often times, a year can go by, three years can go by, five, 10 years can go by and you look up and you realize that the real estate practice that you have or whatever you're doing with the thing that you’re working on is not the thing that you wanted, right? You look back at the time you spent and you realize, “what I was hoping to accomplish, I did not.” Even though you were using your best decision making, you we remaking using your best thinking at the time and you end up getting to where you’re at and we all end up wherever we are is based on the best thinking that we have. It’s a lot of it, it’s because we just were so focused on the details that we never pause to look up, look around and see what’s going on in my real estate practice. What should I be doing and what is it that I really want to accomplish? You know, different people are going to have different things that these want to accomplish. I think what we wanted to do was to take our experience and really, especially Garry’s experience because he’s been selling real estate for over 20 years now and to be able to look at that experience and say you know, how did you craft, how did we craft and cultivate the careers that we wanted? I think this book is the starting point for anyone who would like to – and the strategies that we share in this book is the starting point for how do I get that career that I want? How do I get that real estate practice or business that I want to have, that I dreamed that I was going to have?

[0:03:07] GC: Yeah, I totally agree with you, Chris, is that it is so easy. First off. Real estate for most realtors is a second, third, fourth, fifth career. Quite often, what happens is that they see friends or family members having great success in real estate or a perceived great success. They think, “that seems easy, I like to look at real estate, I’d be great at that, how hard can that be?” And so, we just kind of jump in and not knowing really the purposeful strategies and tactics that we need to have in place or in mind before we take that leap. Because once we take that leap and we get into it, like Chris said, is that we get so focused on the details of day to day just survival in this real estate business, that next business deal, that next business deal, that next paycheck so I can pay my mortgage so I can have groceries, so I can do these things. What’s so fascinating about the real estate industry, is that we have cultivated this industry to be a business practice of accident. It is not a purposeful business operation or practice that we have and so, what we did is we did take very, very purposeful experience and design it in a way to where we can provide the experience, the expertise, the arrows in the back that Chris and I have both taken in our real estate careers and share that with real estate entrepreneurs, so that they don’t have to suffer the way that their peers are. They don’t have to suffer the way that we did. In fact, what they can do is they have a real manual, a blueprint here of how to create a successful, sustainable, consistent real estate business that they can be proud to own. Instead of making accidents every single day to just barely get by and to produce a mediocre business operation in real estate. It was like, “you know what? Let us give you the experience, the expertise that we have learned over the past 20 years so you don’t have to struggle and suffer the way others do.”

[0:05:30] CS: I think Garry said it. Most people don’t graduate from high school and say, “I’m getting into real estate, right?” Most people fall into real estate. None of us, Garry didn’t plan on going into real estate, he fell into it. I didn’t plan on getting involved with real estate, I fell into it. So, most people, it’s not a purposeful thing that they say, that they aspire to, initially. It’s something that they fall into. I think that’s a problem because when you’re falling into something, you know, often times, just trying to grab that thing to be able to figure out, “okay, what’s going on?” Unfortunately, in real estate, it’s one of those fields where you’re not going to get a lot of help, right? So, if you look, most people, if you go work at a regular job and you go get hired at a job. The company is really interested in helping you succeed. The peers around you, really interested in helping you succeed, you're a manager, you’re a boss, whoever, is really interested in helping you succeed. But in a real estate field, the person sitting next to you is a competitor. Now, you go have a friendly relationship most likely, but the fact of the matter is, everybody in the office is potential competitor. Heck, your broker or your manger may also be a competitor against you when it comes to them needing to be able to survive and put food on the table so in addition to having an office with people in it, they’re also having to sell real estate. And so, I think because of this, there’s a weird dynamic that happens where people are often isolated, they’re left alone to their own devices and that’s where a lot of the struggle comes from. It doesn’t have to be that way because there are people out there who have figured it out and can share it with everybody who gets into this practice. But it’s not something that’s very obvious.

[0:07:11] RW: All right, let me ask you this, a lot of the books that we – I’ve seen on real estate and a lot of people have talked to about real estate, talk about real estate, again, like you guys said, as something that they kind of fell into and talk about the actual selling part and the actual why this is important that you go into real estate or how it can be beneficial to you? But they don’t talk about it being formulated as a business. You as an entrepreneur, as you guys do. What are some of those fundamental differences between having real estate as kind of like a – I wouldn’t even say a hobby, but even just like a career that you stumble into or a side thing that you do as supposed to making it a business and having entrepreneur and you kind of touched on some of that, but I’d love to know some of the real deep differences there.

[0:07:59] CS: I think the easy one is, you’re paid like you’re a self-employed individual, right? If you’re self-employed, you’re in business, right? You get paid that way. I think there’s a lot, Garry, maybe can start of answering and then – because so much of it is a mindset issue, right?

[0:08:16] GC: Yeah, it is all mindset, owning a real estate business is all about your mindset, it’s all about how you think about your business and your day to day operations. I believe that most real estate agents get into real estate, they have no experience of running a business and so what do they do? They focus on, “how do I get the next deal?” It’s not a focus on strategy, it’s not a focus on longevity, it’s not a focus on business operations, marketing, sales, human resources, anything like that. The focus is how do I get my next deal because that’s how I pay for my groceries. And in fact, most real estate agents that I know actually don’t even get a business credit card, a business checking account or a business name or incorporate. It is all sole proprietorship and what happens in real estate is we run the business expenses through the same checking account and credit card account as our home expenses and so what happens is that we see these marketing expenses as potentially taking food of the table, instead of an investment into my business and an investment into my growth. That is a – there’s a huge chasm there between that lone ranger, real estate agent and a real estate entrepreneur, a real estate entrepreneur has the vision, the mindset of a business owner and a business leader, they have the mindset of a business operator and a sales person and what we do is we focus on business as a business. We work on our business; we work in our business and we don’t comingle our funds, which helps us focus on the operations that really matter. And so, when we are budgeting in our business, when we are working on reinvesting in our business, when we are working on business development strategies, we have the money set aside in order to do that because we already have that mindset.

[0:10:20] CS: Yeah, I think. If you were to ask most people in real estate, what is it that you do? I think one of the first things that’s going to come to mind, “is that I help people, right? I help people buy homes, I help people sell homes.” If you were to ask a group of real estate professionals, what do you love about the business or why did you get into this business? You know, one of the easy things that people say is, “I got into this for the money or they might say, I got into this to have more freedom and flexibility with my time,” not realizing that they were going to make a lot less money and they were going to work a lot more hours. At some point, someone’s going to say, I got into this because I like helping people, because there are other ways to make money and there are other ways to have flexibility outside of real estate. But in real estate, you get to help people. You get to connect people. So, I think most people in real estate, we really identify with service, right? Taking care of people. When you identify with services which if you were to look at a business context, right? What are the three pillars of a business? You’ve got sales and marketing, you’ve got the operations or in real estate, that would be taking care of the customer and then you’ve got finance. So, most people in real estate really identify with just that one pillar of the whole equation. Because that’s where the day to day is, in taking care of customers. But when you want to take a step back or how do I achieve what I really want to have in my career? And this is like again, this is just in real estate, this could be if you were a dentist. Anybody who has – who is in professional services, right? Doctors, dentists, lawyers, people in real estate. You can just take care of the customer, right? Sort of work and live in operations, but if you want to be able to have that practice with the freedom and the money that goes along with it, well then you have to address finances, you have to address sales and marketing. And so, with all of the information that we provide, it’s trying to help people and assist people and one of those two areas. How do I design the services that I provide so that they’re unique in the market, how do I design the message that I have in the marketplace? So that’s going to attract people. How do I design and offer in the market place where instead of everyone thinking I’m just another real estate agent? Instead, they look to me as an expert. They look to me as someone who is different, who stands out, who is an authority, who is desirable and who they would want to work with, who they would want to get the advice. And, I think that’s so much as mindset, it all starts with one step, right? It all starts with the acknowledgement of realizing, “I’m not going to get to where I want just by focusing on service that there is another dimension to this career that I’m in and I can’t just focus on the customer now.” You do have to provide excellent, excellent customer service to do any of the other things. However, excellent customer service is not enough to be competitive because everybody works on being, providing the best experience that they can, for the most part, right? The folks who care, of course, they’re going to do their best to take care of their client. You have to go beyond that if you want to have success.

[0:13:18] RW: All right, for each of you, what are some of the lessons and again, we’ve kind of touched on a few things, but I know you have like some of the book, what are some of the lessons that you learned very early on while building your businesses, that would be invaluable for other people to know as they build theirs?

[0:13:39] GC: So, when I got into real estate, real estate was the most inefficient transactional business that I had ever studied. I studied business in college and I’ve studied business post graduate. And real estate has traditionally been the most inefficient operation that I’ve ever seen. One of my focuses has always been on how do I take better care of my customers, build a better business around me and have sustainable, consistent income and have the identity as a real estate professional in the minds of my clients. And so, what I have always done is designed my business, my outreach, my marketing around those messages. One thing that I can clearly say is the number one reason real estate agents fail and by the way, there are so many different statistics out there, a recent one by the National Association of Realtors shows that over 80% of real estate professionals fail and get out of the business the first year that they’re in. And so, one of the missions of our book is to stop that statistic and help people not drop out of real estate, but actually, build a sustainable business. One of the primary things that you absolutely must get very, very good at is you must become your own chief marketing officer. You must consistently reach out to people in your database, in your base, in your sphere of influence, whatever you may call it, but you must have consistent marketing communication going out either with you doing it or somebody else doing it, to stay in touch with people and remind them of your expertise, your experience, in the real estate business because that is exactly why people will contact you and that is exactly why they will refer you to friends and family members and that is exactly why you will be a success is because number one, you must have the experience. You must have the expertise and share your knowledge with other people, so that they begin to trust you, the name of the game in real estate is trust. Real estate buyers and sellers will hire the realtor who they trust will take care of their needs and their concerns and here’s the thing. In real estate, most buyers and consumers look at us and they marginalize us. And it’s simply because we marginalized ourselves. They think that we are all exactly the same, that we produce the same results that we do the same things to market their homes and that could not be further from the truth. But because the consumer believes that, that is the number one reason they marginalize us and when they marginalize us, what happens is they come to us and they say, “will you discount your fee?” “Will you discount your commission?” Because somebody down the road will discount their commission and I want you to as well? What we can share with real estate agents is if the number one thing, if you want to be successful, is you must become an expert and then you must consistently communicate your expertise to the people. So that you have a powerful brand and that they begin to trust you, so that you continue to be hired over and over again and referred over and over again and that is going to be the number one secret.

[0:17:08] CS: Yeah, I liked what Garry said about being your own chief marketing officer. In real estate and in most forms of self-employment, most problems it seems like it could be solved with just a few more deals or just a few more clients. And one of the things I learned early on in my career was just how important it was to get good at getting customers. Because getting customers is what makes everything else go around. Without getting customers, you don’t have people to take care off. Without getting customers, you don’t have the income to be able to build your finances. And so, it all starts with getting customers. I think in real estate, one of the issues is that because we focus on taking care of customers, we have this unspoken expectation, which is if I take really good care of my client, they will probably recommend and refer me in the future, right? If I take good care of my client in the future when it comes time to sell their home or to buy another home that they are probably going to contact me to do that. And that is the assumption that we have. Unfortunately, statistics show that that doesn’t happen very often, in fact according to the National Association of Realtors only 24% of home sellers work with their previous agent when it comes time to sell their home. So why do 76% of sellers choose to go find somebody else than work with the person that they had worked with previously where you would have thought that they had trust build. You knew that they knew, liked and trusted that individual. A lot of that comes down to marketing you know? Unfortunately, there is a marketing gap between getting a recognition that I deserve in the market place versus being unknown. You know Garry talked about standing out and what is it and how can we make ourselves stand out and be distinguished, well those are marketing practices. They don’t happen by accident. You can have the absolute best service in the world. Unfortunately, if you don’t stay in contact through good marketing practices, people are going to forget your name because it is not like people buy homes every single year, right? There is some times that goes between the time my buyers sell a home and then next one that I am going to buy or sell. Even when it comes to recommendations and getting word of mouth business, if I am not in regular contact with my real estate professional after I’ve bought or sold a home time fades. Memory fades a little bit and then when I have a conversation with a friend of a family member and they tell me that they are thinking of moving, well unless my real estate professional has done a good job at staying in contact with me with marketing, then I don’t even think of them, right? They don’t enter into my field of consciousness at that point in time and so the opportunity for a referral or recommendation just doesn’t take place. So most of these problems with finding the next customer can be solved by a little bit of marketing to accomplish that. But if you were to ask most people, “you know how much time in a given week do you spend thinking about or doing marketing in your real estate practice?” For most people it is not going to be that much, right? They might spend a little bit if time doing it, but it is not like they are going to spend a lot of time doing it or they are not going to have necessarily the skills to be able to close that gap. Between providing the service that I do and getting the recognition that I feel that I deserve after having taking care of so many people.

[0:20:31] GC: Yeah and here is the thing, the reality is in real estate we have a 90 day sell cycle. So, this is why here is a prime example why most real estate professionals live in a feast or famine lifestyle. And it is because we work our tails off to prospect and lead generate and convert those clients and then we get really, really busy driving them around in our cars and taking listing appointments and marketing these homes and as soon as we get really busy, what we do is we stop marketing ourselves for new business. We stop lead generating. And what happens is when we stop, well after the business that we currently have closes and we get paid on that were in famine. It is now dried up and there is no business and so then what do we do? Well we work really, really, really, really hard and we generate more business and generate more business and then we get really busy and it is this cycle. It is this feast. It’s this famine. It’s this feast, it’s this famine. And what our wish is for real estate professionals and real estate experts is that there is no feast and there is no famine what it is, is there is consistency in their business. There is consistency in their sales and there is consistency in their lifestyle and in their joy that they are living with their work. And that can only happen by treating your business as a business and by utilizing and implementing the marketing skills and expertise that Chris has into your own business and that is how you get out of this cycle and just start building a sustainable consistent business.

[0:22:10] CS: You know, here is a funny story. So, you know without the marketing skill and marketing knowledge, it is hard to get a customer. In fact, it is so hard that it is a nice detour from working on getting a customer as soon as you get one. Garry and I know this one agent here, where this person had one client, just one client that they were helping find a home and all of a sudden, this individual stopped doing all of their marketing. Stopped doing all their prospecting. Stopped all their activities on trying to get the next customer because they were taking care of one. And that is a recipe for disaster.

[0:22:49] RW: All right, so let me hear from you guys some of your success stories. Some of the ways or some of the things that you’ve just spoken just a while ago have transformed your careers and other people’s lives?

[0:23:01] GC: Okay, so Hilary is a real estate agent on the North East Coast and she had built up a really great business and had been very busy for several years and because of some personal situations her business slacked off. And it’s simply because what she did is, she stopped marketing herself. She stopped treating her business like a business and really, she just kind of expected that people would continue to refer her because she had done a great job for them. So, why wouldn’t they refer her to everybody that they know? Well when Hilary came to us, her business was in a slump and she said, “I don’t know what to do, please tell me what to do.” And I said, “well, what are you willing to do?” And she said, “I will do anything you tell me to do.” And so what Chris and I did is we showed her all of the marketing and the operations and the sales tactics and programs that he and I use in our own real estate business and we said, “if you do these things, it will work out.” And so, what happened is Hilary went from closing $3 million a year to $3 million a month, within just nine months of implementing the programs and the programs are focused around producing excellent content for her consumers, for her customers. And producing that and delivering it consistently in what Chris likes to call omnipresent marketing. And omnipresent marketing is making sure that you are marketing yourself everywhere all at once. So your customer can’t turn around without bumping into you somewhere. Whether it is virtually in person on email, in social media, whatever it may be. And so, by branding yourself as an expert, by sharing her expertise and staying in consistent communication with her base that she had built up, she has been able to transform a $3 million a year production business to a $3 million a month production business.

[0:25:07] CS: You know one of the things that I have learned that has helped us in our real estate practice is something I learned very early on, but did not realize how often it is overlooked. There is a formula in marketing that we use to make sure that our marketing does well and more importantly, it is a great diagnostic tool for figuring out what you are doing wrong and it is very simple. There is only three parts to it. It is the fundamental tool of marketing, which is you want to have the right person, the right message and the right time considered in every single marketing communication or piece that you do. So, whether it is on social media, whether it is on video, whether it is in emails, whether it is on your flyers is to always take those things into account. Has this piece been created with the right person in mind? What is the message of that right person needs to hear and is the timing of context appropriate for what I am going to ask him to do in this communication? It is usually one of the things that you will see is most people just copy marketing or they will produce stuff without – they will produce something for everybody, which means it is for nobody. And I think that is one of the things that we touched on the book is this right person, right message, right time and formula because if all you were to do starting today, if all you were to do is just look at every single communication that you are going to have with a customer. Even on your individual emails that you’re sending out with people is to look at it with just that perspective or just that filter is to say, “all right, who is the right person for this and what are the characteristics of that individual? What does that person care about? What is that person concerned about? What does that person want? Who is that right person really and what is it that they want?” It is only when I have that understanding that I can create a message or to design a message that is going to satisfy those things that those individual wants. And when I have that message fine-tuned then I can evaluate it for the timing. You know a good example of timing is that if you are driving down the street or on a highway, going 65 miles an hour and you see a billboard and it tells you to go to a really long website address. It is just not going to happen because that is not the right time for that message. And so, we have to take that into account. The other thing time has to take into consideration is consistency. You know consistent marketing overtime always trumps trying to have that home run message that grand slam because consistency will trump timing every time because we don’t know when that person is going to react and respond. That is why digital tools are great because we can employ consistency and let the tools take care of the timing. But that right person, right message, right time formula is something that I think if there is one take away that you had that’s had a great impact on our business. And it is one that we constantly use whenever something doesn’t go the way we want from a marketing perspective or from a campaign or any effort that we have to go find clients, if there is something that didn’t go right, we can use that formula to say, “well did we have a good understanding of who that right person was? Did we even really think about what they wanted or what is the message for this individual?” And usually for our own mistakes are going to be that we really didn’t spend enough time evaluating who specifically this individual is that we want to receive this information or what circumstances they might be in and then making the message one that they would respond to.

[0:28:33] RW: All right and so if you guys each had to issue or even collectively issue a challenge, so whether that is to just anyone listening, people reading your book, people hoping to get into the real estate game, what would that challenge be?

[0:28:46] CS: So, the challenge I would have for anyone who is in real estate or thinking of getting in real estate is to create the challenge of distinction. To create the challenge of standing out. It is very easy to be one out of 1.3 million members of the National Association of Realtors and when consumers look at us that way like Garry said, we just look like one out of a sea of this thing. So, the challenge that I would have for anyone listening is what exactly and intentionally are you going to do to equip yourself with the skills, with the knowledge with the understanding to stand out in what can seem like a really crowded market place. And if you were to just that one thing is really think intentionally and make that your challenge because, “I challenge myself to stand out. I challenge myself to share my expertise. I challenge myself to do videos and educate people about the real estate market. I challenge myself to do more proactive marketing and standout in my market place.” If you were to think along those lines, you will stand out and I think you will see some really good results from that.

[0:30:02] GC: That was a good one Chris. My challenge to everybody listening to this is I challenge you to become a really great listener and a great interviewer and the reason this is so important is in real estate, in sales, we are trained by an old heritage that believes that, in order to sell something, we need to boast about how awesome we are. We need to tell people things. We need to talk at them and that couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, to be an exceptional sales person, an exceptional business owner. We have got to get very, very good at asking questions, asking clarifying questions and then asking clarifying questions about the clarifying answers that they just gave to our clarifying questions. So, if we can challenge you to stop talking so much, stop telling people so much and instead ask questions, be inquisitive, be curious about who people are, who is your customer? Why are they behaving the way they are behaving, why is it that they want what they want? What do they want, “and gosh, that seems really important to you? Do you mind if I ask why that is so important to you?” We must dig down at a very deep human level to understand who our clients are so that we can then design solutions that take great care of them and what they want to achieve. And the only way that we can understand what that is, is by asking enough questions of our customers and then sitting back, closing our mouths, opening our ears and listening with an intent to understand.

[0:32:01] RW: All right awesome and how can we contact you if we want to get more information?

[0:32:05] CS: Well, Garry’s cellphone number is –

[0:32:08] GC: You can reach Chris at the county lock up. So,p the very best way to reach us is going to be on social media through The Paperless Agent. You can also reach out to us through our public profile pages on Facebook, Garry Creath and Chris Scott.

[0:32:33] RW: All right, awesome. Thank you so much.

[0:32:36] CS: Thank you.

[0:32:38] RW: So. you already have the required people skills and the blueprint for everything else you need to succeed is available on amazon.com. Check out Blueprint and thank you so much for tuning in to Author Hour.